Fushiki to Beijing - Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World - page 46

rice fields pass by in a blur. The nearly three-hundred-mile trip to Kobe is over before I finish reading my
magazine.
IN the 1950s, the three-hundred-mile rail corridor between Tokyo and Osaka became so crowded with
“rolling stock” (train-geek talk for “train cars”) that there was no space left for additional traffic on the
existing tracks. Demand for seats outstripped the supply. Something had to be done to ease the passenger
crush.
The government began the early planning stages of a new high-speed, high-capacity line. They determ-
ined that the old tracks—designed for slower-moving trains—had curves too sharp for a bullet train mov-
ing at 130 mph or so. They also decided it would be impossible to build fancy new tracks alongside the
old ones, because neighborhoods had nestled up around the old tracks and stations, leaving no room for
fresh construction. An entire new system had to be laid out. New routes were carved and new station plat-
forms were designed—accounting for the possibility that the slipstream of a bullet train whooshing by at
full speed might sweep a bird-boned bystander off her feet.
The first Shinkansen trains (the Japanese term for them) opened to the public in 1964, in time to be show-
cased during the Tokyo Olympic Games. Almost from the start, they were a smashing success. On the old
trains, it took six and a half hours to get from Tokyo to Osaka. On the Shinkansen, it took four hours. One
year later, it was down to three hours and ten minutes. Bullet train ridership doubled within a few years,
and doubled again after a few more. Soon, Shinkansen lines were being extended to reach new cities.
In his charmingly oddball memoir, If There Were No Shinkansen , former railway chairman Shuichiro
Yamanouchi imagines life in Japan without bullet trains. He begins his thought experiment with these basic
facts: On the Tokyo-to-Osaka Shinkansen line, each sixteen-car train carries thirteen hundred people, and
a new train leaves from Tokyo every five minutes. This stipulated, he asks: Could Japan possibly replace
these trains with buses, airplanes, and automobiles?
To carry all those Shinkansen passengers on forty-seat buses, the buses would have to run all day at ten-
second intervals. To use planes would necessitate an air route nine times more crowded than the busiest
air route in the world (which happens to be between Tokyo and Sapporo, a city on the northern Japanese
island of Hokkaido). As for cars, Yamanouchi-san quotes The Economist theorizing that “if the hundreds
of millions who travel on these express [Shinkansen] lines each year switched to car travel, there would be
at least 1,800 extra deaths and 10,000 serious injuries.” By contrast, in the entire history of the Shinkansen
the only passenger fatality happened when a person was killed by closing train doors. There has never been
a passenger death due to collision or derailment.
Yamanouchi-san doesn't ask this question, but I will: Why has high-speed rail not taken off in the United
States as it has in Japan? Some theories blame Amtrak's underwhelming performance on the fact that it's
government run, or on the notion that its unionized workers are too intractable to allow a much-needed
revamping. But Japanese railroads have seen their share of bitter labor disputes. And it's worth noting that
Japan didn't privatize its railroads until the 1980s—long after the Shinkansen had built up its expansive
infrastructure and huge ridership numbers.
To be fair, Japan's geography has clearly been conducive to high-speed rail development. Many of
Japan's largest cities—including Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, and Hiroshima—form a densely populated stretch
along the main island, allowing one straight shot instead of a branching tree of connections. Similar geo-
graphy has helped Amtrak's semi-high-speed Acela service achieve a modicum of success in America's
crowded northeast corridor.