[dustintrex]

That's a lovely story, but it's also why JR is bleeding red ink. Here's a typical story about one line that was serving an average of 19 (nineteen) passengers per day and made a loss of about US$3m/year for decades until it was finally axed in 2014 thanks to a providential landslide.

https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/2012/05/20/minispike-the-en...

[lobochrome]

There is a tendency to undervalue the importance of feeder lines to the main arteries. Individually yes they might be unprofitable - but they provide value to a railway system. This process has happens in Germany over the last 30 years following privatization attempts. Only slowly are people realizing the detriments.

Almost like in a circulatory system - cutting of the tiny vessels isn’t a recipe for success even if the main system can function for a while without them.

[p_l]

It's also a lesson from Beeching axe, that you can't expect to replace feeder lines with individual cars, and that without feeder lines, the profitable mainline stops being profitable.

[tecleandor]

But it made certain sense, as it's remarked:

"...it was targeted for the axe at the privatization of Japanese National Railways in 1987, just 15 years after completion, but escaped because the road that runs more or less parallel with it and is the only route into Iwaizumi from the south is not wide enough in many places for two cars to pass and is treacherous in winter."

Also, per that article, the number of passengers is quite higher than that, and "per kilometer". Not that is huge, but...

"...the least trafficked line in the whole nation, with average daily ridership per kilometer of 46 people in fiscal 2009"

Anyway, I'm with @rob74 on this, profit shouldn't be the only concern in public transport.

[cinntaile]

I'm not sure I agree with not demanding public, national train transport to be profitable. One issue I see is that the entire country pays for these feeder lines, I don't think that is the right call. Maybe a better approach would be that these local cities pay JR for the cost of providing this service. If the local cities see the advantage, it'll get funded and if not then the whole country doesn't have to pay for something that the locals don't really want anyway.

[tecleandor]

I mean, the target shouldn't be profit but providing a service. But throwing money down the drain should be kind of avoided, in general. Probably some cost share would be great.

In said case, they might have calculated the cost of upgrading the road through this mountains versus maintaining the train. I guess..

[helen___keller]

it kind of depends right?

when you think about funding structures, there's a myriad of approaches based on risk and potential outcome.

You can try to estimate ridership, but usually only in the near future as there are major macro affects at play.

every party has a different stake. transit infrastructure can lower housing costs by connecting low cost exurbs to the urban region, which in the us makes locals less interested (probably not so for japan). it can also grow national tax base by providing a competitive central business district and attract international investment, which is something that should appeal to the national government. so it is not as simple as "if locals want it, locals should pay for it", ideally there should be aligned incentives across the board

like any business, investment in transit requires leadership and vision. blindly funding every station proposed is clearly a bad idea. so too is an overly conservative investment regime that takes 0 risk

[cinntaile]

The cost of providing regular train stops can be quite high though, the more stops the less attractive trains become because it takes longer to get from A->B and it costs money to maintain the train station infrastructure. Why would motivated people not move to the competitive center? It seems unlikely they want to take the train and commute for a considerable amount of time?

Overall I agree that it depends on the particular situation, but if it costs several millions for 50 ish travellers from a specific station (an example from in this thread somewhere) that doesn't sound like money well spent.

[helen___keller]

It definitely depends, and you need to keep in mind network effects. But yes, a station getting little ridership was probably a bad investment and in hindsight would have been better served as a bus. (Alternatively: more investment is needed to better enable that particular station.)

As far as overdoing it on stations, you’re not entirely wrong but for this reason the Japanese train system has tiers of express service. I’ve heard sometimes it’s worth taking the local train 1 stop so you can then hop on the express train to the city.

Finally, it’s worth noting there are user stories besides commuting to/from downtown business district. Hub and spoke systems like Boston are good for the commute story but fail miserably at displacing the need for car ownership

[Aeolun]

I dunno, I think it’s fine for some train lines to be unprofitable when there are so many that are massively so.

In fact, I think there are many things like that in Japan (mailing things comes to mind), where the cost is so low it’s reasonable for anyone. Or where I can go to an out of the way town serviced by one gasoline powered train a day.

