# Analysis of the Railway Accident-Related Damages in South Korea
## 4 Real Application  
Table 1 summarizes Korea's railroad statistics for the year 2018, from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT) in Korea. There are three types of railways in operation:  
The Korea Train Express (KTX) and the general railroads, operated by KORAIL; the Korean National Railroad; and 15 routes in 9 cities operated by 11 Metro private sectors. The high-speed rail has a total length of 643 km on three routes, with a speed of 300 km/h and the general railway has 107 lines in total, with a speed of 60-100 km/h, of which 52 lines are operated for passenger transportation. With respect to the annual passenger transport statistics, Metros had a total of 3618 million passengers and the high-speed railway carried 297.6 million passengers, while the general railway carried, merely, a total of 92.1 million passengers due to its low frequency of passenger services. We analyzed a railway accident dataset in South Korea for the period from 2008 to 2016, which was obtained from the KOTSA. There were 5051 railway accidents during the mentioned period. Figure 1 presents the significantly decreasing temporal pattern of the number of railway accidents from 2008 to 2016. The number of accidents were 704 and 360 in 2008 and 2016, respectively, representing almost 50% decrease in accidents in 9 years. In the Figure 1, the number of accidents over the years were compared by the railroad types (KTX, Urban and General) and it was found that general railway-related accidents dramatically decreased from 2008 to 2016, compared with other train types. According to MOLIT, the reasons for the reduction of railway accidents are in three folds: (1) continuous railway facility improvements such as double tracks, electrification, new rolling stocks, modernization of maintenance equipment and so forth, (2) investments in the expansion of safety facilities such as three-dimensional crossing, installation of platform screen-doors (PSDs) and safety fences along the roads, (3) reinforcement of education related to accident prevention and training for railroad employees. These three actions have strengthened the overall railroad safety management in the form of systematic establishment and maintenance of the railroad safety system and the implementation of periodic facility safety inspections. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c} \hline \hline \multirow{2}{*}{**Type**} & \multirow{2}{*}{**Descriptions**} & **Operated Speed** & \multirow{2}{*}{**Length (km)**} & \multirow{2}{*}{**No. Lines**} & **Passenger** \\  & & **(km/h)** & & & **(Million/Year)** \\ \hline KTX (Korea & High-speed railway & & & & \\ Train Express) & (operated by KORAIL) & 300 & 643 & 3 & 297.6 \\ \hline General & Regional railway & & & & \\ Railway & (operated by KORAIL) & 60–100 & 3492 & 107 (52 *) & 92.1 \\ \hline Urban railway & Metro (11 operators) & 20–30 & 704 & 15 & 3618.3 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular} Note: (*) represents the number of railway lines for passenger transport service.  
\end{table} 
Table 1: Description of railway statistics in Korea (2018). Figure 1: Time series plot of the number of railway accidents (2008–2016). Figure 2 shows the map of the number of railway accidents in 17 provinces of South Korea. There were 892 accidents in Seoul, the capital of South Korea within the study period and 857 accidents in Gyeonggi province, the area surrounding the capital. Thus, the total number of railway accidents in Seoul and Gyeonggi province was 1749, which is about 34.6% of all accidents. The frequencies of all KTX and the majority of urban railway lines have increased dramatically in this area in order to meet the rising travel demand. As a result, train accidents are concentrated, mainly in the metropolitan area. Therefore, it can be concluded that the number of accidents escalate with rise in train frequency. In this study, we considered the following three damage variables from the railway accidents: number of delayed trains, delay time and amount of costs incurred in handling the accidents.