Rail safety and rail privatisation in Japan

Over the period from 1980 to the present, the economic status of the main line railway systems in many developed countries has changed, by privatisation or economic deregulation or both. The principal aims of such changes have been to improve the economic performance of the railways, and not to change the safety performance. Nevertheless, it is recognised that changing the organisational structure of railways might affect safety. The empirical evidence of the effect of restructuring on safety is limited, both in railways and in other industries. This paper adds to the empirical evidence by analysing train accidents in Japan before and after the privatisation of the Japanese National Railways (JNR) in 1987. The paper finds that the JNR achieved downward trends in the mean number of train accidents per train-kilometre in the 16 years 1971-1986, and the paper takes the extrapolation of these favourable trends as the yardstick by which to judge the safety performance of the privatised railways. The paper finds that the privatised railway had fewer train accidents in total than this yardstick in 1987-2006. This finding applies whether or not the high-speed Shinkansen train operations are included. Thus there is no evidence that rail privatisation in Japan had an adverse effect on train accidents. The methods adopted and the results are similar to those previously found by the author for rail privatisation in Great Britain.