alt Hacker Newsone thing worth pointing out is that the legacy private railways work because they were never nationalized and had decades to quietly buy up land around stations before it was worth anything. That's really hard to replicate from scratch. This model is great in dense cities but even Japan is still struggling with rural lines
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Exactly. Tokyu's model of building a train line from the city center to rural areas and then building suburban developments in the rural areas the line traverses doesn't work in already built-up areas. Hence, there are still publicly-owned lines in areas where that model doesn't work. A great example is the Yokohama Municipal Subway. It is publicly owned and serves areas that were generally already built before the subway line was built.
Exactly this. And the European case is the opposite starting point. Paris already had 2+ million people when the Metro opened in 1900. You're not building rail to create land value, you're building it because the existing density already demands it. Which is why European systems basically all require public subsidy while the Japanese private lines could turn a profit. The preconditions are just so different that copying either model somewhere else rarely works. IME the people pushing "just do what Tokyo does" tend to skip over this part.