Tokyo Transit

I would like to draw your attention here as a follow up to my previous article.

Why does Tokyo have an extensive privately-owned public transit system, and no US city has anything comparable?

Wendell Cox says elsewhere that the reason that the auto, and travel by road, never took precedent in Tokyo as it did in other countries is because of poverty. After WWII, Japanese could not afford to buy cars, and depended on public transit for their livelihood.

I would slightly modify that statement to simply state that car travel was too costly. In Tokyo's case, the prohibitive cost was purchasing an automobile. Hypothetically, a similar public transit system could have developed just as organically anywhere in the world if the prohibitive cost had been road building.

In fact, even though Tokyo's highway infrastructure has been built, and Tokyo's citizens are now able to afford to purchase an automobile, the public transit system is still a more viable travel option because of congestive traffic and heavy tolls. The marginal costs of money and time are greater to travel by road than by rail.

I have no idea how much Tokyo spends on highway infrastructure, and I have no idea whether the tolls are reflective of the actual cost to build and maintain those roads. Tokyo could be undercharging for highway travel, or they could be overcharging to encourage public transportation. I don't really have the energy to look up all this random crap when I don't even know if the information is available.

Regardless, it shows that when car travel is marginally more expensive than rail travel, consumers prefer to travel by rail, and massive rail systems are built to accomodate those passengers. The systems are efficient, and they are profitable.

It is impossible to recreate a system like that in the US so long as the public is paying for highway travel as a fixed expenditure, and not as a variable/marginal expenditure, because the public will never overwhelmingly prefer a marginally more expensive mode of transportation so long as the public remains rational. Additionally, to cut off these subsidies and charge commuters on the margin would be economic and political suicide. The market would respond, of course, in the most efficient manner possible. But the markets unenviable task would be to reallocate billions upon billions of dollars to more efficient use.

I have always said that people are like water, they always seek the path of least resistance. When the government provides subsidies for some activity, it is like digging a trench so that the water might flow in that direction. When the government enforces penalties for other activities, it is like building a dam so that the water is halted. When these subsidies and penalties are removed, the market reacts, in the same way water would react, by dramatically and radically altering it's behavior. Of course, politicians then blame the free market for the readjustment saying, "Look at the devastation that results when the free market is left to run its course." It's like building a dam, blowing it up, then expressing surprise that, lo and behold, the village that was built in the riverbed below the dam is flooded and washed away.

So, if the government has been subsidizing travel in the far-reaching suburbs, and those subsidies are quickly removed; the drastic and radical return of the populace to the city would devastate the economies in those suburbs. Formerly prosperous townships would be reduced to ghost towns.