JAPAN TODAY – January 20, 2016 – TOKYO — The transport ministry plans to conduct broad inspections on the safety management of relatively small bus companies, after a deadly crash of a chartered ski tour bus exposed lax business operations at one such operator, sources close to the matter said Monday.
The operator of the bus that crashed in central Japan last week, killing 15 people, is believed to have been routinely violating regulations and ministry officials said Monday they have found the company ran the bus without providing its drivers with appropriate instruction paperwork as required by law.
Operating the bus without the paperwork required by the ministry would constitute a violation of the Road Transportation Law.
Tokyo-based ESP provided its drivers with an instruction document together with a basic itinerary given by Keyth Tour, the travel company that organized the tour, but the ministry judged the document and itinerary did not meet standards under the law, saying they were insufficient to ensure proper and safe bus operations, according to the officials.
A bus operator is required to compile and provide its drivers with detailed instructions on places of departure and arrival, the route to be taken, break times and areas of caution.
But a special inspection by the ministry showed that the instruction document provided by ESP only specified the places of departure and arrival.
“We thought that there would be no problem if we simply attached an itinerary,” an ESP official said.
The itinerary provided was essentially a document created by the travel agency to inform customers about their tour in line with the Travel Agency Act. As it did not include information such as locations where a driver should hand over driving, the ministry has determined it was not a sufficient replacement for an instruction document.
Other possible legal violations by ESP include providing the bus service for the ski tour far more cheaply than the state-stipulated minimum.
ESP was established as a security company in 2008 and was given permission to operate chartered buses from 2014.
To make sure lax practices regarding safety management are not common in the industry, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism plans to conduct inspections of small and medium-sized companies that are short of experience in the chartered bus business and own several buses, like ESP, the sources said.
The inspections are likely to start later in the month. The ministry is expected to punish companies if they find violations of the Road Transportation Law.
The Japan Tourism Agency, which is investigating the accident with the transport ministry, also plans to conduct intensive inspections of travel companies organizing bus tours at what they call “bargain prices,” they said.
In the accident early Friday, two drivers and 12 university students were killed when the bus carrying 39 passengers from Tokyo to a ski resort in Nagano Prefecture veered off a mountain road and rolled over in the resort town of Karuizawa, Nagano, northwest of Tokyo. Another student who had been in critical condition died Monday.
Meanwhile, the ministry corrected late Sunday its earlier explanation that last year, the bus operator falsely reported to the ministry that it had conducted health checks on its bus drivers, and that one of the two drivers on the bus may have been among them.
The ministry said that in its special inspection following the crash, it found documents showing that ESP did conduct health checks.