Can Japan’s maglev bullet train survive covid?
The coronavirus upended few sectors as much as travel. Thus the announcement that ridership on Japan’s Tokaido Shinkansen was down 84%, and that its operator JR Central lost ¥83.6 billion (around $800 million) in the April-June quarter, down from a profit of ¥206.2 billion a year before, came as no surprise, but was nonetheless another marker of the unusual times in which we live. Since its debut in 1964, the Tokaido Shinkansen has been the backbone of one of the densest and most reliable transport networks on the planet. Its average daily ridership of 452,000 people in 2016 made it the world’s busiest HSR corridor and a cash machine for JR. So consistent and stable were the profits from the Tokaido Shinkansen that JR Central felt confident enough in its financial outlook to break ground on one of the world’s largest infrastructure projects — a new magnetically-levitated bullet train in the same corridor, know as the Chuo Shinkansen — with a promise to pay the entire ¥7 trillion ($70 billion) price tag out of its own pocket.
Clearly, covid has blown a giant hole in this rosy vision of the future. Ever since the Chuo Shinkansen plan got rolling in 2015, I’ve been skeptical that the assumed increase in demand and benefits of additional speed will materialize now that Japan is rapidly losing population. After covid, the shift of business from the real world to online only makes these assumptions even more self-evidently suspect. What will happen if Japan’s famously in-person business culture changes for the long-term? JR’s maglev technology, under development since the 1960s, is perhaps as close to a physical teleportation machine as humanity has come so far. It just turns out that in the meantime, we’ve created a better teleportation technology — its called the internet.
Even before the collapse of the travel market in March, the Chuo Shinkansen was facing major hurdles. The 286 kilometer section between Tokyo’s Shinagawa and Nagoya was due to be complete by 2027. However, approval of a particularly difficult section in tunnels 1,200 meters below the Southern Alps is now being held up by the local governor due to concern about how the tunnel will impact local water resources, delaying the opening date. JR Central’s promise to build the new line entirely with private financing was also compromised when the government announced in 2018 that it would provide long-term, low-interest loans to the company to accelerate the construction schedule. Now the total collapse of the company’s financial position raises the likelihood that it will receive a more direct bailout in some form.
The pandemic raises a larger question, however: why in the world is this being built in the first place?
This new line is being built in the same corridor as the Tokaido Shinkansen, which already does its job remarkably well. Even as passenger numbers cratered earlier this year, the introduction of a new, marginally faster train set and the wizardry of the schedulers made it possible for JR to introduce an updated schedule in August, succeeding for the first time in squeezing 12 Nozomi departures — the fastest service that stops only in Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Kyoto, and Osaka — into every hour. This is in addition to the Hikari and Kodama services that stop more frequently. Think about what that means — the currently existing system can dispatch a 16-car, 1,323-seat super-express train every five minutes. That’s the equivalent of a Boeing 787 (242 passengers) departing every minute. The result is that you never need to reserve in advance unless you want to, and can just walk into a station and be on your way a few minutes later. With service this convenient, business people are hardly clamoring to be shot through an underground tube at twice the speed. Moreover, much of the recent growth in passenger volume has been a result of foreign tourists, and the new line bypasses Kyoto altogether, not to mention that there are no iconic views of Mt. Fuji from inside a tunnel.
It seems the only constituency hungry for the maglev, besides train nerds, is the construction-industrial complex, and politicians unable to craft messages for the 21st century not based on the script of “faster is better.”
The Chuo Shinkansen reveals a disconnect between the cultural significance of trains in Japanese culture with the needs of the moment. For most of Japan’s modern history, the role of the railroads was to reach ever-deeper into the country’s mountainous terrain, connecting once separate domains and remote hamlets into a modern, synchronized nation state and national economy. This expansive role came to an end during the privatization of the National Railway in the 1980s, when many rural lines operating at a loss were axed. Even so, the private companies have maintained an admirably extensive network, with the local lines subsidized by profits from the bullet trains and massive commuter networks in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, and other major cities. Reliable public transport to every corner of the country is close to a right of citizenship in Japan, offering a fabulous form of freedom that car-bound Americans could never fathom.
Since the 1990s, higher speeds have remained a guiding principle of the railroads. The Shinkansen network has continually been extended, and several extensions are under construction today. The core JR companies are also increasingly focused on delivering value to their shareholders by more intensively leveraging their real estate assets for commercial and residential development. But these twin goals of faster speeds and greater profits through efficiency do not exactly maximize the potential of Japan’s fully built out, exceptionally high quality rail infrastructure.
A better mission for the rail companies would be to diversify their ticket offerings, with family discounts and cheaper off-peak services, to drive domestic air travel as close to extinction as possible, thereby reducing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions (bullet trains are around 1/10th as carbon intensive as air travel). The Shinkansen remains largely a business product, with mostly inelastic pricing. Currently, due to the pandemic’s impact, JR East is offering 50% discounts on all tickets reserved three weeks in advance until next March. These deals mean its possible to travel anywhere in eastern Japan, as far as Hokkaido, for less than $100 one-way. Making such products permanent, and reorienting the bullet trains away from last-minute business travel towards competing more directly with low-cost airlines and highway buses would improve quality of life and have great environmental benefits. A more affordable high-speed rail system would have the added benefit of enabling a rebalance of the country’s population by making it easier for people to decamp from crowded Tokyo while continuing to return to the capital for business and pleasure.
Pushing the railways to use their existing assets to take on the airlines and discount highway buses would upset the airline lobby and road building lobby. Even as Europe and the United States both seem inclined to invest trillions in green infrastructure, one of the most difficult challenges in shrinking Japan may be the competition between different lobbies, each accustomed to growth, as they squabble over a shrinking pie. But to remain indispensable infrastructure in the 21st century, Japan’s trains will need to do something new: stop accelerating.
