As someone who thinks, writes, and posts a lot about Seoul, I’ve seen an uptick of friends and friendly strangers asking me for travel tips on their next visit to the country. It feels there are more people than ever visiting the South Korean capital, and the numbers agree: Seoul recorded its highest number of foreign tourists in 2025 at 18.5 million visitors.1 Whether it be for the sights, the food, or the lifestyle (and transit, at least those who ask me), Seoul has become a sandbox for tourists from around the world, all each seeking to bring home a piece of authentic Seoul they can claim as their own. And I think most Seoul travel guides miss the mark when suggesting locations for what makes Seoul Seoul.

What makes Seoul Seoul? Like any grand city in the world, it is steeped in history. Don’t let the amnesia-inducing bright neon lights and canopy of high-rise skyscrapers fool you; Seoul is a 600-year-plus city with more transformations in the past century than some cities twice as old have experienced in its lifetime. The Seoul tourism industry likes to package “history” into neatly packaged zones – palaces, museums, or official landmarks — but history is rarely that clean. History lives inside both the symbolic landmarks into improper eyesores, which respectively, describes the two protagonists of this story. They are my favorite buildings in Seoul — and perhaps anywhere in the world. These two locations connect so many threads of local history that simply learning about them can instill a deceptively broad and deep understanding on the topic. And the best part? They are across the street from each other.

The locational pair cannot be further apart in its shape, form, and history: the first is Jongmyo Shrine, a Confucian shrine founded in 1396 which houses the spirits of the kings and queens of the defunct Joseon Dynasty. From above, Jongmyo is an urban forest pockmarked by long wooden buildings centering their own courtyard. The architecture of these buildings from a distance look plain and monotonous in comparison to the colorful bombasts of the palatial structures. The enveloping trees soundproof the urban noise out. At the price of serenity, however, is a relative lack of photogenic spots.

Its direct neighbor is the Sewoon Sangga, a massive complex of brutalist shopping mall buildings which span four wide blocks in a straight north-south line. Sewoon Sangga directly faces Jongmyo to its north, but they share little to nothing in common. Jongmyo’s well-kept, serene paths give way south to a chaotic warren of shops and alleys in and around Sewoon Sangga. Jongmyo’s buildings are single story wooden structures; Sewoon Sangga’s are giant concrete monoliths stretching 17 stories tall, once the tallest in Seoul. The buildings have fallen into serious disrepair thanks to decades of neglect. Locals consider the area a slum. It may well be the least-tourist friendly place in all of Seoul.

Despite being polar opposites in form, function, and contexts, both Jongmyo Shrine and Sewoon Sangga work together as an architectural history textbook on both Seoul and South Korea. And this dual portal may be closing soon, as Sewoon Sangga faces ongoing threats of demolition and redevelopment. In recent months, the two have been the center of a national political scandal amidst a swirl of concern about gentrification, redevelopment, and historical preservation (demonstrating these issues are alive as well in very dense, high-rise-centric cities like Seoul). They are alive with politics, and their mere existence lets the reader travel back in time so they may, upon return, appreciate the current moment better.

This blog, usually focused on mass transit, has spilled a lot of ink on Seoul’s urban history. While this post will be thin on trains and buses, I think this is a necessary addition to the growing Seoul portfolio. I had a chance this summer to briefly visit both sites. I hope I can transmit my enthusiasm and appreciation for these landmarks to you for your next visit to Seoul. To do so, I will be your tour guide today.

Author’s Note

While not the usual transit-focused post, I hope you will enjoy.

I also would like to thank Katharine Khamhaengwong for editing this story. Please follow her at @katharinegk.bsky.social‬.

You can help support my work at S(ubstack)-Bahn by putting some money in the Ko-fi tip jar.

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Jongmyo Shrine and the creation of a Korean Seoul

In 1392, General Yi Seong-gye overthrew Goryeo Dynasty, the previous kingdom in the Korean peninsula, and founded the Joseon Dynasty. Eager to rebuild the Korean peninsula in his vision, he dispatched the best geomancers in the land to find him a new city where the invisible energies coursing through the land and water would help bring longevity to his new kingdom.2

They found such a place in a flat valley north of the Han River, surrounded by mountains supposedly radiating with chi energy. Four years later, Yi moved his court to the new capital city of Hanyang, the first of Seoul’s many names, and began building the city according to old feng shui principles dating nearly 3,000 years. One such instruction, from the Rites of Zhou, was “tomb on the left, shrine on the right” (좌묘우사 [左廟右社]).3 From the throne at Gyeongbokgung Palace looking southward, the Sajik Shrine — where kings would pray for good harvests — would be on his right, and Jongmyo Shrine — where the souls of deceased Joseon kings and queens would be housed — to his left.

In Jongmyo Shrine, the kings and queens’ spirits reside inside wooden tablets marked with their names. Several times throughout the year, the Joseon king would pay tribute to his ancestors at Jongmyo, with food, liquor, music and dance especially prepared for the event, known as Jongmyo Jerye-ak. The complex is not a graveyard where the spirits are simply interred; to the Joseon royalty and political elites, the spirits were very much alive and interacting with the living, physical world at Jongmyo. Special spaces, such as a stone-laid “spirit path”, were made through the complex so spirits may walk the area undisturbed. To rule in peace, Joseon kings believed the dead must be held in harmony too.

Above: A short introductory video to Jongmyo Jerye-ak.

Jongmyo Shrine grew in size, undisturbed, for five centuries barring two major interruptions: first, the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592, during which the invaders burned down the shrine and nearby palaces, and second, the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910. Following the 1592 destruction, Jongmyo was rebuilt before the palaces, demonstrating Jongmyo’s centrality to Joseon’s political and religious legitimacy. During the period of Japanese colonization after 1910, the colonial government downsized in scale and significance the practices of Jerye-ak.4 While Jongmyo was left relatively untouched, the Japan reconfigured nearby palaces to their own purposes, building the massive Government-General of Chōsen Building in front of Gyeongbokgung Palace (thereby hiding the palace from view) and turning Changgyeonggung Palace into a zoo and amusement park.5

Jongmyo’s rituals were preserved and now performed once a year by the House of Yi, the former royal family, following independence in 1945 and the Korean War. But the South Korean state’s interest in preserving and restoring Jongmyo and the palaces did not begin in earnest until the year 1995. Two events contributed to the change. First, UNESCO designated Jongmyo as a World Heritage Site, giving the shrine a global validation of historical importance.

Second, President Kim Young-sam, the first civilian president in 30 years, ordered the demolition of the Government-General Building to begin a full, historically accurate restoration of Gyeongbokgung Palace. In a city built on feng shui order, Koreans had long believed the giant, concrete Government-General Building was purposely built to block the chi flow from the mountains in the north onto central Seoul.6 The demolition was symbolized as a modern South Korea throwing off the last shackles of Japanese rule and fully embracing its Joseon roots. Following the demolition, the national government began more rigorously investing in the restoration of the Seoul palaces and Jongmyo Shrine. In 2022, the City of Seoul connected Jongmyo to the palaces to its direct north by burying a busy road and building a park on top.7 In 2025, the Jongmyo restoration was completed after five years of work, its construction materials all manufactured by hand and according to old Joseon-era methods.8

The restoration of Joseon landmarks ushered in a new historic bent in Seoul’s urban renewal work, best exemplified in the Cheonggyecheon freeway removal and stream rehabilitation project of the early 2000s. In 1969, a freeway viaduct was built atop the stream, concealing the stream which once served as the source of potable water for the residents of Hanyang. After 34 years of use, the viaduct was torn down, the stream re-excavated to open-air view, and the surroundings along the stream built to become the walkable tourist destination it is today. The project also included the restoration of three pedestrian bridges from the Joseon era. Archaeological excavations found relics of the pedestrian bridges along the stream and incorporated these centuries-old pieces into the new bridge reconstructions.

At the heart of the Hanyang-era architecture restoration boom is Jongmyo Shrine, the oldest continuous complex of them all. The austere aesthetics of the complex reminds the visitors that this is not a place for the living; the living are here in this world to entertain and sate the spirits through its Jerye-ak rituals. The solemn atmosphere is what made the late, great architect Frank Gehry fall in love with the shrine more than any other building in Seoul, comparing it to the Parthenon in Athens.9 Jongmyo Shrine is the timeless center of Seoul where time can slow and worlds can blend.

The many lives of Sewoon Sangga

If Jongmyo is the spiritual sanctuary for a dead kingdom, then Sewoon Sangga across the street may be the bygone mausoleum for the new global soft power state. While some may be put off by its brutalist, run-down appearance, Sewoon Sangga’s history is so rich it alone can serve as a textbook for Seoul’s postwar history.

Sewoon Sangga is both one and multiple: it is the massive concrete complex which begins immediately south of Jongmyo Shrine, crosses the waters of Cheonggyecheon, and extends southward to the Togye-ro boulevard at the northern foot of Namsan, a mountain in the center of the city. But this complex is broken up into eight lots where eight separate brutalist buildings once towered over the Seoul skyline.10 Seven still stand, and the one gone is the source of the current scandal. Sewoon Sangga is the center of a blue-collar district crammed with small-scale industrial shops — printing presses on Eulji-ro, repair shops and metal workshops near Cheonggyecheon — which began haphazardly congregating here in the 1960s and 1970s. For detractors, it’s the biggest concentration of urban decay in prime Seoul real estate; for supporters, it’s the last place to experience an authentic 20th century Seoul, now at serious risk of extinction by gentrification.

Sewoon Sangga began as a gentrification project in its own right. Before its construction in 1966, the area was replete with slum homes built by thousands of war refugees eking out a living. Nearby neighborhoods were rapidly industrializing without any city planning; Cheonggyecheon in the 1960s – before a freeway viaduct was constructed overhead – was an open sewer for industrial waste dumped from textile sweatshops established along its stream. Pyounghwa Market, where activist Jeon Tae-il would work in the sweatshops and in 1970 self-immolate to protest labor conditions there, was a stone’s throw from Sewoon Sangga. The slum was cleared by the aggressive builder-mayor Kim Hyun-ok, nicknamed “The Bulldozer”, in the mid-1960s and its residents displaced. Kim, with the personal blessing from President Park Chung-hee, would build the first high-rise complex in South Korea.

Sewoon Sangga was the architectural capstone for Park Chung-hee’s vision of state development in 1960s South Korea. A military officer who successfully led the 1961 coup d’etat, Park became president in 1963 and aggressively rallied and coerced the nation to a planned economy focused on rapid export-focused industrialization to propel economic growth. When Park blessed Sewoon Sangga in 1966, South Korea’s GDP per capita was a measly $134 – but Park was eager to stamp South Korea as an economy ready to accommodate westernized haute lifestyles for its own upper class and to signal to the world its arrival. Accordingly, Mayor Kim named the complex Sewoon Sangga (世運商街), the word Sewoon meaning “Channeling the world’s energy.”11

When its first apartments opened for lease in 1967, Sewoon Sangga was the exclusive enclave for Seoul’s wealthiest cosmopolitans, sporting amenities which were not available in the country. The eight buildings each comprised a ground-level parking garage topped with three floors of Western-style department stores, and then a high-rise apartment complex atop that (one of the towers was a luxury hotel). The tallest reached 17 floors, and a deposit for a 160-square-foot apartment was 18 times more expensive than a comparable apartment built for lower-income families at the time.12 Politicians and celebrities flocked to live in Sewoon Sangga; some National Assembly members requested their legislative offices be set up in the complex so they and their families could live, work, and shop without ever having to leave.13

The architect for Sewoon Sangga was the young rising star Kim Swoo-geun, who was in his 30s when he was picked by Mayor Kim to design the complex. Heavily influenced by Le Corbusier, Kim sought to bring the Radiant City to Seoul.14 For Kim, the hallmark feature of the complex would be an aerial walkway on the third floor connecting the eight buildings together; this would provide a straight pedestrian path from Jongmyo Shrine to Namsan Mountain, away from cars and overlooking the city. But such a walkway would not be built for decades. Kim, already considered one of Korea’s most influential architects, died in 1986, at the age of 55, without seeing it completed.

As bright as Sewoon Sangga’s profile shone at its opening in 1967, its luster quickly dimmed in the 1970s. The lack of pedestrian connectivity between the buildings — whether on the ground floor, which had been reserved for parking, or aerially, as Kim envisioned — made Sewoon Sangga hard to navigate for well-to-do shoppers. Soon, the luxury shopping experience moved away to nearby Myeong-dong; then the luxury apartment experience moved away to the Gangnam District south of the Han River. By the 1980s, seedy, black market elements had made their base in the now-neglected Sewoon Sangga complex. It became a flea market for electronics and spare metal parts, often leftovers from deployed U.S. soldiers. Locals used to say, “One can assemble a whole tank with parts produced in Sewoon Sangga.”15 (Other quotes say a missile or a nuclear submarine instead of a tank.) But what sealed Sewoon Sangga’s reputation was its seedy status as the Mecca for all things porn. Despite the military dictatorship cracking down on illicit and indecent materials in the 1980s, every boy and man in Seoul past puberty age seemed to know if they wanted to get their hands on anything pornographic, Sewoon Sangga would have it.16

Sewoon Sangga limped into the 21st century, as their main industries — in secondhand electronics and porn — withered away in the age of the Internet. Beginning in the 1990s, the complex was subject to numerous demolition and redevelopment proposals, including one for a singular 260-floor skyscraper that would be taller than the Burj Khalifa, but no proposals went anywhere until the arrival in 2006 of Mayor Oh Se-hoon.17 (Readers of this blog may be familiar with Oh as the Seoul mayor who ushered in platform screen doors in all Seoul Metro stations –- and his “zero tolerance” stance against disabled protesters in the subway fighting for more accessibility.) In 2008, Oh proposed building a new high-rise mixed-use district with a surface-level greenway through the center of Sewoon Sangga.18 In a show of commitment, Oh demolished one of the eight lots of the complex, the closest one to Jongmyo Shrine. But the global financial crisis soon dried up developer interest. Three years later, Oh resigned following a failed referendum ploy to end free lunch benefits for Seoul schoolchildren.19

Oh’s successor as mayor, Park Won-soon, took the issue of a crumbling Sewoon Sangga in a totally new direction. A strong-willed liberal lawyer with a reputation for fighting for the marginalized, Park eschewed demolition, seeking to preserve Sewoon Sangga in its current form and embark on an urban renewal plan “which places more importance on the prevention of gentrification than development.”20 In 2016, Park funded a renovation and rebranding of the complex as a hip, swanky hub for startups in IT, 3-D printing, robotics, and tech repairs. Video game arcades, a rooftop space for concerts, and a museum of retro electronics opened up shop. The aerial walkway, envisioned by the architect Kim, was also partially completed. Artists and dance studios took advantage of the abandoned office blocks and apartments as spaces for expression and urban exploration. Park’s regeneration efforts won the hearts of visiting western architecture writers during the first Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism in 2017, with one lauding “there are so many exciting implications of what is happening in Sewoon Sangga that it’s hard to know where to start. … All the boring New Urbanism rules are broken.”21

This period turned out be a sweet but short honeymoon due to two catastrophic events in 2020: first, the COVID pandemic, and second, the suicide of Mayor Park a day after he was publicly accused of sexually harassing his female staff. In 2021, Oh was elected back as mayor for his third term. Over the next four years, Oh carefully laid his pieces to finally demolish redevelop Sewoon Sangga, a place he visited in his current term which made him “want to vomit blood” in how little it has changed.22 His plan would ultimately lead to a showdown that recently grabbed the nation’s hearts and minds on what Seoul’s future should look like.

The great battle of Jongmyo

On October 30, 2025, Mayor Oh unveiled a new development project at Sewoon Sangga. He announced that the vacant lot across the street from Jongmyo Shrine would be upzoned significantly for the already selected high-rise developers. The height limit for the northern half of the lot, facing Jongmyo, was increased by 80 percent, to 98 meters, and the southern half, facing Cheonggyecheon, received a 100 percent increase, to 140 meters.23 These jumps in maximum height allowed for at least a 10 to 20 story increase from what Seoul’s zoning codes had previously allowed. This set off alarms in the national government, especially the Korean Heritage Service, the agency responsible for preserving and promoting designated heritage sites — to which Jongmyo is one of its crown jewels. The service argues that the new heights will impede Jongmyo Shrine’s sightlines from ground level and disturb the spiritual serenity the site has provided for centuries.24

The development announcement was years in the making. In 2022, Oh unveiled his “Green Ecological City Re-creation Strategy,” which planned to create new urban parks around Seoul — including at Sewoon Sangga — surrounded by high-rise, mixed-use buildings.25 Oh has argued the park-high rise combination is what Seoul needs to regenerate the area and attract economic growth. The vacant lot by Jongmyo was merely the first lot to get city approval to begin construction. In the 2022 announcement, Oh administration decried the regeneration focus of his predecessor Park as leaving little choice but to seek a bold urban renewal strategy to stem the tide of urban decay.

To achieve big bold actions, small bold steps were required: Oh and the Seoul City Council removed parts of the existing Cultural Heritage Protection Ordinance which required a cultural heritage impact report before approving a high-impact building near a heritage site. The City Council erased these parts and called them broad and excessive regulations; the Korean Heritage Service sued to challenge the removals but the Supreme Court sided with Oh and the Seoul City Council, paving the way for the drastic upzoning of the vacant Sewoon Sangga lot.26

Oh’s announcement sparked a weeks-long news cycle — the verve and televised debates led some commentators to title the war of words between the Mayor of Seoul and the national government “the great battle of Jongmyo.”27 A week after Oh’s press conference, Prime Minister Kim Min-seok, the second-most powerful man in government, visited Jongmyo Shrine to demonstrate his opposition to the upzoning.28 In December, Korean Heritage Service administrator Heo Min reported to President Lee Jae-myung that legislation intended to supersede and prevent Seoul’s upzoning scheme is in the works and likely pass next year at the National Assembly.29 UNESCO also threw its hat in the ring, asking the Seoul Metropolitan Government to suspend the new high-rise plan or risk having Jongmyo’s World Heritage designation stripped.30

The battle between the Korea Heritage Service and Mayor Oh reached fever pitch over two photos. They each published strikingly different three-dimensional renderings on how much shadow the currently planned buildings will cast on Jongmyo Shrine. At a Seoul City Council meeting, Oh held up his own rendering — which shows the high-rises as faraway specks — and asked, “When you see this…do you feel suffocated? Do you feel your chi blocked?”31 The former rendering, however, show the skyscrapers definitively looming over the Jongmyo airspace. (In January, an independent simulation by the Seoul National University Department of Environmental Design found its rendering much closer to the Korea Heritage Service's.)

It’s plausible that in Seoul, with its history of feng shui influences, chi flow could be a serious consideration for planning decisions. After all, in the United States, high-rise plans in urban settings have also been stymied by concerns about shadows or sightlines, too. This episode has been a reminder that even in a city of skyscrapers like Seoul, the argument over whether high-rises can be allowed is never a settled question.

Plans like Oh’s for Sewoon Sangga still can elicit a lot of negative feeling even if they may create thousands of housing units in a long-neglected part of town, in a country where most live in high-rises themselves. The opposition to development has been overwhelming in Korean public opinion; one survey found 69 percent of respondents supported “development restrictions to preserve the landscape and value of a World Heritage site like Jongmyo” versus 22 percent for “the development of high-rises should be allowed to revitalize aging urban areas.”32

Timeliness, or timelessness? Seoul faces a crossroads

All good tours end just before it overstays its welcome, and this tour will leave you, the reader, with some uncertainties surrounding Sewoon Sangga.

The paths of neighbors Jongmyo and Sewoon Sangga are diverging: Jongmyo’s place is secure, likely for centuries to come, but Sewoon Sangga’s fate seems destined for demolition. Even as Oh’s opponents fight back against the increased heights, the opponents have shown no appetite in further renovating the complex, as Mayor Park aimed to do. The choice for Sewoon Sangga seems to be between towering skyscrapers looking down into Jongmyo Shrine or shorter, less imposing new buildings to fill in the area; renovation and regeneration are no longer vogue. When interviewed by the media, shopowners in Sewoon Sangga seemed accepting of their fate, totally exhausted by 30 years of uncertainty about what may come.33

In other countries, a place with Sewoon Sangga’s history might have been treated with far more dignity and respect. As Mayor Park Won-soon tried to salvage, Sewoon Sangga has merit and great potential to educate Seoul’s urban history as a historical landmark. But it seems the buildings are too deteriorated, the political will too atrophied, and the economic headwinds too strong for there to be any hope of actual historical preservation of the area. One wonders if a different fate could have been salvaged had its biggest champion, Mayor Park Won-soon, not died in office.

As Sewoon Sangga faces an unknown future, the area surrounding the complex, too, faces deep uncertainty as well. South Korea’s rapid economic growth from the 1960s into the 1990s was undergirded by blue-collar manufacturing jobs which, in central Seoul, clustered around hundreds of industrial shops around Sewoon Sangga and Cheonggyecheon.34 These jobs are rapidly disappearing. In many cases, the industrial shop owners and employees are aging out, and there are no younger replacements lined up.

Seoul’s urban history is often colored more by what has been lost than what remains. In the 20th century alone, Seoul was the capital of the dying Joseon Dynasty, the administrative heart of a Japanese colonial state, a bombed out city traded between North and South Korea four times during their civil war, an industrial shantytown generating high economic growth, and then a modern metropolis fit for the 1988 Summer Olympics. Now it is a global city célèbre as South Korean film, television, and music enchant the world. Those who remember the Seoul of previous eras — including myself who opines foolishly for the pre-Asian financial crisis ritzy Seoul and its nowhere-as-good Seoul Metro — often search more for what survived the latest era change than trendy novelty when they revisit. On my last visit, in the dizziness of displacements, I sought groundedness; I found myself in a quiet shrine where time is absent and a decaying mall next door where time is running out.

Riding the Seoul Metro this summer for the first time in 25 years, the most visceral change I noticed was the ubiquity of platform screen doors between me and the tracks. I noticed them alertly, for I remember how deathly afraid I was of falling over into the tracks as a child. Usually one grows out of or overcomes their childhood fears; standing on the edge of the platform, peering through the glass wall, I realized my fear, at its site of origin, had been made physically impossible, now a concern no child in Seoul would share.

How did Seoul do it? As with the focus of this blog, it all comes back to the politics and the hinge points which catalyze political action. Seoul did not build its platform screen doors (PSDs) out of some Confucian duty or because of the better angels of Korean nature (in this house, we reject Orientalist flattery and overwrought cultural essentialisms!) but through its own grinding political process, through crises in Seoul and South Korea’s tempestuous 21st century history.

Seoul Metro in the early 2000s experienced the same issues many metros in cities around the world experience to this day: an alarming frequency of deaths and injuries due to people falling onto its tracks. Platform screen doors were entertained briefly between 2000 and 2002 but went nowhere until two events in rapid succession in 2003 greatly shook the country: a fire inside a metro station in the city of Daegu which killed 192 people in February and a subway-pushing murder at a Seoul Metro station in June. These two events led to a widespread feeling of panic and unsafety at metro stations across South Korea. Even then, as platform screen doors were hailed as a solution, local politicians haggled and argued over their feasibility, cost, and effectiveness. The political stalemate was broken, unexpectedly, over another public safety issue – clean air – which suddenly shook up the value of PSDs and made them too valuable to leave behind as a failed pilot project.

The fine details in this short history – spanning 2003 and 2015 – underscore how much initial resistance and uncertainty there was to installing PSDs in Seoul. It can be argued that, at the beginning, two men alone kept the possibility of PSDs alive: the mayor of Seoul and the widower of the woman murdered in the subway-pushing incident. PSDs’ position was never guaranteed – until it was, and then it was as if PSDs were the most natural thing in the world. These decision makers could never have imagined their PSDs would be equipping every metro station in South Korea in less than 20 years’ time. Perhaps, with some optimism, readers can imagine such a banal history happening in their own city.

Author’s Note

This post would not have been possible without the 2016 paper “An Analysis of Restriction of Access to Means of Suicide Policy Process: The Case of Platform Screen Doors in Seoul City’s Subway System,” published by Jeong Duyong at Seoul National University’s Graduate School of Public Health. I found it to be an illuminating research paper that delved deep into the political formation of platform screen doors in Seoul.

I also would like to thank Katharine Khamhaengwong for editing this story. Please follow her at @katharinegk.bsky.social‬.

You can help support my work at S(ubstack)-Bahn by putting some money in the Ko-fi tip jar.

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Disaster Republic

One can chart the course of South Korea’s history after the end of the devastating Korean War in 1953 by a chain of large-scale accidents, which killed and injured hundreds of civilians. South Korea’s breakneck industrialization and urbanization from the 1950s to the 1980s made accidents a regular occurrence. But these accidents did not transmute into forms of national trauma until after democratization in 1987, when freedom of speech and press was opened after decades of dictatorial censorship and the country reached the status of a developed nation, heralded by the 1988 Seoul Olympics. The country’s citizens had come to expect a higher quality of life, and they were no longer afraid to speak out.

The 1990s was a time of whiplash: the Korean economy ran red-hot until its spectacular crash in 1997; shiny new buildings, roads, planes, and boats also crashed, with horrifying casualty figures. Mass casualty accidents piled up as the decade progressed, and citizens began calling their new democratic country the “disaster republic.” These accidents included:

• the Mugunghwa train collision in March 1993 (78 dead),

• the Asiana plane crash at Mokpo in July 1993 (68 dead),

• the sinking of the MV Seohae ferry in October 1993 (292 dead),

• the Seongsu Bridge collapse in Seoul in October 1994 (32 dead),

• the Daegu Metro construction explosion in April 1995 (101 dead),

• the Sampoong Department Store in Seoul collapse in June 1995 (502 dead),

• the Korean Air crash in August 1997 (228 dead), and

• the Sealand Children’s Camp fire in June 1999 (23 dead).

Beyond the witty moniker, Korean society was left deeply traumatized by this succession of accidents. A shared feeling that nowhere was truly safe – considering so many buildings, roads, and bridges were built in the same rapid, unregulated manner – pervaded nationwide. As a child growing up in 1990s Korea, I can speak personally: these disasters were some of my first memories, and I vividly recall learning about the Seongsu Bridge collapse and especially the Sealand fire, where 18 of 23 victims were children aged 5 to 7 – my age then – found huddled together in the same room after the fire engulfed the building.

(The accidents slowed in frequency over time but the shockwaves never went away. The sinking of MV Sewol ferry [476 dead] in April 2014 and the Itaewon crowd crush [159 dead] on Halloween night in 2022 re-traumatized the country and have galvanized, and polarized, Korean politics since. The current president, Lee Jae-myung – who is partially disabled from a machinery accident which crushed his arm as a teenage factory worker – seems to have made it his crusade to dole out heavy punishments on any company with a record of on-site fatalities or casualties.)1

This background is critical in understanding the political environment that helped usher in platform screen doors. The Daegu subway fire of February 18, 2003, shocked an already traumatized nation due to its gruesome and preventable nature. The arsonist, a taxi driver in his 50s who had lost his job due to a stroke, entered a Daegu Metro train at 9:53 am with a lighter and two cartons of flammable liquid. After wrestling with passengers trying to stop him, he lit one of the cartons. The fire spread through all six cars of the train within minutes; the cars were lined with polyurethane foam and furnished with vinyl seats and plastic matted floors – all flammable materials. The train operator failed to immediately alert officials, and another train pulled into the underground station next to the burning train heading in the opposite direction. The second train soon caught on fire. The operator for the second train fled without providing passengers a way to escape, trapping them to their deaths. One hundred ninety-two passengers died and 151 were injured.

Four months later, at 10:07 am on June 22, a 42-year-old woman, Ahn Sang-ran, was waiting for a Seoul Metro’s Line 4 train at Hoehyeon Station. She had finished her all-nighter business at Namdaemun Market and was heading to another market to buy fabric. As a Line 4 train pulled in, a man in his 50s randomly pushed Ahn onto the tracks as a train approached. Ahn died immediately. Her husband, Yoon Byung-so, was the chief detective of the Seoul Metro Police Department, based at the far busier Jongno-3-ga Station. He learned on the job that he lost his wife in his jurisdiction and now was left to raise three young children without their mother.2

Mission Impossible

In 2003, Seoul Metro registered 85 accidents on its tracks, resulting in 52 fatalities – of which Ahn was one – and 31 severe injuries. This was a notable increase from the 139 fatalities recorded on the tracks between 1998 and 2002, 91 of which were suicides.3

Seoul Metro had explored platform screen doors already – but only in the last year, for the under-construction Line 9.4 In negotiations with private construction partners in Seoul’s first and only privatized line, Seoul Metro demanded platform screen doors on all Line 9 stations.5 For the already-operating Lines 1 to 8, the Seoul Metro’s labor unions had demanded PSDs prior to the Line 9 settlement, but management determined it would be too hard and too costly to retrofit operational stations. However, in preparation for Line 9, Seoul Metro management tested a PSD prototype at Singil Station in 2003, where Lines 1 and 5 operate.

The prototype started as a half-enclosed door, open from chest-level upwards, before a second floor-to-ceiling door prototype was installed the next year . During the Singil pilot, its construction chief reported to the Seoul City Council that he thought PSDs might be a waste of extremely limited capital funds. He suggested safety fences – metal grated fences at about waist height along the platform edge, with openings for doors – along the platform as a better, cost-friendly alternative; the now familiar Seoul Metro PSD, of giant, hermetic glass panels and sliding doors, was still in gestation.6

As Metro management shuttered its interest in PSDs, widower Yoon soon began pushing the agenda that PSDs would have saved his wife’s life to the media. He petitioned directly to the Seoul Metro to install PSDs at its stations and floated the possibility of a lawsuit against Seoul Metro. But he acknowledged in his petition that he faced incredible odds:

[Seoul Metro] tells me coldly that installing platform screen doors at stations is impossible as they do not have the funds and the engineering skills in South Korea are lacking. … I have visited several lawyers but they all turned me down. They say if I sue it will be dismissed. They say there is no gain.7

Politicians were divided on feasibility. While some were supportive, many on the city council dismissed a system-wide PSD installation plan based on cost and lack of domestic expertise in installation. PSDs were initially estimated to cost between 2 billion and 3 billion won (approximately US$1.8 million to $2.6 million) per station – and more than 500 billion won for all 250+ Seoul Metro stations.8 If completed, this would increase Seoul Metro’s existing construction debt of 1.6 trillion won by nearly a third. For management, this was repellent. Besides, it was unclear if anyone could build it for that price. Once, the city council asked Seoul Metro staff how many firms in South Korea could even do the installation work; they said one – and a dubious company at that.9

Those against PSDs repeatedly said they were economically “impossible.” Internally, policymakers and bureaucrats in the Seoul Metropolitan Government echoed the sentiment:

Economists and experts ask if there is a need to install platform screen doors considering its huge expenses and lengthy construction periods. If there is an accident, [the Metro] can compensate. … Even in the United States, systems like the New York City subway have not installed one over its 100-year history.10

Despite the price tag scare, the debate over PSDs rolled over into 2004 due to the continued interest of four unconnected parties: first, the widower Yoon, whose media campaign was in full steam; second, the labor unions who had over the years demanded PSDs for passenger and employee safety; third, Seoul Mayor Lee Myung-bak, who, in January 2004, jumped into the debate by asking his own staff to look into PSD feasibility; and, lastly, a cadre of councilmembers who periodically quizzed Seoul Metro management about PSDs.11

The last two held the most sway. Mayor Lee, a former Hyundai Engineering and Construction CEO, was arguably the most consequential Seoul Mayor in modern history, most famous for tearing down the Cheonggyecheon freeway and restoring the creek that ran below it. Lee, who often took the metro as mayor, was greatly interested in transforming Seoul’s transportation network and led the consequential 2004 bus network reorganization.12 The PSD plan was thus in Lee’s wheelhouse: a large-scale construction project to remake Seoul’s urban transportation fabric. One anonymous Seoul Metro employee told the press that despite the council’s majority opposition to PSDs, Lee kept the issue alive by sheer will and personal interest.13

Those aligned with Lee in the city council approached the issue from a different emotional source – anxiety and trauma. The Daegu subway fire was constantly on their minds as they talked about PSDs. One councilmember said, “citizens are at a point where they cannot shake off the anxiety in their everyday life and are in a state of panic.” Another said “after [the Daegu subway fire], little accidents in Seoul Metro since have continued the stress and fear within Seoul residents.”14 It reached a point where politicians felt pressed to do something, anything, to allay the nerves.

New Wind in its Sails

This rudderless, ragtag group of supporters tasted its first victory in February 2004, when the Seoul city council decided to explore a pilot platform screen door program funded entirely by private investments (in return for turning PSDs into new advertising space). The pilot was, however, uninspired and conducted with little urgency – it would take 20 months for the first PSD pilot to be installed at Sadang station in October 2005.

Meanwhile, local politicians and bureaucrats continued pushing for PSDs by highlighting benefits beyond safety, such as reduction of noise levels, lower fine dust levels, and retention of air-conditioned cooling on the platform.15 But detractors poked holes at the central supporting tenet for PSDs, which was whether they are effective at preventing fatalities on the train tracks. Politicians cast doubt on PSDs ability to meaningfully reduce or prevent suicides. Their opinions coalesced along a rather crude line of reasoning, as expressed by a city councilmember against PSDs:

Let’s say we installed PSDs everywhere to prevent suicides, but these people who want to kill themselves will kill themselves elsewhere. Do you understand what I mean? There are more people who throw themselves to death at the Han River. Shall we install PSDs on every bridge on the Han River too? … The subway’s budget is already so tight, and this is not the way to spend money.16

But in 2005, the beleaguered pro-PSD movement gained new momentum with support from an unexpected source. Seoul's environmental bureau threw their hat in the ring to loudly back PSDs as the key to combating a growing public health hazard: air pollution. Seoul Metro stations then recorded very high levels of fine brake dust on their platforms. When trains brake, their steel wheels spark off microscopic particulates and blow them into the air. This brake dust includes iron, manganese, and cadmium at levels well over recommended exposure levels and continuous exposure at high levels is associated with higher rates of cancer and respiratory, cardiovascular, and neurodegenerative diseases.17 Seoul’s environmental chief reported in November 2005 that the Sadang pilot PSD had reduced fine dust levels by half, a shocking success. As a measure to safeguard public and environmental health, the environmental chief thus argued, PSDs must be installed systemwide, through private investment, public subsidies, or by any other possible means.18

The twin crusade of public safety (reduction of train collision fatalities and injuries) and public health (reduced exposure of carcinogenic dust) made the case for PSDs far stronger and more palatable to politicians with power of purse. At the same time, the Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) and Seoul Metro’s difficulties finding a suitable private bidder for the pilot PSDs cemented the understanding that some level of public support would be necessary. In 2005, the SMG approved a budget of 10 billion won to install PSDs at 28 Seoul Metro stations by the end of 2006. Despite the figure, that was only enough to cover 15% of the cost for the 28 stations; half of the funding was to come from public-private partnerships and the remaining 35% from Seoul Metro’s own pockets.19

PSDs were undoubtedly on the rise, and their destiny as part of Seoul Metro was sealed on December 28, 2005. The incident that cemented their place was not a council vote or an executive order of the mayor but a verdict at the Seoul High Court. The widower, Yoon Byung-so, had sued Seoul Metro in 2004 and, surprisingly, won his case at the Seoul Central District Court, which ruled the corporation bore responsibility for his wife’s death. Seoul Metro appealed, but, on December 28, the Seoul High Court sided with the lower court’s opinion. Yoon was compensated 220 million won in the High Court verdict.20 Of greater consequence was the precedent set in South Korea: if a person falls off the platform and is killed by a train, whether as an act of suicide or by accident, the train corporation does bear some responsibility for their death. Seoul Metro was now exposed to future liability in similar accidents or suicides (or murders). The corporation took the ruling as “an administrative order” that stations would need to be death-proofed, regardless of cost.21

The Clean Air Mayor

Before his term ended in 2006, Mayor Lee Myung-bak announced he would not run for re-election, in order to focus on the presidential election the next year. Lee’s swashbuckling mayoralty transformed the urban landscape and transportation of Seoul in ways no predecessor had; his outsized legacy as the “CEO mayor” of Seoul ushered him first as the conservative Grand National Party presidential candidate and then into the Blue House in 2007 as the 10th president of South Korea.22 (After his presidency, Lee was convicted of bribery and embezzlement and spent four years in prison.) Lee had a chosen heir for Seoul mayor: the telegenic 45-year-old lawyer-turned-politician Oh Se-hoon. Like Lee, Oh sought to remake areas of Seoul’s civic life to his own specifications. Lee had targeted transportation and urban spaces; for Oh, it became clean air.

Seoul’s air pollution problem had been growing since the 1970s, reaching its peak in the 2000s. Seoul was then replete with heavy industry, including factories within city limits, and fostered a growing middle class buying and driving increasing numbers of cars. In 2006, Seoul’s outdoor fine dust levels, at 61 µg/m3 (micrograms per cubic meter), were twice as high as Tokyo’s and thrice as high as in New York City and Paris; underground Seoul Metro stations were far worse, recording levels as high as 150 µg/m3.23 Smog was a familiar filter, covering the Seoul skyline year-round. Air pollution would reach its apex in springtime, when yellow dust from the Gobi Desert would push east and fill the sky for weeks.

When Oh was elected mayor in July 2006, he promised a ten-point “Clean Seoul” agenda to reduce air pollution, including restrictions on old diesel vehicles and installation of emission filters in diesel vehicles.24 One of his most ambitious promises was tucked inside his eighth point: combat fine dust in underground spaces, especially Metro platforms. There, Oh proposed to do something that until his election seemed not only impossible but implausible: install platform screen doors at all 265 Seoul Metro stations by 2010, the end of his first term.

