Review and Assessment of the Korea Rail’s Safety

초록

The Korean railway industry has undergone rapid changes such as structural reform, Korea Train eXpress (KTX) operation. Railway safety is one aspect of the transport service quality delivered to passengers, employees and third parties. To improve safety by a cultural shift from a deterministic to a risk based approach, “Railway Safety Act” focused on the risk-based safety management was announced in 2004. To establish safety management systems according to this Act, requirements for common and transparent methods to monitor safety performance and set targets should be met. In this reason, since Oct. 2005, Korea Railroad Research Institute (KRRI) had developed the risk assessment models based on the accident scenarios. The developed models were applied to assess the accident risk of the Korea railway. The risk assessment process followed the requirements of the common safety methods (CSM) suggested in EU. Domestic railway accidents had been investigated and quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed. This paper introduces the results of their application to the Korea railway, reviews the Korea rail industry’s safety performance and assesses it against the trajectories for some defined key risk areas. To judge the levels of the frequencies and severities of fatal railway accidents, this paper also provides empirically based FN-curves. FN-curves are a graphical presentation of information about the frequency of fatal accidents in a system and the distribution of the numbers of fatalities in such accidents. We expect that this paper will increase the industry’s knowledge of the risk from the operation and maintenance of Korea railway network and allow the identification of areas of railway operation that need further risk controls.