Disclosing the losses on 30 unprofitable local lines (2022)

The logic of efficiency, and the region’s lifeline

The core of this decision lay in placing the disclosure of losses, in hard numbers, not as a notice of abolition but as a starting point for dialogue. For a West Japan Railway without metropolitan commuter demand, the internal cross-subsidy that props up loss-making mountain lines with the profits of the cities and the Shinkansen had grown heavier atop a revenue base thinned by the pandemic. Even so, the company chose not to treat each section’s economics as unilateral grounds for withdrawal, but rather a framework for weighing options — including the separation of track from operations — together with the regions. The character of the disclosure shows in this restrained approach that begins from a sharing of facts.

That said, a figure such as a cost-recovery ratio of 0.4 percent carries in itself the force of being read as “abolition foreordained.” Even as the country’s first line-reconstruction council got under way on the Geibi Line, a gap remains, it seems, with local governments that regard the railway as a foundation of their region. Abolition, vertical separation, or a switch to buses — the answer divides section by section, and each is tied directly to the question of how to preserve a community’s everyday transport under a shrinking population. The disclosure of facts that JR West set out was handed on to negotiations, line by line, over which of those paths to choose. That a railway company cannot, on its own, answer the question of how to keep a region’s transport alive under depopulation is something this disclosure showed ahead of time.