Safety Transportation

In order to ensure the safety of THSRC's operating environment, the Company has set up safety committees at 3 different levels to formulate prudent safety policies and implementation plans by the company-level safety committee, and regularly report significant issues related to operational safety to the Board of Directors. The cross-division-level Operational Safety Committee, functional committees, and division-level committees, executes strategies to ensure that each employee understands and abides by the Company's safety regulations. In addition, the employee work instructions stipulate that employees shall be assigned the management or execution responsibilities as per their job rankings to thoroughly implement safety management measures and shape a safety-oriented operating culture.

THSRC has implemented an operational safety management mechanism in order to mitigate and control safety hazards. It effectively applies internationally recognized risk assessment and safety management methods, ensuring that every operational process is executed according to the procedures. Quarterly, THSRC conducts comprehensive reviews on significant railway operational safety issues from the perspectives of legal regulations, systematic transportation, extreme disasters, safety management, and security affairs, both domestically and internationally. These findings are then presented to the Operational Safety Committee for review.

The THSRC has established a safety management system (SMS) for many years, formulating the "Operation Safety Plan" as the highest level of safety management guidelines. The plan encompasses 12 safety management elements, and through the P-D-C-A (Plan-Do-Check-Act) principle, continue to control, supervise, improve the safety performance of the railway transportation system. This approach effectively achieves the goal of prioritizing safety. In response to the amendments to the Railway Train-Control Rules in 2022, which require railway organizations to implement safety management systems, THSRC also cooperates with the regulator to promote safety management mechanisms. The Company has drawn on the experiences of international transportation and standardization organizations (such as the European Union Agency for Railways, the International Civil Aviation Organization, and the International Organization for Standardization) and references the results of previous safety management system reviews conducted by THSR (including incident/accident investigations, operational safety audits, and major internal and external issues). Based on these inputs, significant modifications have been made to the Operational Safety Plan, taking effect on January 1st, 2023.

In order to strengthen the protection concept of THSRC colleagues and partners on the protection of THSRC as a key infrastructure, we held 3 "Railway Industry Security Work Symposiums" in 2023, including "Suspicious Object Handling and Response Practice", "Security Incident Handling and Response Practice", and "Differentiating Threats and Mobilizing Defense in Peacetime and Wartime" to promote exchanges and communication among colleagues in various units and jointly shape safety awareness. A total of 120 trainees participated, including front-line maintenance executives and supervisors. We look forward to effectively improving THSRC overall protection preparedness and emergency response capabilities through expert sharing and cross-unit discussions, and continuously improving the quality of security in the face of future new types of threats and challenges.

THSRC regularly reviews the effectiveness of quality management through a rigorous quality management system, various quantitative quality performance indicators, and quality improvement proposals, and promotes quality policies from top to bottom, so that the spirit of quality becomes the High-speed rail culture, to protect each passenger who trusts THSRC.

The THSRC introduced the ISO 9001 Quality Management System since 2005, and annual quality management review meetings are held since 2007, chaired by the General Manager and attended by various company's various supervisors. Since 2010, THSRC has been verified by external third-party certification companies annually in accordance with the ISO 9001 international standard for quality management system certification, certification covers the "high-speed rail operation, maintenance and passenger service" the overall core business, as of 2023 have been successfully passed.

THSRC has established various internal performance indicators for quantification of quality, and reviewed and improved those tasks by following up on the results quarterly, so as to provide customers with high-quality travel services in line with four major aspects of “safety”, “reliability”, “efficiency”, and “customer satisfaction”. The number of serious injuries and deaths caused by traffic accidents on the THSRC in 2023 is 0; while the number of minor injuries to passengers is 2, which is 1 fewer than that in 2022. The passenger injury rate (minor injuries) of the “safety” performance indicator for the current year is 0.027 per million trips, which meets the set goals/estimates, which demonstrates that we focus on continuing to improve quality management and provide passengers with safe and high-quality travel services.

Maintaining the smooth operation of tracks is the core of safety management of THSRC. THSRC's track maintenance personnel perform routine inspections after daily train operations. In addition to routine track inspections, daily maintenance and examination of THSRC facilities includes stations, trains, mechanical and electrical facilities, civil structures, and route safety, which covers the safety inspection of various facilities. At the same time, various professional technologies are used to maintain transportation safety, such as Train Vibration Automatic Measurement, Ultrasonic rail inspection, Rail and turnout grinding and other daily maintenance operations. The actual safety inspection performance in 2023 includes a total of 1,800 turnout inspections, and routine track inspections and track irregularity inspections of 8,421 kilometers.