Safety culture in a railway maintenance environment : a case study of Bangkok metro network

Abstract

Safety culture is an organizational culture, which places a high level of importance on safety beliefs, values, and attitudes. These are shared by most people within the company or workplace. This paper discusses the complexity of the safety culture approach in the railway maintenance environment. The paper aims to better understand rail safety culture from a developing country perspective to advise how theory and practice could be integrated to improve it. The research explores factors that influence the relationship between safety culture and safety behavior and examines differences in perceptions of safety culture within three metro operators in Bangkok, the capital city of Thailand. Results of an online survey completed by a total of 97 representatives of the three companies showed some differences in their sub-samples' characteristics in terms of age and years of service, as well as in the way safety culture as perceived by employees involved in metro maintenance supervisory tasks. Overall, the study showed that training and supervision culture within companies scored the highest, while management commitment issues scored the lowest on average. However, the scores were still high between 70% and 90% positive range. Also, across four out of five different safety culture issues discussed, the order of responses from the highest to the lowest was similar for the three companies, where one company was constantly at the top, whereas the other was permanently at the bottom. This showed that responses were consistent and highlighted the overall perception of safety culture within each company. Specific outcomes of the study and recommendations are widely applicable to any safety-critical environment, but especially railways in developing countries. The result from the comparison safety culture between ARL which obtained the highest score from the respondent's answers especially on the same questions between Bangkok Metropolitan, Thailand and Newcastle in the UK (NEXUS) indicated which one has more safety culture. The outcome of this research listed several specific recommendations as linked to the key four factors of training, management leadership, reporting system, and communications to the rail maintenance department for improving their safety culture related to their work equipment