Cableways Impact Assessment Study - Final Report - saferail.nl

IA Study Concerning the Revision of the Cableways Directive
3. IMPACT OF THE CABLEWAYS DIRECTIVE ON THE CABLEWAYS
SECTOR
3.1 Overview
This section summarises the main impacts of the Directive, based on the information
obtained from literature review and stakeholder consultation as summarised in Section
2. It focuses on two main impacts: impacts relative to the aims of the Directive and
impacts on the functioning and on the structure of the cableways sector.
3.2 Impacts in Relation to the Aims of the Directive
The Cableways Directive (2000/9/EC) was established with the aim of ensuring the
safety and free movement of cableway components by harmonising passenger safety
and protection requirements. Its two fundamental objectives are passenger safety and
the creation of a single market (EC, 2006).
In terms of the creation of a single market, it is clear that the Directive has
harmonised national legislation on design, manufacture and conformity assessment of
subsystems and safety components. This is supported by the fact that the
transposition of the Directive at national level did not, on the whole, run into any
particular problems, and it was not necessary to start infringement proceedings against
any Member State (EC, 2011).
Publicly available data are generally not sufficient for a comprehensive and robust
assessment of the impacts of the Directive on passenger safety. Even where
accident/incident data exist, they either highlight individual accident cases or provide
an insufficient basis for drawing any conclusions. This is because a robust assessment
would require a detailed examination of the causes of each incident (technical
malfunction, user behaviour etc.) and of the installation involved (approved in
accordance with Directive 2000/9/EC or predating the Directive) and of the total
number of installations in use or of the number of passengers carried. For instance,
the numbers of serious accidents in France associated with cableways are available for
2002 – 2007 and presented in Table 3.1.
Please note that the reason why accident data are presented in this report for certain
countries only is that we have not been able to locate data for some other countries.
Table 3.1: Cableways Accidents in France
No. of passengers
(million)
No. of accidents
resulting in serious
injury
2002-3 2003-4 2004-5 2005-6 2006-7 2007-8 2008-9 2009-10 2010-11
729 737 702 677 532 692 761 666 665
15 16 15 18 13 20 14 23 19
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