RailTEC Professor and George Krambles Director Christopher P.L. Barkan and Postdoctoral Research Associate Chen-Yu Lin were recently awarded a BRIDGE Seed Fund initiation grant for their project titled “Creation of An International Benchmark and Index for Railway Safety”. The main objective of this project is to develop a common safety evaluation index for different railway systems so that safety performance can be evaluated and compared, starting with a cross-Atlantic comparison between the United States and the United Kingdom and ultimately extending to other countries’ railway systems. The indexing system will be composed of two elements – the first being a measure of the transparency/availability of data, and the second will be a weighted measure of safety derived from the data that is publicly available.
The BRIDGE (BiRmingham-lllinois Partnership for Discovery, EnGagement and Education) Seed Fund was founded by the University of Birmingham and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March 2014. This alliance created a framework for continued collaboration and investment to grow a strategic partnership between the two institutions and is available to support planning visits, workshops, and exchanges with the partner for the purpose of developing the collaboration. Initiation grants encourage wider faculty involvement and expand institutional engagement.