I worry that explanations like these are the technocrats' version of, say, left-wing social science on power dynamics. Just a bit too neat & tidy, appealing to all the author's priors. I say this, of course, as someone with a lot of technocratic sympathies myself.
If I compare the view that normal people have of their railway system across different countries I've been to, and my own impression of riding it, there is a very obvious through-line: Public disorder and crime. The details of the technocratic railway management of course matter for financial reasons, but even highly inefficiently managed railway will generally be well-liked if you can ride the train without being assaulted by piss smell, accosted by beggars, or in the worst case, literally assaulted. Contrariwise in high-crime countries, public transport suffers no matter how well you may manage the company internally.
That's not to mean that managing it well is pointless; But Japan's railway is uniquely pleasant at least partially due to the countrie's astonishingly low crime rate and low tolerance for disorderly conduct of any kind.
I would think this is highly disincentivized with privatization. Trains not being run as a social service would not need to tolerate bad behavior and the higher cost of a train journey the less likely it is that people down on their luck can afford getting on to begin with to beg or try to use the service as a shelter.
Also they run shopping centers, apartments, offices, etc on top of the stations, so unlike other countries where the station itself has no activity and is generally an unpleasant place to be - meaning low numbers of people, plenty of space to loiter and dark corners to harass people in - instead the stations are full of shops and people whose destination literally is the station. Not the kind of place you’d ever be able to camp out or commit crimes without being caught red handed.
Japan’s low crime rate definitely helps but it’s also structural. Anyway, if the argument is “anywhere with crime can’t have nice public infrastructure”, then the future of those places is bleak. You have to start somewhere.
This is a good overview of Japan's past wrt the rail networks and companies. Moving forward, due to the slowly falling population, and the move from rural to urban centers, rural train lines are closing as they become unprofitable. Tanner and Brandon Mosconi on YT are documenting some of these lines before they close.
Recently, in 2026, there was news that the Tohoku Shinkansen was adding freight to the shinkansen itself due to a lack of truck drivers. So things are changing here in Japan, due to macro changes in population and the lack of staff for key roles in industry.
The financial constraint argument says housing supply is ultimately governed by investor behavior. Developers and capital providers will only fund projects that clear their required returns, which means they are unlikely to support construction that significantly drives prices down. In this view, even if regulations improve, capital will still avoid oversupplying housing because falling prices compress margins and undermine financing assumptions. The strength of this argument is that it correctly describes how institutional capital behaves in modern real estate markets, especially where projects depend on credit, securitization, and return thresholds. However, its weakness is that it treats housing supply as fixed within those constraints, when in reality returns can still be met through higher density, lower unit costs, and larger volume, meaning affordability can improve without eliminating profitability.
I worry that explanations like these are the technocrats' version of, say, left-wing social science on power dynamics. Just a bit too neat & tidy, appealing to all the author's priors. I say this, of course, as someone with a lot of technocratic sympathies myself.
If I compare the view that normal people have of their railway system across different countries I've been to, and my own impression of riding it, there is a very obvious through-line: Public disorder and crime. The details of the technocratic railway management of course matter for financial reasons, but even highly inefficiently managed railway will generally be well-liked if you can ride the train without being assaulted by piss smell, accosted by beggars, or in the worst case, literally assaulted. Contrariwise in high-crime countries, public transport suffers no matter how well you may manage the company internally.
That's not to mean that managing it well is pointless; But Japan's railway is uniquely pleasant at least partially due to the countrie's astonishingly low crime rate and low tolerance for disorderly conduct of any kind.
I would think this is highly disincentivized with privatization. Trains not being run as a social service would not need to tolerate bad behavior and the higher cost of a train journey the less likely it is that people down on their luck can afford getting on to begin with to beg or try to use the service as a shelter.
Also they run shopping centers, apartments, offices, etc on top of the stations, so unlike other countries where the station itself has no activity and is generally an unpleasant place to be - meaning low numbers of people, plenty of space to loiter and dark corners to harass people in - instead the stations are full of shops and people whose destination literally is the station. Not the kind of place you’d ever be able to camp out or commit crimes without being caught red handed.
Japan’s low crime rate definitely helps but it’s also structural. Anyway, if the argument is “anywhere with crime can’t have nice public infrastructure”, then the future of those places is bleak. You have to start somewhere.
This is a good overview of Japan's past wrt the rail networks and companies. Moving forward, due to the slowly falling population, and the move from rural to urban centers, rural train lines are closing as they become unprofitable. Tanner and Brandon Mosconi on YT are documenting some of these lines before they close.
Recently, in 2026, there was news that the Tohoku Shinkansen was adding freight to the shinkansen itself due to a lack of truck drivers. So things are changing here in Japan, due to macro changes in population and the lack of staff for key roles in industry.
The financial constraint argument says housing supply is ultimately governed by investor behavior. Developers and capital providers will only fund projects that clear their required returns, which means they are unlikely to support construction that significantly drives prices down. In this view, even if regulations improve, capital will still avoid oversupplying housing because falling prices compress margins and undermine financing assumptions. The strength of this argument is that it correctly describes how institutional capital behaves in modern real estate markets, especially where projects depend on credit, securitization, and return thresholds. However, its weakness is that it treats housing supply as fixed within those constraints, when in reality returns can still be met through higher density, lower unit costs, and larger volume, meaning affordability can improve without eliminating profitability.