Assessment of railway safety in Southeast Asia region

Abstract

This paper reports on the railway safety in Southeast Asia based on rail accidents and incidents trends. Rail transportation has many benefits, it includes fixed routes, cost-effective, safe and large capacity. It is also every country's major means of transportation. However, there are less research on causes of rail accidents and incidents, despite rail risk assessments being conducted in Great Britain, Finland and Japan. In Southeast Asia, there is no investigation for predicting rail accidents and incidents. Hence, it is vital to study the railway safety risks in this region. Data reporting is based on news or reports published for public reviews. After performing Trend Analysis, robustness is evaluated in prior to perform risk analysis using Delphi technique. Following risk analysis, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique-based railway safety rank is carried out which is designed by the Authors of this study. The variables are based on total number of cases and fatalities, level of robustness and risk. Ranking countries from high-risk to low-risk, the rank are as follows; Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Philippines, Malaysia, Cambodia and Singapore.