By the end of 2006, PSDs had been installed in 18 out of the 28 stations approved by the SMG in their 2005 budget.25 SMG staff noted encouraging benefits, invisible to the naked eye, brought by the PSDs: the average fine dust levels at these stations dropped from 131 µg/m3 to 85 µg/m3 – a 35% drop, and the average noise volume dropped 8%, from 78.3 db(A) (weighted decibels) to 72.1dB(A).26 With this data, Oh promoted PSDs as a pillar of his ambitious “Clean Seoul” agenda. Like with Lee, Oh’s vocal support made it difficult for local politicians to push back on PSDs.

Unlike in 2004, when the SMG sought private contractors to pay for and build the test PSDs, the city was determined to pay for this project using public funds. For the SMG and Seoul Metro, they wanted nothing more to do with private operatorship after an arduous initial pilot process. Low bids from companies with no technical expertise had slowed the project. Some companies even went bankrupt in the middle of construction.27 Ironically, the rough lessons from the pilot helped iron out technical issues with later PSDs and taught the SMG, Seoul Metro, and the surviving private contractors valuable lessons on how to build more reliable PSDs at scale.28

In September 2006, the Seoul Metropolitan Government’s transportation bureau calculated the remaining cost to install at all Seoul Metro stations at 400 billion won (approximately US$420 million).29 The transportation bureau proposed to Seoul Metro that it would fund 20 billion won annually from 2007 through 2010, with the remaining costs paid by Seoul Metro.30 In December, this funding plan was approved by the Seoul city council and Mayor Oh.

Going National

On December 31, 2009, the last of the platform screen doors was installed. All 265 Seoul Metro stations for Lines 1-8 sported PSDs – a year ahead of schedule. That night, former Metro police officer Yoon Byung-so stood where his wife was pushed to her death at Hoehyeon station, now blocked from the tracks by a PSD. “Rest up now dear, don’t worry about the kids now,” said the teary-eyed Yoon.31

Literature or videos on the three-year PSD installation project were not available online, which casts a fog on how they were able to install so quickly. But we can take some educated guesses. First, as mentioned above, the hard technical issues of PSDs had long been ironed out, thus making it easy to procure for the SMG and Seoul Metro and for the contractors (Hyundai Movex and Samjung Tech built the vast majority of Seoul Metro PSDs) to build at scale. Second, Mayor Oh’s interest in seeing the project completed before the end of his term in 2010 likely played a part. Third, all Seoul Metro rolling stock measurements are standardized and identical – the train cars all have the same length, width, and height, as well as four doors on each side – for a fast and easy installation process.32

Since its completion, Seoul Metro’s full PSD enclosure has delivered all its supporters promised – and more. Most crucially, track fatalities vanished overnight. Between 2001 and 2009, about 37 people died in Seoul Metro right-of-way annually on average, 34 of which were determined as suicides.33 Since 2010, fatalities in Seoul Metro have come in at 0.5 per year, with 0.1 determined as suicides. (Between 2012 and 2022, no suicide-determined fatalities occurred.) Fine dust levels averaged around 80 µg/m3, as observed in the pilots. Seoul Metro reported it saved 30% on energy prices during the summer months thanks to PSDs.34

The immediate success of Seoul Metro’s PSDs spurred action to codify them as an essential part of the South Korean transit fabric. Since the project’s inception in 2007, all subsequent Seoul Metro stations have been built with PSDs already in place. Starting in 2012, Busan Metro, the country’s second largest system, began installing their own PSDs.35 In 2015, the National Assembly amended the Rail Safety Act to include that railway operators must install PSDs at all rapid transit station platforms, new or old.36 Following the 2015 amendment, all other metro systems in South Korea retrofitted their stations to include PSDs.

Sliding Doors Moment

In South Korea at the time of this post’s publication, there are 708 train stations that serve mass rapid transit operations.37 All of them have platform screen doors, a stunning achievement for a country which 20 years ago had one operational PSD, at Singil Station. In fact, PSDs have now been around long enough that the Seoul and Busan metros have replaced their entire stock since deployment.38 And, thanks to the 2015 amendment of the Rail Safety Act, this full compliance is guaranteed for all stations to come.

As noted above, Seoul Metro’s push to equip all stations with PSDs provided the technical expertise and experience for companies like Hyundai Movex and Samjung Tech to be able to build PSDs at scale. Clear government-led regulations and promotions have eased procurement and construction to the point where PSDs have been absorbed as a natural part of a metro station. New technologies have been proposed to herald the next generation of PSDs in South Korea, such as transparent OLED glass screens produced by LG that will show live subway maps and safety information.39 Creating engaging platforms does not require cutting-edge technology; Seoul Metro holds an annual competition for rider-submitted poems to fill up unused glass panel space.40

It would be inaccurate to characterize the full implementation of PSDs as perfect. Between 2012 and 2016, six fatalities occurred in Seoul due to accidents related to PSDs. Three fatalities were passengers caught between the screen door and the departing train.41 Another involved a 19-year-old mechanic who was struck by a train while repairing a broken PSD sensor from the track side. Later revelations found the mechanic was dispatched to work alone – despite rules requiring the presence of two people for PSD inspections – and gained Seoul Metro public ire, especially from labor activists.42

Tragedies have dotted modern South Korean history both before and after the installation of PSDs. Just as these terrible deaths were not predestined, nothing about the arrival of PSDs was either. It took the confluence of several societal conditions – including the trauma of the Daegu subway fire, which continues to actively shape emergency safety planning in South Korea to this day – and men like Lee Myung-bak and Yoon Byung-so, men shaped by their times and experiences and traumas, to materialize PSDs into a nigh-invisible object encountered daily, if not hourly. For the outsider looking in, these doors may as well be transit magic; for the insider, however, the platform screen door looks more like a mere child of its times growing up in the Disaster Republic.

I confess starting a transit blog has been a pretty neat sleight of hand: it permits me to build out my travels around the blog’s topics of interest and then charge it as a fact-finding mission. It’s not that I was ever going to skip out on the trains and buses when abroad, of course. But I get to grant myself extra license to ride, observe, and note liberally in hopes they become blog material when it all clicks in my head. When it does indeed click, it is mighty fun.

I have just returned from an extended trip to Japan and South Korea this summer. Despite my extended coverage of both countries on here, it was my first time visiting Japan and a return to South Korea, my homeland, after 25 years. Both countries offer so much for those visiting as plain tourists, but again, S(ubstack)-Bahn blesses me to go beyond, to seek out experiences which corroborate and build upon itself.

In Japan, I had the luck of riding — and experiencing firsthand — some of the lines reaping the benefits of the Commuting Five Directions Operation, the mega-infrastructural project to add train capacity in Tokyo’s busiest regional lines. In Osaka, where I was based, I thoroughly enjoyed the massive malls and hotels next to train stations, these transit value capture behemoths unleashed by its private railways (especially Hankyu Railways) and, later, the privatized Japanese Railways companies. I saw up close, and with puzzlement, the facial recognition fare gates located throughout Osaka Metro stations — which I touched upon in my post on the creeping security militarization of Metros worldwide. I took several regional trains out into the countryside, enjoying the rural networks which so crippled the public Japanese National Railways and ushered in privatization in the dawning of neoliberalism.

In Korea, I got to ride Seoul Metro for the first time since I was a child. It was a visceral experience to see how far the system has come in a quarter-century. I got to experience the incredible madness that is Seoul Metro Line 1 and the Yamanote Line-equivalent Line 2, the rides made sweeter knowing their full origin stories. I endured Seoul’s infamous rush hour train crowding, as I had written about the crowded “Hell Line”, Line 9. I took the train out to suburbs and visit the apartments I grew up in, the direct source of inspiration for my most recent post on the intersection of housing and transit politics in Seoul. I also witnessed a very small protest of wheelchaired users at a Seoul Metro station, to whom I felt a deep kinship toward because writing has this magical effect of letting you relate to people and a cause even though you are thousands of miles away.

This trip was a deeply validating one. Often times, especially the writing is not going so well, I wonder if the writing here is too esoteric, too irrelevant, too boring. Your feedback — commenting, liking, subscribing, sharing — snaps me out of the negativity. And then these firsthand experiences weld together all that I have written to the motions of the real world. Only recently have I felt all the posts on this blog — scattered in histories, ideas, and geographies over three years’ publication — come together and present an unifying worldview and real-world applicability, and that emergence has been personally satisfying.

I plan to continue writing here. I have several ideas, some inspired by the trip, which I hope to flesh out over however long to bring to your inbox.

I am blessed to say S(ubstack)-Bahn now has more than 2,000 subscribers. I hope it is never lost to you how much I appreciate your readership, interest, and support.

I have three items to ask of you, the readers:

1. I am honored and excited to speak in the panel, “What can California learn from transit in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan”, hosted by the transit advocacy organization Seamless Bay Area on July 16th. I will be speaking on South Korea and Japan’s transit successes and what can be imported to California. I really hope you can RSVP (click on the button below) and join what I hope will be a lively discussion.

   

   RSVP here

   As a former BART employee, I am keenly aware of Seamless Bay Area’s amazing advocacy work in my Bay Area. I met Ian once on a Caltrain at Millbrae for a Bay Area transit event in Palo Alto, and I am flattered Ian regarded S(ubstack)-Bahn high enough to invite me to speak. To share the stage with an actual academic like Dr. Chang, as a blogger cosplaying as an academic, is also very humbling.

2. Over the past few months, four readers graciously pledged for a paid subscription if S(ubstack)-Bahn ever created pay-to-read content. I’m flattered by the notion that this blog is worth giving money toward to keep it going.

   
   When I started S(ubstack)-Bahn, I never wanted to make money here. If I believed the ideas I was writing about were so imperative to share, then I did not believe it should be walled in. Transit history writing is scarce as is, and I feel uncomfortable adding to its inaccessibility. However, frankly speaking, it can be hard to pour personal time and money with no payout at the end. As a small compromise, I created a Ko-fi account where readers may donate or tip me if you so choose. I will be using the money toward printing out large PDFs, buying books or journals, and grabbing a cup of coffee to find the time and energy to publish the next S(ubstack)-Bahn post. I will be adding this button to future posts going forward.

   S(ubstack)-Bahn tip jar

3. In my recent post exploring France’s transit renaissance, I collaborated with another transit thinker for the first time on S(ubstack)-Bahn. I greatly enjoyed that experience, and I want more of it. I would be happy to collaborate with others who think about transit in a similar manner as I do. This collaboration can happen on S(ubstack)-Bahn or your terrain of choice, whether it be a formal publication, another blog, a podcast, etc. So hit me up on Bluesky, Twitter/X, or seungylee14 at gmail dot com.
   
   Lastly: I would be really keen on working with — and even paying for — those with editorial experience to be a editor on call for S(ubstack)-Bahn. As a former newspaper reporter, I recognize the immense value of having an editor. I catch grammatical and editorial mistakes all the time after publishing, and it is very frustrating. I know how hard it is to find a good editor. Considering I publish 4-8 posts a year, I hope this will not be a burden to the editor. If you have enjoyed my posts and have the chops to be a part-time editor, please do reach out.

Thank you. Choo choo.

Two thousand years ago, two princes came from the north looking for new land fit for a kingdom. On the south bank of the Han River, they found one so. His older brother, however, wished his city closer to the sea, so he headed west where the river met the sea. But he soon found it unsuitable and went back to his younger brother in defeat. The younger brother took the throne and named his new city Wirye. His new kingdom, Baekje, would last for more than 700 years.

Wirye is alive again two thousand years later — as a glitzy real estate project on the southeastern edge of Seoul. Wirye New Town (위례신도시) is the first and only planned development built from scratch within Seoul’s city limits. Gleaming with glassy high-rise apartments and verdant parks, it now houses 120,000 people, many of whom own apartments units priced in at more than $1 million USD. Many Wirye residents receive a royal treatment as one of most desirable demographic in contemporary South Korean society: young, wealthy homeowners with jobs in Gangnam looking to raise a family.

Then, how did it all go so wrong?

Homeowners in Wirye are mad as hell. Broken promises over a 17-year period on new rail connections have left Wirye residents bereft of mass transit and left stewing in isolation and frustration. A volatile housing market and supply shortage has discharged an air of panic for relatively new homebuyers. They hold near-weekly protests in their town square and in front of Seoul City Hall demanding action.1 In 2024, Wirye residents took the drastic step (in non-American terms) of suing the Seoul city government.2 Wirye is now often shorthand for everything wrong with Seoul’s red-hot market among Korean real estate content creators. A cursory online search of Wirye New Town showcases the following headlines: “Wirye New Town collapse: My whole savings is about to disappear”; “Tears in Wirye New Town: What do I do, asks investor”; “Wirye homeowners say: ‘The government scammed us.’”3 45

But on the ground, this rancor may be hard to imagine. Wirye New Town on the surface looks like an urbanist’s dream: dense, high-rise sky-rise residential complexes circle an inner central business district (CBD) marked by a car-free promenade; two manicured parks, with a lake each, sandwich the town; and a “Human ring” walkway connects the parks and create a walkable, bicycle-friendly greenbelt. Conceived in 2008 and first move-ins in 2013, Wirye New Town was built as the model suburb for the model Korean family in the 21st century. Wirye was where the kind of smart, dense, walkable, mixed-use urbanism envied by many outside Korea and East Asia was actually achieved. (Take a stroll in 4K video below)

For Korean readers or those who lived in one of Seoul’s many satellite cities, this sole focus on Wirye may be confusing. Wirye is no more unique, perhaps even less stellar, than the other planned development which orbit Seoul: why not focus on the hyper-futuristic Dongtan suburb, or the pioneering Bundang district, or even Sejong, the new administrative capital of the country? They too have tall apartments and verdant parks and good schools. But I argue what sets Wirye apart is its shortcomings, and its shortcomings reveal a surprising amount on the current state of the South Korean political economy often hidden to Western observers.

This post, I hope, aims to achieve four objectives: 1) examine how in South Korea a new city is planned and built from scratch; 2) shed light on the criticality of rail transit in the success of these new developments; 3) explore the unique characters of the Korean housing market and the forces at play which both contribute to Wirye homeowners’ mutiny and the greater Seoul’s severe housing crisis; 4) ponder Wirye’s self-selected long history and its uncertain future. Many of these topics — planned city developments, the housing-rail linkage, and global housing dynamics — are topics of great interest around the world, including in my home California. (Remember California Forever?) Wirye New Town offers a rare opportunity to explore these complex ideas through one history, one full of promises and failures.

How to Build a City from Scratch

The first planned city in South Korea was created in 1962 under the Park Chung-hee regime at Ulsan, 30 minutes drive north of Busan. Purposed as a base for heavy industry in South Korea’s rapidly growing economy, Ulsan was designated as a special industrial zone, as corporations such as Hyundai and the Korean National Oil Corporation built there refineries, a car manufacturing plant, and a modern shipyard. Ulsan was to be home for these skilled workers and their families. Ulsan set the precedent of the Korean government’s priority in leading the selection and guidance for brand-new cities to be built by large construction corporations.

As Ulsan grew from a fishing village to a port town, Seoul grew exponentially into a megalopolis. As the political, cultural, and economic heart of the country, Seoul’s population grew tenfold from 1 million in 1953 to 10 million 1988. Seoul was where Korea’s first large apartment blocks were constructed. With the advent of the Seoul Metro, Seoul cannibalized marshlands south of the Han river, slums tucked away between mountains in the northeast, and textile factories in the southwestern plains to build large housing complexes to keep up with an explosive housing demand. At the same time, Seoul was building its first four Metro lines which zig-zagged the city. The government felt more drastic action was needed.

Read more on Seoul Metro's origin

Twenty-seven years and two republics later since Ulsan’s creation, President Roh Tae-woo in 1989 announced the first generation of five new planned satellite cities to fulfill his campaign promise of 2 million new housing units. While suburbs like Bundang and Ilsan became its own centers of gravity within Seoul’s urban-suburban solar system, the first generation left only a minor dent on the housing demand. In 2003, under Roh Moo-hyun (no relation to previous Roh), Wirye New Town was announced as one of eight second-generation new planned cities. In the mid-2000s, Seoul housing prices soared at record levels, and the Roh government felt imperative to intervene; perhaps this urgency is a factor why the new generation was located further away from Seoul and transport planning was not as in lockstep with housing production as the first generation.6 A decade later, under another surge in housing prices, a third generation of five planned cities, more in style of the first generation, was announced in 2018.

As the isochrone map above show, Wirye New Town is the only second generation city in direct contact with Seoul’s borders. To add, a third of its town is directly within Seoul as part of the southeastern and affluent Songpa District. This high distinction has been a blessing and a curse. Wirye administratively is split between Seoul in the north and its satellite municipalities Seongnam in the south and Hannam in the northeast, requiring a tripartite government over its affairs. Despite the pristine appearance, this fractured governance has created a Frankenstein-style planned city of bizarre inconveniences. Local development regulations such as floor area ratios differ based on the city of construction. Amenities such as schools, social centers, post offices, and bus routes are largely segregated between the three Wirye parts.7 Garbage bags and taxi fares cost differently depending on what part of town you are in. Wirye residents living in the City of Hannam have to pay a toll on the expressway around Namhan Mountain to visit their own City Hall for paperwork.8 The only thing the three cities seemed to have agreed on is agreeing to name their portion Wirye to promote the brand and pump up property values.9

Before the first shovel for Wirye New Town hit the ground in 2008, the Korean government went out its way to clear the road for a successful development. They granted a 10-year lift of all greenbelt regulations starting in 2009 allowing unrestricted housing heights and limits in previously undeveloped areas in the fringes of Seoul’s borders.10 The government also relocated existing military bases, including a previously undisclosed U.S. army base, and military schools to clear the land. They also funded infrastructure work to improve road transportation prior to construction. Under the original 2003 plan, Wirye New Town was a centerpiece of the liberal Roh administration’s plan to massively increase affordable rental apartments to the Seoul region in the nearby suburbs. However, after a power change to the conservatives in 2008, that plan seemed to have been scrapped for the more lucrative home-buying endeavor. Wirye New Town became a homebuyer-majority area. In 2022, only 22% of its 42,700 units were rentals compared to 73% of stock available for purchase.11

Wirye New Town is composed of 52 high-rise apartment complexes and mixed-use developments. Every residential complex is planned out by the state-run Korea Land & Housing Corporation (commonly called “LH”) which solicit bids from construction conglomerates, such as Samsung, Daewoo and Hyundai. A total of 27 construction companies claimed at least one Wirye complex as its own for construction, including the Ministry of National Defense which built apartments for soldiers. For LH, Wirye is one parcel to a nationwide portfolio of “Smart Cities” totaling 950,000 housing units with the goals of achieving the government’s housing goals and providing a consistent source of housing availability.

Due to its newness and proximity to Gangnam, Wirye saw its housing prices balloon steadily from its first housing sale in 2014 to 2016, when residents settled in and businesses opened in the CBD. Apartment complexes in the Seoul area of Wirye expectedly were the most desirable but remained consistent all three administrative sides. Wirye’s housing price peaked in 2021: a 35 pyeong — or a 1245 sq ft apartment, a common medium-size apartment in Korea — on the Seoul side peaked around 1.7 billion Won, or $1.24 million USD.12 At that time, Wirye homeowners had every reason to believe the prices were only going to go up.

Waiting for a Train

When building 42,700 housing units to house 120,000 people on land the size of two New York City Central Parks, transport inevitably becomes the major talk of town.13 Most apartment complexes come replete with underground parking lots, but the only desirable mode of transport for these commuter is the train, especially ones heading straight into Seoul. This desire has been the source of much ire.

As shown in the administrative map above, two Seoul Metro lines skirt past Wirye. Wirye nominally has a Metro station of its own called South Wirye (Nam-Wirye), but it sits outside its borders; from the central square, it takes 30 minutes to walk from the town square. Another station, Macheon, is a longer distance away on the north side. As it stands, Wirye residents have to choose either to walk or bike a fair distance to a Metro station, or brave the infamous Gangnam traffic on a bus or on their own to commute to Seoul.

Wirye is the black sheep of its siblings. Among the eighteen total planned cities across three generations, Wirye is the only one without a direct rail access to Seoul or a direct rail line to Seoul under construction. As noted earlier, the second generation cities were planned further away and more clumsily in regards to matching transportation planning with housing planning. It is ironic that the only planned cities in Seoul’s city limits does not have such critical amenity. Planned cities in the northwest of Seoul are connected via the Gyeongui commuter line and now GTX-A high-speed regional rail, which opened in 2024. Even those without direct rail access now have a clearer path to one in the near future: two new third-generation cities east of Seoul have the GTX-B line and an extension of a nearby Seoul Metro line in the plans to give them a direct rail connection Wirye residents have been begging for.

Since Wirye’s very conception, three plans have been floated to bring much-needed mass transit access to its city center: a new Metro line connecting Wirye to Gangnam; a new peripheral Metro line connecting Wirye to a nearby satellite city; and a tram line connecting to the two existing Metro lines on its north and south sides. All three were announced as the transportation solutions back in 2008. Seventeen years later, none of them have materialized.

Of the three, the most anticipated and frustrating wait has been the 15-kilometer long Wirye-Sinsa Line, the one-seat train ride to Gangnam in 15 minutes. The plan was approved by LH in 2014, just in time as residents began moving in, and the project was awarded to Samsung C&T Corporation to begin construction. However, Samsung forfeited its bid in 2016 citing low profitability concerns. Four years later in 2020, a new consortium led by GS Construction won the bid to build the Wirye-Sinsa Line by 2027. GS initially stalled in its planning phase due to internal infighting over where to finalize station locations along the lucrative Gangnam neighborhoods. Then, of course, COVID shut everything down. The project slipped through GS’s grip when the pandemic triggered high inflation and high interest rates.14 Two years later, the Russian invasion into Ukraine hit the Korean construction economy hard, and that was the knockout punch to GS’s bid. By the time GS pulled out, the Wirye-Sinsa Line was projected between 1.5 ($1.1 billion) and 1.8 trillion Won ($1.3 billion), its price tag more than doubling from GS’s 2020 projection of 830 billion Won.15 Without a private contractor to build, Wirye residents have been desperately trying to pressure the government to do the construction work themselves to no avail.

The second Metro proposal called the Wirye-Gwacheon Line was originally as an outer loop line around the southeastern periphery of Seoul, connecting Wirye to the satellite city of Gwacheon to its west.16 It was set to complete in 2013 when it was announced in 2008.17 Seventeen years later, in May this year, LH unveiled a revised map of the Wirye-Gwacheon Line as a Y-shaped three-legged line, with the third leg extending to Gangnam. However, the plan does not extend to Wirye at all. In the new revised proposal, Wirye has been left out of its own namesake line — with the closest station some distance outside its town limits.18A spokesperson for the Wirye citizen’s group demanding rail connection expressed his frustration, saying “we will gather our forces to respond to this wrong route plan is not confirmed.”19

But not all is lost for Wirye. The tram is happening, and, yes, under construction as we speak. For Korean railfans, this Wirye tram line is one of great intrigue, as this is the first tram line in Seoul since its once-expansive tram network closed for good in 1968. For longtime residents, however, it feels too little too late: after no private bidders in 2014, the Seoul Metropolitan Government took it upon itself to build the line with public money. Construction began in 2022 and the 12-station, 4.9 kilometer line will connect Macheon Metro station to the north to Nam-Wirye Metro station in the south through the car-free central promenade. The project has cost 261 billion Won ($189 million) and will open in 2026.20

In the past year, Wirye residents have ratcheted up their protests to air their rail grievances. Their main gripe is toward the Seoul Metropolitan Government for their transportation slow-footing, despite all homeowners having to deposit a 7 million Won (about $5,000) dedicated toward transportation improvements in the area. A total of 310 billion Won ($224 million) has been contributed by Wirye into this pot.21 And for what exactly? Time is running out, it seems, for Wirye’s home-owning class.

High-Rise, High Stakes Housing Crisis

For the western reader, it may come as a surprise, even a shock, that a city full of high-rise apartments is enduring a severe housing crisis not unlike those in San Francisco, New York City, or London. One may know of the housing surfeit in nearby Tokyo — thanks to its similar aesthetics and capital city status — and apply it clumsily to Seoul. But housing political economy in Seoul is complicated, capricious, and behaves in many ways unlike Tokyo, and this section hopes to unpack several of its layers.

There are three good starting points to understand Seoul’s housing crisis which impact homeowners and rentiers alike. First, South Korea remains a heavily heliocentric country with Seoul as its sun and its gravity unrelenting. Since the 1980s, government efforts have tried to diffuse (with satellite cities) and break (a la Sejong City) Seoul’s hegemonic status as the political, economic, and cultural city in South Korea without equal. It has been largely ineffective. The Seoul Metropolitan Area occupies less than 12% of South Korea’s land area but 47% of all housing stock and 51% of population.22 Whereas Seoul’s housing price saw a 3.6% year-over-year increase between 2024 and 2025, the next five biggest cities in South Korea outside of Seoul’s orbit saw a negative dip in housing prices.23

Second, nearly 40% of total households in Seoul are now single-person households, driving up demand for individual housing units that far outpace the volume of existing housing stock, many of which are 2- or 3-bedroom family-oriented units.24 Young Koreans in Seoul are increasingly marrying later or choosing to live alone, its downstream effect reflected in South Korea’s notorious birth rate. Nearly half of the 1.7 million registered single-person households in Seoul are in their 20s and 30s. Limited availability in land in and around Seoul and financing to build smaller units better suited for single-person households have driven up competition for these newly premium housing units. Per the Korea Housing Institute, housing demand in Seoul outpaced supply in 2023 by more than 200,000 units — despite a 6% population decline in Seoul between 2015 and 2022.25 26

Third, the post-COVID economic volatility and inflation which exploded transit construction costs, as evidenced by the unbuilt Wirye-Sinsa Line, has likewise impacted housing construction in Seoul. In 2021 and 2022, housing prices grew at near-record highs until the Bank of Korea continuously raised interest rates to cool the red-hot housing market; meanwhile, the central government loosened housing restrictions to foster a supply boom.27 In 2023, the boom skidded to a freeze, as prospective homeowners could not afford mortgages at its highest interest rates since 2008. Local governments outside Seoul put a halt on construction as thousands of newly built units sat empty.28 Even in red-hot markets like Seoul, private developers struggled to secure financing under high interest rates, stricter loan conditions set by the government and higher construction costs. In 2024, housing construction permits met only 32% of Seoul’s annual target for housing supply.29

Where does Wirye fit in all this? The three factors listed above are conditions more acutely felt by lower-income single-household renters across Seoul and its suburbs. In contrast, Wirye is a homeowner enclave for upper and upper-middle class family households. Take the aforementioned 35 pyeong apartment on the ritzy Seoul side of Wirye, which was priced in 2021 around 1.7 billion Won ($1.24 million). After a 20% drop in housing price in 2023 alone, the same unit has crawled back up to 1.55 billion Won ($1.13 million), recouping half of its lost value. Wirye, like nearly all parts of Seoul, has seen an upswing on its property values, and with the advent of the Wirye tram, there is room to be optimistic. But the mood on the ground from homeowners is very dark and cynical. How do we make sense of this divide?

I would like to shed light on three more factors which apply exclusively to the real estate-owning class of South Koreans that may share some insight on their unique personalities and dilemmas. First, owning housing or real estate is not only critical to a Korean household’s wealth generation; it may as well be the only way. Per Bank of Korea data, 65% of net assets of Korean households are tied in real estates whereas only 7% are in stocks; in comparison, the net holdings of households in the United States divide to about 28% in real estate and 33% in stocks.3031South Korea’s financial exposure to real estate nearly doubled between 2014 and 2024, with loans to households making half of the added amount.32 The Bank of Korea voiced concerns over the extreme over-reliance of household investments into real estate, warning of a bubble. Both liberal and conservative lawmakers have urged Koreans to invest more into stocks and bonds, a tall task in a country still traumatized by the Asian financial crisis of 1997.33 34

Second, residential real estate investments, especially high-rise apartments, are a ticking time bomb. Built modularly, rapidly and sometimes haphazardly, even the shiniest, newest high-rise apartments in Seoul do not age so gracefully. Apartments older than 20 years often show leaks, cracks, sewage smells, and icicles in wintertime.35 Apartment passed 30 years is considered obsolescent. In Korean real estate, the 30th birthday of an apartment building means it’s time for a “reconstruction” — either via heavy, even total, renovation or a clean demolition-rebuild project. In 2024, LH announced apartments can just begin reconstruction as soon as it hits 30 years without a safety diagnosis test, which historically served as the first step toward reconstruction.36 What once were new, modern apartments in Seoul in the 1990s have been “slumified” — to use a Korean English loanword — through wear and tear as it nears the dreaded 30th birthday.37 Under these timelines, homeowners expectedly calculate their home equity with a far shorter frame than those in the United States, where a prewar era home is often viewed increasingly desirable. Homeowners naturally look to cash in on their home equity before the buildings show age in its 20s and obsolescence in its 30s. Any later can mean their chance at cashing out melts away. It then may be of note to remind viewers that first apartments opened in Wirye New Town 13 years ago.

Third: while hard to quantify, there is a real, deep, longstanding paranoia among Korean homebuyers of getting ripped off or being swindled by a broker, landlord, or some other party. Real estate corruption scandals are very common and extremely high profile. They litter the annals of modern South Korean history and rise to the very top. In 1995, President Roh Tae-woo was arrested and sentenced to life for taking more than $300 million in office — most notably, a slush fund from a construction magnate to sell illegally land at Suseo, near Gangnam, to build housing complexes. In 2022, the Daejang-dong real estate scandal — located in another planned city outside Seoul — shook the Presidential race against liberal candidate Lee Jae-myung, handing Yoon Suk-yeol the closest election victory in modern Korean history.

Landlords, while never popular, has reached new lows of trust in recent years. The jeonse deposit system — where tenants deposit a lump sum worth a year or two rent’s worth to their landlord for very low rent or free rent for the lease’s duration — has been the cornerstone of the home-renting system in South Korea since the end of the Korean War. It was made ubiquitous in the 1960s and 1970s when interest rate and savings rates were very high and mortgages were uncommon. For example, the average jeonse deposit for a Seoul apartment in 2022 was 680 million won, or $522,000. (Imagine saving that much money just to rent!) For tenants, jeonse is often a stepping stone toward home ownership and has been preferred over the more conventional monthly rent system common in the West (wolse). Jeonse landlords typically invested these deposits into more real estate, a practice known as “gap investment”; this gap investment and its high, somewhat predictable profits, were what kept the jeonse system firmly in place in the Korean socioeconomic fabric.38

However, during the real estate freeze in 2022 and 2023, many jeonse landlords found their real estate portfolio too exposed and could not pay back their tenants’ deposit when their lease ended. In several cases, the expanding jeonse crisis exposed many scammers who fled with their tenants’ jeonse deposits. For many, these deposits were the tenants’ entire life savings built painstakingly over decades. It hit those in their 20s and 30s the hardest, and the psychological damage was catastrophic. At least eight people committed suicide after being victimized in the jeonse scams of 2022-2023.39 This jeonse crisis greatly shook the confidence of both renters and homebuyers and bred paranoia about who people can trust in the market.

To make matters worse, even the regulators are sometimes implicated: in 2021, suspicions swirled that LH employees preemptively bought land before the government’s announcement of the third generation of planned cities and became a months-long front page news saga.40 Suspicion and short-term speculation continue to fuel real estate news. In March, acting President Choi Sang-mok vowed to take “all available steps” to curb speculation in the housing market, perhaps reflecting the current frenzied zeitgeist of home buyers and sellers.41 It also breeds downstream, bleeding down to neighbor-to-neighbor relations. Per one report, rental tenants in Wirye have been questioned by their neighbors about their housing status and derogatorily labeling other neighbors as renters.42

I find the Korean real estate market fascinating as they seem to intersect what is commonly understood to be opposite dynamics of housing politics: large volumes of dense, high-rise apartments and the highly speculative commercialization of housing as an investment vehicle. In the United States, at least, the quality that often appreciates housing value is its detached form, on a plot of land not directly in touch with any other unit. That quality does not apply in South Korea, where apartment is king. And yet the same specter of housing price speculation is alive, perhaps at a more frenzied pace than in the United States. That speculative economy has allowed neighborhoods like Wirye to boast $1 million-plus housing units — figures seen commonly in the United States — in an economy where average household annual salary is $46,800 — only 60% of that in the United States.43 Unique factors, as outlined above, hopefully can help understand Wirye and Seoul’s housing market and make sense of its many contradictions.

Wirye: Where Past and Future Meet

It seems remarkable how many random history factoids Wirye New Town ties to itself through geography. First, it rests against Namhan Mountain to its east, providing an easy mountain hike getaway to its locals. More than 400 years ago, this mountain was where the Joseon king laid siege and then surrendered in humiliation to invading Qing forces. (An excellent movie on this event is available on Netflix). Second: the north side of Wirye is an abandoned golf course, once the playground of an undisclosed U.S. Army base which has been around since the 1950s. To make room for Wirye New Town, the Americans left. Korean regulators found in the golf course large quantities of carcinogens and oils, such as arsenic, left unabated; this was discovered after an elementary school was built next door.44

History abounds in Wirye. Even if it was just a cheap marketing ploy, Wirye New Town ties in 2000 years of Korean history, spanning the Three Kingdoms era, the Joseon era, and the postwar US-backed era in one small locale. It carries potential for more history-making. In June, Lee Jae-myung was elected President of South Korea. In 2023, prosecutors indicted Lee on corruption charges, alleging Lee, as Seongnam mayor in the 2010s, colluded with private property developers on projects in and around Seongnam — including Wirye New Town.45 Lee still faces trial on this indictment even after his election.46 There remains a small, though unlikely, chance Wirye New Town may be back on the news to reshape Korean history once more.

History is often personal, and this is where my personal history intersects with Wirye’s. Like Lee Jae-myung, I lived in Seongnam in the 1990s. My parents moved our family to the then-new planned city of Bundang where we lived in a high-rise apartment. That apartment and its surrounding environs is where I hold some of my first memories quite dearly. As perhaps one does about important locations in the making of one’s childhood, I wistfully regard that Bundang apartment was the finest place I ever lived. In nostalgic reverie, I looked for the apartment and its history and its present and its future, which, along the way, I found another suburb, this time on the edge of Seoul, to weave another history of.

As Paris burned for revolution in May 1968, France’s elites confronted another crisis threatening to tear its capital city asunder: its buses and Metro were falling apart. Buses became intolerably slow in the gridlocked streets chock full of new Renaults and Peugeot cars. The Metro was old, crowded, and limited in reach in an increasingly suburbanizing Paris. To use a modern transit parlance, Paris was facing a transit death spiral — and they were not alone.

By the end of the 1960s, every major city in France faced declining ridership and growing deficits in a rapidly automobilizing society. The situation was dire: between 1962 and 1968, Paris’s bus ridership fell 37% and Metro ridership 6% — despite the overall city population growing 15%.1 Other cities faced precipitous declines too: between 1960 and 1967, Lyon’s ridership fell 15%, Lille fell 32%, and Marseille and Bordeaux’s each saw similar declines.2 The head of Parisian region’s urban planning spoke plainly of the stakes at the turn of the decade: “if an effort is not made to improve public transport, we are heading for a catastrophe.”3

It may be hard now to imagine such a situation in France. Few countries have a more impressive national patchwork of public transit in cities large and small as France, after all. Paris the capital city is the darling of 21st century city-scale urbanism and the North Star of those who believe trains, buses, and bicycles are the urban future over the privately owned car. Paris’s transit network is mushrooming and thriving; in 2024, RATP (Paris Metro and RER’s operator) registered more than 3.1 billion trips. The regional transit overseer, Île de France Mobilités, is building four new Metro lines as part of the Grand Paris Express super-project.

This super-charged transit system was 50 years in the making. In the early 1970s, under the presidency of Georges Pompidou, France passed a slew of reforms to not only save public transit but make it competitive to driving a car as a mode of mobility. While the positive effects are felt by the sum of these reforms, this post focuses on one particular vehicle which, on its own, has transformed French public transit: the versement transport (transport tax). Introduced in 1971 and now called versement mobilité (mobility tax), this is a payroll tax on employers operating inside an urban region which goes to the local regional transport authority to use for operations or capital projects. This tax is the lifeblood of French buses and trains and the engine of French transit’s current and future successes. Just to put into scale: RATP reported in 2023 that 48% of its annual operating revenues, or 4.457 billion Euros, was generated by this payroll tax alone.4 Systral, the agency which manages the transit networks of France’s second largest city Lyon, reported in 2024 half of its operating revenues, or 505 million Euros, came from versement mobilité.5

The history outlined below is a short one bookended by two major events in postwar French political economy: the May 1968 protests and the 1973-1974 Oil Shock. Stupefied by the student-labor uprising which nearly toppled the state and pressured by the French Left flotsam in the years after May 1968’s failure, the Pompidou government acted out of urgency, fear, and confusion to rescue Paris’s public transit around 1971. Then came the Oil Shock in 1973 which shook France’s high-growth postwar economy to its core and gave the French public a hard look in the mirror about their energy dependence. To encourage less oil reliance, France expanded recently passed transit reforms, such as versement transport, to smaller municipalities to spur alternative transportation across all urban fabrics of France.

