Rural trains: unprofitable but serving a purpose

Sankei Shinbun on rural trains in Japan. The Geibi Line (芸備線) is operated by JR West in the mountainous area of Chūgoku. Some stretches of the line are operated by one-car trains commuting three times a day for a handful of high-school students. The busiest train carries a staggering 13 passengers. According to JR West, it costs about 27,000 JPY to earn a fare of 100 JPY in this section.

I have to wonder if there are any government subsidies that are covering the shortage. Obviously it is in everyone's interest to have the line available if there aren't any other options.

Petaris said:

I have to wonder if there are any government subsidies that are covering the shortage. Obviously it is in everyone's interest to have the line available if there aren't any other options.

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I would assume so, simply out of public interest. My wife is on the local committee to keep the only bus line connecting our hill to the nearest JR stations (about 1.2-1.5 km away) alive: a private company with three drivers running a single bus. They could never survive without heavy municipal subsidising.

Good on Mrs Thomas!

Systems actually need some redundancy (unprofitable bus lines, public telephones, relatively inefficient but local farming) to give them resilience when things go wrong, as they are going to increasingly do while we continue to degrade our environment. The current crisis with the cost of food is largely due to excessive optimisation, resulting in a food chain that is very vulnerable to shocks such as the war in Ukraine. I've always been concerned about the lack of effort by the Japanese and British governments to make their countries more self-sufficient because it's less hassle to import stuff cheaply from overseas.