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Monthly Archives: October 2024

The Shinkansen and Japan’s Lost Decades

By | | Transportation
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Japan is known for many things, but two of them are the Shinkansen high-speed trains and the nation’s three Lost Decades of slow economic growth. Unfortunately, most tourists who go to Japan see the former and don’t see the latter and especially don’t see the connection between the two.

The distinctive noses of Japan’s first high-speed trains led people to call them bullet trains, a name that has endured even though later trains were shaped quite differently.

Yesterday’s 60th anniversary of the first revenue runs of the Shinkansen generated many laudatory articles about the trains. “Bullet trains changed the world of rail travel forever,” said CNN. The Guardian called it “The train that helped rebuild the idea of a country.” Continue reading →

$650 Million Plus $17 Million a Year for 1,100 Daily Riders

By | | Transportation
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In 2004, Denver’s Regional Transit District persuaded the region’s voters to support a sales tax increase to pay for six new rail lines that together would cost about $3.5 billion to build. The agency claimed to be surprised when costs doubled soon after the election. Since then, the $7 billion RTD has spent on rail capital improvements was only enough to build five lines, while the sixth line, which was supposed to connect Longmont and Boulder with downtown Denver, remains unbuilt.

A Denver commuter train connecting the airport with downtown. Photo by Jarrett Stewart.

While all of the rail lines were idiotic, there were good reasons to delete the Longmont line. First, the Boulder part of the line was duplicated by a bus-rapid transit line that has probably been the most successful of the projects funded by the 2004 tax increase. Second, RTD’s own analysis found that the line to Longmont would be so expensive and carry so few passengers that the cost of carrying one rider would be more than $60 compared with under $10 for most other FasTracks lines and no more than $22 for any other line. The line was projected to cost a third as much as all of the other lines put together yet carry only 7 percent as many passengers. Continue reading →