This post, I hope, at least achieves two goals with the reader. First, I want to spell out yet another way a nation in modern times not only rescued its public transit networks but transform them entirely through innovations in funding, governance, infrastructure building, and state capacity. It is rather an interesting thought exercise to compare this post to an earlier post of mine — also from the late 1960s and 1970s — on how Japan rescued Tokyo’s regional rail network.

How Japan Saved Tokyo's Rail Network

Second, I hope to bridge a knowledge gap on the concept of a payroll tax as a driver of public transit funding at scale. A regional payroll tax as a funding mechanism for public transit is rare in North America and not often discussed. Two places in the United States already have a transit funding payroll tax — one in New York City, and the other in Portland and Oregon. In the San Francisco Bay Area, a payroll tax was briefly considered in 2024 for a multi-county ballot measure to raise sustainable operating funds for its regional transit network.6 But the idea died in the crib under opposition from business associations.7 Surprisingly little is known about this funding mechanism in English. I hope this post sparks a greater understanding and further research into this novel vehicle for transformative change.

Author’s Note

I am thrilled to write this post on versement transport, a topic I learned when I was visiting France two years ago. This post was conceived and researched in part by @kue.glitch.paris, an American living in Paris who everyone should follow on Bluesky, who shared the following local perspective on this topic:

Today's Île-de-France transit shares recognizable problems of maintenance, cost, and governance to other systems around the world. Yet this system is also in a constant state of expansion and modernization.8 9It isn't a system struggling to keep its head above the water but rather a system struggling to maintain stability in its evolution to a larger, more modern network. Versement mobilité, however, is that bedrock of stability. It remains central to French transit politics to this day: recent unpopular fare increases in Paris show business interests’ opposition against tax increases at the cost to everyday Parisian riders. But even small increases in versement mobilité rates have prevented crushing fare hikes on the riders without compromising Paris public transit’s quality.10

When raising the concept of a funding source decoupled from the farebox and instead tied to a region's economic output, I've had some American urbanists brush it off as idealism. But this is a concrete reality to the millions of transit users in French cities. This disconnect is what spurred me to spread the message of this policy.

Despite my extremely limited French, the following documents in both English and French were key in the formation of this post:

• Legal text of versement mobilité, translated in English

• “Interest Groups, Professions and Public Policy Change: The Case of Paris Transport -1968 -1976” (1989) by Andrew Malcolm Webster

• “Discuter, politiser, imposer une solution d’action publique: l’exemple du tramway” (2011) by Benoît Demongeot (in French)

• “Georges Pompidou et l’alternative à l’automobile individuelle” (2010) by Arnaud Passalcqua (in French)

• “Organization of Urban Public Transport in France: Lessons for Developing Countries” (1988) by Slobodan Mitric

The Rise and Fall of Gaullist Paris

Between 1945 and 1973, an era of postwar high-growth economy affectionally called by the French as les trentes glorieuses, the automobile was king in France. Car manufacturers such Renault, Citroen, and Peugeot cornered the booming domestic market, especially in the 1960s. Paris’s car ownership population grew 46% between 1962 and 1968.11 The French auto industry lobbied the government under President Charles de Gaulle for new auto-centric infrastructure, proposing for instance 15 new radial highways around Paris and one bank of the Seine River paved into an express highway.12 De Gaulle’s heir Pompidou served as an avatar of France’s 1960s car mania; the famous lover of the Porsche 356S exclaimed in a speech “we must adapt Paris both to the lives of Parisians and to the needs of the automobile.”13

Under de Gaulle’s new French Fifth Republic, Paris was groomed to become the financial center for the capitalist western Europe, which as a region began its long integration towards the European Union. Multinational firms and banks set up offices in Paris — but outside the traditional arrondissements and in the suburbs west of Paris (even before La Defense district was formally conceived) where no Metro service was available.14 To plan for the Gaullist vision of Paris as a modern, international, sprawling city, the French state created a new administrative region around Paris and its suburbs in 1961 called the District de la Région Parisienne. The head of this District would become the ultimate civil servant on all urban affairs in the capital region, so de Gaulle chose Paul Delouvrier, his right-hand man during the Algerian War, as the director who would report to de Gaulle directly. Within two years with de Gaulle’s blessings, Delouvrier was able to carve out, as British academic Andrew Webster writes, a “dominance of Parisian affairs that Haussmann enjoyed.”15

Two years later in 1965, Delouvrier’s District de la Region Parisienne published their master plan of a Gaullist Paris in the Schéma directeur. Aiming to remake Paris by the end of the century, the schéma directeur envisaged brand new cities on all four sides in the Parisian periphery. Clusters of high-rise concrete-and-glass offices and apartments would connect to each other and to central Paris via the automobile. Using forecasts of future travel demands imported from the United States, the plan called for nearly 1,000 km of new expressways.1617

Such confidence would be violently shaken in May 1968. A student uprising and a national general strike over the course of four weeks pushed de Gaulle to flee France in its most volatile days. While Pompidou rallied the Gaullist parties to a sweeping parliamentary election in June 1968 (and the Presidency in 1969 after de Gaulle’s resignation), a reactionary verdict to the uprising, the Gaullists’ heady vision of a new French world order centered in the high-tech Parisian suburbs was shattered. Doubt and insecurity “ate away at the Gaullist ideal of modern urban living”. The Gaullists cowered of another May 1968.18

Urban planning reflected this crisis of confidence. The 1965 Schéma directeur was revised in 1969 to a more modest vision and forecasts — and a growing focus on mass public transit over the individual automobile.19 Pompidou’s own ministers began to eschew the Gaullist automobile for the humble train and bus. The Minister of Transport spoke of the "asphyxiation of the city” by cars, and his subordinate Director of Land Transport said France would never be able to satisfy individual car owners’ demands for more roads and more lanes. 20 Even the auto-friendly Paris Chamber of Commerce chimed in agreement, stating without a massive effort in transit investment, the region “will endure a severe crisis.” A consensus was building, but more was needed.

“Users Movement” and the Birth of Versement Transport

As the Gaullists retreated from their pre-1968 ambitions, the French Communists and Socialists licked their wounds over the revolution which never came — and where to go next. One offshoot of the post-1968 political climate was the rise of the “users movement”, in which local activist transportation groups rallied to rescue their transit networks in crisis and to democratize the decision-making powers from technocrats to local communities.

By 1970, Parisians users movement groups faced an uphill battle. As transit service suffered, its providers bled more and more money. Between 1962 and 1970, the Paris transit provider RATP saw a 515% increase in its annual operating deficit, due to falling bus ridership and a frozen fare system as part of de Gaulle’s counter-inflation policies.21 In 1967, Parisian transit fares almost doubled after a six-year freeze, and steep fare increases were scheduled again in 1970 to further rein in RATP deficits. Parisians felt their fare money stretched less and less, and frustration mounted. A Parisian government survey in the summer of 1970 found 88% of respondents felt the city’s transit systems have deteriorated.22

New scheduled fare increases in 1970 boiled over angry Parisian commuters into action. Local activist groups organized protests on the streets, crammed into government committee meetings, and bombarded local media with letters and petitions carrying a simple message: paying more in fares for increasingly poor bus and train conditions was intolerable.23 The users demanded no fare increases, new travel passes, and increased investments in public transit by the national government as the central planks of their platform. Other demands received scattered support, reflecting a disjointed landscape of the post-1968 French Left who rallied for the same cause concurrently but not unitedly.

Two political coalitions led the users movement and embodied that disjointed method of leftist activism: the Communist-backed Cartel and the Socialist and Trotskyite parties-backed Federation des Comites d’Usagers de Transports en Commun de la Region Parisienne (FCU). The Communists, concerned with presenting itself as the national opposition party to the Gaullists and maintaining a strong link to trade unions, sought sweeping nationwide and industrial solutions to the transit issues; meanwhile, FCU’s backers in the socialist Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU) and the Trotskyite Lutte Ouvrière (LO) fought for full democratization of transport politics and decentralization of decision-making powers on transit issues to local authorities, revealing strong distrust of the central Gaullist regime.

These views had a downstream effect. The Cartel introduced the idea of an employer payroll tax to cover employees’ transit passes, sought higher investments toward transit construction (built by labor unions, of course), and called for the government to write off RATP’s deficit. They however shied from any policies restricting car access into cities. The Communists strongly supported car production in France and believed the transit crisis was the government’s “insufficient provision to facilitate new styles of living” — or, car owners and transit riders could coexist in Paris. 24 The FCU, however, was totally opposite the Cartel’s view on cars. The FCU decried the “tyranny of the car” as destroyers of the urban environment and proposed the closure of central urban areas to private cars, tighter parking restrictions in cities, and urban tolls for cars driving into the city. 25 FCU’s fight against the tyranny of cars extended to the tyranny of centralized government; they campaigned to strip the central government from its transport decision-making powers and giving it to autonomous, local, elected bodies, where they will weigh and legislate their populist demands, such as more public sector housing, limiting private development in city centers, and freezing land prices.

While rarely working together, and often antagonistically, the Cartel and FCU provided an effective two-pronged pressure campaign against Pompidou and his Gaullist administration. The Cartel energized suburban, working class voters (often car-owners themselves) frustrated at the state of Parisian transit but weary of far-left inner-city politics.26 The FCU mobilized middle-class arrondissement voters still energized from the barricade fights from May 1968 and encouraged them to create their own autonomous transport users’ committees, which at its height in November 1970 reached sixty.27 The Cartel were more effective at organizing mass protests, such as 30,000 people marching through central Paris in November 1970 against a fare increase scheduled for January 1.28 And it was the Cartel’s proposal of an employer payroll tax that would filter through the noise and into the lawmakers’ ears.

In March 1971, the Pompidou government announced it would introduce a tax on all employers in the Parisian region to pay for transit. As Communists pushed for the payroll tax, Gaullists too warmed up to the idea on three fronts: that employers need to pay more accurately for the “true price” of having its employees commute via transit; that it would be politically convenient and popular among the electorate to target and tax a small voting bloc (medium-to-large sized businesses); and that a tax collected by the central government is far preferable than decentralization as demanded by FCU.29 Perhaps more surprisingly than the pro-business Gaullists’ growing sympathies to a payroll tax was the “muted and ineffectual” response from the business community towards a tax on themselves. While small businesses and manufacturers in Paris were resistant to the tax, the large financial banks and corporations supported the idea. They were generally eager to back their close ally Pompidou, a former bank director at Rothschild, and his government’s vision of building new transit networks throughout Paris, especially expanding the under-construction Réseau Express Régional (RER) train network to their ritzy corporate oasis west of Paris. Perhaps most importantly, the business community have not forgotten May 1968. Like the Gaullist politicians, they were terrified of setting off another public unrest. The Cartel, FCU, and the users’ movement made visible through ongoing protests how mad Parisians were about public transit. Nonstop protests at the time from the users’ movement, woman’s liberation movement, and anti-Vietnam War protests, among others, kept the elites on knife’s edge, including Pompidou, who confided to advisers these protests may just be a harbinger of another May 1968 that will bring him down like his predecessor de Gaulle.30

By May, the versement transport bill was introduced in Parliament as a payroll tax of up to 2% on all employers with more than nine employees in and around Paris. The versement moved along the legislative ladder at the same time as a larger infrastructural investment package known as the Sixth Plan, which included expansion of the RER, extensions to the Metro, bus lane constructions, and a wider bus network reorganization in Paris. 31Despite light resistance from centrist parties representing small businesses, the bill breezed through Parliament, signed into law on July 12, and was to go into effect in the next year.

The Oil Shock and the Psychological Shock

By 1972, the coalition which fought and stirred for the passage of versement transport seemed to have settled down. The Cartel and FCU faded fast following the flurry of government reforms in 1971, losing steam without its central rallying cry. The Cartel, for example, formally disbanded in September 1971. But the activists who cut their teeth with the Cartel or FCU help usher in a new era of “community politics” in France, during which local action groups banded around housing, environmental protection, and other salient issues.32 The days of de Gaulle’s grand, centralized, and shadowy schemes — such as Schéma directeur and its promise of 1000 new kilometers of highways in and through Paris — was over.

Versement transport was the first tax of its kind applied solely to the Parisian region. The tax was encouraging before passage, forecasting for first gross revenue in 1972 of 1170 million Francs — substantially higher than RATP’s 1970 record-high annual deficit of 768 million Francs.3334 But its immediate performance was staggering. Between 1972 and 1982, the percentage of operating revenues generated by versement transport jumped from 17% to 28%, and the proportion for rider fares, other contracts, and advertising fell from 52% to 41%.35 The tax did not just shake up transit coffers; it shook up transit agencies in Paris to grow something of a backbone. The bureaucrats running RATP and the national railway agency, SNCF, finally had a reliable revenue source divorced from political influence in versement transport. It also gave them precious breathing room to propose plans and programs which may have been too radical before.36 In 1973, versement transport in its second year was already deemed a success, so much so the French Parliament expanded it to other urban regions with more than 300,000 people and granted cities outside Paris powers to create an urban transit organizing authority (AO) to administer the tax.37

France’s new interest in public transit would enter a new era later that year in October when Arab oil-producing countries embargoed petroleum to states supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War. While France was not directly embargoed, France — 80% of its energy supply came from imported oil — was left severely exposed by the threefold jump in gas prices due to a sudden drop in supply across Western Europe.38 On November 30, Prime Minister Pierre Messmer announced a series of bans to conserve France’s energy reserves, such as a ban on illuminated advertising or lighting in shop windows at night., no television broadcasts after 11 p.m. on weekdays, and speed limitations for vehicles.39 Pompidou stressed to his cabinet that any major actions on transport, such as vehicle speed limitations, will need first a robust development of public transit.40

Across France, the Oil Shock rippled not only materially but also as a “true psychological shock”.41 Although automobiles made up a fraction of France’s national energy consumption, the disillusionment of owning a car fueled by cheap gas shook the French electorate. Questions about energy reliance on imported oil and potential future scarcities dogged the political discourse of the time; the slogan “In France, we don’t have oil, but we have ideas!” dominated the airwaves.42 In April 1974, Pompidou died in office, and a snap presidential election was called. The centrist candidate, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, echoed his predecessor Pompidou’s priorities. He promised public transit improvements were his second-highest priority as President and that France’s second cities like Marseille and Lyon would see the same improvements granted to Paris under his watch.43

Following Giscard d’Estaing’s win, his government passed four new transit-related reforms from 1974 to 1976 which ushered further public transit development in Paris and the rest of France. The first two impacted non-Parisian cities: in 1974, the versement transport was further expanded to all urban regions with more than 100,000 people and the tramway made its return as a viable mode of public transport after its nationwide abandonment in the 1930s. In February 1975, Transportation Minister Marcel Cavaillé wrote to mayors of eight medium-large cities in France to consider rebuilding a tram network in their city and, in return, be eligible for national government financing. The “Cavaillé challenge” was ignored by most mayors at the outset, but this sparked France’s returned love affair with the tram in many of its cities, including Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Nantes, and Marseille, which continues to this day. 44

The next two reshaped Parisian transit forever: in 1975, the carte orange (Orange Card) was introduced as the first unlimited transit pass for the region, and in 1976, the District de la Region Parisienne was promoted into the Île-de-France Region, giving it the autonomy to hold regional elections and have discretion on its infrastructural budget. With the Orange Card, riders could seamlessly transfer between the bus, Metro, and RER without needing to pay a fare each time, as it had been done previously. Within the first six months, 900,000 Parisians applied for the Orange Card (the precursor to the current Navigo Pass), far exceeding planners’ expectations.45 The creation of Île-de-France Region helped quash growing tensions between local and central authorities emerged during the planning and construction of the RER network. The Region status, akin to a province-level authority in France, gave the local authorities broad autonomy on how the region could build and operate its public transit network.46 Further legislations in 1979, 1982, and 1983 clarified the roles of the urban transit organizing authority (AO), the local/regional governments, and the central government to facilitate contracting, financing, and transit management. In sum, these legislations formalized France’s new “hybrid” system of transit governance: large-scale visions animated and guided by the central government, and the decision-making and financing for these projects made locally.47

The French Transit Revolution

For French transit, it took less than a decade from flirting with catastrophe to enjoying a “transit renaissance”.48 Between 1975 and 1984, France’s public transit registered a 50% increase in trips served and a 60% increase in vehicle-kms offered.49 Since 1974, France has constructed 28 tram networks (with three more coming) and brand-new Metro systems in Lyon, Marseille, Rennes, Toulouse, and Lille. And in the Paris/Île-de-France Region: nine of 13 previously existing Metro lines have been extended, and Metro Line 14 (with four more incoming), all five RER lines and 14 tramway lines have opened since 1974. Very few countries in the world have expanded its urban transit networks as much as France in the past half-century.

As researcher Slobodan Mitric writes, the adoption of the versement transport was “probably the single most important element reviving French transit.” Renamed and expanded to versement mobilité in 2019, the tax now extends to all municipalities or commune with more than 10,000 people. The current tax also have a higher threshold, applying to employers with more than 11 employees instead of nine, and new businesses are exempt for the first three years. In the smallest level of government eligible for versement mobilité, 0.55% of payroll wages are levied from the employers. The taxation rate rises depending on population and metropolitan area; Paris maintains the highest rate in France at 2.85%, short of the maximum rate allowed by the central government of 3.20%.

Even after fifty years of existence, versement mobilité continues to evolve and generates controversy in France. The 2025 budget by the central government has granted for the first time for regions outside Île-de-France to levy versement mobilité. The reactions from regional presidents have been mixed. Some supported the expansion as a new way for France’s rural regions to improve their transit networks and combat climate change. Others rejected it even before its offer, claiming this tax is yet another burden on struggling businesses in their constituency.50

Can versement mobilité work elsewhere outside France — perhaps in the United States? Mitric, who wrote his paper on versement transport in 1988, may claim no, considering he labeled it a “flawed tool” and not one for recommending to export to other developing countries.51 Payroll taxes for transit funding already exist in the United States but the rates are fractional compared to French cities with the most robust transit networks. In Oregon statewide, employers pay .1% of their wages to transit funding. In the city of Portland, Oregon, an extra .82% of wages is taxed on top of the statewide payroll tax to fund their network, Trimet — generating $515 million in revenues in 2024.52 In New York City proper and the surrounding counties in the state of New York, the Metropolitan commuter transportation mobility tax is on a ladder scale. Its highest rate is .6% for employers operating in the five City boroughs whose quarterly payroll exceeds $437,500 — almost one-fifth of Paris city limit’s 2.85% rate and near identical to France’s very lowest rate reserved for rural towns.

What sets New York City and Oregon’s transit apart from its French counterpart is not entirely the taxation rate. A transit system does not require a robust payroll tax to survive and thrive, and many other countries outside France has built successful transit systems in their cities without the need of a payroll tax. But the unique thread that sets the success stories apart is the political will to take risks, try new ideas, and give transit networks broad latitude to do what is necessary to improve service and quality. The success of versement transport did not happen in a vacuum; it was rather the stabilizing core within a flurry of reforms and capital works to inject French public transit new life during the 1970s.

I want to end by circling back to a place which this blog has spent far more time examining than France: Japan. In the late 1960s, the Japanese National Railways (JNR) financed much-needed expansions in Tokyo’s regional rail through a risky scheme which backfired and added to its already mounting debt. JNR was dissolved and privatized in the 1980s largely due to this debt. Like France, JNR also weathered the political and economic storms of its own labor uprisings and the Oil Shock. In response to similar events, France went in a different direction than Japan, opting to tax its businesses to finance these expansions and modernizations. Without fully realizing at the time, France paved the roadmap for a novel way to grow and maintain a world-class transit network while not giving up its public sector character. It remains to be seen if any countries may follow this roadmap.

It is past 11 a.m. in Seoul on August 15, 1974, the 29th birthday of the Republic of Korea. The mood on the platform at Cheongnyangni Station is tense and sombre. Cameramen and journalists have fled the station already. After confusion and a previous cancellation, the ribbon is brought back out to be cut. The Mayor of Seoul and three government officials are rushed out to line up and cut the ribbon. None of the men smile for the cameras.

And so, under the most awkward, funereal atmosphere, Seoul opened South Korea’s first-ever subway line. It is hard to imagine a more uncertain and confusing beginning to one of the most celebrated urban mass transit networks in the world — now expanded to nine Metro lines, several more commuter lines, and a national high-speed rail network centralized around the capital city. But perhaps such dispositions were an appropriate mood for the event: Line 1 would grow beyond the original planners’ wildest expectations and its unconstrained growth will reshape not only Seoul’s mass transit but Seoul and the country themselves. The history leading to Line 1’s creation is also marked by volatility and violence — quite neatly in line with that of the Korean peninsula in the 20th century.

Why were the men who cut the ribbon so sad?

Seoul’s turbulent rail beginnings

1899 was the birthyear for rail in the Korean peninsula, with the advent of two separate railways connecting Seoul — then called Gyeongseong, the capital city of the Joseon Dynasty — in two different directions. First was the Gyeongin Railway which connected Gyeongseong to the port city of Incheon to its west in September. (Note the portmanteau “Gyeong” “In”, a common wordplay in Korean) Under the American entrepreneur James R. Morse, the Gyeongin Railway connected Incheon’s port district of Jemulpo to Noryangjin, a port on the south bank of the Han River.1 A year later, the Gyeongin Railway crossed the Han River and terminated at the current Seoul Station north of the river.

Second was the opening of Gyeongseong’s first tram line in May 1899. Also built by Americans Henry Collbran and Harry Bostwick, the line started right outside Daehan Gate at Deoksu Palace, where King Gojong resided. The line travelled north up Sejongro, turned right on Jongro and travelled east past Dongdaemun (East Gate) to terminated next to rice fields of Cheongnyangni. The last leg to Cheongnyangni was more for symbolism than logistics; Cheongnyangni was where the tomb of Gojong’s wife, Queen Min, was buried after she was murdered by Japanese assassins in Gyeongbok Palace in 1895.2 As much as urban connectivity as priority, this first tram line was built as a reminder of a recent historical injustice and a play at the king’s own heartstrings by extending a literal train line from his palatial footsteps directly to his slain wife’s tomb. Despite the emotional charge at patriotism, locals near the tram line rioted against it, seeing it as a foreign intrusion on the local feng shui and threat to their properties.3

Once Japan annexed Korea in 1910 and abolished the 505-year-old Joseon Dynasty, rail played a crucial role in the Japanese colonial management of economic growth and resource extraction. Gyeongseong, now called Keijo under Japanese rule, became the epicenter of a national rail network which connected the southern port cities of Busan, Mokpo, Gunsan, and Incheon to the industrial northern cities of Pyeongyang, Wonsan, and Sinuiju, the last of which extended into Manchuria. Under Japanese rule, Keijo’s tram network expanded as its new centers around Japanese-populous neighborhoods in the southern half of Keijo, around what is now Euljiro (then called Kogane-cho) and Toegyero (then called Honmachi). Yongsan Station, outside the city walls and located next to the Japanese Army Headquarters south of Seoul Station, emerged as a new railway hub for colonial affairs. Japanese soldiers, Korean forced labor, rice, and other materiel departed from or passed through Yongsan Station as Japan’s wartime efforts grew in the 1930s and 1940s until Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945.4

The Korean War between June 1950 and July 1953 had a devastating impact on Seoul’s railways. All bridges crossing the Han River were destroyed and railway tracks and depots were targeted by aerial bombings on both sides; for example, a recent declassified CIA record confirmed the US Air Force targeted Yongsan Station and nearby Haebangchon neighborhood — then packed with refugees fleeing the north — repeatedly with B-29 bombers in September 1950, resulting in total devastation of rail infrastructure around Yongsan and the refugee camps at Haebangchon, resulting in thousands of civilians dead.5 For the Seoul tram network, the war crippled their operations beyond full repair: nearly one-ninth of its trackage and nearly half of its streetcars were rendered unusable, and countless catenaries and equipment were looted by desperate civilians.6

Despite restarting service in 1952 and entering peacetime following the Korean War’s armistice in 1953, the Seoul tram network struggled due to its wartime damages. In the 1950s, Seoul received nearly 60 trams from the United States to shore its depleted rolling stock: nearly 20 from the Atlanta streetcar system, discontinued in 1949, and nearly 40 from the Pacific Electric Railway Company in Los Angeles, which too was on its decline.7 However, the Seoul tram network continued to decline under aging infrastructure and growing deficits due to a government-imposed fare freeze. Under a fast-growing Seoul with rising rates of automobile ownership by a small but emergent urban middle class in the 1960s, the Seoul government put the kibosh on the nearly 70-year-old tram network. Concrete was poured over discontinued tram lines across Seoul. The last tram in Seoul ran for service on November 30, 1968.

Video timelapse of the growth and dismantling of the Seoul tram system, with advent of Line 1, between 1899 and 1970

“If you build this subway, the country will be in ruins”

Between 1955 and 1970, the population in the city of Seoul more than tripled from 1.6 million to 5.5 million, as displaced postwar families from both North and South moved in search of industrial jobs.8 Traffic jams became an increasingly common sight, with trams offering little relief. After 1968, buses and automobiles were the only modes of moving within the city of Seoul. Intercity trains connecting Seoul, Yongsan, and Cheongnangnyi stations to Incheon to the west, Suwon to the south, and Baengmagoji to the north (part of a line to Wonsan in North Korea, now disconnected) ushered in and out commuters to add to Seoul’s crowding issues.

The first discussions of a subway line in Seoul were recorded in 1958, under Rhee Syngman’s presidency, a surprisingly early register for a rebuilding South Korean government looking toward its future.9 In 1965, Seoul Mayor Kim Hyun-ok unveiled his plans for a four-line Seoul subway system, with Line 1 as an underground tunnel through central Seoul connecting to the intercity lines at Seoul Station in the west and Cheongnangnyi station in the east. As an aggressive and haphazard builder-mayor of a rapidly industrializing metropolis, Kim dreamed of a subway network before he was forced to resign in 1970, after a public apartment built under Kim’s administration collapsed and killed 34 residents.10

Kim was succeeded by Yang Taek-sik as Seoul Mayor, a like-minded mayor who built on Kim’s subway dreams. Yang modified Kim’s four-line plan, with the Line 1 tunnel running up north up Sejongro, then a sharp right on Jongro heading east to Cheongnyangni — a near-identical route as the first tram line of heavy symbolism built under King Gojong. Shortly after his promotion on April 1970, Yang made subway construction a key priority and directly inquired President Park Chung-hee to green light the project.

Then Vice Prime Minster and Minister of Economy Kim Hak-ryeol, however, vehemently opposed Yang’s proposal for a Seoul subway. Kim asserted to Park that a subway construction would increase prices, accelerate Seoul’s ongoing population explosion, and unduly test South Korea’s developing economy; in one conversation with Park, Kim warned “if you build this subway, the country will be ruins”.11 One story believes Kim’s opposition was not economics but personal politics: he was furious at Yang for bypassing him and asking Park directly. Another story goes Park was on the fence about Yang’s request until he met the Japanese Ambassador to South Korea. The ambassador told Park "the subway is a global trend. In the case of Tokyo, citizens cannot live a day without the subway. Therefore you will have to build one.”12 Park soon gave Yang his blessings to build a four-line subway network, beginning with the Line 1 tunnel between Seoul Station and Cheongnangnyi Station.

In the summer of 1970, Park solicited the help of Japanese expertise to plan and oversee construction and import Line 1’s first rolling stock, since South Korea did not yet have any experience running a subway. Plans for the first four lines of the Seoul subway was finalized in October, with Line 1 construction to begin shortly after. Under Japanese recommendations, Lines 2, 3, and 4 plans were also completed: Line 2 would connect Gimpo International Airport to Euljiro and the newly annexed and then-undeveloped Gangnam; Line 3 would make a U-shaped line north of the Han River; and Line 4 an upside-down U-shape connecting south of the Han River suburbs to the city center. But in theme with the turbulence of Seoul’s rail history, little of this plan would stay in place.

A dig at the heart of Seoul

On April 12, 1971, Seoul’s Line 1 celebrated the start of its tunnel construction under a huge celebration in front of Seoul City Hall with performances and fireworks. The approximately 10.3 kilometer, 9-stations tunnel — then commonly called the Jongro Line — was the first urban mass rail endeavor in South Korean history and cost 33,000,000,000 Won. (Approximately $95 million USD in 1971 exchange rates)13 One newspaper in 1973 calculated the Jongro Line’s per-meter construction at 277,000 Won ($81 USD) and found it was at least half of what London, Paris, and Osaka paid for their subway tunneling projects.14 (Albeit Korea’s GDP in the early 1970s was still considerably behind Japan or Western Europe)

To bookend the feud between Yang the Seoul Mayor and Kim the Vice Prime Minister, the central government only funded 10% of the project, a tacit refusal by Kim and his administration to believe in the utility of a Seoul subway. The city government picked up the rest of the tab.

For the construction workers, the project’s comparatively affordability did not mean the tunneling was any easier. The entirety of the Jongro Line was constructed using the cut-and-cover method, and the open excavation work encountered three problems: first, great care was taken to not damage the Joseon-era city gates Namdaemun near City Hall Station and Dongdaemun near Dongdaemun Station; second, the workers constantly ran into underground streams and creeks, of which there were many in central Seoul and fed into larger above-ground streams like Cheonngyecheon; and third, the aforementioned sharp right turn from Sejongro to Jongro needed to be built under one of the densest intersections of the city replete with skyscrapers.15 Resolving these issues — while learning the engineering of subway construction on the fly with help from the Japanese — the rather short tunneling took three whole years to complete.

The major conundrum for subway planners was not the tunnels or tracks but the electricity to power the trains. The Japanese consultants recommended that Line 1 trains be powered using 25000V 60Hz alternate current (AC), as a common utility frequency already used on existent Line 1 branches extending from Seoul to Incheon, Suwon, and others. However, other government agencies, such as the telephone utility, recommended a 1500V direct current in the tunnel, arguing electrifying the tunnel with AC will not only add further costs to the construction but the tunnel’s central location in Seoul may contribute to potential widespread telephone outages.16

When the first Line 1 rolling stock arrived at the Port of Busan in April 1974, the Hitachi-built train cars were built to support both currents and convert between AC and DC. The fateful voltage decision can still be felt on Line 1 to this day; if on a Line 1 train traveling outbound south of Seoul Station or east of Cheongnyangni Station, the train will play an automated announcement that the train will be switching power sources soon and lights inside the train will turn off for a second or two before lighting back up again.17

What happened on August 15, 1974

Cheongnyangni Station was brightly decorated on August 15, 1974 for the ribbon-cutting ceremony of Line 1. Seoul Mayor Yang was already posted at the station to greet President Park and his First Lady, Yuk Young-soo.

An hour before the ceremony, Park and Yuk were at the National Theater of Korea to attend a live-televised Independence Day ceremony. At 10:23 a.m., Park was at the podium giving a speech when a Japanese-born Korean named Mun Se-gwang approached Park and prematurely fired his revolver. Park ducked behind the podium. Running down the theater aisle, Mun fired four more shots wildly at the stage. The fourth bullet struck Yuk, who was sitting on stage, in the head. A shoot-out between Mun and Park’s security killed a high school student in attendance. Yuk was hurriedly rushed to a hospital. Mun was captured shortly after. Park finished his speech, picked up his wife’s handbag and shoes and left the stage. The melee was broadcast on live television, to the horror and shock of the nation.18

According to legendary television journalist Cha In-tae, Park and Yuk were to arrive at Cheongnyangni Station shortly after 11 a.m. and take the first Line 1 train to Seoul Station. Instead, shortly after 11 a.m., security agents flooded the platform, guns drawn, and barred anyone from leaving or entering.19 They cancelled the event without explaining why but reinstated it shortly after.

Yuk later that day would die at the age of 48. During his trial, Mun would confess to being a sympathizer of North Korea and was aided by North Korean-aligned organization in his native Japan. Mun would be found guilty and was executed by hanging in December 1974.

Yuk’s assassination would carry ripple effects through many channels of South Korean history, some more obvious than others. Perhaps the most direct effect was the ascendancy of Park and Yuk’s daughter, Park Geun-hye, as the replacement First Lady after Yuk’s death, thus beginning Park Geun-hye’s political career. Park Geun-hye’s rise after South Korea’s democratization in 1987 would climax in 2012, when she was elected the first female president of South Korea. Park Geun-hye would also become the first impeached South Korean president five years later.

Yuk’s assassination would also transform Seoul and its Metro system in profound and unexpected ways. Seoul Mayor Yang Taek-sik would be forced to resign the next month, as he was responsible for security details at the Independence Day event in the National Theater. Yang was replaced by Koo Ja-chun, a former military officer.

Legend has it in February 1975, Mayor Koo came into a meeting with heads of city planning and subway planners to discuss the yet-to-be-constructed Line 2. As aforementioned, Line 2 under Yang’s plan was a west-east line through Euljiro. Grabbing a black pencil, Koo walked over to the large map of Seoul in the room and drew a large circle around Seoul. As he drew the circle, Koo pointed out that certain facilities — such as the industrial factories in the Guro neighborhood and the Seoul National University — needed to be served by Line 2. Koo’s circular exercise took no more than 20 minutes, as the story goes, and Line 2 plans were complete.20

Opened in segments between 1980 and 1983, Line 2 as a circular line would profoundly reshape Seoul’s landscape, not unlike how the Yamanote Line remade Tokyo in the early 20th century. First, Line 2 is by far the busiest line of all nine Seoul Metro lines, registering more than 2.2 million passengers per day in 2019. Second, Line 2 connected existing landmarks such as Euljiro, Seoul National University, and Ehwa Women’s University with upcoming ones such as the Jamsil Sports Complex for the 1988 Summer Olympics. Lastly, and perhaps most consequentially, Line 2 was critical in spurring development in previously sleepy suburban areas of Seoul south of the Han River, such as Yeouido (where the National Assembly is now and the new political center of Seoul), Seongsu (the new “Brooklyn” hipster hotspot district), and Gangnam of global soft power repute. Without a circular Line 2, the Gangnam we know today may not exist.

Following Line 2’s transformation, Line 3 and Line 4 — the last two lines in the 1965 plan for a Seoul subway — would also dramatically realign its route, with both lines cutting through Seoul in a rough X-shape and conjoining at Chungmuro Station. Both lines opened for service in 1985.

Lastly, Yuk’s death greatly impacted Park Chung-hee, the presidential widower. Park’s biographers write the shock of seeing his wife’s death at an attempt on his life let him to heavy drinking and smoking. Shortly after his wife’s death, Park turned over many officials, such as Mayor Yang, with younger acolytes in his inner circle. One such man on the rise was Kim Jae-gyu, the Deputy Director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) who was appointed the Minister of Construction, a highly influential position in the fast-growing Korean economy, in September 1974. Often doted as a younger brother by Park per observers, Kim would be promoted to KCIA Director two years later to oversee Park’s surveillance state. On October 26, 1979, at a private dinner banquet, Kim would shoot and kill Park in point-blank range, ending Park’s 18-year rule and hurtling South Korea into a chaotic new era.

Line 1’s remaking of South Korea

Seoul Metro Line 1 is unlike any Metro line in the world. At 102 stations and 218 kilometers in total length (135 miles), Line 1 is less a conventional urban Metro line and more an octopus-like regional super-connector, stretching its limbs far out west to the Port of Incheon, north to the town of Yeoncheon just 11 kilometers from the DMZ with North Korea, and south to the town of Shinchang 87 kilometers south of Seoul Station. Shinchang, the southern terminus, is so far away it resides two provinces over from Seoul.

Line 1 has five total branches and five rapid and express train types. No one train can serve all the stations, but even regular service is a massive odyssey: a local train from Incheon to Yeoncheon, for example, would stop at a whopping 66 stations and take 3 hours long to complete one-way.

All Seoul Metro lines except Line 1 built the entirety of their lines from scratch. Whereas the other eight Metro lines focus on serving only Seoul and its immediate satellite cities, Line 1 serves the widest spectrum of urban/rural interfaces imaginable: on a single Line 1 ride, a passenger will pass through the perennially bustling Seoul Station and nearby Jongro, skyscraper-decked planned suburbs of Bucheon, Osan, and Dongtan, and far-flung rural outposts of populations less than 10,000 in the area.

On Line 1, one can see the full strata of South Korean society in one train ride. Line 1 is a popular hangout spot for seniors over the age of 65, who in Seoul can ride the Metro for free. Many seniors ride the trains for hours to kill time. Line 1 also carries among locals a reputation where one can observe urban disorder and antisocial behaviors — relatively more so than other public spaces in a rather rigid, orderly society — with frequently noticed “villains” in attention-grabbing costumes or shocking antics disrupting commuters and going viral on the Internet.

Line 1 itself from conception was an oddity: a short subway tunnel in the heart of Seoul as the missing link to bring several conventional intercity rail lines under one Metro line. With no prior construction experience and very limited central government backing, projects like Line 1 often die on the vines before the first shovel dig. Thanks to the visions of mayors like Kim Hyun-ok and Yang Taek-sik, who understood a growing metropolis needed a mass transit network like a Metro, Seoul not only finished Line 1 but all four lines of Kim’s original plan. The “first generation” of these four lines in the 1970s and 1980s would spur a “second generation” of Seoul Metro lines — Lines 5 through 8 — to be opened between 1995 and 2000. Seoul has ceaselessly grown out its urban rail network thereafter, as the construction dynamo set in Jongro in 1971 churns on to this day.

It feels comically small stakes to write about the state and the prospects of public transit in the United States of America in the breakneck throes of a second Donald Trump administration, at least from the besieged liberal/liberal-adjacent position that has been the intellectual harbor for pro-public transit views. But then again — what else can anyone who runs a politics and public transit Substack discuss?

