Door-up the train platforms!

Of the number of people who fell onto tracks (excluding those who had committed suicides), 56% of them were reported to be drunk. Japan's railways are notorious for the open platforms which see many fall off onto the tracks, purposely or accidentally. The best way to prevent such accidents from happening is to put sliding doors on platforms. But to date, only about 7% of the nation's stations have platform doors. The main reason for this is the high cost of installing doors on existing platforms. It is reported that it cost ￥2b for each station to be fully installed with doors. To 'door-up' all the stations on JR Yamanote Line will cost a whopping ￥5.5t The cost goes not only to the installations but also the beefing up of the platforms to withstand the heavier loads of the doors.
Another difficulty that stations faced is the different designs of the trains of the different railway companies. Trains have different numbers of doors on each carriage. Some have three exits while some have only two, which means that one set of sliding doors does not meet the requirement of all trains. To overcome this problem, some stations installed multiple sliding doors that can cope with the different configurations. To overcome the high costs, the authorities are testing out sliding doors which are lighter so that there is no need to beef up the loading limit of platforms. Currently about 665 stations nationwide are 'doored-up'. Tokyo hopes to bring that number to 800 in time for 2020.