At the kind invitation of SNCF Gares et Connexions (the stations and connection division of French National Railways), the SMGG met in Paris on 7 March 2017. SMGG is the UIC group dedicated to railway stations. It comprises station managers from UIC members and is managed by Carlos Ventura, Director of Passenger Stations at ADIF (Spain).
The UIC members represented at the SMGG meeting were: ADIF, DB, JR East, RZD, SNCB, SNCF.
UIC Headquarters was represented by Mr Iñaki Barrón, Director of the High Speed and Passenger Department, Ms Kathrin Faber, Senior Advisor Security Division, Mr Andrea Braschi, Environmental Advisor within the Sustainable Development Unit, Mr John Lutz, Senior Advisor Certified Project Management Professional and Mr Marc Guigon, Senior Advisor for Passenger Transport.
Finalisation of the UIC project SUSTAIN – Best practices, benchmarking, guidelines and recommendations for sustainable stations
Mr Atsushi Sakai presented some stations of JR East from the point of view of sustainability.
Dr Roland Nolte, IZT – Institute for Futures Studies and Technology Assessment
The results of the project SUSTAIN – Best practices, benchmarking, guidelines and recommendations for sustainable stations were presented. The project output comprises best practices, Sustainability Performance Profiles, a multi-dimensional assessment tool as well as guidelines and recommendations.
The collection of best practices for sustainable railway stations covers examples across Europe and East Asia and describes in detail environmental, social and economic sustainability measures. The Sustainability Performance Profiles for the best practice railway stations clearly show their strong points and focus as well as the potentials for future improvement of sustainability performance. The easy to handle multi-dimensional assessment tool can either be used for screening a larger number of railway stations or for a more detailed sustainability assessment of selected railway stations.
Guidelines and recommendations have been developed for the assessment process and the application of the tool as well as for the improvement of sustainability performance of railway stations. They cover assessment procedures, data handling & quality and reporting issues as well as lanes of action with measures to improve the sustainability performance in the short-term, mid-term and long-term time perspective for all five main criteria of sustainability performance. Furthermore, an outline of a future standardisation process has been developed.
Security of stations
Ms Kathrin Faber presented the conclusions of the security workshop of 6 March 2017. The aim is to analyse effective solutions for station security measures and their impact on station business elements and client perception. Therefore, the project group will provide guidelines and recommendations on “station security – station business” for longstanding balance, including potential improvements to be available for future developments on new stations and implementation at the existing ones. The results will be summarised in a handbook and presented during the NextStation Conference, which will be held from 19 – 20 October 2017 in Madrid.
To exchange knowledge on different kinds of security measures and their impact on station business, a decision was made to hold three workshops with security and station manager experts taking place on the following dates:
- 10 – 11 April 2017 in Ostrava, Czech Republic – focusing on technical measures
- 12 May 2017 in Paris, France – focusing on organisational and procedural measures
- 14 June 2017 in Moscow, Russia – focusing on human factor measures
During the meeting the participants decided that at least 2 – 3 members from SMGG will attend at each meeting.
Future Station project
Mr John Lutz presented the preparation of the project “Future Station”, in the framework of Shift2Rail.
The last point of the meeting concerned the future projects to launch in the framework of SMGG for the period 2018 – 2020.
The next SMGG meeting will take place on 29 June at Berlin.