My 2025 plans were to write about an interesting and complicated subway suburb outside Seoul; a 1960s tax history powering French public transit growth to this day; the regional negotiatory politics of Chinese high-speed rail; and keep the Substack humming. While this Substack has produced time-sensitive (or at least respectful of current events) posts before, the goal always was to produce amateur rail history insensitive to current events. Geographically, while this Substack previously covered U.S. rail history, I prioritized foreign histories to shed new light for the readers.

But again, what else is there to write than the state of the United States, right here, right now? I have compiled several thoughts and fleshed as far as I can stretch them. This will be a series of ideas and observations I have gestated in my head and felt compelled to write out. I have written a similar post in the past, a series of transit ideas, observations, and reflections. I hope some of them will resonate more than others with you, the reader.

Transit has never been more under attack for lesser reasons

In 2025, five years after the COVID pandemic began, all of the United States’ public transit (rail) powerhouses are still recording ridership levels lower than its pre-pandemic days. As of September 2024, WMATA in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area was crowned public transit comeback king — at about 75% of its 2019 ridership totals. Globally, transit recovery has been mixed but largely better than the U.S.’s: London Underground’s 2024 levels are about 75% of 2019 levels, but many others, such as Madrid Metro and Hong Kong MTR, long surpassed its pre-pandemic figures.

The United States’ largest urban rail networks suffered some of the steepest ridership collapses found globally in the spring of 2020. BART in the Bay Area registered a 91% ridership decline in March 2020 alone. The harder the fall, the higher the climb, and this long climb for some systems has often been slowed due to unforeseen, often self-inflicted reasons: unwavering local work-from-home trends (BART), a temporary spike in slow speed zones across the system (MBTA), or continued cancelled trains and longer wait times (CTA), to name a few. These specific trends were coupled with a nationwide panic over urban crime and disorder, especially in public transit settings, which likely dampened mass local interests in returning back to transit.

Most, if not all, of the major urban networks (now including bus and light rail networks) in the United States were keeping the lights on with unpredecented one-time operating subsidies doled by the Biden administration. Under a new Washington, however, such amity seems fully dead. Sean Duffy, the new Secretary of Transportation, has threatened to cut federal transportation funding in “sanctuary cities” — AKA most major American cities — and tie transportation grants, partially, to the region’s marriage and birth rates in the first week of taking office.

This upswell of hostility could not come out a worse time for transit. Some of the largest and most successful public transit agencies are inching closer to the “fiscal cliff”, where the Biden-era subsidies fully run out and the future of operations funding looks unclear. Consider the agencies and their own fiscal cliff estimates:

• New York City MTA (balanced budget thru 2027)

• Washington D.C. WMATA (by 2028)

• San Francisco Bay Area BART (by FY2026)

• San Francisco Muni (by FY2026)

• Philadelphia SEPTA (by FY2025)

• Chicago CTA (by 2026)

• Seattle King County Metro (by 2028)

• Boston MBTA (by FY2025)

Falling off the fiscal cliff can mean, as Randy Clarke of WMATA said, “death by a thousand cuts or it’s death by a big sword” for the agency’s operations. Such operational collapses have happened elsewhere in the world before — but during wartimes, severe regional depopulation, or economic collapses. The United States and its biggest cities are not experiencing any of the three, and yet its transit prospects are under existential threat. And for what exactly, other than ideological differences animating enmity to brinksmanship?

Transit is only good as its gaps

In many of these metropolitan areas, local and state leaders has expressed support to prioritize transit funding and avoiding the fiscal cliff. That’s good news, but far insufficient. Truly, what these agencies need — and has always needed, for decades — is continuous, stable, and increasing investment for operations. But beggars, unfortunately, can’t be choosers, especially when facing a potential death spiral.

Why does X country have so much better transit than the United States? The lack of stable and continuous investments towards transit operation is one tidy answer to explain as a catch-all. These countries in Europe or Asia or elsewhere have invested for decades into funding their largest cities’ transit systems, or better yet, created mechanisms to self-generate sufficient funding to improve and grow. Yes, United States has indeed pumped billions into public transit over a similar timeframe — but an outsized majority goes to capital projects to build extensions, streetcar systems, or oversized stations. Operations funding is always second thought in the United States transit world. The only exception in living memory to the U.S.’s cold shoulder toward operational transit funding was just three, four years ago, when Biden pumped a one-time influx of funds to keep trains and buses running.

Operational funds are the lifeblood of public transit, and public transit is only good as its gaps. The latter statement can be applied micro and macro. For micro, let’s look at my region, the San Francisco Bay Area: with 27 systems across nine counties, it is an extremely balkanized region with its fiefdoms. But transit networks do not apply like the Holy Roman Empire; it instead works like an organic, rhizomatic ecosystem. If one of 27 systems is rendered obsolete due to funding, cuts to routes or frequencies leave gaps that cuts through the network. If it is a central node, like BART, it is fatal. Even the most peripheral gaps matter, as it kills connectivity with partner agencies and potential for ridership growth. Outstanding gaps over time recede transit from the public imagination as a reliable, trustworthy public good worth investing in.

Like an ant colony or a root system, an ecosystem built on connectivity needs continuous expansion growth to create new permutations of connections, new journeys of travel, and new ways of mobility. As water flows downhill in the path of least of resistance, mobility seeks more mobility, and good cities encourage this. Oft-crowned public transit nirvanas, such as Paris, Madrid, or Seoul, never stop building transit stations and lines and networks in both in its well-served core areas and outer areas — to reify its ecosystem of connections, to feed the mobility monster.

The gaps theory can be applied across on a national/continental scale. Imagine: you are taking intercity transit (Amtrak/Brightline/CAHSR) from one city with a convenient transit network to another city with a deadening network. If you are compelled to rent a car or use non-transit services to get around the new city, the transit experience is harmfully over. Connectivity works not only spatially but sequentially as well. A gap in sequential connectivity may be even more harmful in that it may strongly disincentivize one from ever making the same trip, or a similar transit-oriented trip in the future.

This is why fighting for every system to not fall over the fiscal cliff will be critical.

Transit’s hidden superpowers will go unnoticed

The paradoxical thing about transit is that despite all the infrastructural visibility — trains! buses! boats! — its most potent strengths lie hidden from plain view.

Transit shines brightest as a positive amplifier of societal benefits, such as: higher quality of living, lower economic burdens, higher property tax rolls, creation of new job markets and opportunities, reduction of health inequities, and promotion of social cohesion. These benefits are abstract fabrics which bind a modern society together. They are the magical spells that hypnotizes everyday riders into becoming its strongest advocates and champions, as they can see, for the first time, the invisible strings which transit binds to create a better society.

I have strong doubts this administration will be moved by any of these studies. I imagine if these points were brought up in effort to save transit, they will be dismissed as fake and unsubstantiated, no matter the volume of literature presented to them. To keep transit alive, new vocabulary may be desperately needed to convince it is worth investing and saving.

“Blue” state networks will pay dearly

I remember in 2019, when I worked at BART, the Federal Transit Administration under the first Trump administration withheld some $300 million in approved capital investment grants. The money was sorely needed to begin expanding train capacity between San Francisco and Oakland under the San Francisco Bay. After continuous pressure, and announcement of a “Twitter Town Hall” to rally local support, the FTA finally released the funds to BART. I remember clearly the FTA Administrator released it 15 minutes before the Twitter Town Hall was to commence.

Under the first Trump term, “blue” states on both coasts — which happen to be where the largest cities and networks are — paid undue prices from an antagonistic executive branch who delayed, disrupted, and deferred. In the second term now, we have seen it all cranked up to 11. As we have seen with Trump’s executive order to “kill’ congestion pricing in New York City, or to review the federal contracts for California High-Speed Rail (to kill it), the largest hits are targeted toward the most Democratic states: New York and California. It has only been one month, and this feels already like the most anti-transit federal administration in living memory. It would be foolish to think the hits won’t keep coming.

Anything and everything in the current political calculus can be a soft spot to attack and twist the knife, a lever to wield during hostile negotiations, a bludgeon to bash over Democratic state leaderships. For example: Trump told a Democratic governor — to her face, in person — he will withhold federal funding from her state if she does not comply with an executive order to ban transgender athletes from college sports. Transit, I believe, carry extra potency to weaponize. These urban trains and buses are not just things that move people; they are raw materials in the current political imagination-ammunition industrial complex. Trains and buses carry connotations, ideas, stereotypes, and symbolisms in the current political landscape. There is no reason to believe public transit won’t be under threat for the next four years — or at the least, wielded to punish blue leaders and blue voters in blue states for the cardinal sin of backing the wrong party and wrong color.

Elon Musk and transit

I do not want to speak too much on this due to the volatility and daily mayhem surrounding Elon Musk.

Public transit and Elon Musk have a long history of beef. Musk’s continuous promotion of his Hyperloop and covert sabotage of conventional high-speed rail projects, such as the California High-Speed Rail, soured relations between transit advocates and Musk. Transit advocates on Twitter often like to boast they were some of the first people to suss out Musk as a charlatan through this beef. And in the late 2010s, public transit agencies took occasional pot shots at Musk and his anti-transit views. I can speak from experience that it was great fun because we saw Musk as a convenient cartoon villain: harmless, easy to mock, and useful to galvanize support or just a few viral tweets.

Now, Musk is the most powerful non-elected man in the United States, using his Department of Government Efficiency cronies to pull out the federal government’s entrails in search of superlative amounts of alleged waste and fraud deep in the system. Musk also now owns Twitter. Musk has proven to be a man who holds long grudges and unafraid to rain hellfire on his foes. He is also completely unpredictable as of this publication. With enough time and due course, one has to believe the DOGE machine and Musk will line its firing cannons on public transit. One has to be ready for all possibilities in this timeline.

“Green” transit is out of step with current times

I firmly believe public transit is the best energy-efficient mode of transport for any person in the world by a country mile. It is a modern miracle that this essential technology can operate without the requirement of creating massive carbon emissions in an already warming world.

But U.S. transit’s close-knit association with green energy may be at loggerheads with the material political economy of the United States in early 2025. I do not know if Americans know the United States in 2023-2024 produced nearly 50% more oil than either petrostates Saudi Arabia or Russia via new fracking technologies; Texas alone would be the third largest oil producer in the world. As economist Adam Tooze put it in a recent podcast episode of his, the United States of current day can neatly be summed as a “self-sufficient fossil fuel/oil-based economy” whose unprecedented oil production is almost entirely to satisfy domestic consumption. Little American oil is exported. No country in the history of the world has yet such total energy dominance and independence from external forces as the United States in 2025.

The Biden administration tried to marry industrial policy with mass-scale green energy transition to diversify the U.S. energy input and ease fossil fuel’s totalizing grip on American economy. But their gamble such policies will reap political gains, such as re-election in 2024, has failed. Now, the Trump administration has vowed unconditional support for keeping oil production at all-time highs as he rolled back Biden’s initiatives on green energy. “Drill, baby, drill” was Trump’s vow on inauguration day; where does transit fit into this new energy equation?

Symbols, Sorelian myths, and the great public safety debate

One can classify transit in so many ways: public/private; urban/rural; heavy rail/light rail/buses/ferries; and so on. But one increasingly important taxonomy of transit, and perhaps the hardest to dissect, is its various registers in the collective social imagination.

Transit is a quotidian part of modern urban life across the globe. Until recently, this was how transit was registered in the public consciousness: empirical experiences driven by the senses — how my personal experience on the train or bus was; how the experience of someone I trust was; what I saw, heard, felt, smelled; and such. But on social media online spaces, new imaginations of what “transit” is began to form and fray into something little to do with one’s daily commute. Coded in shibboleths and coated in layers of associations, “transit” took on a new definition, as a stand-in for many of the most urgent societal issues at home: crime, homelessness, urban dystopia, failure of liberalism, etc.. I’d wager now a large plurality — or majority — or Americans prescribe to this coded language.

I speak from experience, as a former BART employee who once monitored its social media channels. BART has always been a lightning rod of Bay Area discourse, especially around homelessness, policing, and crime. But I noticed a discursive change, in tone and in content, between 2019 and 2022, in the comments, the DMs, the quote retweets, the tags, and the shares. Before, the mentions were usually filled with customer complaints, requests for refunds, and vents on how awful the commute was. By 2022, the mentions were dominated by right-wing rhetoric labeling BART as the irredeemable poster child of Bay Area liberalism’s total failures and a skyrocketing increase of graphic videos of crime, gore, and human misery shared to the BART accounts. Many of these videos were years old or even not from the Bay Area. It did not matter. I remember seeing videos of men covered in blood or gaping wounds in unclear backgrounds where one cannot make out for sure if this was a BART station. The videos came in so often and so graphic I sought a therapist out of serious concern for my destabilizing mental health.

No policy topic flared this growing schism of language online more than when policing and public safety was discussed; it was as if the two sides were talking past each other. I noted then that one side — ranging politically from Bay Area socialist or communist groups to centrist technocrats — always used the language of the empirical: customer experience, societal impacts, financial impacts, etc. The other group never indulged in such details and almost exclusively spoke in images, narratives, apocalypses — in line with what writer John Ganz calls myth-making which “reflect an entire worldview in a series of striking images” as developed by the heterodox socialist thinker Georges Sorel.

In this war of words, short-form videos caught on cell phones and sharable across social media platforms is the ammo. Eminently available, infinitely replayable — videos catching gruesome and traumatic crimes in action on transit became inalienable truth bombs that only reinforced the Sorelian myth. Many astute writers about transit, such as Darrell Owens and Alon Levy, have tried to bridge the growing gulf between anti-transit paranoia and matter-of-fact encouraging crime statistics. But the floor keeps moving underneath whenever one tries to drive some stakes into the ground to hold the discourse upright, for moving images from television to Tiktok reels — to paraphrase author William T. Vollmann — has no reverence for time. It matters not if the criminal has been arrested, when the crime occurred, or if the crime is going down. All it needs is just one more crime caught on tape.

Moving images frankly have no reverence for geography either. These videos, whether they mark the specific station or location somewhere, do a sublime job in flattening all geographic terrains into one unspecified plane. A crime in a far-flung subway station in Brooklyn is flattened to a crime on all stations in New York City; a horrific video caught on a bus near the Tenderloin in San Francisco becomes a horror in all buses in San Francisco or anywhere in the Bay Area.

Human geography is a key layer in how we move through our empirical, quotidian world. Call it street smarts or common sense, but we map out in our heads what cities, neighborhoods, street blocks, sidewalks, and even entrances are safe or unsafe into a matrix of deeply rich and textured topology. In the empirical United States of America, we can deduce, correctly, that the sporadic crimes and disorder in public transit networks caught on videos are a downstream effect of disorder and poverty seen above, in our streets. But the camera has no way to overlay this critical contextual layer onto the film. So we get stuck on our phones or desktops, on social media platforms of choice, talking past each other, about whether the subway is either an abattoir of human horrors or a just an okay (but not perfect) way to get around town.

Public safety, perception issue or not, is a real issue that transit agencies across the globe are wrestling over. As I have written, transit agencies across the globe, from China, Thailand, Russia, and Brazil, are testing new military-level technologies and mechanisms to prevent threats of violence and terrorism occurring in its train or stations. No matter the cameras, or the camouflage-clad soldiers on the platforms, I am unsure if these additions can now cut through the noise as it would have years ago.

Public transit unions may be in for an existential fight

Last year, I wrote about the rise and fall of the Japanese national public railway’s labor unions. Once one of the most powerfully represented sectors in a booming economy, railway unions were large, confident, combative, and influential in the Japanese political economy. However, their influence began to wane following a failure of a ten-day strike in 1975, and a new neoliberal movement of bureaucrats and businessmen chipped away at the Japanese National Railways and its unions for a full decade until the unions found themselves facing oblivion. Many unions bent the knee, some fought to the bitter end. Ultimately, long after privatization in 1987, Japanese railway unions are now a fractional shadow of their peak size and powers during the Les Trente Glorieuses period of 1945 to 1975.

It was an existential time for Japanese railway unions; it may be one for its American counterparts. While facing oblivion, the Japanese unions never encountered an outright labor-hostile federal administration, with an unprecedented billionaire with a long history of anti-union bonafides in the United States and abroad leading the crusade to challenge the power of the purse, a funding lifeblood for public transit. The National Labor Relations Board is virtually non-operational at time of publication. It is an unprecedented terrain for most institutions in the public sphere, but perhaps none more vulnerable than labor unions in the public sector, especially public transit.

Privatization now will not save transit

It is clear as day that the current mood with this administration is a reckoning against what they perceive as government waste, fraud, and corruption. Thus it seems inevitable that Trump or Musk will soon dish out regularly the P-word: Privatization. The United States has largely resisted privatization of national (Amtrak) and urban rail transit, largely out of negligence rather than an ideological stand against it. In the current zeitgeist, it seems like a no-brainer that privatization of public transit are back in the cards, perhaps louder than ever before.

I have written extensively about the history of national rail privatization in Japan in my Substack, (and another in South Korea as well). While no scholarly expert, I feel confident to give my simple opinion on privatizing public transit in the United States: it will be a total disaster for two reasons: privatization needs competent and extensive state capacity to be rendered successfully, and privatization is ineffective without giving rail agencies major licenses into land use decisions in and around its networks. If public transit is currently dragging its feet away from the nearing fiscal cliff, a push toward privatization would be like stuffing them in a cannon and firing into the abyss over the cliff. It will be a death knell to the American cities, and to the American economy, as cities still are the predominant economic engines.

First, rail privatization sagas in South Korea and Japan demonstrate that privatization actually requires heaps of state capacity to render successfully. In South Korea, the lack of clear guidance from the national government created confusion that materialized into operational woes and dangerous over-crowding on Seoul Metro’s newest Line 9. In Japan, the push for privatization of the Japanese National Railways in the 1980s came from bureaucrats who targeted two major goals: resolving the massive JNR debt issue through free market mechanisms and crushing the militant labor unions. As they cleared the runway to target both goals, the architects of privatization put in many guardrails — in the form of cleverly accounted government subsidies and holding corporations — to ensure the newly privatized and sectionalized Japanese Railways companies can survive and thrive in its first few years of operation.

At a time where DOGE reigns supreme and the guardrails of governance are totally off and state capacity is being crippled on the daily, I am beyond bearish on the idea that the current United States government will be able to provide the guiding hand to lead a public transit to a sustainable privatization venture. Privatization is not simply jettisoning public goods into the free market ocean in a makeshift dinghy. The New York City Subway is not a memecoin that can be conjured up in hours and put on the market immediately. Transit networks are a web, and a very tangled one, and transformation requires a surgeon’s hand, not those of a half-blind butcher.

Second, privatization also does not resolve a key weakness of American public transit: the toothlessness of its own land use decisions. Nearly all public transit agencies have no or very limited decision-making powers on what they can build in their land next to stations. They are hamstrung by local, state, and even federal entities that severely restrict what they can do on their land. This is a critical tool available in many successful cities with great transit that the United States have deprived for decades.

The common feature which separate countries and cities with great transit and those without is the synchrony and symbiosis between transit and land development. Japan’s privatized mass transit is not successful due to some innate feature of the Japanese people or society, but instead government policies that enabled JR companies to capitalize on its land holdings near urban stations and develop hotels, shopping malls, and office buildings as they saw fit as a major revenue stream to operate its transit. Whereas in the United States, a separation between land use and transit, as if both are intrinsically and mutually exclusive from each other’s welfare, is the law of the land. This tactical divorce has hamstrung American transit (both urban rail and intercity rail, like Amtrak) for decades, depriving agencies from maximizing its land holdings’ potential. Resolving this issue cannot be solved outright in the free market as it is first and foremost a policy issue. Privatization cannot solve this public, political issue that has seeped into every city and every community in this country.

Land use policy is that invisible ledger that accounts for a place’s present shape and form through past decisions and envisions future possibilities (or limitations). One may argue land use is the most potent engine of politics in the current era, in the same vein the late, great philosopher Fredric Jameson mused “in our time all politics is about real estate”.

Americans are getting squeezed on mobility, on all fronts

Americans are sleepwalking into a crisis of mobility — as a practice and as a right, both for self-interest and national health. Consider the following statistics:

• Most of the largest U.S. public transit agencies face a fiscal cliff, as aforementioned

• U.S. pedestrian fatality rates in 2023 by drivers were the highest since 1981

• U.S. car crash fatality rates (per 100k population) in 2023 rose back to 2007-levels after decade-long decline in the 2010s

• Americans spent nearly $50,000 on a new car in December 2024, the second highest month on record

• More than 80% of new car sales in the U.S. are trucks or SUVs, which are getting bigger and thus more likely to kill pedestrians or other drivers in crashes

• Car repair and maintenance costs have risen by nearly 40% since 2020

• Delinquencies on U.S. auto loans in 2024 hit highest levels since 2010

• National gas prices have stayed above $3 per gallon since 2021, the longest stretch since 2011-2014. (It is much higher in select regions, such as the West Coast.)

• All fifteen cities which recorded the largest population adds between 2022-2023 are in the South, per the U.S. Census. The top three cities — San Antonio, Fort Worth, and Charlotte — recorded, in sum, a daily ridership of ~145,000 in 2024. (Their total population: 3.5 million)

• Licensed drivers over the age of 65 has grown from 27.6 million in 2001 to 49.6 million in 2021, per NHTSA. Traffic deaths in 2022 involving drivers over the age of 65 was the highest since 1975.

What am I trying to spell out here with this list? America is already an exceedingly car dependent country, but even cars are becoming too dangerous to drive (or be exposed to other drivers) and too expensive to buy, to make monthly payments for, to buy gas for, to maintain. A government elected in with a vision and compact to its voters may venture to relieve this addiction by making alternative modes of mobility — train, bus, bicycle, paratransit, etc. — more available. Instead, we are flirting with transit Armageddon. What, if any, of these statistics will be moving toward an encouraging direction by January 2029, when this administration’s four-year term is scheduled to end?

Attacks on transit are attacks on American modernity

“Somebody told you the railroad was a bad thing. That was a lie. It may do a bit of harm here and there, to this and to that; and so does the sun in heaven. But the railway's a good thing." - Quote from Caleb Garth, a character in George Eliot’s Middlemarch

It is impossible to imagine an United States of America without trains. From the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad christening the New World with its first railway in 1827, the Transcontinental Railroad binding the continental closer together in 1869, to Boston’s Tremont Street Subway in 1896 becoming the first subway system, American cities and states were made whole with transit. The United States once was a web of trains and streetcars zig-zagging between towns, cities, and states; even if much of that is gone now, Americans in 2025 roam over its footprints.

It is impossible to imagine a modern world without trains. What 19th century invention has endured in both the logistical and imaginative worlds for 200 years as the humble locomotive running on rail, after all? The eminent British historian Eric Hobsbawm credits the railway for breathing new life into a stagnating Industrial Revolution in Great Britain in the 1820s and 1830s — the time of Middlemarch — by giving accumulated capital from textile mills a new outlet to invest and expand its markets. New British rail meant new demand for British steel production and British coal mining; and new energy sources and new modes of transportation allowed British capitalism to flourish not only at home but abroad, further entrenching its status of global colonial superpower. Without British colonial capitalism, the world we know it today would be radically, unfathomably different.

It is impossible to interpret the modern world without trains. Trains both gave man wings to travel long distances faster than ever but also captured the once-fleeting time in modern bondage. French novelist Marcel Proust — who used to fall asleep by reading train timetables — quipped “the necessity of not missing the train has taught us to take account of minutes”, forever transforming and hurrying man’s relationship with time. Poets, artists, politicians, and propagandists in Europe, North America, and Asia in both 19th and 20th century sought to channel the train’s dynamism and industrial symbolism for their own purposes to describe the modern world it helped create.

Trains can serve not only as catalysts of the Industrial Revolution and its consequences but also vessels of the ideals of its twin revolution (as also pushed forward by Hobsbawm) which ushered Western modernity: the French Revolution. Trains represent values in the political imagination: communal, egalitarian, climate-friendly, equitable, affordable, and fraternal are among adjectives which may come to mind. Trains — and transit, by large — are often weaponized as political projects of nation-building; whether it be Japan’s Shinkansen, London’s Elizabeth Line, or California’s high-speed rail project, it is packaged to represent a set of ideals of its citizenry and the state together, a potent symbol of the national strength, unity, fluidity, and enterprise. It is perhaps no surprise then that the American right who have written many thoughts against the enduring relevancy of the French Revolution would disdain the ideals trains often come to carry.

The future of trains in America is under threat. This administration has fired its opening salvos against New York City’s congestion pricing plan and California high-speed rail. It is my strong conviction that a meritocratic, truly efficient, and good-faith federal government who believe in freedom of movement would be supporting these projects in full (and continuously and stably and increasingly). Instead, these projects are slung the usual anti-transit bromides: it’s a boondoggle, it’s government waste, it’s anti-freedom, etc. It is to be expected for the next four years.

The true anti-freedom boondoggle is a total car monopoly, by limiting the modes a citizen can choose to travel on and enclosing the possibilities for where mobility can choose to expand and build. Mobility of people, goods, capital, ideas, and values is the cornerstone in which American modernity was founded upon, and any obstacles of its continued growth is an attack on that said mobility. Trains, and transit by large, have played an outsized role in this founding of American modernity despite its longstanding issues and neglect. Attacking transit is to spit on the face of American modernity, a 200-year-old national project whose overarching narrative has been a people, from all corners of the world, on the move for something better.

Read JNR's origin story here

Read JNR's death (Part 1) here

Read JNR's death (Part 2) here

Read JNR's labor unions' death here

As the clock approached midnight on March 31, 1987, Japan’s television stations live-broadcasted the end of the country’s public national railway system. Cameras on standby at major station platforms caught late-night commuters, and pre-recorded tributes filled the dead time. Five minutes before midnight, a chorus of vintage steam locomotives, lined in a half-circle in a train yard, whistled “Auld Lang Syne” as uniformed men — at least one openly crying — sang goodbye.

(A 2.5 hour live television special on the final hours of JNR on March 31, 1987, skip to 1:49:00 for the Auld Lang Syne performance)

On midnight, under fireworks and a matching percussion performance, the Japanese National Railways (JNR) died, and the new Japanese Railways (JR) was born. Agents across the county replaced signage at stations and trains on cue to reflect the historical change. JNR’s corpus — a world-class national train agency who birthed the Shinkansen but languished under two decades of serious financial stress — was split into seven regional, privatized JR companies to give a birth to a new era.

After years of reputation damage to JNR, the new JR honchos were eager to distance their new rail companies from JNR, and a live television bonanza satisfied their bombast. They desired to project a public image of a modern, young, sleek, forward-thinking and profitable JR, a rail system befitting a 1980s Japan whose economy was running red-hot, its zeitgeist engorged from speculation and hubris. As new kids on the block, the JR Group — especially the major three companies based in the largest Honshu Island — were eager to mature and ready to offer their company shares on the Japanese stock market as soon as possible.

Readers are likely aware of JR’s longstanding successes. JR stands as a model for global railway excellence. For believers, JR is a North Star in prescribing privatization as a cure for ailing public railways. The media honed this narrative early into JR’s lifetime; foreign observers, like the BBC, for example, hailed JR “the envy of the world” by 1993, only its sixth year of operation.1

But why and how did JR deserve such glowing coverage so early in its project? And did it deserve it? It is impossible to answer fully without the complicated, heavily bureaucratic, and decade-long political struggle which led to privatization and sectionalization — the focus of the JNR/JR series on this Substack thus far. The struggle occurred in the bowels of the Japanese administrative state and on the streets with militant labor unions. The manner and conditions which transformed privatization from an idea to reality will be essential to evaluating its post-privatization successes and failures.

A closer examination into JR’s adolescent years in the late 1980s and early 1990s show the lengths the Japanese state went to clear the runway for JR to take off in two ways: first, most of JNR’s long-term debt liability of 37.2 trillion Yen (roughly $264 billion in 1987 USD, yes, billion)2 were selectively contained in new bureaucratic agencies separate from the JR companies. This accounting maneuver shielded the railway babes from exposure to the radioactive material which ultimately killed JNR. Second, the mass labor unions — which held an uneasy and often confrontational relationship with JNR — were crushed into oblivion prior to privatization. Casualties ranged in hundreds of thousands of workers who were forced into early retirement, pushed out, re-shuffled or laid off. All remaining employees were re-hired by the JR companies, who rebuilt their workforce in their vision. In their total victory over organized labor, Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone and his architects of the JR — all devotees of that ascendant Reagan/Thatcher neoliberal system — expended great political capital to win, even at great concerns coming internally from their Liberal Democratic Party.

Ian Smith, the British scholar who has been foundation to this Substack series, writes:

The degree to which the privatization of the JNR has enhanced this reputation is…more easily discernible at this uncritical ‘image’ level than in detailed analysis. Thus, it is contended that the aura of success…is due, in reality, as much to the prior conditions applied to the privatization process as it to the tangible results of the new policy of managing the national railways.

The key to understanding the creation of this aura is to be found in the analysis for the preconditions established as an integral part of the legislative process by which the JNR’s division and privatization was enacted. The procedures introduced to shelve the bulk of the JNR’s debt and thereby to remove the massive interest burden, to cut drastically the labor force of the national railway and to neutralize any union opposition, were the essential elements of a policy initiative designed to conceive an instantly profitable JR Group of operating companies…Their execution, moreover, did not solve the financial problems; it merely ensured that they were not inherited by the new ‘profitable’ privatized JR Companies and, instead, that the real financing burden remained in the public domain. 

This post unpacks the first eight years of the JR era, from 1987 to 1995.

Author’s Note

This is the fifth and last installment of a multi-part examination of JNR’s history. Popular in discussions of global railways, a detailed and granular history of both JNR and JR is much needed, especially in the English language.

To accomplish this post, I rely almost exclusively on University of Stirling academic Ian Smith’s 1996 study “The Privatisation of the JNR in Historical Perspective: An Evaluation of Government Policy on the Operation of National Railways in Japan”, which provides the most comprehensive English-language understanding of JNR’s dissolution and JR’s first five years of operation. I also used Smith’s 1997 report in the Japan Railway & Transport Review “10 Years of JR Operation — The Explicit and Implicit Aims of JNR Privatization”. It is out of the sheer lack of available English-language material on this topic and time period.

In the three-years-plus timeline of research, reading and writing this project, I can sense there is much literature in Japanese on this topic that is unavailable to an English speaker in the United States. As such, I welcome all feedback, including corrections.

And eternal gratitude to Ian Smith, whose work I have read a hundred times over.

The 37.2 Trillion Yen Question

Before the clock struck midnight, JNR shouldered a long-term liability burden of 37.2 trillion Yen. The size of the burden was so big it made up nearly 70 percent of the total national public sector deficit.3 By 1983, the burden was equivalent to two South American countries’ national debts, combined.4 How was this possible? To recap, the most egregious culprit was the exponential growth of the Japanese rail network into the sparsely populated rural areas — a favorite quid pro quo of politicians in the national legislature, the Diet, with constituents — which sunk JNR’s healthy profits into deep red by the mid-1960s. Even after objecting, JNR was obligated to run trains in these long distance rural lines with less than 100 riders per day in the name of national connectivity.5 High-risk bond schemes and further spending increases added fuel to the money bonfire, as a growing Japanese middle class increasingly ditched the train for the automobile. After the Oil Crisis of 1973, the hemorrhaging took on its own velocity, and the annual deficit grew at eye-watering exponentiality. By the mid-1980s the Diet finally intervened: dissolve the JNR and privatize its entities.

When killing a national train agency, burial is a key logistic. For the Diet, it involved creating a new corporation, the JNR Settlement Corporation (JNRSC), where 25.5 trillion Yen of JNR’s long-term liabilities will be held. In a blink of an eye, the money pit swallowing JNR was moved to a new location. For Smith, the JNRSC accounting magic served a tacit “acknowledgement of the financial burdens which had been imposed on [JNR]…beyond its financial capabilities”, that JNR indeed was left neglected for decades.6 JNRSC was not only a dumping ground for undesirable capital but also undesirable labor: the last holdouts of the militant JNR Kokuro labor union membership, rejected during the re-hiring process, were transferred to work at JNRSC.7 On JR’s third birthday, in April 1, 1990, these employees would be fired by JNRSC; their lay-offs would spark a courthouse odyssey which would ultimately be settled in 2010 for 20 billion Yen (roughly $225 million).8

The total 37.2 trillion Yen debt were divided between longstanding debt and extra burdens carried by JNR, such as pension obligations, railway construction liabilities, among others.9 As its founders envisioned, JNRSC would repay the liabilities down through two revenue streams: first, by selling JNR’s surplus real estate, and second, from stock purchases when the three Honshu JRs would make its initial public offering. However, even at its rosiest outlook, 13.8 trillion Yen — only 37% of the total liability burden — was expected to be left over after both streams were exhausted as “Long Term Public Sector Obligation”, as seen in the table below.10

It was an optimistic time. Japan in the 1980s was enjoying a major real estate price appreciation, often with eye-popping figures: a square meter of land in Tokyo’s central Ginza shopping district, for example, were selling for nearly $250,000.11 Two-thirds of Japan’s private wealth was tied to land and real estate in the late 1980s. Japan’s real estate market was aggregately priced four times larger than that of the United States, a country 26 times bigger in land mass.12 JNRSC were expected to aggressively sell more than 8,180 acres of non-operational land held by JNR — about 13% of its total real estate acreage — through open competitive bidding.13 Holding some of the hottest undeveloped real estate lots in Japan, previously unavailable for purchase, JNRSC was primed to cash in big at the right time.

In October 1987, six months after privatization, the Nakasone government halted JNRSC’s land auctioneering to rein in real estate prices from spinning further out of control. Under the Emergency Countermeasures against Rising Land Prices, JNRSC were limited to selling only developed land, through Land Trusts, and without competitive bidding. These anti-speculatory measures dampened massive interest from cash-ready speculators.14 Continued government intervention, including tightening the monetary supply in 1989, finally cooled off the once red-hot real estate market by 1990, but the cool-off precipitated a stock market crash, where the Nikkei 225 lost 39% of its start-of-year index by end of 1990.15 This economic paralysis heralded the famous “Lost Decade.” Missing out on a golden opportunity, JNRSC’s land-sell scheme yielded abysmal results: by the end of fiscal year 1991, JNRSC generated only 2.2 trillion Yen in real estate sales, just 27% of the 7.7 trillion Yen forecasted target set by the JNR Reform Commission prior to privatization.16

A backsliding stock market spelled further trouble for JNRSC, which was also responsible for setting up the initial public offerings for JR East, JR Central and JR West. Their stock market debuts (along with JR Freight’s) in 1991 and 1992 were postponed. Despite a government mandate that ready JR companies enter the stock market as early as possible, the first JR stock sale occurred in October 1993, five and half years post-privatization.17 However, the first sale of JR East stocks beat forecasts and generated 1.07 trillion Yen in revenue, gifting some belated good news for JNRSC. However, the profits from the JR East IPO left nary a dent on JNRSC’s debt: between 1987 and 1992, JNRSC’s long-term liabilities also increased by nearly a trillion Yen, from 25.5 trillion in 1987 to 26.4 trillion thanks to interest.18

JR West and JR Central ultimately went public in 1996 and 1997, respectively.19 But as land prices in both urban and rural areas fell through the entire 1990s, real estate sales failed to make the sorely needed impact.20 JNRSC ran out of ideas — and their debt continued to grow to 27.7 trillion Yen. Finally, in 1998, the Japanese Diet passed the “Act on the Handling of Debts of the Japanese National Railways Settlement Corporation” which disbanded JNRSC. Fixed assets, leftover JR shares held by JNRSC and pension debts of around 4.1 trillion Yen were transferred to the Japan Railway Construction Public Corporation.21 All of the JNR-era leftover debts, totalling 23.5 billion Yen, of which two-thirds bore interest, were deposited into the General Account of the Japanese Government. 22

It bears spelling out in plain terms: 11 years after privatization, nearly all of JNR’s long-term liabilities was ultimately subsumed into the Japanese national debt as taxpayer responsibility. Despite an unforeseen rough Japanese economy of the 1990s, JNRSC ultimately was a major failure, its dissolution a total affront to the aims of the JR framers’ vision that the debt crisis could be handled through the stock market and real estate rationalization. And this last, truly grand intervention by the Japanese government to absorb the debt and put an end to a 30-year-long fiscal crisis underscores a running theme of public oversight over the supposedly independent JR.

“A Form of Stage-Management”

A critical form of the “aura of success” mentioned above is the patina of JR as an exemplary model where free market principles can and do succeed in a nation-scale passenger railway system. But as observed by the life and death of JNRSC, a key instrument to develop said patina, the true free market was either introduced very late (not in full until 1997) and in limited fashion thanks to constant government intervention.

The first years of the JR Group is fueled by constant and diversified government subsidies to upkeep the system. To set the table, JR and JNRSC collectively received, on average, a gross annual subsidy payment of 155 Billion Yen in its four years between 1987 and 1990.23 (As comparison, JNR in its last year in 1986 received a total 188 billion Yen in subsidies.24 ) In 1989, the Japanese government endowed a one-time special payment of 442 Billion Yen to reduce JNRSC’s pension burden.25

In addition to JNRSC and further subsidies, its JR framers added two more mechanisms — The Management Stabilization Fund and the Shinkansen Holding Corporation — to make its clockwork system tick. These lesser-understood mechanisms maintained the image of a private railway company without relieving itself of public aid. Or as Smith puts it, they served a “form of stage-management to ensure that the results of the new JR companies would appear favorable by comparison with those of the JNR.”26

The Management Stabilization Fund

The framers of JR were well aware that urban and intercity Shinkansen lines in Honshu were where the money resided. The other three big islands in the Japanese archipelago were running at a major deficit under JNR, so the Management Stabilization Fund was created to subsidize operating deficits for JR Hokkaido, JR Shikoku, and JR Kyushu.

