In recent years, China has witnessed rapid development in urban transportation, especially in metro projects. However the safety records of metro projects is rather worrying and cannot help to make us think where actually is going wrong. Official reports have claimed that the causes for those metro accidents are mainly from technical and organizational aspects. But are the reports really telling the true story? Or are there deeper reasons that lead to accidents which are not so obvious? In previous studies, Martin de Jong and Yongchi Ma have asked the same question. They conduct their research on three Chinese cities of Beijing, Hangzhou and Dalian through Jens Rasmussen’s safety theory: drift to safety boundaries. In this theory, various incentives drive stakeholders to trade off quality and safety for other core values, resulting in safety boundaries to be crossed. All three cities represent a certain extent of profit driven, excessive subcontracting and loose monitoring which rightly match what is described in Rasmussen’s theory. In my study, I will take the city Shanghai as an example to do a replicative research following Martin de Jong and Ma Yongchi’s work. Based on the main research question of searching for the contractual and organizational arrangements in metro accidents, firstly Rasmussen’s theory will be discussed in Chapter 2 to lay a theoretical underpinning for latter research. Secondly the development of Shanghai metro system will be introduced to provide background information for latter case studies. Then in Chapter 4 and 5, I am going to thoroughly study two cases: Line 1 and Line 10, which are representative in terms of social impact, data availability and data freshness. The history of development, organizational structure, contractual arrangements and value tradeoffs in the design and construction process will all be mentioned in the analysis of Line 1 and Line 10. Institutional context and underlying behavior pattern of stakeholders will be described as well. Rasmussen’s theory will be checked to see whether it is applicable in my case. Comparison will be made among Shanghai cases and other three cases from value tradeoffs (time, scope, budget and quality) and subcontracting issues in Chapter 6. It is not surprising that many common characteristics exist in all cases, like profit driven, excessive and illegal subcontracting, immature safety regulations, low public participation and etc. These features exist for institutional and social reasons. I will discuss about it and find out the differences between the Shanghai cases and previous cases. Finally in the conclusion and recommendation part, empirical and theoretical conclusions are drawn respectively to shape the mechanism of metro accidents in terms of contractual and organizational arrangements. Whether Rasmussen’s theory is suitable will be answered. On four levels recommendations will be given for policy practice in order to improve current metro management level. I will lastly carefully reflect on my research method in the research, and how I generally feel about the whole case study process. The lesson learnt in this experience will also be shared. I would like to thank my main supervisor Martin de Jong, who generously gave me the chance to study this very interesting topic, which is so closely related to my home country, and professor Leon Hombergen, who gave me valuable advice on contractual arrangements, and professor Fred Hobma, who patiently explained everything I didn’t understand and gave me great confidence. All of them provide me with consistent support from beginning to end of my thesis. I also like to send my best gratitude to Professor Yongchi Ma from Dalian University of Technology for his precious guidance on my data collection. Last but not the least, I want to say thank you to my dear parents and friends in China who concern for my study and help me collecting data in all ways. I could never accomplish this work without their help. It is the thesis writing process that gives me a great opportunity to understand and reflect on China’s metro development and Chinese society. Little by little I came to realize how influential institutional and social impacts could be on a country’s construction projects, how necessary a mature and sound legal system is in China and how important it is for public to strive for their voice to be heard no matter what it costs. I sincere hope the future for China’s metro development could be better and better.