[hngiszmo]

Heart-warming story but too much praise for the government for my taste.

What are the opportunity costs of not shutting down this platform years ago? And of getting the train delayed by 40s twice a day for who knows how many passengers plus some minor costs like acceleration, meetings to change the schedule etc. Considering all this it would almost certainly be cheaper to provide her with a taxi at the train cost, maybe only to the next train stop. Maybe given the choice of getting a taxi twice a day or getting the compensation in cash, the girl would even have taken the money and moved closer to school.

[TeMPOraL]

> Heart-warming story but too much praise for the government for my taste.

I found it weird too after I Googled some more and learned that the Japan Railways[0] is a group of companies that were the result of privatization of national railway system. But I've seen a similar phenomenon in Poland - even though our rail system has also been mostly privatized, people tend to think and talk about it like it's still a government service. I guess that it's because in some places, the concept of "infrastructure" generally pattern-matches to "government".

About your second paragraph - the most heartwarming thing I could imagine about this story would be learning that the company did in fact take into account everything you wrote and then decided to just ignore it. We are homo sapiens, not homo economicus. We have a capacity to care about other people, and caring is an economical inefficiency.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Railways_Group

[mrob]

Social equality has value. Other people might be resentful if she were given cash or a taxi. Keeping the station open is a strong signal of support for treating people equally. People who approve of this will have an improved opinion of Japan Railways, and that goodwill has value too.

[canthonytucci]

I'm not sure I follow. I understood it that they're keeping the station open solely for her and stopping the train to align with her schedule.

They're not (to my knowledge) doing this for anyone else, so it seems to me like she's being given extra special treatment that has a net negative (albeit small) effect on the other users of the system and the environment.

It made me smile though.

[mrob]

Being a high school student, presumably she didn't choose to live there. If the station closes it looks like she's being punished for something that wasn't her fault. It seems unfair/unequal because none of the other riders are being treated that way. The "unfairness" of making the other riders wait is much less salient because they were doing it already and it's only a short wait. Looking it at from a purely utilitarian point of view gives results that conflict with common human intuition (technically you could assign monetary values to "image of fairness", "social harmony", etc. but that's rarely if ever done because it's so difficult). I'm not the only person approving of keeping the station open despite the cost, so I can't be the only person to value these vague/intuitive social values.

[canthonytucci]

I wonder if the train company just decided to keep the train running without consulting with the girl's family and proposing other options.