Unlike a regular public subsidy, the Fund was a pool of money which JNRSC would invest in the stock market for a return. Created by Tokyo University economists, the Fund was created with a 1.3 trillion Yen principal, which would be invested for an ambitious 7.3% annual interest return, the level necessary to cover the three companies’ operating deficits.27 Interestingly, or maddeningly, the government did not deposit the principal; it was instead JNRSC who took out additional debt to kick-start the Fund.28 For the first two years of JR, JNRSC paid to JR Hokkaido, JR Shikoku, and JR Kyushu an amount equivalent to a 7.3% return by taking on more debt, as the principal existed only in name and without any government assistance.29 From 1989 until JNRSC’s dissolution in 1998, the policy was changed, to JNRSC simply paying from the principal annually to the Three Island JR companies.30

Despite the quirky start, the Management Stabilization Fund has served its purpose every year since 1987 and still remains to this day. In the mid-2000s, JR Kyushu stopped receiving the Fund and in 2016 became the first non-Honshu JR company to offer stocks.31 In 2011, the Diet amended the aforementioned “Act on the Handling of Debts of the Japanese National Railways Settlement Corporation” to allow the Japanese Railway Construction, Transport and Technology Agency (JRTT) to issue special bonds to stabilize the two remaining island JR companies.32 However, the future looks unclear at Hokkaido and Shikoku. As mentioned in my previous blog post on JR Shikoku, the company ran a 13 billion Yen in fiscal year 2019 and saw its ridership crater following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Shinkansen Holding Corporation

The Shinkansen Holding Corporation was created as the proprietor of the then-existing four Shinkansen high-speed rail lines. They would lease them to JR East, JR Central, and JR West which would operate the services. SHC not only inherited from all Shinkansen facilities but also its liabilities at about 5.7 trillion Yen.33 This liability would be paid down by revenues generated by the lease payments from the Honshu JR Companies, which could fluctuate based on passenger traffic and market values. A further 2.9 trillion Yen debt — dedicated as capital for eventual repairs of Shinkansen facilities — was added onto SHC for them to pay to JNRSC over 30 years.34

The lease payments were unevenly divide to minimize financial burden on the three JR companies. JR Central carried the largest lease payment burden as they ran trains on majority of the extremely profitable Tokaido and Sanyo Shinkansen lines. SHC and its payment pipelines were a finely tuned system to ensure payments were met without impacting the JR companies’ profit margins.35 However, the delicate system faced its first challenge in 1989, as a new Shinkansen line — the Hokiriku Shinkansen — began construction. The decision for a new Shinkansen was decided on “national” grounds prior to privatization and had not factored new sectional leasing system.36 How this new Shinkansen would be funded — and by whom — was in flux. And this was enough to topple the intricately formed SHC.

In 1991, SHC was disbanded by the Diet and reorganized at the urging by JR Central, the carrier of the heaviest lease burden.37 (A new funding framework for the Hokiriku Shinkansen simultaneously went into effect) On October 1, 1991, SHC sold all its Shinkansen facilities and assets to the Honshu JR companies for a total of 9.1 trillion Yen, and the SHC became the Railway Development Fund.38 That money became the principal for the Railway Development Fund, now a special fund to meet construction costs for new planned Shinkansen lines in the future.39 These arrangements, per Smith, enabled two things: first, for the Honshu JR Companies to take control of the Shinkansen assets and create a cash flow for when facilities are being replaced, if possible; and second, to dedicate a funding source to encourage new Shinkansen construction, which was postponed since 1982, outside of JR company pockets.40

Privatization: What’s It Good For?

So far, we have outlined three mechanisms the JR framers and the Japanese state devised to ensure JR’s inaugural financial success. Two of them were disbanded with 11 years of implementation, and critically, JR’s inherited debt situation did not improve. Arguably, it got worse; and no Midas touch of the invisible hand came to the rescue. And yet: JR is considered not only a phenomenal success, but a gold standard for railway management in the world. A yawning gap exists between what has been explicated here already and what is the common understanding — that “aura of success”. This is where we will attempt to bridge it.

In JR’s inaugural fiscal year of 1987/1988, the passenger per kilometer volume rose by 3.2%, the first of a seven-year streak of continual ridership growth.41 The JR Group also recorded a 156 billion Yen profit, the first recorded profit by Japan’s national railways since 1965.42 (Critical to note that JNRSC and SHC payments were not included) But perhaps more important than the numbers were the perception: one commentator wrote “privatization has brought about a change in awareness reflected in media…and in the attitude of the general public…Strong efforts made by the JR Group since its inception have received full public recognition.”43

The JR Group indeed kicked off its new services with a slew of customer-oriented improvements. In its first two years, the JR companies offered the following (not limited to) to woo more passengers:44

• Increased train service across all JR companies in its busiest lines

• Increase of special service trains (i.e. Friday nights for Tokyo area JR East trains and Shinkansen; event trains for baseball night games in Nagoya)

• Improvements and cleaning-up of station facilities, most notably repairing toilets

• More trains equipped with “cooling facilities”

• Upgrade of train seats across all JR companies

• New special scenic trains in Kyoto area (famously the Sagano sightseeing train) and Shikoku

• Extension of hours for selling reserved tickets (JR East only)

Smith takes a skeptical view at this list, calling it “minor improvements” of “cosmetic nature”, especially in comparison to, say, the less attractive and graver task of handling 36.5 trillion Yen of long-term liabilities.45 Does it require privatization to be able to make these customer improvements? Smith argues no, and provides hidden trade-offs that muddies the answer. He notes this uptick in operational improvements starting in 1987 was possible because of a 61% year-over-year reduction in capital spending from the final JNR year of 1986. JNR was obligated to maintain a massive capital spending portfolio due to its expanding rail network into rural, extremely unprofitable areas; as a private enterprise, the JR Group was freed from such demands and was given the flexibility to spend the capital money more freely.46 That flexibility to focus on service and cleanliness over critical maintenance, Smith does concede, did make a perceptive difference, or at least “deflect attention from the less positive consequences” of JR Group’s first year.47

Such improvements came easily with a totally domesticized labor force who survived a reckoning in the lead-up to privatization. Within twelve years between 1975 and 1987, JNR headcount was cut nearly 60% from 432,000 to 183,000 workers. In addition, at the onset of JNR’s dissolution, the waiting JR companies got to re-hire all JNR employees as they saw fit. The self-selection of the remaining employees — and mutually, the total destruction of all resistant labor unions — allowed for an acquiescent labor force where nationwide rail strikes and unsanctioned union graffitis on Shinkansen trains and station platforms were relics of a bygone era. Management found it easier to divert capital and labor to their target improvements. The general public and once-hostile media thus were happy to overlook any concerning signs under the JR hood.48

JR management proselytized openly on their new reality and their visions. In a 1992 magazine piece asking JR’s achievements in its first five years, JR East heads cited the removal of the Oyakata Hi no Maru spirit — or “the government will pick up the tab for any excess or mistake” — and the introduction of competitive spirit in a smaller workforce as its main benefits.49 In an internal publication, JR East sought to establish its corporate-ness and its corporate philosophy: “[JR East would put the customer first…Central to our service orientation is the concept “high-quality service and reasonable fares.”50 Other JR companies cited as benefits a decentralized management structure incentivizing quicker decision-making and implementation.51

These new benefits meant they were more on par with Japan’s numerous existing private railways, many of which serve the dense Kansai area. The “Big Fifteen” private railways prided on their diverse portfolio which a majority of its total revenues were generated from non-railway operations; for example, the Hankyu Railways’ holding corporations sport numerous hotels, retail, TV stations, and a legendary all-female music theater troupe company that has served as inspiration for generations of manga and anime creators.52 (In contrast, railway critics have long complained the private railways’ relatively low capital investments to improve its system came at cost of everyday riders.)53

JNR never was given leeway to expand its operations beyond railways under the Ministry of Transport’s tight control. Under the privatization laws of 1986, JR companies were explicitly given privileges to divert capital investment to begin new business activities such as hotels, shopping malls, insurance agencies, concession stores, warehouses, and travel agencies.5455 With the aid of the Railway Development Fund to help find new revenue streams, JR companies increasingly became landlords to the most premier hotels and shopping complexes connected next to their most-used stations.

This unlocking was immediately as a game-changer for JR’s financial vitality in its early years, so much so that one critic of the JNR privatization quipped the elimination of JNR’s prohibition into non-railway businesses “might be the only true advantage of privatization.”56 JR East in its 2024 fiscal report states 32% of its operating revenue comes from non-railway operations, such as retail, hotels and real estate.57 JR Kyushu now holds the most diversified portfolio of all JR companies, with 62% of operating revenues coming from non-railway operations, thanks to its aggressive approach since inception in creating and operating new businesses, such as 20 hotels and more than 530 retail stores and restaurants.58

Was privatization successful from the jump? JR management would say an emphatic ‘Yes.’ From its inaugural year in 1987, buoyed by a ridership jump, the seven JR companies saw instant profit and saw its annual profits grow until its peak at 307 billion Yen in 1991. The profitability turn-around is all the more impressive considering there was no true fare increases across all JR passenger companies until 1995.59

However, we are more aware of the fuller picture. SHC and JNRSC must be accounted for, as they, like the JR companies, are direct descendants of JNR. When accounting their total annual interest payments ranging around 1.5 trillion Yen, JR’s profits ranging between 150 and 300 billion Yen quickly nosedive in the red. However, JR did record a much lower annual deficit despite having a higher interest payment obligation than JNR. Only twice did JR recover back into the black in 1990 and 1993: the first due to JNRSC’s major sale of its holding Tokyo Metro shares (netting 882 billion Yen) and the second following JR East’s IPO (netting more than 1 trillion Yen). This arithmetic comes to a close, of course, in 1998, when JNRSC was dissolved and JNR’s debts were no longer a concern.

What is ultimately the verdict on privatization? I suspect many readers may find their favorite silver linings of privatization: mass workforce reduction; elimination of militant labor unions; introduction of an enterprising corporate culture; customer-oriented improvements; and flexibility of a diversified transit-oriented development portfolio. These are all strengths lauded to this day and are readily apparent when discussing what makes Japan’s transit exceptional. There is no doubt that solely the movement toward privatization unlocked some of these qualities. But are these qualities, truly, mutually exclusive from that of an existing public railway agency, or do all these agencies need to go through a similar existential, exhaustive metamorphosis of a JNR-to-JR to emerge with these qualities?

Smith, I’d like to believe, would argue it was a catastrophe, on the sole fact that the debt was never handled with any degree of competence and grew to a point where it required a bailout from the Japanese government. This resolution flew against the face of JR’s founding vision. Hundreds of thousands of JNR career workers lost their jobs as a cost for this promise. An entire nation was changed, politically and societally, by this promise. And exactly, for what?

Auld Lang Syne to the JNR/JR Series

Our exploration of JNR and JR begins on August 15, 1945, when the Japanese Empire surrendered and handed supreme domestic authority to the United States. Where it ends is much less clear; for our sake, I mark its terminus in 1998, when the debt crisis was resolved forever.

I want to keep it short (I may do a epilogue) and conclude by reminding the readers that this was a saga marked only by politics of a very familiar kind. No natural laws or objective economic truths heralded its arrival. This story was written only in bureaucratic ink: from General MacArthur’s staff meetings with an unstable postwar government; from decisions made at the Ministry of Transport and the Japan Railway Construction Public Corporation during Japan’s 1960s boom; from the boardrooms of the Second Rincho and the Mitsutaka Subcommittee toying with JNR privatization; and the scattered sectionalized offices of the new JR Group. I believe this story is both entertaining and enlightening because these decision points are familiar locales to any reader. From such banal starts, history with magnitude are often weaved.

In February this year, two teenagers were killed in San Francisco after “surfing” a BART train.1

It took the Bay Area by surprise: thrill-seeking daredevils are aplenty in locally but none have been daring enough to ride atop a BART train car which can run up to 80 miles per hour through tunnels, viaducts and under the San Francisco Bay. The fatalities left two families grieving in truly heartbreaking fashion.2 The quick succession of deaths left those on the other side — the public transit workers — reeling, too; this news cycle occurred during the last month of my own employment at BART before leaving the agency. I recall how it shook many of my colleagues. Train-surfing, and its consequences and emotions, were some of my last souvenirs from BART.

The anxieties inside the agency on a possible train-surfing epidemic were real and not far-fetched; one needs to only look at the train mecca of America, New York City. Its subway system has seen an explosion of train-surfing incidents in the past two years, with 683 and 565 reported incidents in January-September 2023 and all of 2022, respectively.3 4 Six train-surfers died in New York City in 2023, one more than the total from 2018 through 2022, combined.5 In September 2023, New York City and MTA launched an anti-train-surfing campaign to stem the sharp rise.6 In the same month BART train surfers were killed, a viral video caught a man train-surfing in Chicago.7 A month later, in March, a 15-year-old boy and a teenage girl were killed while train-surfing the Washington Metro in separate incidents.8 Local media in Chicago and Washington, like San Francisco’s, all siloed from each other, loudly wondered if their fair cities caught a New York-origin virus.

A cursory look for context around train-surfing will reveal quickly this is not a New York issue, or a San Francisco issue, or an American issue. Timeline-speaking, train-surfing has been practiced for decades. (If applying its less thrilling father, train-hopping, or its most famous practitioner, the hobo, to the train-surfing genealogy, then train-surfing has existed as long as trains.) To be more precise, train-surfing in the modern, urban context has existed since at least the 1980s. The Mecca of train-surfing – if one deserves such a terrible honor – is not New York City, but Berlin, which has seen two loosely defined eras of train-surfing in the early 1990s and the 2010s. And Berlin’s ignominy casts a long shadow, extending to the other side of the world in Brazil.9

Train-surfing and its practitioners are universally met with scorn and horror by the authorities and the lay public. In the media, local reports of train-surfing are very often reported as evidence of a new strain of lawlessness and anarchy taking root and growing in their cities.10 But piecing together the volume of media reports and academic literature on train-surfing reveals perhaps it is the exact opposite – that it is rather an evidence of societal malaise, already existent and thriving, imposed harshly on the margins and a terminal symptom of those yearning to find any escape from it however possible. This is not my naive grandstanding; this is what train-surfers express in their own words, across the world and over decades. 

In each case in New York City, Berlin and Rio de Janeiro, train-surfing peaks with each city’s own turbulent times and challenges: rising displacement, growing economic inequalities, and even world-historic events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall. While not all victims who died from train-surfing have been affected by these urban challenges (both victims in San Francisco, one in Washington D.C. and another victim in Berlin were model students with stable families and bright futures, per local postmortem features), many others who have been active in the train-surfing community live through these obstacles on a daily basis. When viewed through that lens, it becomes possible to bind these stochastic acts of thrill and madness into an interlinked global phenomenon, one that gives more credence and understanding and even a little grace for why anyone would do such a thing. 

A Strong Disclaimer

I can foresee writing about this taboo topic may be misunderstood as a tacit endorsement for the practice of train-surfing. That cannot be further from my personal view: train-surfing is one of the most reckless and stupid thing any city kid can do and should not be encouraged by any means. As a commuter, a former public transit employee, and a believer in public transit, I believe train-surfing is anathema to all which I identify. 

Wie ein Engel

It is no coincidence that the birth of train-surfing in Germany began on the eve of reunification and took off when the Berlin Wall fell. The first instance of train-surfing was reported in Hamburg in 1988 but spread quickly to Berlin. The fascinating 2015 paper “Identities in transit: the (re)connections and (re)brandings of Berlin’s municipal railway infrastructure after 1989” by Samuel Merrill in the Journal of Historical Geography seeks to connect how Berliners relearned their own U-Bahn and S-Bahn networks in the days and months immediately after the Wall’s fall. Many youths chose to relearn both halves of unified Berlin atop the old S-Bahn train cars, which months earlier would have been physically impossible to traverse. 

The train-surfers were known as S-Bahn Surfen, who took advantage of the old, slower S-Bahn rolling stock and low staffing levels at its stations. The Berlin S-Bahn was cut in two with the construction of the Wall and scarred with operational idiosyncrasies; in-train custom checks were routine and East Berlin S-Bahn trains ran through without stopping when trains crossed into West Berlin territory.11 As U-Bahn became the primary mass transit network in West Berlin, S-Bahn became East Berlin’s. Stations on the West Berlin-operated U-Bahn lines (now U6 and U8 lines) and East Berlin-operated S-Bahn stations close to the Wall were disused, with watchposts installed on underground platforms for border guards and transport police, barbed wire across the concourse, and live third rail to deter any underground escapees from East to West. These central Berlin stations remained closed for 30 years and became known as “ghost-stations”, or Geisterbahnhöfe – christened by Berliners to whom the guards were “observed as spectral figures” standing on near-pitch-black platforms as their trains ran full speed without stopping.1213

On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; the velocity in which the Wall fell stunned denizens on both sides of the wall. The historic event “triggered an intense period of exploration as East and West Berliners rushed to rediscover the parts of the city” that were once closed to them, including the ghost-stations.14 Berliner photographers and train enthusiasts flooded into the disused stations and tunnels to capture them frozen in time. Theater producers used the ghost-stations to host plays, taking advantage of a total administrative vacuum in these new urban spaces. The city-wide euphoria after the fall was shared most acutely and intimately in the overcrowded U-Bahn and S-Bahn trains, now carrying two cities in one. Jannowitzbrücke U-Bahn station was the first disused station to re-open for service on Saturday, November 11; that weekend, 800,000 East Germans visited West Berlin via train, and some U-Bahn stations were closed due to over-crowding. (Video below is a VCR record of that Sunday, November 12 on the Berlin U-Bahn) The West German public transit operator BVG granted East German citizens free fares through 1990, continuing the post-unification U-Bahn over-crowding for several more months.15 All ghost-stations would reopen in phases through 1993.

As Berliners spilled into its trains, its youths climbed atop it, seeking a far dramatic but nevertheless kindred thirst for exploration of their new city. In a city swept in euphoria, anxieties and unease about new norms and authorities, especially in the East, the youth used and abused the urban rail infrastructure to “adopt rebellious subjectivities and identities while pushing at, and overcoming, previously accepted boundaries during a period when they were increasingly exposed to the payoffs of anti-authoritarianism.”16 The ephemeral sense of total freedom and lack of old authoritarian counters mutated into a rash of racially and politically motivated attacks (i.e. fights between far-right and left-wing groups) inside U-Bahn stations in the early 1990s, leading to a sharp rise of perception of the Berlin U-Bahn as a symbol of post-reunification disorder and crime. The disreputation was so intense that the designers who created the bright yellow BVG iconography and livery, still in famous use today, hoped that the color and signages would deter vandalism and visible disorder in “making the environment…slightly more bearable.”17

The price of freedom cost dearly many S-Bahn-Surfen riders. Between 1989 and 1995, 41 train surfing accidents were recorded in Berlin U-Bahn and S-Bahn. Eighteen of the 41 died. A 1998 study from the Humboldt University analyzed 14 autopsy records and found the following18: 

• Most fatalities occurred on the S-Bahn and riding atop older, slower rolling stock

• All but one were male; ages ranged between 13 and 25 years with most between 16 and 20

• Most accidents occurred between 8 p.m. and midnight

• More than half were affected by alcohol but no medications or drugs

• All but one suffered “polytraumatisation” injuries, with injuries to the head most common and severe

The new crisis of train-surfing fatalities in Berlin were widely covered and eulogized by artists. In one famous example from 1992, the former East German rock band The Puhdys’ music video of Wie Ein Engel (“Like an Angel”) recreates a band of train-surfers awash in youthful thrill and ecstasy until one of their comrades falls and dies on the tracks. The fallen train surfer, wearing a leather jacket, lies on the tracks, eyes open at the end of the video, still and lifeless.

Fuck the System

The S-Bahn-Surfen returned with force in the 2010s, and they captured it all in high definition for the world to see. 

The most famous ambassadors of the new era of Berliner train-surfers were the Berlin Kidz, a Kreuzberg-based artist collective best known for their iconic graffiti in seemingly impossible locations in high-rise apartments and buildings in Berlin. Along with their graffiti snaking down multi-story buildings, Berlin Kidz made their Internet fame by filming escapades atop the yellow U-Bahn trains. Berlin Kidz have released two documentaries, Fuck the System and Fuck the System 2, and other videos on YouTube and elsewhere which accrued hundreds of thousands of views. In these videos, the train-surfers push the act of train-surfing to the extreme by riding a bicycle, juggling a soccer ball and even jumping from a moving train into a nearby river. A BVG spokesperson in 2016 called the rash of videos of train-surfing, including those from Berlin Kidz, an “incitement to suicide…they are not giving a thought to the kids who might copy them.”19

Maintaining ironclad anonymity, Berlin Kidz never speak to the media on their intentions or goals. In understanding Berlin Kidz, the best resource has been Thomas von Wittich, a street photographer who followed Berlin Kidz for four years, and has provided a few interviews available in English. According to von Wittich, the members are lifelong Berliners who “are not happy with the circumstances the city is offering” such as gentrification and increased surveillance.20 Berlin underwent a wave of gentrification and displacement, with a vibrant counter-offensive to stop rising rents, evictions and housing speculation, and the group’s home in Kreuzberg was at the geographical heart. Berlin Kidz’s politics extend beyond local politics and remain faithfully anti-authority on all levels; in the Fuck the System 2 trailer, members can be seen repeatedly kicking a cardboard cutout of then-Chancellor Angela Merkel.

While immensely popular online and influential in the local graffiti scene, Berlin Kidz’ impact of encouraging other youths to train-surf may be precisely unknowable. In the decade between 2013 and 2023, the BVG counted eight train-surfing fatalities: a 22-year-old on the S-Bahn in 2013; a 19-year-old on the S-Bahn in 2014; a 13-year-old on the U-Bahn in 2014; another 19-year-old on the S-Bahn in 2015; a 22-year-old on the U-Bahn in 2016; a 15-year-old on the S-Bahn in 2022; and a 19-year-old on the S-Bahn in 2023; and a 14-year-old on the U-Bahn in 2023. 21222324252627Last November, the newspaper Berliner Zeitung worriedly asked if train-surfing “was back in vogue”.28 Between BVG’s comment in 2016 and renewed local media anxieties in the post-COVID years, the new generation of S-Bahn-Surfen has now cast a long shadow over Berlin’s public transit operators approaching a decade in a few years.

The Brazilian Connection

Will Berlin get a reprieve? Not until the anger subsides. Anger – at authorities, at society, at the world, at themselves – is a key fuel driving both Berlin Kidz. It is also the dominant emotion driving their oft-cited inspiration, the pixação movement in São Paulo in Brazil. Pioneers in high-rise graffiti, the pixação movement have been tagging the sprawling Brazilian metropolis since the 1980s, blending daredevil acts, runic graffiti and messages on widening socioeconomic inequality. With an estimated 5,000 pixadores working anonymously in Sao Paulo as of 2016, their art is meant to be an “assault on the city”, to remind the city elite of their consequences of neglecting their downtrodden; the movement “a reflection of the absence of the state in the life of that person who decided to become a pixador.”29

Brazilian youths, like their German counterparts, sought out freedom and a release through train-surfing. In the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro in the 1980s and 1990s, adolescents living in the impoverished suburbs far inland would imitate surfers in the local beaches of Ipanema or Copacabana atop a train moving 50 miles per hour. The train-surfing craze exploded around Rio at the final years of the 20th century, with some towns having train-surfing associations. But the communal thrill led to truly staggering casualty figures. Around 150 train surfers were killed in 1987 alone at the height of the craze, per the Los Angeles Times.30 In the 1990s, more than 100 fatalities were recorded.31 A major reason for a far greater casualty count are the overhead electrical wires webbing Rio’s commuter train network; contact with exposed electrical high-tension wires – running 3,000 volts – was a “relatively frequent occurrence” leading to complex and horrific injuries, per a 2000 study from Brazil examining electrical burns caused by high tension railway overhead cables.32

Train-surfing in the outskirts of Rio withered away following an “intense crackdown” in the 1990s.33 But its spirit has latched onto another form of public transit – buses. Adolescents aged between 12 and 16 and living in the impoverished suburbs of Brazilian cities are now riding atop and on the sides of public buses. Like the train-surfing associations in the 1980s, the bus-surfers also have associations and clubs. The New York Times followed one, Loucos do Surf, or the Crazy Surfers, riding atop buses in northeastern Brazil in 2017 for a travelogue published four years later.34

Loucos do Surf hail from the neighborhoods of Olinda. The youths in Olinda and countless other towns in Brazil have seen a sharp increase of homicides amid growing inequality, rising unemployment rates especially for youth, and increasing poverty and disinvestment from local governments in the past 15 years. One member told The Times he began bus-surfing because local authorities demolished the only soccer field in his neighborhood. Others found political protest in bus-surfing against the rising price of bus fares. The Times’ travelogue teems with desperately bored teenagers thirsting to exchange their current circumstances for any chance to escape from it all. The story tragically comes to a close when the ringleader of Loucos do Surf is killed near his home by a gunman at point-blank range at the age of 18, and the group falls apart.35 

“Everybody’s going through a lot of shit”

When people discuss train-surfing, especially in the light of so many deaths in the United States in the, past two years. it is frequently discussed as a new and disturbing trend with no comparisons and equals. As we have seen, train-surfing is nothing new or exclusive to American cities.

Why do these kids do this? One thread connecting American, German and Brazilian train-surfers is that they consistently call themselves “artists”. Teenagers who risked their lives train-surfing in New York City repeatedly spoke about how this is a “form of expression”.36 They also readily admit this is an artform reserved for the truly desperate. Michael – a 19-year-old New Yorker who quit train-surfing after a friend died surfing the J train in Brooklyn – talked to Curbed how he has been dealing with several mental health issues, attempted suicide and have visited numerous outpatient centers and treatments to no avail through the byzantine and underfunded mental health system in New York City. 

Michael said the following, which was particularly illuminating on how one even dares to surf a train:37 

No one says one day that they’re just going to get on top of a train. Everybody’s going through a lot of shit. I don’t know what, but it’s enough for them to start doing this…Going through that [mental health] system so many times, and you know it’s broken, and you know it’s not going to do anything for you. You just start to look at other options.

Social media platforms, like Instagram and TikTok, can indeed be big propagators to susceptible teenagers. One New Yorker teen shared with Curbed he quit train-surfing but went back one more time to capture footage of him riding atop a Subway train with the New York sky blood-orange due to wildfire smoke coming in from Canada; that video got 6 million views. Like the teenagers in San Francisco who lost their lives, the allure of Instagram fame does play a major part in recruiting the newest generation of train-surfers. Spokespeople in Berlin, New York City, and San Francisco have called for tighter regulation of social media content which includes train-surfing to stop the flow of information. Tighter enforcement can make an impact — but it is limited in answering the pre-Internet-era origin question in why a teenager joins the train-surfing craze in the first place. 

What can cities do? The 1998 German study examining Berlin train-surfing autopsies did identify “structural design possibilities… to be the most important approach to prevention of accidents in the future.”38 A newer, faster generation of S-Bahn trains, delivered in full by the late 1990s, did peter out the first generation of Berlin train-surfers. Other design alterations with well-used egresses in station platforms and structures can help too. Such fixes can prove costly (especially to chronically cash-strapped public transit agencies) and at odds with station access and agency operations and present a new cycle of challenges.

For four decades, train-surfing has remained an extreme but sticky form of societal disobedience and thrill-seeking among a very small slice of young people, mostly teenage boys. For those who seek train-surfing, it has remained an intoxicating option to escape from the turmoils of their own inner and outer worlds. These teenagers and young adults in Berlin, Brazil and New York City have spoken with their feet that the roof of a fast-moving train feels safer than being at home, or in their neighborhood. From Berlin Kidz to Loucos do Surf to Michael’s crew in New York City, the wayward adolescents found a community for them in lives often socially wrecked and displaced. For not letting your crew down as they surf a train was enough cause for one more train-surfing ride. In their own words and actions, they express lucidly why they take the risk.

Train-surfing may serve as an indictment to the current state of cities, expressed from the margins. Communal spaces (public spaces, third places, etc.) where teenagers of all backgrounds can congregate safely, unsupervised and unsurveilled are declining in cities around the globe. In countries like the United States and Brazil, growing wealth inequality has strained young people and their families to the breaking point in the past 15 years. For Loucos do Surf in 2017, their time coincided with a 29 percent youth unemployment rate during the worst recession in Brazil’s history and a ten-year-rise in homicides among its Black population.39 For the New Yorker train-surfers of 2022, their time coincided with a 10-point-jump in the city’s poverty rate due to the COVID-19 pandemic and one in 4 New Yorkers under the age of 18 living in poverty.40 As Michael said, when so much seems broken at an age when you begin piecing together the world around you, you start looking at other options.

During the research for this story, I was particularly moved by the death of Ka’Von Wooden – the friend who got Michael to stop train-surfing. The death of Wooden – a railfan and transit photographer with a popular Instagram account of New York City Subway trains – received an outpouring of remembrance from his friends, many of whom were train-surfers themselves. One answer published in ANIMAL Magazine from a friend of Wooden eulogizing him and why he is quitting train-surfing stuck with me. The sincere eulogy really drove home for me that indeed these are all lost kids, looking for directions atop a singularly moving train:41

I’mma a miss him as a person in general. He was a kind-hearted person and just someone who was fascinated with trains. We were his only real friends, so that’s the reason he use to hang out with us. Some rail fanners would bully him cause he had “autism,” so when he was around us, he felt like himself and acted like himself. He made sure everyone around him was smiling and everyone was chilling. He didn’t cause any trouble and just enjoyed being with us in general. He never really did anything bad and it’s sad to see how he went out, but i mean that’s the risk you take when you surf. I was kind of shocked when I found out, ‘cause he was never really the person to top surf. During the big event,  he didn’t even surf, he was just in the back of the train messing with it ‘cause he was just a kid who was fascinated with trains.

There is no longer that rush anymore—that’s the only reason we did it, because of that adrenaline rush we got from doing it and when that was gone, we just found other ways to get it through the tunnels and graffiti. I mean some other people are still gonna stay surfing even though they said they “quit” because they are addicted to that adrenaline rush and they don’t really care about the risk of losing their life. That’s how everyone was, we didn’t really care about the risk and thought it would never happen to us even though prior incidents that happened due to surfing, but this one hit home because he was a close friend to us, and it just opened our eyes of how this can happen to any of us.

Read JNR's U.S.-led origins here

Read Part 1 of JNR's privatization here

Read Part 2 of JNR's privatization here

The first three posts of my Japanese National Railways series spanned its lifetime between 1948 and 1987 and detailed its political birth and its political death. Created by American occupiers in the image of New Deal corporations, JNR met its end under the banner of neoliberalism promising a rejuvenated Japan through a Reaganite/Thatcherite revolution. Much of JNR’s trajectory in between occurred outside of its control, dictated heavily by politicians in the National Diet and the Liberal Democratic Party which controlled the government from 1955 onwards. But one force shaped JNR’s destiny from within: its labor unions. 

JNR’s unions were diverse and massive, with a membership of 432,000 in 1975 at the zenith of its powers.1 As one of the largest public sector employers, JNR workers wielded some of the strongest unions in Japan. When labor unions were legalized by Douglas MacArthur in his first months as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in 1946, the unions gravitated toward radical left-wing politics heavily influenced by Communists released from prison by MacArthur. Its longstanding ideology and willingness to use illegal work strikes on a national scale granted JNR unions considerable powers – and many enemies. In the 1980s, with Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone’s critical support, anti-labor businessmen, academics and bureaucrats united under JNR privatization to break labor’s back. JNR labor unions of the 1980s were thoroughly out-maneuvered in the political dissolution of JNR into a rebirthed JR and left crushed by the transformation.

Japan’s national rail unions are now a fraction of its former selves. The National Railways Labor Union, or Kokuro, was once the most populous, powerful and militant JNR union with a membership of 245,000 in 1982; in 2016, they reported 9,000 members.2 JR Rengo is now the largest current railway union under the privatized JR companies at 74,600 members as of 2020, a fraction of Kokuro’s during JNR’s final years.3 While Kokuro’s successors have been reduced to a fraction in volume, its ferocity did not go extinct, as demonstrated by an exhaustingly long legal fight between terminated union employees and JR companies lasting from 1990 until 2010. The unions continue to make noise to this day. 

This post is an addendum to the larger chronology series of JNR and JR (the next post after this will cover JR’s first years post-privatization). Labor history is always a key piece of the rail history puzzle, and Japan’s is no different. Too often, observers and admirers of Japanese railways underplay its labor workforce as a reason for its success, falling back on infantilizing stereotypes as inordinately obedient or robot-like. The Japanese railway unions’ organization and militancy may surprise readers subscribed to the aforementioned underplaying.

Author’s Note

This is the fourth installment of a multi-part examination of JNR’s history. Popular in discussions of global railways, a detailed and granular history of both JNR and JR is much needed, especially in the English language.

To accomplish this work, I rely heavily on two English-language papers found online: University of Stirling academic Ian Smith’s 1996 study “The Privatisation of the JNR in Historical Perspective: An Evaluation of Government Policy on the Operation of National Railways in Japan” and Ohio State University academic Eunbong Choi’s 1991 study “The Break-up and Privatization Policy of the Japan National Railways, 1980-87: A Case Study of Japanese Public Policy-Making Structure and Process.”

In the two-years-plus timeline of research, reading and writing this project, I can sense there is much literature in Japanese on this topic that is unavailable to an English speaker in the United States. As such, I welcome all feedback, including corrections. Thanks to the excellent written works of Smith and Choi, I hope this will help serve a great deal of utility in furthering and elevating discourse on successful railways around the world.

1946-1973: Labor and management draw their battle lines

The formation of JNR’s labor unions was an American-supported initiative within months of Japan’s unconditional surrender of World War II in August 1945. Under MacArthur’s rule, the Japanese Diet passed laws – inspired by the Rooseveltian New Deal laws of the 1930s – enabling the formation of unions, collective bargaining, and right to strike. MacArthur, in particular to the JNR, which would be birthed in 1948, envisioned the agency to be operated like the Tennessee Valley Authority, a public sector agency with its own finances and relative harmony with non-combative labor unions. 

The labor unions, including the most popular Kokuro, had huge Communist contingencies in its membership, leading MacArthur to take a “reverse course” in his political liberalizations of Japan within two years. Under MacArthur’s direct orders, the Diet rolled back much of the labor rights given to public sector unions in 1948. In addition, on the day before JNR’s birth date, MacArthur’s SCAP staff and the Diet ordered JNR to fire nearly 100,000 grandfathered employees to reduce headcount and undermine Kokuro’s oversized influence.4 Amid mass layoffs in its first month of existence, JNR management rebuffed Kokuro’s demands for stronger labor arbitration processes and wage increases, setting in an “undercurrent of bitterness which had a lasting effect on labor relations” within the union, according to Smith.5 In 1950, more than 400 JNR employees were fired as part of a nationwide red purge to remove Communists and left-wing activists from public sector circles. Decisive government actions such as the purge, in contrast to slow progress for better labor negotiations, deepened labor’s resentment toward management.6 These actions fixed Kokuro’s longstanding antagonism and deep distrust toward JNR management, leading to a “profound effect on the latter performances” of JNR and “goes a long way to explain JNR’s lack of enterprise and its ultimate demise”, according to Smith.7

In the 1950s and 1960s, JNR workers began splintering and creating their own labor unions. In 1951, The National Railway Locomotive Power Union, or Doro, was created for highly skilled locomotive engineers, power vehicle crews and some train operators; despite a more specified “skilled” labor union, Doro would work in tandem with Kokuro through the JNR era in labor fights against management.8 But not all JNR workers were supportive of Kokuro and Doro’s methods. In 1957, an unannounced labor strike in Niigata was the catalyst for the creation of a splinter faction opposed and critical of the Kokuro-Doro orthodoxy. This splinter group found kindred spirits across Japan and soon united with recent defections from the Japanese Socialist Party, both searching for a political future where labor and management can more harmoniously work together. In 1968, this labor coalition inside JNR became the Japan Railways Workers Union, or Tetsuro.9 Tetsuro’s origins as anti-Kokuro and Doro defectors instilled their instincts to work first with management and resist participating in Kokuro-led illegal strikes. The continuous infighting between labor union and an inability to present an unified labor front to JNR and, more importantly, national politicians in the Diet would prove an Achilles heel for all three unions in the 1980s.

