Ian Prosser Director of Rail Safety Office of Rail Regulation One Kemble Street London WC2B 4AN

Beach Cottage Long Rock TR20 8JE

2nd April 2013

Dear Ian, The Friends of Long Rock Mexico Crossing thank you and Matthew McNeal for coming down to meet us, and to see the local situation last week. We have discussed the local issue and ask the ORR to withdraw or severely qualify its support for closure of this crossing in the light of the new information now available to you: The alternative crossing adds over 500m to every journey, not 200m. Walkers will be displaced on to a manifestly more dangerous off-rail route that you have now seen. The higher usage figures now presented to you by NR reduce the apparent individual risk to well below the target level. The case for using collective risk to justify closure has not been made. The statistical methods used in your previous appraisal have not been shown to be valid. The relevance of near-miss reports is not clear - we expand on this below - and there will be vastly more near misses on roads than are saved by closure. The off-rail issues that you believe should be considered by the local council are not being so considered - the councils officers believe they should be evaluated much later in a public inquiry. The location of the crossing makes it immensely valuable to the village.

On the national issues we see room for the industry to clarify the basis for action on risk in four ways:

The use of collective risk and individual risk.

Irreducible individual risk is the measure relevant to any decision on closure predicated on risk. Collective risk provides a sound basis for assessing how much safety investment may be appropriate. Collective risk is not a valid measure for decisions on closure. To provide an illustration: Good large hospitals have a huge collective death risk. For sick people they have a low individual risk, lower than staying at home, so we keep them open, and invest in them. If a small hospital has a much higher individual risk than the larger hospital then investigation, and even closure, may be required, even though the hospital has a far lower collective risk. We do not accept the argument that public concern or newspaper headlines require closures. The sinking of the Marchioness did not lead to banning any class of vessel from UK rivers, and the response to the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise and the Costa Concordia was also essentially rational with no calls for extinguishment of these ship types or their sister ships. Likewise crashes of coaches on roads, train crashes etc. have not been used to promote bans. Using collective risk to support closure where individual risk is low and individual benefits are real is not logical. We will submit the Mexico Crossing case to the next series of More or Less on BBC Radio Four. The programme deals with just such issues in the use and misuse of statistics.

The use of deaths and near-misses as evidence of risk.

If individual risk remains constant then both death rates and near-miss rates at crossings will be expected to rise as usage rises. It is not reasonable to use these rates as evidence supporting closure without normalising them to assess what they actually mean about individual risk, or you will be supporting closures of crossings purely because they are particularly valuable. The trend in near-miss rates for pedestrians nationally is strongly upwards, while the trend in deaths is going the other way, so clearly near-miss trends do not predict death trends. Do they predict high-risk sites? We can find no evidence on this, and it could be that other local factors are far bigger in determining reporting rates e.g. a crossing near a terminus may have higher reporting rates because incidents are very fresh in the drivers mind when they leave the cab.

In making any assessment of the significance of death or near-miss rates a valid time period must be used e.g. two deaths in the last 40 years does not mean 1 death per 20 years any more than 1 death on a road in the last week means 1 death per week. Trends must also be assessed appropriately.

Abuse of the safety agenda by Network Rail

We respect your concern to reduce risk, but see that NR takes no notice of the impact of closures on those affected. We have received biased and often misleading evidence from NR, always biased towards closure, and we know that the Safety Improvement Manager believes her task is to close every crossing regardless of what it does to us, the users, who are, at every step, told this is for our safety benefit. Balance of risk against benefit is essential or this becomes a mindless imposition of the nanny state. So you will understand that we believe NR has taken the baton from you and run off the track with it, to serve its own purpose of cutting costs by getting rid of rights of way that are a nuisance to it.

Lack of respect for crossing users in policy on crossing closures

NR has 14 points in its policy on crossing closures. Not one point recognises that these are rights of way that should not be stolen by imposing very high on rail safety standards regardless of off rail risks and loss of benefits to users. The ORRs policy is conspicuously weak on the balance of benefits.

On the local issue we can provide further detail to support the ORR in withdrawing its support for closure of this crossing.
The Mexico crossing is heavily used - 100,000 times or more per year it confers the freedom to walk easily to a beautiful coastal path and beach. This means investment is justified, if there is any that is appropriate. Because of the high use the collective risk at the Mexico crossing is expected to be above the average pedestrian crossing as many are low-use crossings. Individual risk at the Mexico crossing is low, probably below half the target individual risk, even when its long period as a much more dangerous twin-track crossing is included. At that time there were many more children in Long Rock and the beach was heavily used by them. At NRs estimated present use of 400 person-crossings per day the death risk, if there had been 2 accidental deaths, would be 1 in 11million since the railway arrived. This is very low. At the maximum death rate that can be estimated here the time cost of using the vehicle crossing is 222 person years of recreational time for every death, whether avoidable or not. Staying at home is the commonest response to the closure. This demonstrates that the alternative is not viable it deprives users of recreation and increases individual risk. Deaths (of all types) on or near the Mexico crossing will have cost less than 3 months of life per year that the crossing has been open. The health impact of loss of exercise and recreation will be vastly higher, and, gives the crossing a real negative individual risk i.e. the people of Long Rock will die later, not earlier, if it is open. Walking over the Station house Bridge is another response to closure and will generate vastly more near-misses and potentially deaths than the Mexico Crossing. Joined up thinking is welcome here, and we realise that you do not see it as your responsibility. Unfortunately Cornwall Council, on whom you rely to do this, is not clear about when or how it should do that, and may opt for passing the whole issue to the Secretary of State. We hope that you recognise that the new evidence you have now received from Network Rail on the level of use puts the history of accidents and near misses into a different context in which it is absolutely not compelling.

On behalf of the 200 people who voted unanimously against this closure, and who are supposed to be among the beneficiaries of closure, we must say that we are appalled by the high handed and ill-informed and biased attitude of Network Rail that takes away the best feature of this village and the failure of both the ORR and CC to protect us from their aggressive crossing closure policy. Yours sincerely,

Dr Nick Tregenza n.tregenza@btinternet.com for the Friends of Long Rock Mexico Crossing