Sadly, all too often, we read and see media reports about serious, fatal rail accidents. Between 1997 and 2000, there were three major rail crashes. At Southall, seven people died when a train went through a red signal and, two years later, 31 perished on the same line in a similar crash at Ladbroke Grove. Then, a year later a rail shattered under a train travelling at 117mph at Hatfield and four people died.

Every time there was one of these rail crashes, the media gave it blanket coverage often for several days. “How could this happen again?” demand the TV interviewers of the rail executives brave enough to face their forensic examination. There is always an immediate search for the cause and, most important, someone to blame. With 24 hour news channels and sensationalist tabloid newspapers leading the way, the public are left with the impression that you take your life in your hands every time you step into a railway carriage.

Yet this image could not be further from the truth. Rail is a very safe form of travel, safer than aviation and, depending on how the statistics are analysed, just marginally more risky than bus and coach. And much safer, mile per mile, than cars which are at least eight times more dangerous for the same length of journey.

Yet, after the Ladbroke Grove accident, callers to phone-in programmes could be heard saying that they would rather drive a couple of hundred miles along the motorway than take the train for the same journey because it would be safer. They were reflecting a widespread public perception of risk. A survey by the Commission for Integrated Transport, carried out in 2001, after a spate of accidents on the railways, found that one person in three would not travel by train because of fears about safety. Only 7 per cent of respondents thought that rail was the safest form of travel, whereas 15 per cent thought it was the car and 13 per cent the bus - by far the highest number, almost half, thought it was the aeroplane.

It does not have to be like that. In Switzerland, they take a more rational view of these matters. When, last year, there was a train collision in Zurich which killed a woman, there was substantial media coverage on the day after, but within a few days there was barely anything in the papers. The accident was apparently caused by driver error, but, unlike in Britain, the incident was not followed by a media frenzy of weeks of soul-searching nor was there any attempt to draw wider conclusions about transport safety from one relatively minor mishap.

The trouble is that the perception of risk, which is largely created by the media, percolates through to the public and ends up determining politicians’ priorities. Billions of pounds are proposed to be spent on a rail signalling system which would prevent trains from ever going through red lights, and yet very few system measures are taken to reduce road accidents, even at blackspots. Moreover, even when safety features are introduced, such as road humps, they can be removed by local councillors opposed to them - such a move would be unthinkable in the case of the railways. It is crucially important for politicians and planners to make the right decisions about spending on transport safety based on the evidence, even when we, the public, have different ideas about what’s safe.

Inevitably, the statistics are confusing because there are different ways of looking at the transport experience. For example, in the past decade, around 35,000 people have died on the roads compared with just 60 on the railways. That, however, is a crude way of determining risk. A more considered approach is to compare fatalities per billion kilometres or journeys of different modes of transport. But even those show that rail is far safer than road.

The Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB) has analysed the various approaches in detail and sets out what the Board thinks is a fair assessment of the risks. The RSSB latest Annual Safety Performance Report, looking at a five year period, finds that rail has a fatality rate of 0.35 per billion passenger kilometres, compared with 0.8 for aviation and 2.9 for cars. Interestingly, commercial vehicles are much safer for the occupants, with a rate only 0.1 higher than aviation, and those at much higher risk are pedal cyclists, with a rate of 35 and motorcyclists with 123, which means the risk is 356 times greater than travel by train. The only forms of transport that are, using this methodology, safer than the railways are bus and coach, with a rate of 0.28 and ferries, with 0.30, a pretty insignificant difference.

The main finding, therefore, is that motoring is around eight times more dangerous than travelling by train. However, even that may misrepresent the position of the railways since the period covered, 1997-2001, included the Ladbroke Grove crash which killed 31, a once in a decade level of disaster and which would now not occur because a new form of safety device, the train protection and warning system to stop trains going through red lights which was the cause of that disaster, has been installed on the railways.More