Safety at stations is very important, travelers and employees want to be able to move safely from A to B.
How often do you not read in the media that there has been another incident of aggression or nuisance in a train or at the station. Unfortunately, NS employees were more often confronted with physical and verbal aggression last year. Last year there were 965 incidents, while in 2021 this was still 744 incidents. This concerns employees at the station, in the shops and on domestic and international trains. Safety at stations is very important, travelers and employees want to be able to move safely from A to B.
Stations must be a safe place for everyone who comes there at any time of the day. ProRail, NS and other rail partners are taking care of this. Safety on and around the track is therefore number one at ProRail. Making level crossings safer, preventing track running, and making stations more accessible and safer are all examples that ProRail, NS and other rail partners are working on day and night.
In recent years, considerable investments have been made in, for example, installing cameras at many locations in the railway environment and also at office locations. Good lighting and wide platforms should also ensure greater safety at stations. In July last year, NS started watching live camera images in trains on specific routes with nuisance. Remote entrances are also being closed at some stations.
As of 7 March, two remote entrances at Lelystad Centrum station will be closed by NS and ProRail. This concerns the entrances in the underpass, located on the Visarendreef. This is done because the entrances are little used by travelers but cause a lot of nuisance by troublemakers and travelers without a valid ticket. This prevents incidents such as verbal or physical aggression in the train and at the station. In this way, the feeling of safety for travelers and employees is increased.
Preventing travel without a valid ticket is very important, as it is one of the biggest reasons for aggression in the train. It is therefore important that there is more social control and supervision at the entrances of stations. Earlier, an entrance at Nijmegen station was closed to improve safety here. Gates were often misused here. NS even deployed security guards with a dog at various stations such as Weert, Rotterdam Central and Amsterdam Central, and at the beginning of 2023 NS with permanent entry checks at Maarheeze station. Due to the hardening of society, the safety of employees and travelers is increasingly compromised and more and more measures have to be taken.