Beginning in the late 1960s, JNR began to report exponentially higher deficits every year. To stem the financial hemorrhage, JNR launched the Productivity Increase Movement (Marusei Undon) as a tourniquet to reduce employee headcounts and its related costs, such as pension obligations.10 In 1975, JNR employed a total of 430,051 employees – twice more than the figure cited by a pro-privatization committee in 1985 to staff JNR adequately for full national rail operations.11 Employees at the time also averaged more than 20 years experience working for JNR; nearly half of JNR employees in 1976 were over the age of 45. Coupled with a freeze on spending for hires and reducing staffing levels, the Productivity Increase Movement sought to increase individual employee productivity and wrangle the unions under a more cooperative partnership to overcome JNR’s financial challenges. As one description goes, the Movement hoped to be a “spiritual movement to encourage a revolution in consciousness among employees.”12

If anything, the Movement sparked a streak of rebelliousness among Kokuro and Doro members. Both unions filed numerous lawsuits against JNR managers citing unfair labor practices, such as pressuring union employees to quit their membership for a promotion or salary increase.13 Union-loyal train operators expressed their anger by tagging their own trains with anti-Productivity Increase Movement slogans, such as “overthrow Marusei” or christening a train the “Marusei Crusher” (マル生粉砕).14 Doro, with a membership of 40,000, were especially involved — it harbored members in the forefront of the Japanese New Left movements of the 1970s and thus leaned more leftist than Kokuro’s general membership. Tetsuro, meanwhile, supported the Movement by wearing ribbons to express gratitude toward passengers. It stood in stark contrast to Kokuro’s own ribbons, commonly worn to support the union’s right to strike, an increasing demand among its ranks.15

On October 8, 1971, the Productivity Increase Movement ceased its operations after the Diet’s Labor Committee of Public Enterprises ruled JNR management did in fact engage in unfair labor practices.16 Three days later, JNR President Ei Isozaki publicly apologized at the Diet for the charges.17 It was a major victory for Kokuro and Doro, who demonstrated that sustained resistance against JNR mismanagement is not only possible but successful. Emboldened by this episode, the 1970s would crescendo into an all-out labor-management battle, dramatized in newspapers and on television by the broken glass, burning trains and violence at the stations — all of which would deeply wound JNR’s already hemorrhaging finances and its sterling reputation in the Japanese cultural consciousness.

1973-1975: Unions Go to War

In 1948, the Diet under MacArthur’s supervision revoked the public sector union’s right to go on strikes.18 Over the next 25 years, Kokuro and Doro repeatedly sought for the return of this right, initiating the first illegal nationwide strike in 1961. Matters were complicated further when Japan’s Diet ratified the Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention written by the United Nations’ International Labour Organization in 1965.19 Kokuro and Doro felt that the Convention guaranteed their right to exercise their labor rights, including the right to strike. After the Productivity Increase Movement died in 1971, the unions focused their energies into regaining their right to legally strike.

In the spring of 1973, the unions launched their offensive via illegal work slowdowns and walk-outs — to spectacular collateral damages. Slowdowns paralyzed the massive commute traffic in Tokyo and its suburbs, leaving tens of thousands stranded in rush hour. On March 13, 1973, enraged commuters in the Ageo Station north of Tokyo attacked the few station staff manning the station despite minimal train service, threw stones at the station and train windows, and vandalized station and train equipment until riot police quelled the crowds. The unions called another slowdown on April 24th, inciting a far larger and more violent reaction from enraged, stranded commuters in Tokyo who vandalized 26 stations across the capital region. Two days after, JNR President Isozaki provided the following damages to the Diet: 760 million Yen in property damages; 1 out of every 15 ticket machines in Tokyo broken; 60 train sets (out of 400) inoperable without comprehensive repairs; and 14 injured employees. 20

A video of the 1973 slowdowns and the chaos which soon followed.

Following a detente in 1974 thanks to a government-labor agreement to improve relations through a council, Kokuro and Doro reloaded its ammunitions for another offensive to restore the right to strike in 1975. In a June 1975 issue of the Japanese National Railways newspaper produced for Kokuro members, the union listed that “in the fall of ‘75 we must struggle to regain the right to strike” and declared that the regainment was “unlikely to be reached” through the council.21 Around this time, Kokuro especially saw themselves as a vanguard for the Japanese Left; in another June 1975 issue of the same paper, they listed their platform of working class revolution and raising worker consciousness. The platform states that “we will fight for the liberation of the working class” and “we will integrate them into a fight for the release of the Japanese government.”22

Kokuro and Doro began agitating for a nationwide illegal strike to occur in the tail end of 1975. The unions believed that a full-fledged nationwide strike would paralyze Japan, and bring the new Prime Minister Takeo Miki and the Liberal Democratic Party to concede their long-sought right to strike.23 Miki, however, willing to play hardball, pledging to “break the cycle of strike and punishment” of recent labor strife .24 By October 1975, the unions and leadership were at an impasse, with the former reporting to its workers via the union newspaper that they will “fight for the fate” of JNR in a strike that will last 10 days or more.25 The foreseen battle commenced on the morning of November 26, and JNR’s entire operations immediately froze up. Only 3 percent of its passenger trains ran the day of and nearly all freight trains were inoperable.26 

Three groups buffered the labor strike’s blows. First, the Miki government did not relent quietly into concession. To combat the impact of freight rail’s absence, and the possibility of food shortages in urban areas, the government encouraged then mandated truck companies and associations to transport foods in lieu of freight trains.27 The strike’s impact on transporting goods was proven minimal, at least in the popular commerce spaces: one customer at the famous Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo told a TV interviewer that perhaps there was more inventory than usual during the strike than before.28 The second group was private railway companies who were not involved and thus ran normal service. Whereas Tokyo — with a far more extensive JNR network in its capital region — were heavily impacted by the strike, the Keihanshin region of Osaka and Kyoto saw much less inconveniences due to a wider presence of private railway operators. On November 28, the third day of the strike, labor unions representing private railways went on a 24-hour solidarity strike – but the impact was minimal and inconsistent based on the railway.29 There would be no more shows of solidarity from the private railway unions to supply more leverage toward Kokuro and Doro. The third group was Tetsuro, the lone JNR union who did not assent to the strike. According to a Tetsuro representative in a post-strike briefing at the Diet, the union instructed its members to go to work during the strike.30 In response to crossing the picket line, Tetsuro workers were threatened, harassed and attacked by pro-strike union members and sympathizers. 

On the tenth day on December 3rd, Kokuro called off the strike. In their internal newspaper, the union leadership wrote it would be “wise to rebuild the struggle for the right to strike for next spring” and took pride that “the government and the Liberal Democratic Party were driven into a corner by this struggle.”31 But the 1975 strike would prove to be the apogee of Kokuro-Doro might. There would be no more strikes at the scale and length as November-December 1975. In 1976 and 1977, the unions laid low, striking for less than ten days each.32 Two months after the 1975 strike, JNR sued Kokuro and Doro for compensation of 20.2 billion Yen in damages for the 10-day rail stoppage.33 Kokuro and Doro began to bleed members after the failed 1975 strike, and Tetsuro ascended as the most politically secure JNR labor union.

The failure of the 1975 strike shook JNR unions to the core, who finally realized they no longer commanded a monopoly of Japan’s transportation choices. The private automobile was king in Japan, and private railways in key urban areas fragmented a dwindled monopoly in rail. Earlier in 1975, an unrelated 50 percent fare increase – a new Diet policy to sharply make up lost finances due to a 20-year pause in fare increases nationwide – depressed JNR ridership further as users opted for driving a car or taking the now more relatively affordable private railways. The major fare increase and continuous labor disruptions marked JNR as a public agency not only financially unstable but culturally as well. This sentiment was keenly expressed by exasperated bureaucrats and politicians who sought to reconstruct Japan’s public finances in the new economic system gaining traction in the West: neoliberalism. Killing off Japan’s militant labor unionism would soon surface as a key desired effect in their neoliberal laboratory of the 1980s.

1980-1985: Labor at the Face of Oblivion

In 1970, Kokuro outnumbered Tetsuro membership nearly four to one, with 270,000 compared to 70,000, respectively. By the end of the decade, Tetsuro more than doubled to 150,000 members, as Kokuro lost tens of thousands of members.34 A major factor in the unions’ reversal of fortune was JNR management’s thinly veiled discrimination against Kokuro members, such as demanding members to withdraw from the union and promoting other union members over Kokuro members. Kokuro filed on behalf of its members 30 times of these alleged unjust labor practices to the Public Labor Relations Committee, but only two cases were accepted for hearing. Frustrated by the squeeze, many members voluntarily left Kokuro. This was only the beginning of the siege against JNR’s organized labor.35

The anti-labor turn in the Japanese mainstream came from two fronts starting in 1981 and through 1982. First, the administrative reform movement was in full bloom in its efforts to privatize and split JNR. Led by pro-business figureheads like Toshio Doko and Hiroshi Kato, the prospect of JNR privatization became a real possibility in 1982 and became a main platform for new Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone. Second, the mass media: long sympathetic to unions across the political spectrum, the nationally syndicated newspapers all turned harshly against JNR employees and their unions. Reporting on the alleged “collapse of JNR work discipline”, the media pointed out JNR employees as lazy or non-present at the job, unserious, scheming for overtime and holiday pay, and careless – and its unions as abetting such behavior. In some papers, JNR employee behavior became symbolic for a socioeconomic rot present in Japan, titling such hypotheses as “A Traitor Theory to the Country” or “If We Continue in this Manner, Japan Will be Bankrupt.”

Kokuro and Doro leadership were locked out of conversations happening deep within the Japanese bureaucracy incubating the nascent proposal of JNR privatization. When the original administrative reform commission (also known as Second Rincho) formed in 1980, pro-business representatives made the majority over labor delegates. Three years later, when the JNR Reform Commission was created to officially begin the task of privatization, three of the five members were the most pro-business voices on the Second Rincho. Kokuro’s Secretary-General in 1982 hinted his frustrations at the shadowy process, saying “there is the [Second Rincho], but there is no government; there is the government, but there is no Diet; and there is the Diet, but there are no people.”36 The unions would remain cast out through the entire process inside JNR Reform Commission under Nakasone’s tight vigilance. And whatever intra-union solidarity there may have been was shattered for good in 1984, when Tetsuro backed privatization and the Reform Commission’s work.37

1985 brought a series of bad news for Kokuro and Doro. First, former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka – the only man inside the Liberal Democratic Party who could dare oust Nakasone – suffered a massive stroke and was unavailable. Second, Nakasone fired all privatization-resistant JNR executives, including the President, in June. Third, the JNR Reform Commission finished its deliberations and presented full policies for privatization and division with the deadline of April 1, 1987. But the worst news of the year was to come in the early morning hours of November 28, 1985.

A small Doro splinter chapter in Chiba, a city east of Tokyo, declared a 24-hour strike, paralyzing JNR train service between Tokyo and Chiba. What was planned as a small wildcat strike turned into the biggest single-day shutdown in JNR history since 1968 (even more paralyzing than the 10-day national strike in 1975) due to the unsolicited sympathy participation of a far-left revolutionary group called Middle Core Faction, or Chukaku-ha. The Middle Core Faction participants vandalized 32 facilities around Tokyo and Osaka, and most importantly, severed coaxial and optical communications cables which powered the national train control computer systems.38 As a result, 20 train lines in Tokyo and 2 lines in Osaka was completely inoperable for the morning commute, leaving four million commuters stranded in the morning and nearly 11 million riders impacted in total.39 In addition, masked saboteurs in helmets threw gasoline bombs inside Asakusabashi station in central Tokyo, setting the station ablaze, along with 26 additional stations in the early morning hours.40

Newsreel from the Middle Core Faction sabotage on November 28, 1985

Forty-eight participants were arrested for the attacks, but the damage was done reputationally against the unions. Both Kokuro and Doro condemned the “anti-social” attacks and apologized for the rider impacts.41 The minority Socialist Party canceled their solidarity press conference. Kokuro’s spokesperson worried this will trigger a “harsh response from the government” and this will impede on its signature-gathering effort to stop JNR privatization.42 The Nakasone government indeed responded strongly by dismissing 20 Doro-Chiba workers for the wildcat strike. (In comparison, only 15 were fired after the 1975 strike)43

1986-1987: Labor surrenders, Kokuro pushed to extinction in new JR era

At the end of fiscal year 1986, JNR employed 276,000 workers, and that was a major issue for the JNR Reform Commission. The Commission determined that the new JR Group, by their creation date of April 1, 1987, should optimally employ 183,000 workers, 93,000 more than current staffing a year out.44 The year prior, 48,000 JNR employees already retired voluntarily thanks to improved pension conditions offered to leave the railways. In 1986, the national Pension Fund sweetened the offer further to include a special allowance of additional ten months’ salary on top of the new pension conditions. As a result, 53,000 more employees took the offer and left the workforce.45

Losing 100,000 workers within two years was a cataclysmic blow to Kokuro and Doro which were now struggling for self-preservation. Doro — long the more left-wing union of the two — caved in January 1986, voting to back JNR privatization and division. The union’s president Akira Matsuzaki recognized as far back as 1981 that privatization can mean destruction of his union and worked for five years to convince his membership to put their arms down for survival. In a deal with JNR, Doro gave up all further strike actions, agreed to cooperate on voluntary retirements and job transfers before privatization and drop all legal claims of JNR unfair labor practices. JNR, in return, dropped its lawsuits seeking damages from previous strikes.46

Kokuro was now alone. Unlike Doro, they remain resolved in the struggle. For two years, they have long resisted the Socialist Party’s alternative JNR reform plan and rejected it once more in March 1986; the Socialist Party carried the reform plan in its General Election platform later that year without Kokuro’s blessings. In October, nine months after Doro’s concession, Kokuro’s leadership begged its membership to concede and allow negotiations with JNR before privatization. In a referendum, its membership overwhelmingly rejected negotiations, balking at the requirement that Kokuro will drop all outstanding unfair labor practice claims.47 In response, the pro-leadership faction seceded in February 1987 to join Tetsuro and Doro in their pro-privatization stance.

Prior to privatization on April 1, 1987, the new JR companies were allowed to re-employ all JNR workers using new criteria set by its management. The companies used the clean slate to draft “requirements” in the re-hiring process to exclude workers previously opposed to privatization and allowed themselves to be extremely selective with their new organization.48 By April 1987, JR companies had 40,000 surplus workers from JNR, and used creative solutions to re-employ nearly 24,000 of them. Thousands more voluntarily retired or took outside employment. The remaining 7,600 JNR surplus workers rejected by JR companies and who chose not to leave the railways were transferred to the newly created JNR Settlement Corporation, a new body to house JNR’s titanic long-term debt and liabilities away from the newborn JR companies. The vast majority of these 7,600 were Kokuro members, the direct result of a “policy of active discrimination against Kokuro members” by JR officials ushering in a new era.49

The total re-shuffling of the JNR workforce created new labor unions suitable for the new era. Doro and Tetsuro fused into one union, the Japan Confederation of Railway Workers’ Union (Tetsudororen or JR Soren) totaling 133,000 members. Kokuro’s pro-leadership faction created its own union, Japan Railways Industry Workers Union (Tetsusanro) as well. Kokuro, once the largest and mightiest labor union of 270,000 strong, was by April 1987 down to 34,000 members with nearly 7,000 on the unceremonious chopping block. At the outset of the JR era, JR Soren agreed with management that the new unions will not strike or disrupt services as JR took shape.50 The mass labor reductions and back-breaking of militant unions and JNR instilled unprecedented docility and anxiety among its workforce, an aimed achievement for JR management, according to one JR East executive:

Dividing Japanese National Railways and making a private management system was a huge trial for us…Certainly the Heisei property [of the 1980s] contributed to our satisfactory management, but the employees’ attitudes made them accept the facts. The sinking of the Japanese National Railways, which was a symbol of a ‘ship which could never be sunk’, and the employment anxiety that between 70,000 and 80,000 employees out of 280,000 had to be fired, helped their attitudes further.51

Another JR East executive echoed the same sentiment: “We’ve rid of ourselves of the gloomy atmosphere that plagued us in the days when you were going around telling the public that the national railways were a band of ‘National traitors.’”52

Requiem for JNR labor: Final thoughts

On April 1, 1990, JR’s third birthday, 1,047 workers still left over from the JNR era and employed under the JNR Settlement Corporation were ultimately fired.53 They were the remaining litter of the 7,600 surplus workers rejected from re-employment by JR, did not retire, did not take an outside job, or were not deemed hirable after a three-year re-employment program under the JNR Settlement Corporation. Of the 1,047 fired, 966 were Kokuro members. 54

For the post-JNR labor union front in a new JNR-less world, the fight for the 1,047 dismissed workers became a rallying point for labor justice. The dismissed Kokuro members alleged their dismissal stemmed directly from their steadfast refusals to leave the union and filed complaints for unfair labor practices with regional Labor Commissions. The fight between the dismissed workers and JR companies escalated into the courts in 1994, and it would remain there for more than 16 years. Interventions and court decision could not stop the struggle; a collapsed deal in 2000 by the Liberal Democratic Party and other left-wing parties to re-hire the dismissed workers and a 2003 Supreme Court split decision ruling the JR companies bear no liabilities despite found unfair labor practices failed to end the legal conflict. In 2010, the Japanese government brokered a settlement deal: JR companies would pay 904 dismissed workers 20 billion Yen (roughly $225 million), or roughly 22 million Yen (or $250,000) per person, in exchange for dropping all existing lawsuits.55 (The numerical difference between original 1047 and 904 plaintiffs is due to the Doro-Chiba splinter union refusing the offer and 60-plus plaintiffs dying during the 20-year struggle.)56

Labor unionism in the JR era has remained in flux and fractional compared to what it once was under JNR. JR Soren, the Tetsuro-Doro fusion in 1987, were supplanted as the dominant JR union by JR Rengo in the early 1990s, formed over disagreements to JR Soren’s threats of a nationwide strike. As Soren leadership were dominated by ex-Doro members, JR Rengo assumed reins as the ideological heir to Tetsuro and its pro-management ideology. Allergy to mass strikes is now the standard for JR unions; in 2018, the JR East branch of JR Soren lost 70% of its membership in three months after its leadership announced its plans to strike. The union apologized for its plans and coaxed its dissidents to return to the membership.57

With labor power diminished to the point mass strikes cannot be conceived, the 2010 settlement serves as the bookend of the era of JNR labor unionism. (Doro-Chiba, who is still fighting JR privatization, would disagree). For thirty-eight years, JNR labor unions and management clashed repeatedly only for both to perish from the modern Japanese socioeconomic fabric. The task to remove both took enormous political willpower — concentrated in a singular character in Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone — fueled by a global economic movement of neoliberalism. Like so many powerful unions around the worldwide, Kokuro and Doro caved under the state’s anti-labor offensive in the 1980s after decades of power-sharing dance with the state.

At risk of contemplating alternative history, Kokuro and Doro may have encountered a different fate if the 1975 strike went differently or responded quicker to the emerging neoliberal movement for privatization. But its slowness to respond to Nakasone’s push for privatization and inflexibility to deal with the oncoming blows resulted in their downfall. JNR management, once its eternal foe, met its end in a similar fashion — the inability to react to a changing political time. Here, Smith provides a potential epithet for both labor and management, who perished in tandem:

If the left wing labor unions and the mainstream JNR Board had anything in common in the early 1980s, it was an inability to see the changing political climate in which the national railways’s dissolution was carried through.58

Read JNR's origin story here

Read Part 1 of JNR's death here

In Part 1, I examined the Japanese National Railways’ (JNR) debt crisis which began in the mid-1960s and ballooned out of control by the mid-1970s, and the emergent administrative reform movement in the late 1970s in partial response. To recap, JNR accrued by 1987 a total long-term liability position of 37.2 trillion Yen (roughly $256 billion in 1987 USD) due to two decades of immense and growing annual deficits. The reason was mainly JNR’s obligations to operate a sprawling passenger rail network far beyond its resources and to expand even further — despite limited support from the national government and its politicians who frequently abused JNR as a political bargaining chip with constituents and businesses.1

I also identified key men within the new “administrative reform movement” which quickly rallied around the dissolution of JNR and the privatization and sectionalization of its network. Pro-business, pro-privatization and anti-labor union figures such as Toshio Doko, Hiroshi Kato and the San Nin Gumi JNR middle managers were identified as major players in the push for JNR privatization in Part 1. But none of them were politicians who wielded the heft and influence to dissolve and privatize JNR, one of the largest bureaucracies in Japan at the time. Such Herculean tasks would be reserved for the new Prime Minister of Japan who took office in November 1982: Yasuhiro Nakasone.

Despite personal allergies to individualistic views of history, it would be disingenuous to underplay Nakasone’s critical role as the singular political dynamo in this saga. Nakasone’s predecessor, Zenko Suzuki, gave life to the JNR privatization movement, but it was Nakasone who fused the esoteric and highly bureaucratic leaders of the administrative reform movement with his political guile within his own Liberal Democratic Party (LDF). Nakasone’s personal drive was both personal and ideological, fueled by his longstanding anti-labor enmity, desire to import the electoral successes of his fellow world leaders Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to Japan, and hunger to notch a major victory for his political legacy. In the course of his pursuit, Nakasone would reshape Japanese railways, its workers and their labor unions, the bureaucrats in and around the industry and the larger Japanese society in his image.

Author’s Note

This is the third installment of a multi-part examination of JNR’s history, and aforementioned, a critical timeline and history in understanding both the fall of JNR and birth of JR. Popular in discussions of global railways, a detailed and granular history of both JNR and JR is much needed, especially in the English language.

To accomplish this work, I rely heavily on two English-language papers found online: University of Stirling academic Ian Smith’s 1996 study “The Privatisation of the JNR in Historical Perspective: An Evaluation of Government Policy on the Operation of National Railways in Japan” and Ohio State University academic Eunbong Choi’s 1991 study “The Break-up and Privatization Policy of the Japan National Railways, 1980-87: A Case Study of Japanese Public Policy-Making Structure and Process.”

In the year-plus of research, reading and writing this project, I can sense there is much literature in Japanese on this topic that is not easily available to an English speaker in the United States. As such, I welcome all feedback, including corrections. Thanks to the excellent written works of Smith and Choi, I hope this will help serve a great deal of utility in furthering and elevating discourse on successful railways around the world.

The Fox and the Elephant

Yasuhiro Nakasone’s political ascent began as a youthful rebel fighting for his war-defeated country. As a freshman Diet lawmaker, Nakasone in 1951 wrote a 28-page letter to General Douglas MacArthur — the Supreme Commander of Japan then occupied with the Korean War — lambasting his occupation in Japan.2 MacArthur reportedly threw the letter in the wastebin in anger, cementing Nakasone’s bona fides as a right-wing politician in postwar Japan. 

Ingrained in the famous 1955 System, LDP’s electoral domination and one-party rule from 1955 to present day, Nakasone climbed the party ranks and experienced many different leadership posts. Most importantly, from 1967 until 1968, Nakasone served as Minister of Transport, giving him critical exposure to the administration of JNR and personal insights of JNR 15 years later.3 In 1980, Nakasone lost the leadership race to Suzuki. Seeing Nakasone as a threat, Suzuki “rewarded” Nakasone with the Cabinet post of Director General of the Administrative Management Agency (AMA), an obscure and unwieldy bureau aimed at improving government efficiency. 4 Nakasone latched his agency to the mission of Suzuki’s administrative reform promises and used his powers to create the Second Ad Hoc Administrative Reform Commission (Second Rincho) and appointment of Toshio Doko as its chairman.5 As outlined in Part 1, Doko’s Second Rincho was the genesis of privatizing and dividing JNR.

Nakasone used the AMA to continue building his political brand and coalition inside the Dietary LDP.6 Under the 1955 System, factions inside the LDP often served as the de facto opposition in the Diet. Nakasone was in a minority faction of the LDP, leaving him vulnerable to attacks from the majority faction led by former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka (a key player in Part 1). Nakasone also suffered a reputation as a “weathercock” (AKA weathervane) who switched sides frequently for personal gain, hindering his Party popularity. When confronted if the label bothered him (his wife very much was), Nakasone responded: “What is most important in Japan now is the weathercock. A weathercock's legs are fixed, but its body is very flexible. Thus it can tell the direction of the wind…Japan needs the attributes of a weathercock if it is to survive despite a vulnerable security system and international economic encirclement…Those who become weathercocks are truly courageous people.”7

Nakasone hoped through the AMA he can build a reputation as a disciplined reformist — no longer an opportunistic weathercock — and build the “thick pipeline” with Japan’s big business leaders for his future run at Prime Minister.8 Nakasone, eager to score political wins, increasingly relied on the octogenarian businessman Toshio Doko and his Second Rincho to deliver plans to reorganize languishing public corporations, including JNR. Nakasone sought to tie his reputation to the Second Rincho’s growing “conviction that a wide ranging administrative reform of central and local government organizations was possible without the need to raise taxation”.9

By the summer of 1982, Suzuki’s cabinet was faltering by internal LDP feuds catalyzed by factions driven by two former Prime Ministers Kakuei Tanaka and Takeo Fukuda. Suzuki resigned in hopes of healing the LDP, and Nakasone — with the backing of the majority Tanaka faction despite being a minority member — ascended to Prime Minister in November 1982. Nakasone’s new intra-party coalition would prove shaky. Tanaka quipped the new Prime Minister tied to his majority faction “is like a fox riding on the back of an elephant. The elephant goes where it wants to go, and if the fox does not like it, let it get off.”10

Nakasone relied on his personal charisma and bombast to govern and promissed he will be “settling the accounts of post-war politics” — by dismantling the restraints placed on Japan by the United States after WWII — both in foreign and domestic affairs.11 Despite his famous personal friendship with then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan, describing himself as a baseball catcher to Reagan the pitcher, Nakasone guided his foreign policies using the compass of his political origins: personal enmity toward MacArthur and the post-war Japan he instituted.12 Among MacArthur’s creations were three public corporation commonly grouped as San Kocha: the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Japan Salt and Tobacco Corporation and Japanese National Railways. The first two would ultimately be privatized in 1985 without much of a fight and its internal structures intact. JNR, however, would not undergo such a painless transition under Nakasone.

1981-1982: The Media Turns on JNR

In the winter of 1981 and spring of 1982, JNR privatization was still nascent idea incubating deep within the committee meetings of the Second Rincho and LDP’s own Mitsuzaka Subcommittee. But media interest began to snowball around the new idea, and they created their own velocity by openly and positively discussing privatization. Long a supporter of JNR labor unions, the media turned on the unions to air anti-labor grievances, with mass newspapers leading the charge on investigating the sudden issue of the “collapse of JNR work discipline”. 13

When a train crashed in Nagoya in March 1982 due to a drunken engineer driving a diesel locomotive into a passenger train and injuring 10, the newspapers surprised JNR insiders with its ferocious criticism, a deviation from relative sympathetic positions of the past despite worse accidents.14 The pressure was unrelenting and hyperbolic; magazines began labeling JNR and its unions was enemies to the nation, as evidenced by a April 1982 magazine piece titled “JNR Labor-Management Relationship: A Traitor Theory to the Country”. 15

Leading the media offensive were Chairman Doko and his protege Hiroshi Kato, the chairman of the influential Fourth Subcommittee within the Second Rincho. Doko and Kato branded themselves as “Mr. Administrative Reform” and “Professor Mass Communications”, respectively, to instill public, affable faces of privatization to the Japanese public.16 Doko — who in 1981 penned an opinion piece titled “If We Continue in this Manner, Japan Will be Bankrupt” — appeared in articles or on TV show programs 50 times in 1981 and 1982 to speak on his administrative reform movement.17 The national public television channel NHK broadcasted in July 1982 a documentary program on Doko, portraying the 85-year old as a dignified, principled businessman who disdained all luxuries and craved the simple life.18 

If Doko was the modern Japanese Cincinnatus, Kato was the chipper, energetic wonk eager to talk policy. Kato himself was interviewed in 60 articles and TV programs in 1981 and 1982, speaking as the common sense professor who could plainly explain complex topics.19 Kato was far more explicit in the calling for privatization of San Kocha and relied heavily on national right-wing newspapers, such as the Yomiuri Shinbun and the Sankei Shinbun, to speak his platform; Kato specifically lauded the Sankei Shinbun as “the vanguard of the public campaign for reform”.20 The JNR scoops delivered by Kato to the Yomiuri or Sankei (or the San Nin Gumi JNR managers to the Yomiuri) catalyzed an arms race among newspapers — including more left-wing newspapers like the Asahi Shinbun — to run bigger and more extensive exposes on JNR. 

The Sankei Shinbun kept the pace of the news arms race. From February to November 1982, Sankei published investigations on militant and undisciplined JNR union workers identified as the main reason for JNR’s terminal decline.21 The Sankei popularized the slogan “Yami Kara Poka” as the rallying banner of anti-labor sentiment against JNR unions, highlighting workers who allegedly got overtime pay without working overtime (Yami), paid for non-existent service operations (Kara), and taking holidays without due notice (Poka).22 The “Yami Kara Poka” slogan was repeatedly cited as evidence for JNR’s obsequence to the abusive and radically left-wing labor unions. (Admittedly one of its larger JNR unions were under the umbrella of the General Council of Trade Unions of Japan which endorsed Marxist ideology openly)23 JNR workers by large felt large newspapers were highly and unduly critical and biased against JNR and their productivity, and the criticisms dampened employee morale.24

The Sankei soon began advocating for JNR privatization and division and the breaking of its labor unions. Public opinion came around to Sankei’s positions; in an April 1982 Yomiuri Shinbun poll, 52% of respondents thought JNR workers were not enthusiastic about their work and 50% blamed on over staffing. Strikingly, 42% of respondents wanted to privatize and split JNR compared to 16% who wanted to keep JNR uniform and public.25 That large support for JNR privatization would stick throughout 1986. 

Choi emphasizes mass media’s role played a key part of driving Nakasone’s agenda toward JNR privatization and division and stresses that mass media “had not only benign and indirect influence but also strong and surprising power over society and politics.”26 Choi quotes a leading member of the Second Rincho on the committee recruiting newspapers and TV networks (bold for emphasis):27

We on the Council realized that the first step toward reform was to create popular awareness of the need for reform…Japan was sick even though we did not feel any pain yet. Without such an understanding, administrative reform was impossible.

The reform was performed like a triple time in music, with three principal actors: the government as a promoter, the PCAR (Second Rincho) as a responsible conductor, and people as cheering squads. In addition, the mass media played a significant role in creating a reform mood so as to lead people to cheer up. In this sense, the government and Council owed much to the mass media.

1982-1983: Nakasone Takes Power

1982 moved like tropical rain: slow drips at the start turning into a downpour. Coupled with the media push, a continuous stream of administrative reports backing privatization created momentum: in April, the Fourth Subcommittee supported breaking JNR into regional companies; in June, an intra-party Matsuzaka Committee backed systemic changes, including privatization, as the de factor LDP position; in July, a Second Rincho report officially backed JNR privatization; and in August, Suzuki and Nakasone launched the JNR Reform Commission to officially begin the process. In September, Suzuki announced plans to privatize and break up JNR within five years, his last involvement with JNR privatization as Prime Minister.

After a hiatus following Nakasone’s ascension to Prime Minister in November 1982, the JNR Reform Law was passed by the Diet in May 1983 to begin the Commission and the five-year road to privatization. The JNR Reform Commission would meet from June 1983 for two years; three of its five members served on the Second Rincho including Hiroshi Kato, “Mr. Professional Communications”, himself. JNR President Fumio Takagi repeatedly voiced his criticism of the Doko and Kato-led Rincho committees. Nakasone, who knew Takagi well, forced Takagi out of his position after eight years of service and replaced him with a supporter, Iwao Nisugi, on the presumption Nisugi backed privatization.28 That would prove to be a mistake by 1985.

The JNR Reform Commission began meeting in the summer of 1983, but according to Smith, “the reform war has already been won”.29 The opposition party, the Socialists, and other leftist minority parties in the Diet aligned themselves with JNR’s two most left-leaning labor unions, Kokuro (The National Railways Labor Union) and Doro (National Railway Locomotive Power Union), and voiced their fundamental opposition to JNR privatization and dissolution. However, they were electorally outmatched by LDP. Despite many LDP Diet members’ private concerns on how JNR privatization may impact business dealings made with close LDP business donors, they stayed quiet behind party lines and on Nakasone’s promise JNR privatization and division would help deliver an even bigger victory at the next General Election.

Here we see Nakasone’s personal will enter front stage. Nakasone saw two major objectives ahead: first, to completely destroy the left-wing JNR trade unions and erase them from Japanese political life forever, and second, to emulate Reagan and Thatcher’s electoral successes in the US and UK, respectively, by bringing to Japan big neoliberal change. Nakasone argued that if Japan ignored the major policy changes happening in other developed countries, Japan could fall behind in international prestige and thus needed bold action.30 Through the JNR Reform Commission, Nakasone ensured his own party’s support for his grand legacy project would go unopposed. The LDP rank-and-file — home to so much internal rancor which forced the predecessor Suzuki to resign — was so compliant through the process that one newspaper noted “in such an important matter it would have been natural to have active debate within the LDP as well, but most members did not say a word.”31 

1984: The Walls Close In

In 1984, JNR reported 3.88 trillion Yen in revenue. Nearly 81 percent of its total revenues came from passenger revenues – and a third of passenger revenues came solely from the Tokaido and Sanyo Shinkansens which connected Tokyo to Fukuoka via Osaka. But it reported expenses of 5.2 trillion Yen, leaving JNR with the total deficit of 1.65 trillion Yen. It was the 19th consecutive year JNR reported deficits; its cumulative deficit was 12.2 trillion Yen, and its total long-term debt came to a whopping 21.8 trillion Yen.32 (In addition to ‘exceptional’ debts of more than 10 trillion Yen)33 Of the 245 passenger trunk and local lines JNR operated, only the Tokaido-Sanyo Shinkansen and seven lines between Tokyo and Osaka made profits.

In 1984, as the Reform Commission worked, initial promises made with privatization were being altered as reality set in. In an interim report to Nakasone in August 1984, the Commission wrote, for the first time, that privatization would not provide a complete solution to JNR’s long-term debts.34 This ran contrary to previous statements that JNR’s indebtedness was precisely the reason for the need for privatization. Instead, the Commission promised to deliver methods to “handle a certain amount of JNR’s liabilities by depending on taxation of the people.”35

In August, the minority Socialist Party announced its own JNR reform plans. The Socialist plan listed opposition to JNR privatization or division; no employee layoffs; 30% of capital costs to be funded from the private sector; and JNR’s long-term debts and unprofitable areas of operations would be taken over by the state. However, the Socialists did not officially adopt it into the party’s platform until 1986, due to heavy resistance from Kokuro opposing any plans that entertained privatization, for or against.36 As the party representing Japanese labor, the Socialists could not move forward without Kokuro’s buy-in, but the Socialists ultimately adopted the plan without Kokuro support in preparation for the 1986 General Election.

With the LDP and Socialists taking sides on the JNR issue, labor unions and bureaucratic ministries also lined up their support. The first move came from the management-friendly JNR union Tetsuro (Japan Railway Workers Union), which in June announced its support for the Reform Commission. In October, the Ministry of Transport – long the neglected half-brother of JNR – also expressed support for JNR’s privatization, delivering a blow for JNR leadership who by then were desperate for allies inside government. The Ministry came to the decision on three reasons: realizing Nakasone will not be budged; its own regulatory powers will not be impacted by privatization and division; and to get even with JNR executives, who historically looked down at the Ministry as second fiddle in the transportation pecking order in the nation.37

After years of passivity toward the development of the Second Rincho and the Reform Commission, the JNR Board and leadership finally came to their senses in the summer of 1984 to fight for its self-preservation. A Nakasone appointment, JNR President Nisugi supported privatization but against division of JNR into sectional companies. As JNR President, Nisugi sought to keep JNR whole and began preparing for its own Reform Plan to be published at the end of the year. Nisugi’s sudden haste coincided with a change-of-heart in the JNR Board; its most pro-reform member, Tomoyuki Ota, turned against the JNR Reform Commission as the Commission alienated the Board in its discussions in reorganizing JNR. To stop Nakasone, Ota, Nisugi and other pro-status quo JNR executives hoped to enlist former Prime Minister and LDP kingmaker Kakuei Tanaka to their side with the new Reform Plan.38

Nisugi presented his yet-to-be-published plan to the JNR Reform Commission in December 1984. (The plan would publish the next month) The Commission received the report coldly and expectedly disapproved it. Word soon got out to pro-privatization newspapers and skewered it as “too little, too late.” The plan drew no support from the Ministry of Transport and all JNR labor unions.39 Kokuro and the other left-wing union Doro opposed JNR’s reform plan because of the plan’s pro-privatization stance; Tetsuro, on the other hand, opposed because of its anti-division stance. The plan fell flat on its face. But the fight for survival had just begun.

1985: The Final Struggle. Nakasone Cleans House

On January 10, 1985, Nisugi paid a visit to Kakuei Tanaka. Despite Nakasone’s tenure in the Prime Minister for nearly three years, Tanaka still commanded the largest LDP faction. Tanaka had long held a keen interest in JNR; it was Tanaka who pressured the JNR to begin construction on the Joetsu Shinkansen between Tokyo and his beloved hometown, Niigata. (The Joetsu Shinkansen opened in 1982 to immediate and huge deficits, ballooning JNR’s long-term debts at a faster annual rate between 1982-1987 than any previous five-year stretch). Nisugi made the calculated risk that if anyone can stop Nakasone, it would be Tanaka.

Nisugi shared the JNR Reform Plan with Tanaka and asked for his support of the LDP machine to preserve JNR in whatever way possible.40 But whatever leverage Tanaka may have had to stop Nakasone would forever remain a mystery, as Tanaka suffered a massive stroke the very next month in February. Tanaka’s illness was covered with global intrigue, with The New York Times warning it may “unsettle Japanese politics.”41 Following the stroke, Tanaka’s health deteriorated, becoming a shadow of his pre-stroke self. He retired from politics in 1989 and died in 1993.

