Our impact on the environment and on society

More than 1 million trips by train and bus every day mean that NS has a major impact on society in the Netherlands, in terms of mobility, safety, emissions and expenditure. We express the positive and negative environmental and socioeconomic effects on the wider community in euros in order to present a transparent picture of the breakdown and scale of this social impact.
Our impact in a nutshell
The diagram below shows the development compared to recent years and to the baseline year (2014). Passengers travelled over 250 million kilometres more by train in 2018 compared with 2017, which means that our positive social impact on mobility and safe travel with respect to cars has improved once again. The negative impact due to travel time has also increased as a result. A new element for NS in the calculations for 2018 is the positive social impact on health because rail passengers move more. Our impact on the environment has improved because we no longer run diesel trains and we sold the bus company Qbuzz last year. The positive impact of expenditure and education was less because NS had a smaller 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 2017 | % w.r.t. 2017 | % w.r.t. 2016 | | Impact compared with cars | % w.r.t. 2017 | % w.r.t. 2016 |
| (in € million) | | (in € million) |
| | | | | | | |
mobility | € 7,776 | 2% | 9% | | | n/a | |
expenditure | € 1,375 | -3% | 10% | | | n/a | |
training | € 12 | -12% | 25% | | | n/a | |
journey time | € -5,727 | 2% | 11% | | | n/a | |
environment | € -72 | -17% | -50% | | € 291 | 3% | 25% |
health and safety | € -131 | n/a | n/a | | € 620 | 4% | 13% |