The risks connected with accidents on highways and railways

Safety in an integral sense is a comprehensive tool by which the humans ensure the level of their security and the sustainable development of them and of other basic public assets in a given territory. In addition to individual parts of human system it is necessary to consider their mutual links and flows being among them. One of the sectors in which security plays an important role is tourism. An integral part of it is transportation of persons, but also material and its associated safety. Safety is fundamental to any transport system; it must always be the top priority. The authors of this article focused on one particular specific area: the safety of transporting dangerous goods in the Czech Republic. The main reason was that traffic accidents with dangerous goods have big impacts on goods and vicinity, i.e. humans and environment (Maturo in Ecol Indic 90:305–315, 2018 ). They are accompanied by fire, explosion, leakage of dangerous substances, or combination of these phenomena. These facts have economic impacts on carriers (damage or destruction of goods) and as well as on protected assets at the accident site (damage to infrastructure, human health injury or loss of human lives of persons being in the vicinity, harms in environment). The aim of the paper is to analyse the traffic accidents involving dangerous substances on the motorways and main railway routes in the Czech Republic, to characterize their impacts, to judge response in case of accidents´ occurrences and on evaluation of real data to suggest the measures for increasing safety in the carriage of dangerous substances. The authors focused on the statistical evaluation of accidents and on analysis of accidents during the transport of dangerous substances from the perspective of the impacts on people and other public assets.