Jämförelse av riskutredningar avseende transport av farligt gods på järnväg

Sammanfattning

Risk assessments are commonly used as basis for decisions regarding land-use planning to ensure that land-use don’t give rise to unacceptable levels of risk. To promote well-founded decisions, it is therefore important that risk assessments are of good quality. Shortcomings in risk assessments, such as inappropriate assumptions, can potentially lead to costly or ineffective risk reduction measures being required or inappropriate development being permitted and implemented. The aim of this study is to investigate how risk assessments related to transport of dangerous goods by rail are carried out and supported in relation to aspects that affect the quality of the risk assessments and aspects that cannot be explained by site-specific factors. This is done by a literature study regarding quality related to risk assessments and furthermore a comparative study of four risk assessments. The results of the comparison indicate that there are improvement opportunities regarding the transparency of both the approaches and the foundation on which the risk assessments are based. Furthermore, the results indicate that the basis used is limited. The study also shows that there are both similarities and differences between the risk assessments regarding factors that cannot be explained by site-specific factors. Some of the differences can possibly be explained by differences in the degree to which the assumptions are conservative.