Comment by laughing_man
10 days ago
The real reason Japan has such good railways has to do with politics. Japanese politicians were unable to create jobs (and collect bribes) with military spending due to post war constitutional restrictions, so instead of a military industrial complex they created what some have dubbed the "construction state".
That's why they have cisterns under Tokyo which can handle a 400 year flood, and more germane to this discussion, railways which make no sense. There are railways built in the '90s which wend their way through a dozen of mountain passes to provide rail service to tiny towns with just a few thousand residents. There's no way you can justify paying the maintenance on something like that, and indeed in recent years they've been shutting these kinds of lines down.
This is completely ignoring the entire piece. Zoning, rail companies having large real estate interest and revenue, profitability, vertical integration, public policy.
If having train service to remote areas and 400-year flood prevention systems are signs of dysfunction, things are going pretty great. Not all public utilities have to be profitable on their own.
I'm not ignoring the piece at all. What I'm saying is the underlying reason Japan built so much rail has nothing to do with what the author is claiming.
And yes, overbuilding infrastructure is a sign of dysfunction. The money to build all that stuff came from people who would have stimulated the economy in other ways, and it isn't free to maintain what you've built. It's really inefficient to build a rail line and then shut it down because you can't afford to maintain it.
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