You can say that it’s all loss making, and you would be right. Japans public debt increases every year, seemingly without limit. But this has zero effect on people’s lives, whereas closing the only train line that services their home…

[user-the-name]

Mass transit is meant to be a public service, not a source of profit.

[dustintrex]

The tax base in the Japanese countryside is rapidly collapsing and the public money used to prop up railways at the end of the day comes out of the same pot of taxpayer money that's used to fund schools, hospitals, etc. Personally, I'm a huge railfan, but it's still absurd to spend $3m/year to serve commuters that would easily fit in a single minibus.

[ant6n]

46ppl/km/day on a 38km line do not fit on a single minibus.

[TheOtherHobbes]

I assume the Japanese have heard of MMT?

[kwhitefoot]

The Japanese might have done but I hadn't so i looked it up. Here is a summary in case anyone else was in my position:

" Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is a heterodox macroeconomic framework that says monetarily sovereign countries like the U.S., U.K., Japan, and Canada, which spend, tax, and borrow in a fiat currency that they fully control, are not operationally constrained by revenues when it comes to federal government spending.

Put simply, such governments do not rely on taxes or borrowing for spending since they can print as much as they need and are the monopoly issuers of the currency. Since their budgets aren’t like a regular household’s, their policies should not be shaped by fears of rising national debt.

MMT challenges conventional beliefs about how the government interacts with the economy, the nature of money, the use of taxes, and the significance of budget deficits. These beliefs, critics say, are a hangover from the gold standard era and are no longer accurate, useful, or necessary.

MMT is used in policy debates to argue for such progressive legislation as universal healthcare and other public programs for which governments claim to not have enough money to fund. "

By Deborah D'Souza, https://www.investopedia.com/modern-monetary-theory-mmt-4588...

[ovi256]

Surely you agree that public service should deliver good service to as many people as possible ? Burning resources on a service from which very few benefit (that's what low ridership means) is not conducive to that. Those resources should be deployed elsewhere.

[thrashh]

It’s easy for this example but usually the line is way more blurry

Currently richer areas already subsidize plenty of things like roads, airplane routes and many other services. It’s figuring out below what number of users it is when it is no longer appropriate

[renewiltord]

Yeah, but mass transit is also meant to be mass transit.

[refurb]

Money doesn’t grow on trees. At $30M/year you could run a daily bus for $1M and spend the $29M on healthcare (for example).

[speed_spread]

Seeing the recent advances in biotech, we might not be that far off from money growing on trees.

[rob74]

Such extreme examples aside, but generally the expectation that rail transport has to be profitable is harmful. On one hand, people expect roads to be well-built and well-maintained so they can run their cars on them for free (with some exceptions), but when rail transport is subsidised with tax money to offer an environmentally friendly and competitive alternative to cars, they complain about it.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Expecting public infrastructure to be profitable is like expecting your bathroom to be profitable.

It's there to provide an essential service. Which you have to pay for.

Not only is it not a business - and not there to make money for shareholders - running it as if it were a business is ruinously expensive and distracting and hampers the service it's supposed to provide.

[beerandt]

If rail isn't profitable due to lack of demand, it likely also isn't environmentally friendly.

The rail efficiency sold to the public is based on projections that (generally) also made them profitable.

Rail efficiency decreases drastically as usage declines, as so much of the embedded energy and emissions is in the fixed cost of building out ROW and track, and ongoing MOW.

You need to operate at a high percentage of capacity in passengers per train, and high percentage of capacity in trains per track.

Efficient rail systems are relatively a highly constrained problem, due to said fixed cost of track, but also due to lack of flexibility to adapt to changes, both in routes (need to move/add track) and capacity (track at full capacity doesn't meet demand, but two tracks exceeds demand at cost of being inefficient). (Operating one track that doesn't fully meet demand increases prices and becomes an expensive but profitable point of stability.)

Which is why eg high-speed rail proposals in the US typically rely primarily on improving existing slow routes, and are limited to midrange distances. Too short and too long both push it to being more costly at reduced efficiency.