Comment by YmiYugy
11 days ago
I think it's more politics and economics. Switzerland is quite a lot richer than Japan and is extremely decentralized politically. That creates strong incentives to provide good public services even to mountain villages. It also helps that Switzerland isn't experiencing population decline. The Swiss population as a whole is growing quite rapidly and from what limited data I could find even rural regions are growing. I think land acquisition doesn't really play a huge role. They are both mountainous countries where rail projects have to squeeze in valleys or bear the expense of tunnelling.
Quite alot richer than the 4th richest Economy in the world?
In a per capita sense of course. But it does pose an interesting question. To what degree does the quality of rail scale with absolute investments vs per capita investments. On the face of it rail is almost entirely fixed cost. The capital investment for tracks, trains and the operating cost for staff and energy are fixed to matter how many or few people the trains are serving. The crux is that for a given cost the quality scales inversely with the population and covered area. Transplant the Swiss rail expenses to Japan and it would make for a pitiful experience. Stretching over an area 9x larger and having to serve 12x more people, simply requires a lot more rolling stock, track and personell to offer a similar level of experience. In particular when talking about rural rail service it's most apt to compare areas of similar size and population and in this local sense Switzerland is not just richer per capita but absolutely.