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Safety Transportation

Safety Services and Responsible Transportation

Safety is the operating principle and core value of THSRC , and is also the responsibility and commitment to every passenger. We monitor operational safety through a sound management structure and continue to consolidate the culture of safety first. During the 15 years of operation, we have always maintained zero operation accident. In 2022, the THSRC has an average daily ridership of nearly 148,000 passengers, an average delay time of only about 0.243 minutes and a train punctuality rate has reached 99.47%. This is a clear demonstration that THSRC provides high-speed rail travel services that can be trusted by the public.

Due to a safe, punctual, and comfortable travel experience, the company has been awarded the 19th National Brand Yushan Award, the first prize for “Best Popular Brand Award”, and the first prize for “Best Product Award”, showing the trust and recognition that the company's services and safety have gained from various stakeholders.

  • Dedicated Safety Management Framework

    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.

  • Organizational Chart of Safety Committee

    Notes:
    1. The Company-level Safety Committee convenes a meeting every six months. The Occupational Safety and Health Committee, as well as the Operational Safety Committee and the Information Safety Management Committee at cross-division-level convene a meeting every quarter. The Operation Division Committee, the Maintenance Management Division Safety Committee at division-level, and the Hazard Review Group (HRG) convene a meeting every month. The "Safety Regulation Review Committee" and the "Technical Reporting-cum-Incident and Accident Improvement Committee" decide whether to convene meetings depending on the occurrence of the incident, with no fixed frequency of such meetings.
    2. The Occupational Safety and Health Committee is parallel to other safety committees and is tightly connected to employee safety.

  • Operational Safety Mechanism and Safety Management System

    Taiwan High Speed Rail (THSR) 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, THSR 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 Operations 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-DC-A (Plan-Do-Check-Act) process and 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.

  • Safety Culture Promotion and Communication

    In order to strengthen the protection concept of THSRC colleagues and partners on THSRC as a key infrastructure, we held four "Railway Industry Security Work Symposiums" in 2022, including "Suspicious Object Handling and Response Practice", "Security Incident Handling and Response Practice", "New Types of Crime Patterns and Preventive Measures (Take Railway industry as an example)", "Critical Infrastructure Protection Exercise Education and Training" and other lectures to promote exchanges and communication among colleagues in various units and jointly shape safety awareness. A total of 150 students participated in the seminar, including front-line maintenance supervisors and controllers. 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.

  • "Railway Industry Security Work Symposium" in 2022

    In addition, in order to communicate with the public about THSRC's focus on operational safety, we held total of six times media events for THSR transportation safety in 2022. The topic includes demonstrations of train crew protective clothing contingency exercises for passenger transfers during operational changes, train ventilation and circulation systems, tunnel safety laser scanning operations, and promotion of THSRC epidemic prevention and control.

    In order to continuously enhance the positive attitude and trust of management and employees towards safety management, in November 2022, THSRC held the "Safety Month" promotional activity focusing on “all employees working together to move towards zero accidents, zero occupational accidents, and zero passenger injuries". The event was commenced by senior executives to encourage employees to take the initiative to report potential hazardous events, and at the same time to hold activities such as scientific and technological physical fitness tests and Safety Talks for senior executives, so as to improve the safety management culture of THSRC.

    In response to the major revision of the company's internal "Operation Safety Plan" this year, we strengthened the organization of seminars, workshops and online learning courses for executives and colleagues at all levels; and expanded the organization of human error management seminars to promote the systematic human error incident analysis and improvement mechanism, strengthen the ability to prevent and handle incidents, and lay the foundation for the next stage of safety management of the THSRC.

  • Safety and Quality Services

    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.

  • Quality Management System (QMS)

    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 2022 have been successfully passed.

  • External Quality Inspection Items

    In order to thoroughly implement quality management, the THSRC regularly checks the latest status of internal operating facilities, equipment and related systems, software and hardware, and ensures that the THSR's quality management system keeps pace with the times through strict control and inspection of internal operating quality, and continuously strengthens the operation and maintenance quality.

    Examination of Internal Configuration

  • Quality Management Performance Review

    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 2022 is 0; while the number of minor injuries to passengers is 3, which is 3 fewer than that in 2021. The passenger injury rate (minor injuries) of the “safety” performance indicator for the current year is 0.055 per million trips, which meets the set goals/estimates, which demonstrates that we continue to improve quality management and provide passengers with safe and high-quality travel services.

