[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.