Policy for Sea Shipping Safety

Safety assessment of shipping is becoming prerequisite for authorities responsible for ports, seaways and restricted navigable waters. Formal Safety Assessment (FSA) can serve as a framework for the total evaluation of safety issues but needs risk quantification on the actual situation and the effects of eventual measures. This paper describes the use of such a model for the quantification of policy measures on the Dutch part of the North Sea. Shipping risk models are used to assess the level of safety with the current set of traffic management measures (e.g. routing, waterway marking, pilotage and VTS) in the North Sea and within the ac-tual context of density and quality of shipping. The assessment of the impacts of future measures was used to determine a better balanced mix of measures leading to an improved cost/benefit ratio i.e. improved stake-holders perception, equal level of risk even under future traffic increase.