  • Quality Performance Indicators

    Since 2011, THSRC has launched an employee suggestion improvement system and introduced quality control circle activities every year, encouraging colleagues to use innovative thinking and technology as the basis for developing practical suggestions to optimize quality control and operational performance, continuously improve various problems, and effectively reduce operation and maintenance costs. Since the implementation of the proposed improvement system in 2011, the savings have exceeded NT$ 80 million. Since 2009, the QCC Quality Control Circle has been promoted, which has saved the company more than NT$260 million and 41,215 man-hours by 2022, greatly improving production efficiency, driving the company's common investment, improving the quality, safety and efficiency of travel, and further improving Taiwan's high-speed rail travel services; and showing the positive image of THSRC, which attaches importance to safety and quality. The QCC (Quality Control Circle) winning team participated in the Taiwan continuous improvement competition on behalf of the company. For the third consecutive year from 2018 to 2020, we were awarded the Golden Tower Award of the Unity Group, and in 2021, we were awarded the Silver Tower Award of the Unity Group. In 2022, we won the Golden Tower Award in the top level of the “Taiwan Continuous Improvement Competition” for the first time. We are also the first company in the domestic track industry to receive this award. It can be seen that the high-speed rail company's pursuit of quality improvement has been deeply recognized by the outside world.

  • Station and Route Safety and Risk Management

    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 THSR facilities includes stations, trains, mechanical and electrical facilities, civil structures, and route safety, which covers the safety inspection of various facilities. The actual safety inspection performance in 2022 includes a total of 1,800 turnout inspections, and routine track inspections and track irregularity inspections of 8,421 kilometers.

  • Train Inspection and Maintenance Performance in 2022

    Other Railway Maintenance Management Plans

    THSRC has established a Hazard Review Group to implement risk management and control. The group is comprised of professionals from various fields within the company. It holds a monthly regular meeting to review hazard information and identify hazard risks while confirming whether appropriate procedures and technologies are implemented so as to put forth countermeasures to mitigate such risks. As of the end of 2022, all hazard risk levels identified at the HRG meetings were within the acceptable risk tolerance range.

    April 1st, 2022, a construction outage at Southeast Cement caused Taipower's 69KV transmission line to disconnect and fall directly onto the main HSR line, resulting in abnormal power supply, and affecting the operation of the section between Tainan Station and Zuoying Station. THSRC immediately established an emergency response center to change the operating interval from Nangang Station to Tainan Station, and started the shuttle services between Tainan Station and Zuoying Station. In response to this outage, THSRC utilized the overhead catenary system maintenance vehicle with aerial work baskets and pulled ladders to conduct emergency repairs. With the cooperation of Taipower and Taiwan Railway, the operation was resumed normal at 22:40 that night, and two additional trains were operated from Zuoying Station to Nangang Station. All non-reserved seat (excluding business car) trains stopped at each station for passengers to return to their hometowns for the festival.

    According to the "Passenger Transportation Contract", this abnormal event is not attributed to THSRC and natural disasters. Initially, passengers are not subject to the delayed refund policy between Tainan Station and Zuoying Station. However, considering the impact of the incident, if the ticket includes the itinerary between Tainan Station and Zuoying Station, after taking the shuttle bus, passengers can still refund the fare for the section not taken within one year. Due to the interruption of operations caused by abnormal incidents, a large number of passengers need to be transferred and redirected. Each station has planned the shuttle position and diversion measures, and discussed the traffic control plan around the station with the local police. In July 2022, passenger transfer operation drills were implemented at each station. Regarding off-rail facilities, THSRC comprehensively inventoried the construction data of the third party once again within the prohibited construction area along the high-speed railway and the location of the transmission lines/towers adjacent to the high-speed railway (including those that span, cross and parallel it) The data were submitted to the Railway Bureau in mid-April 2022 to guide the relevant engineering regulatory authorities to pay attention to construction safety. Regular or irregular inspections will continue to be carried out by local engineers and security personnel, and the hazard control record sheet will be updated monthly to reduce the risk of such hazards.