With Tanaka fortuitously out of sight, Nakasone soon took his revenge on the insubordinate JNR leadership. In February, Nakasone warned the JNR leadership to “take responsibility” for the agency’s fiscal crisis.42 The “final straw” came a few months later when the Prime Minister learned Ota contacted the Asahi Shinbun to publish materials supportive of the anti-privatization JNR Board. Nakasone sacked Nisugi and Ota and their supporters in June 1985 and replaced them with pro-privatization bureaucrats. To back Nakasone’s Pyrrhic victory, twenty JNR managers – included the infamous San Nin Gumi three – published a statement in June titled “We Feel This Way Towards JNR Reform'' lambasting JNR’s own Reform Plan and advocating for full privatization and division. The new JNR leadership rewarded the San Nin Gumi with promotions to senior posts the following month. 43

In July, the JNR Reform Commission completed its final report on privatization and division. Now it was time for the Diet to enact policies recommended in the report. The deadline to dissolve JNR was set to April 1, 1987.

Earlier in the year, the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) and the Japan Tobacco and Salt Public Corporation (JTSPC) – were officially privatized from state monopolies to publicly traded stock companies. A mere five years ago, in 1980, the three San Kocha companies were in equal standing for reform in the eyes of administrative reformers of Doko and Kato. Within five years, JNR became the predominant focus of the movement as the NTT and JTSPC’s own privatization processes occurred with little resistance or fanfare. As NTT and JTSPC reached the end of their privatization journey, JNR was still hurtling toward the finish line. A few more dominos needed to fall before JNR’s demise.

1986: Labor Surrenders. JNR Sentenced to Death

Between 1975 and 1986, JNR shed nearly 150,000 workers from its payroll, shrinking from 432,200 workers nationwide to 277,020 eleven years later.44 The shrinkage had devastating effects on its once impregnable labor unions. Whatever intra-JNR labor solidarity remained by 1986 had been stripped in the ongoing labor reductions, and labor unions sought to find high ground for themselves in the incoming post-privatization future, one that forecasted 70,000 more job reductions within the next year.45

In January 1986, the historically militant and left-wing labor union Doro declared its support for JNR privatization and division, joining the management-friendly labor union Tetsuro. Doro’s bending of the knee was shocking; the union steadfastly resisted privatization along with Kokuro for years and harbored more far-left radicals in its ranks than Kokuro. But Smith notes Doro union’s leader, Akira Matsuzaki, privately signaled JNR management as far back as 1981 he was willing to compromise to prevent the destruction of his union and avoid mass layoffs.46 Five years later, Matsuzaki’s Doro abandoned all further strike action and agreed to cooperate with management on voluntary retirements and job transfers prior to April 1, 1987. JNR and Doro further agreed to drop the latter’s legal claims of JNR unfair labor practices for the former's lawsuit for damages in previous illegal strikes.47

Kokuro, the largest JNR labor union, now was the last holdout. Despite its executive leadership open to working with JNR management, its union membership staunchly opposed any and all proposals to give in. In March, the membership voted against supporting the Socialist Party’s JNR reform plan. In October, the leadership pleaded to let them negotiate with JNR but was overwhelmingly rejected in a vote.48 The leadership resigned following the failed referendum, and a new more hardline leadership declared its intent to continue fighting. For their recalcitrance, Kokuro members would soon pay the heaviest toll among all JNR unions in the job rationalizations in the lead-up to privatization.

Following the JNR Reform Commission’s final report in July 1985, the Japanese Diet set to legislate proposals for JNR privatization and division throughout 1986. In February and March, the Nakasone Cabinet drew up eight bills dissolving JNR and privatizing the sectional companies in its replacement by April 1, 1987. The bills were temporarily suspended for the General Election in July; Nakasone’s LDP won 300 out of 512 seats, the most seats ever won in Party history before and since. With a 43-seat majority, the LDP swiftly brought the eight bills back to the Diet in September. After former review of the bills, the eight JNR Reform Laws were passed on November 28. 

With eight strokes of the pen, the Japanese National Railways – one of the world’s great railway agencies – would operate for four more months and then cease to exist when midnight struck on April 1, 1987. 

“Japan was sick even though we did not feel pain yet”

The death of the Japanese National Railways did not go quietly into the night. In fact, the opposite occurred, with public interest pouring out for the revolutionary change promising to change the fabric of Japanese daily life. In the days heading to April 1, 1987, JR successors – six passenger rail companies in total – each ran their own television commercial campaign to remind riders the old JNR was on its way out. JR East, the biggest of the new companies encompassing Tokyo, ran daily countdown commercials featuring the popular idol Kumiko Goto, ending with a calendar countdown to April 1.

As JR counted down to its birth, the 38-year-old JNR was on its deathbed. The death of JNR came to represent a symbolic release from a societal, even spiritual, illness Japan contracted and could not shake out. As one JNR Reform Commission member said: “Japan was sick even though we did not feel pain yet.”49 JNR became the symbol of the Oyakata Hi No Maru problem – that the government will always foot the bill for public agencies – and of Japan’s public sector malaise. Despair turned to anger, as evidenced by the media turn of 1981; JNR managers were seen as part of a “traitor” class who needed to “take responsibility” and that “if we continue like this, Japan will be bankrupt” from their irresponsibility.50 51

Who got them sick? For Nakasone, the Americans who occupied their country after the War in 1945. The agency, from its birth, was corrupted by American hands – specifically, that of Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of Allied Powers. The pro-privatization forces continuously spoke in the language of health and corruption to describe JNR’s original sin; they pinned JNR’s on the supposedly “alien” nature of its public corporation structure “imposed” by foreign forces in 1947.52 Privatization was Japan’s “cure.”53 And what better nurse than Nakasone, the man who earned his stripes by spiting MacArthur in 1951?

The death of JNR was neither natural nor inevitable: it was simply political. As seen in Part 1 and this post, the politicization of the JNR is what doomed the national service and catalyzed the debt crisis. Its executioner was a guileful politician — the weathercock, the fox — who delivered a promise made during his ascension. Through JNR’s 38-year existence, missed opportunities litter its timeline — i.e. the formation of the Railway Construction Council in 1951, the first year in the red in 1964, the labor strike of 1975 — where a different kind of political vision and willpower may have resolved JNR’s crises to whatever degree and kept the agency alive and whole. But instead, it was Nakasone and his neoliberals who realized their vision first. So JNR is dead, and a new era began.

The now-forever “halfway there” high-speed rail project. Featuring Conservative Party MP and Rail Minister Huw Merriman (left). Source: HS2

Usually I let topics I write about marinate for a few weeks, but I feel compelled to rush this piece out following the dramatic and, frankly, unbelievable way the High Speed 2 (HS2) rail project in England was killed this week.

To recap: HS2 is the ambitious High Speed Rail project currently under construction designed to link London in the south of England to Manchester in the north via Birmingham. It has been under heavy scrutiny due to its ballooning costs, approaching £100 billion. This week, at the Conservative Party Conference, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced Phase 2 of HS2 — the segment from Birmingham to Manchester — would be cancelled, leaving only the London-Birmingham section for targeted completion.

HS2 was one of the great rail projects under construction in the world, and arguably the most ambitious in the Anglosphere world. It was the transformative infrastructure project in the United Kingdom of the early 21st century, and one ready to bring the island nation on par with its European peers. But Sunak decided to break its spine before gestation was complete, ostensibly under the old Tory banner of fiscal prudence but with the desperation to gather voter goodwill before the upcoming General Election.

I am still racking my head around the long-speculated and yet quick demise of HS2; perhaps I refused to believe the United Kingdom would do something so foolish so suddenly. And I would be lying if I said if this news did not make me reflexively glean over to the high-speed rail project under construction in my home state of California, and wonder if a similar fate awaits it. (I will get into it later) For now, the ruling Democrats in Sacramento have been largely supportive of the still-nascent California High Speed Rail (CAHSR) project. But of course, the Conservatives believed in HS2 — until they didn’t.

One may blame on British NIMBYism, or post-Brexit state dysfunction, but everything Sunak and his Conservatives spoke of HS2 since the Conference have betrayed a total mistrust of any movement to transform Britain’s urban environments. Throughout the Conference, top ministers fully embraced anti-transit, anti-urbanist messages full of dogwhistles, such as the Transport Secretary declaring a war against “15-minute cities” and the Home Secretary pledging British cities will not “be going the way of San Francisco and Seattle.”1 2 Sunak himself started the dogpile before the Conference, calling local decisions to lower speed limits in town centers “a relentless attack on motorists.”3

Information trickling out after the Conference (especially the “Network North” plan, a plan so comically improvised it may well be a Weekend at Bernie’s dress-up of HS2’s still-warm body) has proven Sunak’s HS2 announcement was somehow both premeditated and rushed. The ubiquity of local mayors and Conservative members caught blindsided by the news demonstrates this announcement was never a move seeking consensus but a ploy to score ideological pot shots.

HS2 did have a very major cost issue, and spiraling costs for infrastructure projects — whether it be highways, power grids or high-speed — are a major concern across the Anglosphere. Ballooning cost issues are indeed corrosive to public confidence in future projects and current belief the government can better there a citizen’s physical environments. However, cost issues are mere by-products of a greater issue: the lack of political will. As I have stated in a previous post observing the success of high-speed rail in France and Spain, political will on the national scale expressed through actions in regulations and standardizations and investments in the project, the experts and the processes are the main key power to transform mass transit. Evidence around the world back strong political will is what rids the cost creep.

If Sunak and the Conservatives were ever serious about solving HS2’s cost issues, they would have invested more into HS2: not only in dedicated, stabilizing funding, but also in governmental oversight, in-house expert personnel and a strong commitment to a long-term program to go beyond HS2. But the Conservative Party power brokers of the past 13 years never showed strong interest in such expression of will. Years of half-hearted actions and constant intervention on HS2 is what precipitated the budget ballooning to £100 billion. Peer countries who have not experienced this spiral with their high-speed rail avoid it because they have not forgotten how to govern.

An Autopsy and Desecration

One can argue HS2 was dead long before Phase 2 was cancelled. The original plan called for a Y-shaped HS2 network forking at Birmingham, one west toward Manchester, the other east toward Leeds. In 2021, the eastern leg between Birmingham and Leeds was cancelled by then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson citing rapidly rising cost estimates. The eastern leg of HS2 up to Leeds would have relieved major congestion off two of three main north-south rail spines of Great Britain. The benefits of a Leeds HS2 would have reshaped rail service connecting London and Birmingham in the south to Newcastle further north of England, and Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland. Former HS2 Chief Engineer Andrew MacNaughton called the Birmingham-Leeds corridor the “most important part” of the project.4 British rail expert Gareth Dennis wrote to Parliament in 2022 that this “is by far its most critical and transformative section” and without it the HS2 project has been left to “disintegrating its primary purpose”.5

MacNaughton and Dennis’s case is simple: the name of HS2’s game always was capacity release. Unlike the United States, the United Kingdom have a robust intercity rail system with advanced signaling and modernized infrastructure. However, most main lines has been running at full capacity for what the tracks can handle for many years. The main lines have little to no more room to add extra service. HS2 was packaged to bring as much capacity release on the rail network running in the north of England and the Midlands in one move. With HS2 infrastructure providing a separate route for express and long-distance intercity trips (say, Manchester to London in 88 minutes from the current 140), local trains will have more space to run its regional and local services more frequently and reliably.

A map showing the parallel routes HS2 would have provided to three of England’s main north-south rail main lines and relieved major pressure. Source: HS2

As Dennis argues, HS2’s Achilles heel was every rail modernization work worth its salt in England was placed into the shiny HS2 basket. In countries like France or Spain or China, strategic rail planning comes as a dedicated program with many baskets; in the French or Spanish way, HS2 would have been broken up into fragment projects (“London-Birmingham high speed line”, “Euston Station modernization”, etc.) and delivered more piecemeal. But due to United Kingdom’s record of skip-starting massive projects, with no prognostication for when the next big national rail project will come, the urgency to salvage as much off the long to-do list onto HS2 was understandable.6

For those who wonder why name-your-country can build so much high speed rail but not the United Kingdom or United States, my short answer is this: the former has an established system tasked with building big things at all times and the latter do not. The former has dedicated, stable government support; a stable of in-house experts with continuous experience in delivering big public projects; a well-oiled supply chain comprised of firms which are assured of future big project works in the pipeline; and regulations designed to standardize designs, reduce redundancies and smoothen the procurement process. Much of these are recommendations from the Transit Costs Project, a NYU-led study into high infrastructural costs in the United States.7 The work never really stops in France, Spain, Turkey, Italy, Sweden, China, or South Korea. But in the United Kingdom and United States, the work happens maybe once a generation, if lucky.

The United Kingdom likely never had the state capacity to be a responsible steward for HS2, but decisions taken by HS2 Ltd. and the government only exacerbated the cost creep. For Phase 1 alone, five tunnels were constructed using double-bore machines to excavate deep underground. Tunnels almost always cost more than a surface-level alternative due to the excavation, logistics and preparation required to dig. One of the tunnels, the 10-mile Chiltern tunnel, runs through the lightly hilly and wealthy commuter towns north of London. To appease what has been a heartland for Conservative voters, the government “pressured HS2 to tunnel as much as possible through the Chiltern Hills, causing a rise in costs so sharp that delivering the rest of the line fully may no longer be feasible” per Bloomberg.8 So much of the London-Birmingham leg has been tunneled underground that when completed, passengers will only see daylight for seven minutes on the 45-minute journey, per The Times.9

Tunnels were not the only HS2 money pit. Phase 1 alone plans for two brand-new HS2 stations of magnificent size, such as Old Oak Common in London and Curzon Street Station in Birmingham. Old Oak Common in west London is grandiosely planned with 14 train platforms and estimated by one independent analyst to cost £7.1 billion. 10 Euston Station was the planned terminus in central London and has been tabbed for a major overhaul to accommodate for HS2 with as many as 16 total train platforms. Delays surrounding whether Euston would indeed become the London terminus or not would add another £2.2 billion to the HS2 budget, warned the National Audit Office in March.11 The excessively large, bespoke designs of both Old Oak Common and Euston stations can occur when there is little to no government guidance in restricting size, materials, and standardized design regulations. Indeed, this exact same lack of public stewardship is cited as a major factor in cost overruns in the United States, according to the Transit Costs Project.12

Some journalists and politicians seem spellbound to believe Sunak’s promise of £36 billion saved through HS2 is a settled number, but that cannot be further from the truth. HS2 is tied up in myriad of contracts which face dramatic, if not total, recalls due to Sunak’s announcement with real repercussions. In 2021, HS2 signed a £2 billion contract to order 54 trains from manufacturers Hitachi and Alstom which can travel up to 225 miles per hour.13 Built entirely within the United Kingdom, the trains were scheduled to start arriving at 2027. This contract was the saving grace for an ailing British rail-building industry which urged more government investments in addition to HS2 work to avoid an “an imminent existential risk” on the domestic supply chain, per an industry report in June.14 However, with Sunak’s Phase 2 cancellation, the HS2 order will likely be reexamined and reduced, as 54 high speed trains for a London-Birmingham shuttle service may be far too redundant.

There is reason to believe HS2 was also not informed of Sunak’s decision until the last minute. Just last week, HS2 awarded ground investigation contracts worth up to £300 million to nine different contractors on the now-shuttered Phase 2 route between Birmingham and Crewe15. It is likely there are many other awarded contracts like this, totaling billions of Pounds, which will never see the light of day because HS2 Phase 2 no longer is planned.16 The British government should have known these risks; a 2020 government review known as the Oakervee Review anticipated direct costs of cancelling the HS2 was between £2.5 billion to £3.6 billion, with additional “serious consequences for the supply chain, the fragile UK constructon industry and confdence in UK infrastructure planning” as indirect costs.17

The worst may have yet to come. Following Sunak’s announcement, the Department for Transport has lifted the safeguarding of publicly acquired lands along the proposed Phase 2 route to be used for high speed rail purposes. The land bought for HS2 is now up for purchase. The sale — likely at a fraction of price the government purchased — means that prospects for a future revivification of HS2 would be impossible. Rail experts, including Dennis, have called this move as “madness” driven by spite and “deliberate vandalism” to ensure no future government can build any infrastructure there.18 Moves like this to hamstring current HS2 construction and future growth have alarmed industry groups. “The principal cause of any real-term cost increases lies in the chopping and changing of the project’s scope, with today’s news being the fourth major change by government in just three years,” wrote a spokesperson for the High Speed Rail group, which represents firms working on HS2.19

Sunak and his Cabinet promised the cumulative £36 billion saved from the Phase 2 cancellation would be redirected into hundreds of different transport work — road, rail, bus, and many more, including a £8 billion commitment to repave potholes in England. The day after Sunak cancelled Phase 2, his Government published the 40-page “Network North” plan to detail the work.20 The promises have been underwhelming, with some major gaffes, such as a promise to extend Manchester’s Metrolink tram system to Manchester Airport — which already opened back in 2014.21

The clumsiness, the confusion, and the cruelty have been breath-taking to observe 5,300 miles away from London, here in California. But a spectre is haunting America just as much as Britain: cost overruns run amok with state capacity asleep at the wheel.

HS2 & CAHSR

The signs are ominous, and the comparisons are ripe. Like HS2, CAHSR recently entered the dreadful 100 billion territory; CAHSR’s 50 percent probability (P50) level of total costs for the San Francisco-Los Angeles Phase 1 was reported at $106 billion in its 2023 Project Update Report.22 (The 65 percent probability is at $127 billion) Total costs have risen 56% between the 2012 Business Plan and the 2023 Project Update Report.23

Like HS2 Phase 1, the opening day for its initial leg for CAHSR between Merced and Bakersfield has been pushed back to between 2030 and 2033. The full San Francisco-Los Angeles Phase 1 leg is without an opening timeline as the project is too underfunded to guarantee such a timeline.

Citing a “difficult global environment for large projects”, CAHSR’s Merced-Bakersfield leg is projected to likely cost between $32 billion and $35 billion, up from a previous $26 billion estimate.24 CAHSR lists inflation (responsible for about a $2 billion addition to costs), new scope elements such as stations locations and designs, and external contingencies such as updated right-of-way and professional services as the main reasons for the cost increases.

The CAHSR Peer Review Group, an expert group created by the California state Legislature to conduct independent analysis of the Authority's planning and implementation efforts, echoed similar cost factors in its letter to the Legislature in March. It also mentioned existing litigation in Central Valley, the need for local buy-in, and a diluted delineation of funding responsibilities between state rail authorities and CAHSR as additional factors for the cost increases. It raised major concerns that the project is severely under-funded by the federal and state governments — currently short by $8 billion — and such unstable financing leads to “raising costs and making effective management difficult if not impossible.”25 Writing “with a sense of urgency over the ever-higher stakes”, the Peer Review Group called for a “independent review of the economic and financial justification for the project, including the ability to operate without subsidy…before recommitting to the full Phase I system.”26

Such independent review rings similar to HS2’s Oakervee Review, which was commissioned by then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2019 to revisit whether HS2 was worth continuing. The Oakervee Review concluded “the original rationale for HS2 still holds” and that HS2 should proceed fully.27 However, the review was mired in controversy as the deputy chair of the review, Lord Berkeley, disagreed with the conclusions so strongly that he demanded his name off the report and wrote his own dissenting report.28 Despite the Review’s endorsement of HS2, Johnson cut off HS2’s Birmingham-Leeds limb, leaving the project crippled as Sunak took office. A government-commissioned independent review which comes victorious for the project’s viability does not guarantee its survival.

The only force which can keep CAHSR from following in HS2’s fate are the California legislators and its Governor. Will they demonstrate the political will to bring the proper mechanisms to keep costs manageable and the project moving forward? That is the million-dollar question. The Peer Review Group has presented numerous recommendations to the Legislature in that spirit, such as reviewing all current contracts and processes to tamp down on the costs. It also recommends more funding for CAHSR as “it is critical that any funding approach be fully funded and stable and predictable from year to year”. 29Unstable government support is a key reason why HS2’s costs spiraled out of control. Left unstable with both funding and accountability, CAHSR will too be smothered in its cradle.

Like HS2, CAHSR is playing with a rigged deck of cards. The sheer lack of state capacity and know-how in how to build a high-speed rail in the United States have baked in extra costs where other countries have flushed away decades ago. Even if CAHSR was commissioned some foreign state-run agency with the keys — such as the French SNCF which was infamously rejected because they proposed a straight shot down I-5 skipping Bakersfield and Fresno — it likely would have faced the same institutional inertia, unaligned supply chains, and a dearth of intra-agency cooperation to reduce redundancies and extra costs.30 Through decades of state under-investment, CAHSR is paying for all the externalities and consequences of arrested public development in one bloated price tag. Public transit YouTuber Alan Fisher defends CAHSR’s rising costs as “the cost of education of learning to do this again”. Such tuition costs will only be justified when CAHSR can be allowed to be finished, and the re-education can start all over elsewhere.31

Final Words

Despite my best effort to bridge HS2 and CAHSR’s plights together, the project has too many differences to reductively compare them as equals. I feel it is important to spell them out in rapid succession: HS2’s main purpose was adding tracks to create more capacity to a robust national rail system; CAHSR is building infrastructure to become the spine for a loose confederation of disorganized rail systems statewide. HS2’s London-Manchester leg is only 20 miles longer than CAHSR’s initial Merced-Bakersfield leg and only 40% long as the total San Francisco-Los Angeles leg. CAHSR still has a daunting engineering challenge in placing tracks through the Tehachapi Pass which at 4,031 feet elevation would be the tallest mountain in all of England by near 1,000 feet.

What unites HS2 and CAHSR is its political vision and imagination. It promises a transformative system which would reshape their transportation networks for generations to come. It would be the first of its kind in their respective countries. For CAHSR, especially, its birth could be a major coup in the global fight against climate change (Transportation is the top emitter of greenhouse gases in California, which is the second highest emitting state in the United States, which is the second highest emitting country in the world, behind China). What will likely undermine both projects is a counter-acting political un-vision, where design standardizations, beefing up internal public agencies, and limiting contingencies, among other mentioned recommendations, is as tall to climb as the Tehachapi Pass.

It may be too late for HS2; Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition Labour Party, has declined to reviving Phase 2, demonstrating a shocking lack of political will for a project that remains popular and should be an electoral no-brainer for Labour.3233 For CAHSR, it is not too late to avoid its fate. It is possible to curb costs by realigning working agencies, regulations, labor practices and design standards. The magic fairy dust — as it always has been throughout the world with fantastical high speed networks — is political will to empower such possibilities. But if CAHSR should have bedfellows like Rishi Sunak now or in the near future, then we may as well be polishing its gravestone.

Note the red timers above the platforms…Credit: УНІАН

I have been hunting a white whale for more than a year.

Nearly exactly one year ago, a tweet went viral for noting Kyiv Metro cut back its headways to a train every 2-3 minutes during peak hours and every 6-7 minutes off-peak due to the Russian invasion. Every 6-7 minutes during rush hours would be an unfathomable dream for U.S. and Canadian passenger rail systems. How was this possible, in Kyiv of all places?

Most people’s interactions with this factoid — whether on Twitter or Reddit — was a surface-level dunk contest, weaponizing the brutal fact to knock down a peg on whichever inferior train system operated in North America. I think the scorn is deserved; a base schedule of 10 or 15 minute frequencies is too far inferior a standard for any Metro system. But my desire was push far below the surface. I wanted to know definitively how in the world is Kyiv Metro running such admirable headways during wartime.

I have good news and bad news, dear readers. Bad news first: I do not have a definitive answer. It was not for lack of trying. To scale the language barrier from English to Ukrainian and then to scour through the Ukrainian internet has been pretty challenging. It may be that there are simply less documents or news articles in Ukraine on Kyiv Metro’s outstanding frequencies, or I amateurly missed them as I waded through a wholly unfamiliar terrain. As a former newspaper reporter, I like to think I have good instincts to scope out evidence, and I certainly have not had much luck.

But good news, which you may infer by the fact you are reading this post: there is something enough to warrant a Substack write-up. And perhaps it will be more stimulating for us to walk through this transit riddle together.

I posit what makes Kyiv Metro work so successfully is a blend of interesting infrastructural choices and organizational practices: the former being the line length, station typology, and train control systems, and the latter being a Soviet-era philosophy of maximum train throughput and heavy reliance on experienced, cheap labor. Much of these are not instantly replicable for existing Metros or regional rail systems in the United States and Canada. As the gruesome saying goes, there are different ways to skin a cat, and different ways to make a transit system world-class. This is an exploration on how a transit system can get to the summit with less resources and unfortunate circumstances than its peers.

The Soviet Way

There is a lot I do not know about the Kyiv Metro, and to bridge over these unknown knowns, I will be leaning on its big brother system, the Moscow Metro. Using the far more available literature on Moscow Metro, we are compelled to interchangeably graft on blind spots we have for its brethren system in Kyiv. It is an uncomfortable space to inhabit, well outside my usual editorial judgment zone. But I believe this leap can work due to the identical construction, infrastructural and operational practices displayed by both systems, once brethren Metros of the Soviet Union.

The Kyiv Metro’s formation and construction plans in the late 1940s and 1950s were heavily borrowed from lessons of Moscow Metro’s construction in the 1930s. Following the opening of Moscow Metro, the first Stalinist-era subway, the Soviet Union standardized subsequent Metros — including Kyiv’s — in Moscow’s image, from rolling stock, train control system, train operations, tunneling practices, and most notably, ornate station platforms. Kyiv Metro’s Zoloti Vorota, Universytet, and Khreshchatyk stations are famous for its ornate platform decorations, in the style of Moscow’s palatial stations. To drive home the verisimilitude, Kyiv Metro’s Vokzalna Station looks near-identical to Moscow Metro’s VDNKh Station, both with its simply white domed vault and large bronze medallions on the walls.

Both Kyiv and Moscow sport stations very deep underground. Kyiv’s Arsenalna Station is the second deepest station in the world at 105 meters underground; it takes 5 minutes via escalator from the entrance to platform.1 Both Kyiv and Moscow were tunneled deep underground with the dual purpose of stations serving as bomb shelters from a foreign enemy. Its builders could have never fathomed Arsenalna and other Kyiv Metro stations would be used to shelter residents from Russian bombs.

Deep stations are one of four characteristics outlined in transit researcher Alon Levy’s article “The Soviet Bloc Way of Building Rapid Transit”.2 The second characteristic is Soviets’ penchant for wide station spacing, at least a kilometer from each other, to avoid the clumped up Metro travel in the city center commonly seen in Paris and London. Moscow’s average interstation distance is roughly 1.7 km and Kyiv’s is 1.3 km.3 This means the Metro is filling in the Goldilocks travel zone of far enough that walking is unappetizing and close enough that driving an automobile is wasteful. (A 2016 World Bank report on Kyiv’s transport infrastructure interestingly noted that walking is the primary mode of mobility for Kyiv residents who would rather make the long walk to Metro stations due to poor service of buses and other means of public transport).

The Soviet way makes up for the relatively large spacing with faster trains; Moscow Metro runs on average 48 km/hr and Kyiv Metro at 42 km/hr, according to a 2013 chart comparing all former Soviet Metros. As a barometer, the Paris Metro trains average 20 km/hr and New York City Subway trains average 28 km/hr.4

The other two characteristics in Levy’s Soviet Bloc Way are little to no branching or interlining in its Metro lines and a radial network design called the “Soviet Triangle.”5 Another term coined by Levy, the Soviet Triangle is a network layout of three lines — all running without branching with each other— and meeting in a triangle at the city center. Three transfer points form in a Soviet Triangle, and in Kyiv’s case, two different transfer stations on each line are connected through underground corridors, staircases and escalators. The Soviet Triangle is not exclusive to the Eastern Bloc — Mexico City and Tehran are others with it — but this layout is replicated across several of its metropolises. Prague Metro, for example, has a Soviet Triangle three-line layout similar to that of Kyiv Metro.

For the Soviet Triangle Metro to succeed, frequency is even more critical than its radial or grid-pattern counterparts as there are strictly limited permutations for transfers. Going from one Metro line to another definitively means getting off at one station, every time, without any flexibility. Timed transfers do not work in the Soviet Triangle Metro as the platforms are at great distances from each other. This leaves really one palatable solution for Metros who was born of the Soviet way: run as many trains as possible.

Timetable-less Metro

One may argue Kyiv Metro should not be able to run as many trains as they do. Its rolling stock are composed of modern modifications of the Soviet-era 81/717-714 series built in the 1970s. Earlier this year, Kyiv city government agreed to accept up to 60 81/717 train cars from Warsaw, which also has operated the train cars which was once standard in the Eastern Bloc. Kyiv Metro’s train control system is also Soviet issue: ALS-ARS is a coded track circuit system with fixed blocks — commonly found in Metro systems older than 30-40 years in North America — with automated speed regulations built to prevent runaway Metro trains.

To the possible surprise of some railfans and urbanists in the West, the former Soviet Metros do not employ a timetable for its services. Where in Germany and Switzerland clock-based scheduling (where departure times remain consistent all seven days of the week) are gospel, Russian and Ukrainian Metros have no use for departure times. The latter’s focus, since its opening days of service, has been maximum throughput of trains, as frequent as every 90 seconds during rush hour in Moscow. In fact, the 90 seconds peak headways at Moscow is worse than it was in 1974, when it ran every 80 seconds during rush hour, per the New York Times.6

The Soviet-built Metro philosophy is most evident at the edge of the platform at a Metro station in Kyiv or Moscow. Atop the tunnel where the train departs to the next station, there is a timer counting how many minutes and seconds have elapsed since the last train departed. This is the substitute for a timetable, keeping train operators and dispatchers honest for every second elapsed. Kyiv Metro, like Moscow Metro, use the same system of station timers with big red fonts visible if waiting for the train on the edge of the platform. (You can see the timer reset in the video below)

Every second is accounted for in this philosophy. In the case of Moscow Metro, and at risk of extrapolation to Kyiv’s, their train operators are trained to wait no longer than 30 seconds at every station to reduce delay possibilities. When there are disruptions, dispatchers at operation centers order train operators to further reduce wait times at stations, or to skip stations entirely to ensure no train is out of sync. The cadence of time elapsed between each train in service is paramount — far more than the frustrations of stranded riders whose trains have passed them — as they are working with fine margins due to its intense headways.

Metros globally can operate this intense frequency thanks to its relative short length. For Kyiv Metro, in particular, the above-ground urban environment factors into its awesome frequency. Kyiv’s metropolitan area is hilly in the city center and around the metropolitan area, with the wide Dnipro River cutting the city in two. The natural environment of Kyiv helped restrict the city’s horizontal growth, and its Metro lines reflect the lack of urban sprawl found around the Ukrainian capital. Kyiv’s three Metro lines each measure at between 20 and 23 kilometers, with its longest line, Line 3, at 23.9 kilometers. As comparisons, Kyiv Metro’s longest line is shorter than all but one of London Underground’s lines (Victoria Line), and all but four of New York City Subway lines (J/Z, G, W, 7 lines)

Kyiv Metro’s short line lengths matter for frequency in two ways: first, with their timetable-less scheduling, the short duration of service allows trains to turn and re-enter circulation in the other direction quickly. Second, it allows tighter operations under vigilance. Kyiv Metro uses an archaic train control system and very old rolling stock, thus points of failure are greater than, say, a brand-new driverless line in Japan or France. More theoretically, every kilometer of track — with all its parts and exposure to whichever natural and man-made elements — is encoded with some level of entropy; everything that can go wrong will go wrong ultimately. Usually, the longer the travel distance, the impact of a train delay compounds. However, with a relatively small system, such impacts can be mitigated with the vigilance of its operations staff.

Kyiv Metro’s ability to run incredibly tight frequencies is a testament to an operations philosophy founded under the Soviet Union and upheld thirty years after its collapse. However, in face of aging infrastructure and limited public funds to rebuild and renew in post-Soviet Ukraine, Kyiv Metro’s resilience may come from another resource rather cheaply considered in the West.

Strength in Numbers

In my white whale hunt, the first thing which caught my eye was the sheer size of the workforces devoted to railways in Ukraine. Prior to the Russian invasion in March 2022, Kyiv Metro reported 8,000 employees; in the days after the attack, during which civilians used its stations as shelters, 3,000 reported to work.7 That is a massive workforce for a single Metro system with 52 stations. For comparisons, BART in the San Francisco Bay Area with 50 stations employ about 5,000 workers. MBTA in the Boston area — accounting for trains, buses and other modes — reported 6,700 employees in 2020.8 Madrid Metro in the Spanish capital with more than 300 stations reported more than 7,000 employees in 2019.9

The over-employment of railway workers extends to the national scale. Ukrainian Railways, the country’s national rail network, reportedly employs a whopping 230,000 people overseeing 19,787 kilometres of rail. Ukraine Railways, or Ukrzaliznytsia, is so encompassing in civil society it is like “a country within a country” with its own glass factory, among several other rail and steel factories, along with children’s railway schools, vocational schools, summer camps, sanitariums and hospitals, according to The New York Times.10

Understanding Ukraine Railways’ enormous employee count needs some comparisons. Deutsche Bahn, the world’s most profitable national railway with employee headcount in Australia, United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom among others as well as its home base in Germany, tallies a total 324,000 employees.11 In contrast, Amtrak in the United States reported 19,000 employees total, less than a tenth of Ukraine Railways.12

Ukraine Railways’ dominant surplus of experienced manpower and a mirror industrial society of its own has been a key reason why the rail network was able to evacuate civilians out of cities en masse during the initial invasion, transport military and industrial goods around the country and even deliver U.S. President Joe Biden from the Polish border to Kyiv by train without any detection. Former Ukraine Railways CEO Oleksandr Kamyshin told CNN its rails have been struck by Russian missiles more than 12,000 times in 2022, and that crews rapidly fix the damage using spares they have. Kamyshin was lauded globally for his leadership in keeping passenger trains moving to evacuate more than 2.5 million civilians in the first month of the Russian invasion.13 In the months after, Kamyshin would boast how his Ukraine Railways kept a 99% on-time performance during wartime.14

Similar tales of success shared by Ukraine Railways is found in Kyiv Metro: a massive surplus of labor was able to be flexibly deployed in both wartime and peacetime to not only run a Metro but run at a frequency which competes with the best Metro systems in western Europe or East Asia. Its very low incomes — one of the lowest in Europe, at $2100 USD for annual household income per capita — likely makes recruitment and retention to work in the rail industry much more feasible for the agencies.15

Under the neoliberal era of the past 40 years, Metros and national rail agencies in the United States, Canada and western Europe continuously look for greater efficiencies from its labor while keeping steady or reducing its headcount. Unlike in Ukraine, technological and infrastructural investments have made the marginalization of labor possible without massive drop of service. Despite the advantages, when observed globally, many of these most recognizable rail agencies have faced massive labor shortages, unfilled key positions, labor strife or inability to maintain quality of service in the past three years. Its far higher wages and guaranteed employer benefits compared to Ukraine indeed does not provide the labor market flexibilities.

But it remains understated, in this current neoliberal-dominant age, that labor too can be an innovative engine of its own, making the most of what little is provided and being able to pivot from a peacetime national service to a wartime national necessity. Ukraine — and its capital, Kyiv — may be the best demonstration of that engine in the world of mass transport currently.

Final Thoughts

Since the invasion by Russia in February 2022, nearly 63,000 people have died, 17 million people have been displaced from their homes and 140,000 homes have been destroyed. It feels odd to be discussing the minutiae of how well the invaded country is running its trains when it and its people collectively has gone through a hellish 18 months. I hope this post reflects a genuine admiration and wonder at what the Ukrainian civilians have endured.

Kyiv Metro demonstrates world-class quality of service can be done without 21st century technology or infrastructure. Kyiv Metro’s founders in a bygone country in a bygone past deeply understood what a Metro needed to prioritize and how to construct a system to deliver nearly 80 years ago. In contrast, so many operational issues plaguing North American rail transit stems from poor decision-making from the start which, after the cake was fully baked, has become either impossible to re-do or prohibitively expensive to remake, such as poor placement of rail line extensions or interlining several lines into one set of tracks. During the Cold War, the Soviets kept its Metro operations simple and tight and frequent; indeed, even the New York Times article from 1974 notes “anyone familiar with both systems cannot help but notice how Moscow has either tried to avoid or has solved some of the pressing transit concerns that have beset New York.”16

Lastly, Kyiv Metro serves an antiquated reminder that labor of the old kind — the kind now shunned and often labeled as wasteful or inefficient — can deliver results unmatched by most of the world. During active wartime, after decades without billions of dollars of investment or ushering of new rolling stock or train control system, Kyiv Metro still outdoes the rest. To run a train service during wartime is a feat; to run it like Kyiv Metro is a miracle.

A 2018 art exhibition in Paris Metro with mural from famous street artist JR (highly recommend his co-lead role with legendary director Agnes Varda in the documentary Faces Places). Source

For a month in June, I had the privilege to travel through France, Spain and, very briefly, Portugal. This was my first vacation since the pandemic, and I was thrilled to visit some of the great European cities — Paris, Lyon, San Sebastian, Madrid, Barcelona, and Lisbon — for the first time. Within and between these cities, I took as many trains and buses I can (without inconveniencing my partner who was traveling with me for more leisurely reasons). Despite it being a vacation, I couldn't help but take copious notes and continue to research transit systems of my host cities.

It was meant to be private journal entries in my chicken scratch. But as I gathered more material, I thought there was enough to not only organize my thoughts further but also to crystallize some epiphanies I encountered in the train, on the platform or at a cafe nearby after a lovely ride.

Seasoned transit thinkers — especially if living in France or Spain or its neighbors — may find some of my points rather obvious or redundant. But in the forum of discussing mass transit, I find there is always room for redundancies to not only remind ourselves but also for a newcomer may find them revealing. Since I have cultivated one such platform here, I figured I’ll put it down in writing.

