Quantitative analysis of options to reduce risk of hazardous materials transportation by railroad

The risk associated with railroad transportation of hazardous materials is an ongoing subject of interest to the transportation industries, the government, and the public. A variety of approaches have been considered or adopted to manage and reduce risk. These include improving operating practices and personnel training, improving transportation packaging, maintaining and upgrading infrastructure, and rerouting hazardous materials traffic. Certain risk reduction options have received particular attention in recent years. Realizing the interest and the need for research in this area, this study focuses on consideration of routing, track infrastructure improvement and speed management as approaches to reducing the risk from railroad hazardous materials transportation. For each approach, potential benefits in terms of risk reduction are analyzed using operations research (OR) and quantitative risk assessment (QRA) methods. The goal is to facilitate the consideration of each approach and evaluate its potential application for a particular objective of interest. Furthermore, this study considers improvement of several parameters in the risk model to enhance the quality of risk estimates and to better understand their sensitivity to various assumptions. When resources are limited so that a complete analysis of the entire routes