A group of visually impaired people will launch a petition drive calling on the Tokyo Metropolitan Government to install protective gates on platforms of the newly opened Oedo subway line to help prevent accidents.

"For us, the platforms are like bridges without railings," said Kanji Yamashiro, director of Toshikyo, a Tokyo group that advocates rights for the visually impaired.

According to a survey the group conducted among its members in 1994, half of the 100 respondents -- and two-thirds of the blind -- had experienced stepping off the platforms.

"There is a joke among us that you are not a full-fledged blind person if you have never fallen from the platform," Yamashiro said.

But it is not a laughing matter, he said.

As far as the group knows, 11 people in Japan have been killed by trains after falling off station platforms in the 1994-1999 period.

Hiroshi Oda, 46, was hospitalized for six months after falling off a platform at Kawagoe Station in Saitama Prefecture in 1984.

Yamashiro said only a few lines in Tokyo, including the Mita and Nanboku subway lines, have platform gates.

The metropolitan government's Transportation Bureau said it has installed the gates on the Mita Line purely as a safeguard measure to replace conductors.

"Trains on the Oedo Line don't have conductors either. I wonder why they don't install gates," Yamashiro said, adding that his group had initially opposed the operation of lines by a single person out of safety concerns.

"I don't know how many signatures we can collect, but we will do our best to create a change for the capital," he said.

"For us, taking trains is now a life-threatening matter."