Nearly 11 million people in the Netherlands travel with NS every year, and with 1.3 million daily journeys our social impact is huge. This is reflected in areas such as mobility, safety, emissions and our expenditure. In this chapter we present a transparent account of our social impact. We will do so by expressing our positive and negative socio-economic and environmental effects in euros.
Our impact in a nutshell
The diagram below presents the development of our impact over the past few years compared with the reference year of 2014.
In 2019, passengers travelled over 361 million more kilometres by train compared with 2018. This means that we have further improved our positive social impact on mobility and safe travel compared with private cars. The negative impact due to travel time has also increased as a result. Since rail passengers get more exercise, we have also, since 2018, calculated our positive social impact on health. That impact increased last year. Our environmental impact increased due in particular to the rise in the number of passengers. The positive impact of expenditure and education was greater because NS had a larger workforce. A new calculation method for occupational safety could not be used for previous years, so comparison is not possible.
Social impact of NS | Impact in 2019 | % relative to 2018 | % relative to 2014 | Impact compared with cars | % relative to 2018 | % relative to 2014 | |
(in € million) | (in € million) | ||||||
mobility | 8,128 | 5% | 14% | n/a | |||
expenditure | 1,370 | 0% | 10% | n/a | |||
training | 13 | 9% | 36% | n/a | |||
journey time | -6,045 | 5% | 17% | n/a | |||
environment | -76 | 6% | -47% | 301 | 4% | 30% | |
health and safety | -141 | 7% | n/a | 629 | 2% | 15% |