Assessing the potential of half-height platform screen doors to prevent personal injury accidents: Evidence from the Tokyo metropolitan area railway network

Abstract

While railway travel in Japan is considered one of the safest modes of transportation, passengers on station platforms still face notable risks, including hundreds of injuries and fatalities caused annually due to passenger falls, track intrusions, and collisions with trains. In response, railway operators have been working to enhance platform safety through the installation of platform screen doors (PSDs), supported with subsidies from the Japanese government and guided by numerical targets set by the government to promote their widespread adoption and reduce personal injury accidents. As prior research has primarily focused on their impact on suicide prevention, the effectiveness of PSDs in preventing various types of personal injury accidents has received limited attention. In this study, we compiled data on railway personal injury accidents in the Tokyo metropolitan area from 2002 to 2018, classified by accident attributes, as well as data on passenger numbers and PSD installation periods. Using a fixed-effect Poisson model, we estimated the extent to which the installation of half-height PSDs reduced personal injury accidents. The results show that the installation of PSDs led to a statistically significant reduction (93.1 %) in platform accidents, and almost completely prevented fatal incidents. Although the relationship between passenger volumes and accident frequency was expected to be positive, the parameter for passenger numbers was not statistically significant in most models, possibly due to the limitations of the dataset collected before COVID-19. These findings underscore the potential of PSD installations not only in improving platform safety but also in prompting further analysis of their cost-effectiveness to guide future implementation strategies.