Why Japan has such good railways

From the article:

Between 1907 and World War II, Japan saw a boom in new private electric railways, coinciding with rapid urbanization. Technologically, most of these private railways were similar to the famous interurbans in the United States: they were basically electric trams, but running between cities as well as within them. The American network eventually withered, and almost nothing of it survives today. In Japan, however, the network consolidated, and the light tramlines gradually evolved into heavy-rail intercity connections.

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This means that Japan has ended up with six railway companies that trace their descent to the nationalized railways, the sixteen big legacy companies that have always been private, and a host of minor legacy railways, as well as numerous underground metros (some private, some municipally owned), monorails, and tram systems. This institutional diversity is striking enough. But equally striking is the consistent business model that has evolved amidst this pluralism: the railway that builds a city.

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This model was pioneered in the 1950s by what became Hankyu Railways. Hankyu’s network connects central Osaka to its northern suburbs, as well as Kyoto and Kobe. Its innovative founder Kobayashi Ichizo first built suburban housing, then a department store at the terminal station; he then created a hot spring resort, a zoo, and his own distinctive brand of all-women musical theater, the Takarazuka Revue. He also began to run bus services to and from his stations. Other companies emulated Hankyu’s example: Tokyo Disneyland is a collaboration between Disney and the Keisei Railway, while Hanshin in Osaka owns the Hanshin Tigers baseball team.

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Core rail operations are profitable for every Japanese private railway company, but they usually only account for a plurality or a small majority of revenue. The rest is contributed by their portfolio of side businesses. There is a natural financial synergy between the reliable but unremarkable cash flow of train fares and the profitable but riskier real estate and commercial side of the business. Railway companies’ side businesses also attract people to live and work on their rail corridor, reinforcing the customer base for the railway services themselves.

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What makes Japan’s cities particularly suited to rail is thus not their residential districts, but their huge and hyperdense centers. These really are special: the cores of Tokyo or Osaka are unlike anything that exists in Europe or North America. Many of their features are famous worldwide: the vertical street zakkyo buildings, underground streets, shopping streets under rail tracks, covered arcades, elevated station squares, and vertical cities. Getting millions of commuters and shoppers into these downtowns is where rail excels because its extreme spatial efficiency means that infrastructure with a relatively modest footprint can transport vast numbers of people into a small area.

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Instead, this variety and adaptability around railways is possible because of the way Japanese urban planning works. Since 1919, Japan has had a standardized national zoning system, but it is much more liberal than development control systems in Western countries. The Japanese authorities did not intend or even desire dense urban centers, but they did not prevent them, rather like nineteenth-century governments in the West.

This liberal zoning system is reinforced by private access to city planning powers. Thirty percent of Japan’s urban land has been subject to land readjustment, where agreement among two thirds of residents and landowners in an area is enough to allow its replanning, including compulsorily taking and demolishing land for amenities and infrastructure. Initially land readjustment was used only to assemble rural land for urbanization, but over time it was increasingly used to redevelop already urbanized areas, and new variants were created to build the skyscrapers that surround the major stations of central Tokyo.

The history of the private railway companies could be written as a story of land readjustment projects: the initial building of the lines in the interwar years proceeded through one land readjustment project after another. Postwar improvements such as double-tracking, platform lengthening, and constant redevelopment of stations and their immediate thresholds were only possible because the railways could secure land takings cooperatively with local businesses and landowners.

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Since parking on public land is banned, municipalities are not worried about overspill parking from developments with inadequate private parking. They therefore have no reason to impose parking minimums on developments: the market is left to decide whether parking is the most valuable use of private land. Where land is abundant, as in rural areas, suburbs, or small towns, private parking is plentiful. But in city centers, it is outcompeted by other land uses. According to the late Donald Shoup, central Tokyo has 23 parking spaces per hectare and 0.04 parking spaces per job, compared with 263 and 0.52 for Los Angeles. Even Manhattan, the densest urban area in North America with the lowest levels of car ownership, has about 60 parking spaces per hectare.