Contributing Factors Affecting the Severity of Metro Escalator Injuries in the Guangzhou Metro, China

Abstract

Urban rail transit has become one of the indispensable modes of public transportation in large cities. Escalators are ubiquitous in metro stations, as passengers typically use escalators when entering or leaving a metro station. Thus, escalators have become an accident-prone location. To develop suitable prevention strategies, it is necessary to understand the risk factors that affect the severity of escalator accidents. This study analyzed 967 escalator passenger accidents that occurred in the Guangzhou Metro from 2013 to 2015. The Haddon matrix was used to evaluate the interaction of humans, escalators, and environmental factors before, during, and after accidents. Then, the contributing factors associated with the severity levels were determined based on chi-square tests. Passengers aged 66 years and older are more vulnerable to serious injuries (p < 0.001), and previous health conditions are significantly related to the severity of the passenger’s injuries (p = 0.002). The weather conditions (rainy days) are also significantly related to the severity of escalator accident injuries (p = 0.039), and injured people with head injuries are at greater risk of being severely injured (p < 0.001). The analysis results of these risk factors can provide theoretical support for the metro operators to develop reasonable and effective preventive measures to reduce the escalator risk.

Risk Assessment of Passenger Behaviors That Influence Accident Type and Severity in Metro Operation

“…Considering the complexity of consequences caused by multiple passengers’ unsafe behaviors, non-linear models have attracted more attention to measure the interactions between unsafe behaviors and severity of consequences in recent years. 15 , 19 , 20 For instance, Xie et al used ISM-DEMATEL to explore the relationship among escalators, passengers and environment in subway station. 18 In 2020, Wang et al analyzed 40 typical metro operation accidents, which were divided into four levels according to the severity of consequence including high, medium, low and insurance accidents.…”

“…It was found that standing instability was the most likely factor to induce accidents, and among the types of injuries caused to passengers, head and neck injuries were more serious. 19 Although these non-linear models have important superiority in revealing the relevance of passengers' unsafe behaviors and accident consequences, 4,15,19,20 a low prediction of accident risk may appear, as they did not consider the effect of different behaviors on the accident type and severity of metro operation. Moreover, due to the uncertainty of behavior occurrence and its consequence, behavioral risk is not a certain value but obeys a certain distribution in statistical significance, which is always omitted.…”