Factors affecting safe emergency evacuation of subways in Iran: findings of a qualitative study

Background: development of construction and operation of subway rail transit system inpopulated cities of middle- and high-income countries along with the increasing population of itsusers, have exacerbated the safety problems of the users against incidents and emergencies insubway stations. although subway emergency evacuation is considered by the governments andsubway network organizations as a critical task related to passengers' safety at the time ofemergency, the risk of mass evacuation in station is undeniable. the main objective of this study isto identify factors affecting safe evacuation of the population from subway station and topropose the strategies for addressing them based on experiences or opinions of stakeholders intehran subways, iran.methods: this is a qualitative study that was conducted between january 2017 and december2018, in which a semi-structured interview was conducted for 17 participants among the seniormanagers, executive managers, subway station operations staff, and subway passengers intehran subway stations, in the capital of iran. in order to analyze the data of this qualitativestudy, the graneheim and lundman method was used and manifested content analysis approachwas employed.results: based on the findings of this study, the factors affecting safe evacuation of thepopulation from subways station were identified in four main categories covering passengers,organization, communications, and environment. then the main categories of culture, interactionand cooperation of passengers, correct and timely decision-making, notification, andlocation of emergency evacuation were emerged as safe emergency evacuation challengesand the most important findings of this study; and strategies were proposed to improve thesafety of passengers at emergency evacuation of subway stations.conclusions: in the present study, the lack of safe approach to improving passengers' safety inthe development plan of tehran subway rail transit network is a major concern for managers andoperations staff. therefore, changing the attitude of policy makers from focusing on thequantitative development of passenger transportation services to improving safety and then thequality of passengers' trip is taken into account as an urgent need to improve the safety ofsubway passengers.