Officials at West Japan Railway decided to introduce a camera system in train stations in a bid to prevent accidents involving drunken passengers.
Initially, 46 cameras are being installed in Kyobashi station found in Osaka, a wise move since the area is located near one of the city's entertainment districts. The company plans to install similar systems at other train stations in the future.
According to the company, the installed cameras will help security officials detect signs of drunkenness in a passenger and send them an alert as soon as it detects a drunken passenger. Some of the signs that show drunkenness include staggering, unexplained reason for remaining too long on the platform, and dozing off on a bench.
Most of the time, drunken passengers stay motionless for a long period of time before they realize that they need to board a train. When they do realize it, they would then head toward the train or the tracks as quickly as they could.
A report in 2013 says that of all the 221 recorded cases of passengers that were hit by trains, 60 percent of these cases involved those who were drunk at the time of the accident. Usually, the accident would involve a drunken passenger falling off the platform or getting hit by an arriving train while standing too near the platform edge or beyond the allowable distance.
The company said that the camera system will never be used to gather identities of train passengers.
Prior to the decision, the company, otherwise known as JR West, also started to reposition the benches on the platforms in such a way that they are placed at 90 degrees to the platform edge instead of being parallel with the tracks. This way, a drunken passenger who would attempt to get up from the bench but moves in an unbalanced way would avoid falling off the tracks.
Japan is known to have the busiest train stations in the world. In a report back in 2013, there were currently 51 train stations in the world which were considered the busiest, and 45 of them were found in Japan. Interestingly, the Kyobashi station where the cameras are initially installed ranked 31st on the list.