1) The top transit cities are still struggling from COVID impacts

When packing into a train in Paris Metro, or Madrid Metro, or Barcelona Metro, this summer, the very last thought I had was “there is not enough people taking the train here.” But for the three listed Metros, total ridership still has not recovered to its full pre-COVID figures.

Madrid Metro's CEO Silvia Roldán spoke last month that her system remains at 95% of pre-COVID demands.1 Telecommuting has drastically reshaped Madrid's commute patterns: morning peak hours have a loss of around 10% from Monday to Thursday and on Fridays of 18%, according to Roldán. However, mid-day peaks have returned and afternoon commutes have composed of more leisure reasons, such as shopping or family outings, said Roldán.

Paris and Barcelona fared worse than Madrid in ridership recovery. RATP Group — the state-owned public transport operator for Paris Metro — reported average ridership was down 14% compared to its 2019 levels.2 Barcelona’s Metro operator TMB recorded around 549 million passengers in 2022, which was down approximately 13% compared to its 2019 figures.3 4

After three years since COVID-19 disrupted the world, it cannot be lost on us still that major transit systems — true world-class systems and industry leaders — are still reeling from the five-alarm maelstrom that was the pandemic. It often feels like societies have pigeonholed the pandemic, or has declared victory over it, but the pandemic still lives with us through these scars of data.

Another under-discussed facet is that many cities worldwide had to bail out their transit systems for pandemic-related revenue losses. The Ile-de-France region — Paris and its suburbs — received a 1.4 billion Euro subsidy package in September 2020 to cover revenue losses, and has received continuous assistance from the French government.5 London’s TfL was bailed out four times between 2020 and 2022.6 In May, the New York State government provided a package of subsidies for the MTA.7 It’s important to remember that COVID did near-mortal injury to even the robust of transit systems worldwide.

I really do not want this point forgotten as we in North America at least are deliberating the future of public transit. A June 2023 survey from the American Public Transit Association revealed 51% of public transit agencies in the United States are facing a fiscal cliff in the next five years.8 The bigger you are, the more precarious per the APTA survey: 71% of the larger agencies in America’s biggest cities expect a fiscal cliff in five years.9 Even one major reduction or entry to a “death spiral” by a transit agency in the United States — a country already so deficient in transit options — would be one too many.

It is imperative to remind ourselves — and more importantly lawmakers and decision-makers — that not having figured out a sustainable post-COVID model of success is the dominant norm worldwide, not an exception. Asking and receiving state or federal aid to keep a vital public service running was not exceptional but rather a worldwide norm, thus undeserving of shame or ridicule.

2) Having really good service can trump pretty awful rider experiences

When people talk about trains in Europe, they gush over the palatial, futuristic treatment they received while on the Metro. I, either through bad luck or having traveled in one of the busiest travel seasons in recent memory or having too high of an expectation as an employee for a public transit agency, have not had the same luck.

In Barcelona Metro, I saw more urine or post-urination messes than I can recall in a long time.10 In Madrid Metro, I vented to my partner that I keep getting lost in the stations due to its poor and surprisingly confusing wayfinding signages. As someone who thinks a lot about wayfinding in stations for personal and work reasons, Madrid was quite shocking.11 In Paris Metro, I witnessed so many broken equipment (next train signs, ticket vending machines, fare gates, elevators) and also a lot of mess. In Lisbon Metro, in limited experience, I noted quite a lot of broken equipment too.

All in all, I was not impressed, which frankly left me disappointed. But I prodded myself why these observations, which would be primary hindrances from taking the train in North America, were mere minor nuisances in Europe. My strong hunch was simply: the trains came frequently to wash away its sins.

Paris Metro ran a train every 2-3 minutes on all lines for most hours. Madrid Metro and Barcelona Metro was, on observation, 5-6 minutes on all lines for most hours. Very rarely would anyone wait more than 10 minutes. If it occurred, the rarity would be noted by learned behavior, with people waiting in platforms getting antsy and rubbernecking down the tunnel for their train. (Lisbon Metro, I may have just had rotten luck, having waited more than 10 minutes in two of our three rides)

It served as yet another reminder that service of frequency is and should be the main barometer for success for any mass transit system. But I also know, working in the industry, that upping frequency often can be the hardest change possible internally due to personnel or resource limitations. These two truths do not excuse poor rider experience or poor frequency, but I have a greater appreciation for the Metros who can provide such service levels every day, all day, for decades prior and for decades to come.

3) Station spacing and train length matters for a line’s success

When people have asked me why can’t America just take Europe’s transit successes and graft it on here, I postulated prior to this vacation that the distance between train stations in a given European Metro system may be a key factor in its success. I think I was onto something that goes under-appreciated in North America.

An extreme example may be the Paris Metro, where two stations between a line in central Paris may only be separated by 200 or 300 meters. In train time, a train will depart and arrive at the next station within one minute. I think that is too short a travel time and rather creates redundancies. But the great thing about the Paris Metro is that all stations are well-attended despite the closeness of stations to overcome this 19th century anachronism.

A more sustainable scale was found in Spain. The spacing between two stations in Madrid or Barcelona may often be 500 or 600 meters: close enough to transport from one neighborhood to another but far enough that walking or biking cannot replace the one-stop Metro ride wholly with ease. It was also close enough to render an automobile rather pointless; it seemed a Goldilocks zone for station spacing for a heavily used Metro system.

Another appreciation in Europe was the length of a Metro train. Usually four or five cars long, increasingly connected via open gangways, I found this to be an ideal length for several reasons: 1) it is of a more human scale, I can reasonably see most if not all the train from end to end on an open gangway train; 2) it keeps the transit systems honest about providing high frequencies instead of falling back to longer trains with lesser frequencies.

In much of the United States, stations are too far apart and trains are either too long or too short for its respective station distance. If stations are too far apart, then the automobile comes in play as a competitive mode. And consequent train length determines whether the train ride will be too uncomfortable (too short) during the long travel between the stations, or too spacious (too empty) which often engender a feeling of unsafety on the train. Ever since returning, I have more sensitive to this observation — and more assured in its solidity.

4) The City maketh its transit (or Culture-Trips vs Capital-Trips)

In reportage or discussions on the state of public transit in North America, a major focus is given to each transit agency of note. The actions of the transit agencies are seen as determinate of the success of the system itself and thus attracts scrutiny and vigilance. I fear that focus carries a very low ceiling of potential for those who want transformative change for transit and a misunderstanding for how a transit system succeeds or fails.

I was in Barcelona in late June during the weekend of the Feast of Sant Joan, which is one of Barcelona’s most popular holidays. The scenes were not dissimilar to that of Fourth of July in the United States, with fireworks, barbecues, beach parties and neighborhood festivities galore. It was an incredible time to be in Barcelona — and on Barcelona Metro. Despite many store closures for the weekend, Barcelona Metro was packed across all hours. I was shocked to be on a crowded train heading to the beaches at 7 pm and crush-load trains from the beaches at 11:30 pm.

Contrast this with a recent experience I had in San Francisco on the eve of Fourth of July. I joined a large group of friends visiting San Francisco to go to a Giants baseball game. After the game, we walked toward Market Street to hit up some familiar and favorite watering holes. To our surprise, our first, second and third choice bars were closed for July 3rd. At 10pm, standing on an empty Market Street, we decided not to head further north for some brews and instead call it an early night. I took the bus home; the majority of them called Uber or Lyft to go back, a major missed opportunity for BART or Muni who may have been happy to patronize an extra dozen riders.

When I reflect on these two experiences, I feel strongly that most of the great cities people love to visit have a robust glut of cultural or leisurely activities spread disparately across a wide geographic swath of the cityscape. Metros, if they connect well to the constellation of these events happening every day and night, will naturally attract a high level of ridership. These rides — I coined them Culture-Trips in my chicken-scratch writings — have a very positive feedback loop; people want to go see friends, or play sports, or go drink, or be social and seen wherever. Systems which can provide a wide array of Culture-Trips to people at a good level of service are deigned to succeed.

Standing in contrast are Capital-Trips, mainly commutes to and from work. They are the atom-level actions which sustain a city’s economy; without commuters, a city is paralyzed. Mass transit excels at providing Capital-Trips, but Capital-Trips carry inherent limits. Most people only make two Capital-Trips a day (home to work; work to home) and the experience is usually displeasant. Capital-Trips in most cities often congeal into morning and afternoon rush hours. Capital itself is usually not pleasant too; to borrow from a certain 19th century German philosopher, Capital has an uncanny characteristic to make people involved feel alienated from their labor, their society and even their human existence.

Most if not all metropolises in North America neatly design and separate areas for Capital and for Culture. Downtowns are a place for jobs, corporations and banks; the Bohemian/LGBTQ+/ethnic/hipster neighborhoods are for music, cocktails and fun. As such, transit systems in cities become designed to provide majority Capital-Trips on some lines and majority Culture-Trips on others. Outliers, like BART in the Bay Area, were designed and built for only Capital-Trips from the suburbs to Downtown San Francisco. It worked great until it didn’t, when COVID blew up the walls between two carefully tended gardens of urban Capital and urban Culture.

Cities worldwide do not have this strict of a separation. They also have a surplus of spaces for cultural and leisures to take place as scheduled or spantaneous. Culture-Trips and Capital-Trips are intermingled every hour, every day on the same trains and same buses. On hours and days outside dominant work hours, like evenings or weekends, cities like Paris or Barcelona are teeming with its citizens out in transit for leisure or for culture. Culture-Trips constantly dare a rider to redefine their associations to mass transit based on their transit experience and also what the transit trips connects them to. Capital-Trips, in contrast, can be disciplinary and alienating in nature where behavioral decisions are made by “I have to/I should”. (Is this why remote work looms as such an existential threat for mass transit in metropolitan areas?)

All cities have the ability to house within itself spaces and events to encourage and unleash more Culture-Trips on a daily basis. To win more ridership, they need a positive, actionable reason to get on. That encouragement on a municipal level can be the tried and true ceiling breaker for North American transit and its lagging ridership figures.

5) Political will is the only instrument which saves or kills mass transit

Through France and Spain, I took not only Metros but also regional trains and high-speed intercity rails. It was a trip of a lifetime for a lifelong railfan, but I was also working out a puzzle: how can we obtain this luxury back home as well?

Since returning from Europe, I am increasingly radicalized in the opinion that national government action and national government investments are the main, if not only, key power to transform mass transit. France and Spain, for decades, have spent billions and billions of Euros to develop their national railway networks. But, as importantly, they have invested and created mechanisms to provide revenue for its most recognized transit systems, for example Paris region's RATP. In contrast, a recent budget crisis with Madrid Metro highlights money-saving decisions can carry massive ramifications down the line, nulling whatever past cost savings occurred due to present and future outstanding bills.

France and Spain has invested billions and billions upon their transit networks. France, in particular, have been aggressive; in addition to pandemic subsidies made available to RATP, the French government pledged 4.7 billion Euros to its national railways in its recovery plan in September 2020.12 Three years later, as part of a “France Nation Verde” plan to sharply cut carbon emissions, France pledged 100 billion Euros to expand and upgrade its national rail network by 2040.13 The 100 billion Euro investment may include construction of RER-like regional rail systems in other cities, the return of night trains, construction of new lines and upgrade of existing rail infrastructure, according to French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne.

Spain is following suit with a 24 billion Euro investment to its national rail network over the next five years.14 (Considering Spain's world-class reputation as economic infrastructure builder, this money may stretch further than most of the developed world) Portugal, a relative late bloomer, recently have pledged a Lisbon-Porto high speed rail line at the cost of 4.7 billion Euros.15

Aforementioned investments are mainly capital investments, leaving out operations for the time being. France have supplied its major metropolitan transit systems the critical operating funds to keep trains running with a novel solution: versement mobilité, or mobility tax. Formerly called the transport tax (versement transport), the mobility tax is a local payroll tax levied on all public and private employers with more than 11 employees. It was first introduced by the French government to the Ile-de-France region in the 1970s, and has been a main engine to help drive RATP — and its Paris Metro and RER — grow and modernize for the past 50 years.

Despite opposition to the mobility tax from pro-business organizations, France's mobility tax has provided the stable financial foundation unfound in most North American peer systems. As impressive has been the French government's steadfast support for the mobility tax, as evidenced by its expansion in the 2019 Mobility Orientation Act.

In 2023, RATP reported 48% of its operating revenues came from employer contributions mainly through the mobility tax.16 Operating revenues from fares (not counting the share many employers pay for discounted employee passes) amounted to 27%. Ile-de-France region has the highest rate of mobility tax at 2.95%. Sytral Mobilités, which operate the Metro in the second biggest city in Lyon, also registered more than 40% of its operating revenues from the mobility tax, set at 1.85%. (The rate was recently raised to 2%).

(I highly recommend this thread on the mobility tax from Kueller on Twitter — who I got to meet in Paris!)

In contrast, we can see a major transit system pushed to the brink of financial catastrophe through poor political choice. Madrid Metro currently has its hands tied behind its back under recently political gridlock in the Community of Madrid, the authority overseeing the Madrid region. In 2022, the President of the Community of Madrid Isabel Díaz Ayuso extended the existent budget to 2023 after the far-right party Vox derailed budget negotiations. For Madrid Metro, this 2023 extension dug Madrid Metro deeper in debt, with around 130 million Euros of debt since 2021 to provide core services.17 With not-yet-100% ridership recovery (Madrid Metro's revenues rely more on fares than Paris Metro, at around 40%) and recent skyrocketing electricity bills, Madrid Metro's financial grounds remain shaky.

This unstable foundation set the stage for what could be a “catastrophic” near-future for the world-renowned Madrid Metro. Madrid Metro stands to lose nearly 40% of its train fleet in December 2023 unless they can buy out 142 trains already in circulation. But due to the current debt burden and because Madrid Metro cannot borrow money themselves without the Community's approval, the situation remains unresolved.18 If the 142 trains are not purchased, Madrid Metro will have to run service with only 207 trains — a crushing blow to its service levels.

Why does Madrid Metro need to buy out trains they already run every day? Twenty years ago, the authorities in charge opted to rent out new fleets with the right to purchase decades later. As the newspaper El País calls it, it was “bread for today and hunger for tomorrow”.19 In addition to this morass, Madrid Metro stands to lose nearly 100 million Euros more as they put a down payment as the partial purchase amount back in 2022 — not knowing then the budget would be extended with no assistance for the rolling stock purchase.

As of publication, the funding crisis surrounding Madrid Metro is not resolved. The opposition party in the Community of Madrid has demanded Díaz Ayuso for a one-time bailout to rescue Madrid Metro out of its indebtedness.20

France and, less generously, Spain has demonstrated how political support and foresight can either set up a system for success for decades or push another system to the brink of a death spiral. Public mass transit is not just a carbon emissions reducer or an equity leveler or a regional economic engine; it is also an endowment, an expression of nation-building. Countries who have demonstrated this understanding and acted with supplying major investments or mechanisms to create operating revenues — over years and decades, as these decisions multiply — are now the ones leading the world in mass transit.

Countries which make corner-cutting decisions or become reduced to political paralysis — whether it be Spain or my United States — are always going to pay the price, and pay them dearly.

Children play in a model MTR train carriage at Hong Kong Police College for National Security Education Day in 2021. Source: South China Morning Post

In spring of 2022, New York City Mayor Eric Adams proposed his city install metal detectors in subway stations to deter crime and shootings, such as the Sunset Park shooting which injured 29 people on a subway car in March. While Adams’ spokesperson later clarified the proposal was for a different, nascent detection technology, many on social media cast doubt on whether a metal detector on the subway would ever be feasible.12

To the possible surprise of New Yorker subway riders, metal detectors are already a common feature among Metro systems around the world. Judging by the ubiquity of metal detectors among Metro systems in China and India, it is likely there are more Metro systems opened in the 21st century with metal detectors at stations than those without.

In the past 10-15 years, a global phenomenon has loosely emerged across many of the biggest urban public transit systems: A growing number of mass transit systems are embracing new means to try to secure public safety which go beyond basic patrol or beat policing. Metal detectors have been the most common technology embraced; facial recognition is another increasingly adopted in the last five years. More notably National Guard soldiers or federal police units are deployed en masse to secure stations and trains indefinitely, exceeding conventional expectations of appropriate police presence for a given train station.

This phenomenon, which dates as far back as 2007, is found mostly in developing countries of Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. But this is not a story of haves and have-nots. If anything, one may wonder whether this growing phenomenon is ripe for cross-pollination in the much older and more developed Metro systems in western Europe, North America (Canada and the United States) and East Asia (Korea, Taiwan and Japan) in the future.

Metros in the latter group are generally designed and operated as civilian spaces — with civil police as protection — and its users are given maximal freedom of mobility within defined spaces. But concerns over terrorism, crime and societal unrest over the last 20 years — and accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic — have eroded confidence in many of these cities. Calls for more security in public spaces are growing in several cities, especially in North America and, to a lesser extent, Western Europe. In the United States, in particular, faith in maintenance of public spaces is at a post-pandemic nadir. Can this heavy-handed, militarized approach from abroad be the model for future emulation?

Policing in public transit can be a politically and emotionally charged topic for readers in my native United States. To clarify, this post will exclusively focus on the extra layer of security apparatus — coming directly from the federal or military branch — finding a home in Metro systems. These extra security personnel, in extreme cases, have not been shy about showing extralegal violence in stations and trains, damaging equipment and injuring protesters in front of recording smartphones and cameras. In several countries, these personnel have drawn much ire among its ridership and general populace, seen as a foreign occupying force on civilian grounds.

From Hong Kong of 2019 to Minneapolis of 2020 to Paris of spring 2023, to name a recent few, cities increasingly have been hotbeds for large-scale confrontations between the state and its citizens. But now, for the first time, public transit may be in the crosshairs as spaces of conflict during societal turmoil. Usual media coverage and discussions of public transit can be myopic to individual cities or regions. This author attempts to paint as global a picture as possible, and the macro-level canvas illustrates an alarming trend. Is the militarizing Metro the future for public transit in the 21st century?

Author’s Note: A definition of how I use the term “Metro” may be needed to continue. “Metros” refer to rapid transit systems which connect inside a metropolitan area with its own right-of-way and electricity-powered trains. From Budapest, the oldest Metro in operation, to Dhaka, which opened last year, Metros transport large groups of people with relatively frequent service and serve as the central mode for any regional public transport. To save space and elucidate the concept clearly, I have opted for this broad general term for “Metro”.

Another Author’s Note: I work at a public transit agency in the United States and want to state this post does not express the opinions of my employer.

Protesters and riot police face each other in a Metro station concourse hallway in Santiago, Chile, in 2019. (Source: BBC)

A New Layer of Security

Railroads have been battlegrounds for many civilian-military clashes, particularly in the historic struggle for labor rights. But Metros have largely avoided these clashes within the constructed spaces. Some hypotheses are: much of the Metros opened, expanded or became critical to urban life in the post-war prosperity and a mass urbanizing migration between 1945 and 1990 (the Soviet Bloc provide an interesting counterpoint); the generally underground station typologies at city centers which aren’t conducive for large-scale confrontations; or growing white-collar riderships estranged from militant industrial unionism. Whichever the case, mass violent confrontations taking place inside Metro stations in the 20th century have not occurred (or at least its records were not available during research for this writing)

Military presence inside Metros were first recorded in the 1990s to provide auxiliary help to police and allay public panic with visible patrols after a terrorist attack. Incidents include the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack; 1996 Paris RER bombing; the 2004 Madrid train bombings; 2013 Boston Marathon bombing; 2015 Paris terrorist attacks; 2017 New York City Subway bombing; 2017 London Overground bombing; and 2021 January 6 storming of the United States Congress in Washington D.C.3 45678The military presence would usually last for a few weeks until authorities determined the threat had passed and the public had returned to relative sense of security.

Military presence solely as a calming force inside Metros remains a common strategy. But in 2019, two simultaneous instances of social unrest saw them used as tools of state repression in Metro stations in Hong Kong and Santiago, Chile. In Hong Kong, demonstrators and bystanders were video-recorded being attacked and beaten with batons by riot police in military gear and plainclothes officers in two separate attacks at Prince Edward Station and Yuen Long Station, respectively.910 Hardline protesters destroyed station equipment and burned station entrances in retaliation to police brutality. As collateral to Hong Kong's democracy protests in 2019 and 2020, Hong Kong's world-class Metro system, MTR, suspended all rail service for the first time in its 40-plus-year history citing need for repairs.11 Critics cited the suspension as tantamount to a city-wide curfew from Beijing considering Hong Kong’s density and over-reliance of its citizenry on MTR trains.12

Similar scenes unfolded in Santiago, Chile the same year. Protesters clashed with riot police over a proposed fare increase that led to a widespread fare evasion campaign, which then erupted nationwide into a violent outpouring against the government’s longstanding neoliberal policies. Eighty Santiago Metro stations were damaged by vandalism and fires, and Santiago Metro suspended service for several days.13 Police fired tear gas and beat protesters with batons in station concourses.14 For some Chileans and observers, Santiago Metro becoming ground zero for the protests was appropriate. Santiago Metro has served as "a microcosm of Chilean society" and a symbol for the country's infamous neoliberal projects which have squeezed the working class of the capital city through privatization and cost-cutting measures.15

In 2023, a new military presence under a new pretense is underway at another Latin American Metro system. In January, the Mexican Government deployed more than 6,000 national guard soldiers to Mexico City Metro to stand patrol after three train collisions within a week’s span were deemed “atypical actions," according to Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum. The National Guard presence is ostensibly for a few months but may remain permanent pending evaluations, said Sheinbaum.16

Critics have pinned the National Guard deployment as a political ploy for Sheinbaum, the current frontrunner for Mexico’s next president. On January 18, student organizers gathered at Centro Médico Metro station to protest. They listed a series of demands: for the withdrawal of the National Guard, for the Metro director to be fired and for the Metro budget to be hiked by 50 percent to allow comprehensive maintenance work on its crumbling infrastructure.17 Critics have pointed that the maintenance budget for Mexico City Metro has declined by 40% between 2018 and 2021.18 Critics have agreed the National Guard will not resolve Metro's continuous accidents in the past two years. "If accidents continue, like a cable or the signal system breaks, the National Guard is not going to detect that or make a difference," said Stanford professor Eduardo Miranda.19

Unlike Santiago, Hong Kong and Mexico City where the military or National Guard are only occasionally called upon in a crisis, another country has long implemented permanent military security for its Metro. Delhi Metro, the largest of the Metro systems in India, are secured not by local or transit police but by the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), a federal paramilitary force responsible for protecting the nation’s most important industrial, infrastructural and cultural assets. Often wearing camouflage uniforms and marching in military parades, the CISF are tasked with securing atomic plants, airports and the Taj Mahal with a 170,000+ personnel force.20 The only other equivalent to Delhi Metro's relationship with paramilitary security presence is Kolkata Metro, which is operated by Indian Railways and thus falls under the security protection of Indian Railway's internal Railway Protection Force.21

From its opening in 2002 until 2007, Delhi Metro was policed locally until the Indian Government turned its security over to CISF. In 2019, CISF Unit Delhi Metro Rail Corporation received 5,000 extra CISF personnel, expanding its security-deployed corps to more than 12,000, making it the largest single unit within CISF.22 As an imperfect comparison to illustrate the volume of Delhi Metro's security personnel, New York City Subway in October 2022 were patrolled by 3,500 police officers with an additional 1,200 overtime shifts in what was declared the largest deployment in its history — despite New York City having nearly twice more stations than Delhi.23

The CISF Unit DMRC is a security apparatus unlike any other Metro outside India. The unit has several "Quick Reaction Teams" for high-priority crime response as well as a Dog Squad and a Bomb Detection Squad for explosives. The unit mans hundreds of metal detectors outside nearly all Delhi Metro stations (more on it later). Despite a sprawling presence, the unit faced scrutiny in 2018 as the rapidly expanding Delhi Metro system was noted a “hotspot of crime," mainly due to pickpocketing from women passengers. Despite platform screen doors, more than 40 suicide attempts by jumping in front of a train were attempted at Delhi Metro in 2018.24

A queue to the metal detector at a Delhi Metro station, with CISF personnel performing security checks. (Source: India Today)

The Airport-ization of the Metro

Like Delhi Metro, most if not all Metro systems in India have metal detectors. In fact, during 2020 at the height of India’s first COVID-19 wave. Delhi Metro re-opened with multiple metal detectors laid one after the other for all riders would enter through so CISF can “contactlessly frisk” for anyone with symptoms.25

Before the pandemic, long queues to enter Delhi Metro stations were the norm, with some lines stretching half a kilometer and the wait taking up to 20 minutes, acording to the Times of India.26 In response to one passenger on Twitter who complained he had been waiting up to 40 minutes to enter Akshardham Station, the official Delhi Metro Twitter account responded that despite the incredibly long wait, they "expect cooperation by passengers in following the security procedures."

Metal detectors are a common security feature found across Asia. One of the newest Metros, Dhaka Metro in the capital city of Bangladesh, India’s eastern neighbor, have riders clamoring for metal detectors at their stations. Opened in December 2022, Dhaka Metro told the Dhaka Tribune that metal detectors will be installed at a later date.27 The same article quoted riders, some of them who queue before the system opens for service to board the first morning train, complaining about the “lax security” provided, including no metal detectors.

Metal detectors remain a keystone feature of Metro systems in southeast Asia. Singapore’s famous MRT system had adopted metal detectors in 2021, but on a rotating basis between stations and not ubiquitously.28 Bangkok MRT in Thailand has had metal detectors in its stations for nearly a decade. Unlike riders in Dhaka, Thais have developed a sense of humor about the inconsistent security at Bangkok MRT, including those who man metal detectors and check inside bags. A 2015 satirical video traces the “origin story” of MRT security to a whip-smart Thai grandma and explains “how the fuck they are able to check bags so fast.”

Beyond the satire, Bangkok in 2015 experienced three bombing attacks which rattled the capital city. Even in a state of heightened awareness among its residents, some voiced frustration at the “security theater” of Bangkok MRT’s metal detectors. (Interestingly, Bangkok’s other rail system, BTS SkyTrain, does not have metal detectors) “I encounter this nonsense all the time. Even the metal detector devices appear to be unreliable…such lax inspections are a waste of time on both sides. They lead to nothing but irritation and frustration,” wrote journalist Ploenpote Atthako in the Bangkok Post in August 20, 2015, three days after the Erewan Shrine bombing which killed 20 people.29

No one country has adopted and expanded its metal detector presence at Metro stations like China. In a country where full-fledged Metro systems have mushroomed within two decades, China wields tremendous social control over its Metro riders. All Metro systems in China (except Hong Kong MTR) have metal detectors at its stations, including those in Beijing and Shanghai, whose respective riderships both double that of New York City Subway and triple that of the London Underground. Beijing Subway in 2018, for example, had 882 subway checkpoints in total and 30,000 security guards. Beijing’s municipal government about 1.7 billion Yuan ($247 million USD) a year to keep the security checkpoints operational and staffed, according to the South China Morning Post in 2020.30

Beijing was arguably the first city to adopt full-time metal detectors for its Metro system in 2008, in the lead-up to hosting the Olympics. The metal detectors stayed after 2008, and whatever remaining political will to remove them disappeared with the 2014 Kunming attack, when an eight-person gang with knives killed 31 people and injured 143 at the Kunming Railway Station. In 2016, metal detectors were codified as part of solutions listed in its counterterrorism laws passed by the Communist Party.31 These security checkpoints were inspired from the aviation industry and how airports check riders before entering its premises, most notably the United States' post-9/11 TSA presence at airports, according to a 2020 journal from the Beijing University of Technology.32

Despite a wide prevalence around the world, Western countries in North America and Europe have never adopted metal detectors for their Metro systems full-time. In Europe, metal detectors have historically been temporary uses for major intercity rail stations after a terrorist attack. One interesting and recent deviation was London in 2018, when metal detectors were in part-time use at Vauxhall Station to combat a series of violent crimes in London, including stabbing deaths outside a Tube station.33

In the United States, new detection technologies have been toyed with at certain Metro systems. As aforementioned, New York City under Mayor Adams flirted with a new untested technology. In 2018, Los Angeles Metro, with federal Transportation Security Administration staff, tested "passive" body scanners at its downtown hub station to detect weapons or explosives. A law professor questioned the legality of the passive body scanners at a transit stop, arguing that what is deemed as a “mass” on an individual is not enough for probable cause to conduct a search. He also gave credit to LA Metro for seeking technology to minimize racial profiling.34

For proponents of metal detector screenings, the legalities discussed in Los Angeles are superfluous. “It is only natural that terrorists would want to shift their sights to trains and subways where they could inflict mass casualties and cause fear and havoc,” said Gal Luft, co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security to SCMP. “The cost of security screening to society in terms of time and loss of privacy is justified. A minor inconvenience which could prevent a catastrophe is not a lot to ask.”35

A Smoothening, or An Extinction of Privacy?

Despite claims by security analysts, metal detectors and security checkpoints are no minor inconvenience for the everyday rider. Rider frustration from Beijing to Delhi is palpable, from media interviews to customer complaints on Twitter. But what if there was a new technology to keep the supposed security of metal detectors but minus the inconvenience? Facial recognition technologies claim to be that perfect synthesis. Riders can seamlessly pay their fares using their face, and Metros can account for who exactly is riding the system at any time and provide another layer of surveillance in addition to CCTVs.

In China, facial recognition scanners were already in operation before the COVID-19 pandemic (it only has become more ubiquitous since). As of 2019, scanners were installed at fare gates. Users' fares would be automatically deducted from their registered account. Metros in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Jinan installed the scanners full-time; others, like Shanghai Metro, were experimenting.36 The Chinese government has reduced or eliminated as many hurdles as possible to allow widespread adoption of this technology. "Money would not be a big problem and there would be little legal and limited social hurdles in doing so," a facial recognition researcher told SCMP.37

India under current Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed interest in China’s facial recognition advancements; now, this interest is being realized at its Metro systems as well. MG Road Station in Delhi Metro installed eight scanners at its entrances and exits in June 2022.38 In Bangalore in southern India, the Bengaluru Metro discussed a monthly pass system using facial recognition technology. But unlike its peers in Delhi, the discussion seems to have stalled under India's constitutional quandaries on privacy.39

Facial recognition technologies have received interest in countries not yet discussed in this post, such as Japan, Russia and Brazil. While these countries may not have adopted the first two security measures, they remain enticed by the futuristic promise of facial recognition to further provide a seamless transit experience. In Japan, Osaka Metro tested facial recognition scanners in 2019, and JR West, part of the national Japanese Rail corporation which also serves Osaka, deployed face biometrics gates at two train stations in Osaka in March 2023. Osaka Metro aims to introduce to all stations before Osaka's World Expo in 2025.4041

Moscow Metro in Russia arguably has had the biggest adoption of facial recognition technology of any Metro system in the world. The famous system, built ornately under Stalin, rolled out “Face Pay” to 240 stations in October 2021, claiming
"the largest use of facial recognition technology in the world.”42 Metro riders will upload a photo and connect their bank and metro cards to the Mosmetro mobile app for Face Pay to work and pay for fares. Authorities say the data will be securely encrypted.43

São Paulo, Brazil has emerged as a fascinating laboratory in the legal challenges involving facial recognition used for mass public transit. In 2022, São Paulo Metro — one of the largest Metro systems in South America — decided to adopt the technology using new biometric cameras featuring SecurOS FaceX. In March, a judge for the São Paulo State Court ruled in agreement with a civil lawsuit brought forth by numerous civil rights organizations calling the technology a threat which “undermined people’s fundamental rights”.44 The judge, Cynthia Thome, noted Sao Paulo Metro had not provided in detail what they plan to process and use the facial recognition data and said several technical issues went unanswered.45

However, after appeal from SecureOS FaceX, the decision was overturned, and facial recognition technology returned to São Paulo Metro in November 2022. The cameras are on Line 3, but plans to expand to Lines 1 and 2 within 18 months of Line 3's deployment, according to São Paulo State governor Rodrigo Garcia.46

In contrast to metal detectors, facial recognition entices a smoothening out of security checkpoints, which via personnel or equipment, often comes into abrasive contact with civilians who simply want to ride the train. Like mass transit at its Platonic ideal, facial recognition promises an invisible experience, one free of delays, queues and checks. But its implications and unanswered questions with the technology extend far further into dystopian spaces than the analog and clunky metal detector. One burning question is consistently raised: where will these biometric data be stored? The answer has been often unanswered or left ominous; Moscow Metro’s FacePay, for example, will only be accessible by federal interior ministry staff but the details are unclear. As surfaced by the Brazilian judge Thome, how governments plan to use the data beyond the Metro have been met with near-universal silence from governments eager to adopt facial recognition.47

“We need to have full transparency on how this application will work in practice,” said Stanislav Shakirov, a Russian digital rights and freedom of information activist, of FacePay in 2021. “We are moving closer to authoritarian countries like China that have mastered facial technology. The Moscow Metro is a government institution and all the data can end up in the hands of the security services.”48

The following year, Moscow preemptively detained more than 140 anti-war protesters using facial recognition cameras across its city, including 29 who were stopped by police at its Metro stations.49 An architect in her 30s who was arrested twice for protesting was stopped twice more inside Moscow Metro by police who knew her whereabouts in the Metro through Face Pay scanners. “They knew what carriage I was in because they waited right outside it,” she said, according to Reuters .50 The same technology on Moscow Metro has been used to detain draft dodgers and re-enlist them.51

In the legal battle in São Paulo, human rights organizations argued in court that facial recognition left non-white, non-binary and gender-transitioning people especially vulnerable. “Frequently these technologies hit non-binary and transitioning people, for example, because they do not recognize the changes in them,” stated Article 19, an international human rights organization, which brought the lawsuit against São Paulo Metro. “People have been prohibited from using a ticket they had bought because the technology failed to identify them as the person who initially made the purchase. There are also ‘false positives’, where black people are more likely to be affected.”52

International civil and human rights institutions have been on full alert about the dizzying growth of facial recognition technologies in recent years. In 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) urged the United States Congress to pass a moratorium on government use of facial recognition.53 Three years later, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called for a moratorium on artificial intelligence, including facial recognition, until global safeguards are in place. Since the UN plea, however, Delhi, Osaka, Moscow and São Paulo have adopted facial recognition for fare payments in its public transit system.

Mexico’s federal auxiliary authorities head down the stairs to La Raza station in Mexico City. (Source: Rogelio Morales Ponce/Cuartoscuro)

What Does the Future Hold?

Whether through the National Guard or paramilitaries, metal detector scanners, or through facial recognition technologies, dozens of cities around the world have opted into additive layers of force and control of its ridership. There is no overarching congress of cities or states conspiring toward this goal, but various nation-states have arrived at similar conclusions to buff their security details in order to combat some real or imagined domestic threat. For some cities, the concept of the Metro as a peaceful civilian space has been stripped; for a rapidly growing number with new Metros, such concepts never existed. The general zeitgeist of global unease and a backsliding of democratic norms as nations scramble to figure out their own 21st century destinies have trickled down to public transit.

While often sharing in that zeitgeist, developed nations in western Europe and North America have not opted into any of the three measures for its Metros. Even in the United States, where post-pandemic urban doomerism seems most shrill, American cities are not at risk and rather well-protected. The 2018 Carpenter v. the United States decision by the Supreme Court has proven foundational in states and cities — like San Francisco, Portland and Chicago — to pass laws which ban or severely curtail facial recognition in public spaces.54 Laws in the United States like the 10th Amendment and Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 limit the extent the military or National Guard can be converted to occupying forces in its own cities (although several Presidents, from George H.W. Bush and Donald Trump, have deployed the National Guard during major urban riots using the Insurrection Act of 1807)55 Despite Adams' flirtations with metal detectors for subway stations in New York City, public outcry has made the idea unpalatable for now.

Laws and public opinion seem to be buffers — but will enforcement and adherence to existing laws and norms follow in 21st century America? Public trust in the United States toward government and democracy has been sliding to decades-low figures, adding uncertainty over whether longstanding democratic norms will have the strength to buttress the political degradation.56 In post-COVID America, states and cities are already blinking in the face of crime and societal ills magnified by the pandemic; the state of Virginia and the city of New Orleans both rolled back its police ban of facial recognition technologies in 2022, citing the need to bolster police with new technologies to combat rising homicides and crime.57

Crime and homelessness are the biggest pain point inflicting physical and reputational damage on the American city. Without an exception, public transit — if readily available — has been the lens through which the media, social media and anti-urban political operatives comb through for incidents of violence and human misery. Denizens of any major American city may feel it is their city alone has fallen solely and irreparably to crime, or their Metro uniquely has become unsafe beyond relief, but even a slight zoom out shows the same coverage and discussions in every other city. It is a unique pathology of American cities where the discourse of their supposed demise is both universal but siloed; the supposed proof in photos or videos going wildly viral but trapped in echo chambers; the plight real and serious but witnessed en masse digitally and ethereally; and the governmental solutions concerted and costly but thus far largely ineffective.

Metro agencies have ramped up policing solutions to get a handle on this national crisis. Some have resorted to unconventional tactics, like playing classical music very loud inside stations to keep homeless loiterers away, out of seeming desperation.58 As cities and Metros flounder, the National Guard seem an enticing silver bullet for local politicians; mayors or councilmembers in New Orleans, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Oakland spoke for or against National Guard deployment to their cities to fight crime in the past year.5960 6162 In national politics, former President Donald Trump -- and likely Republican nominee for the 2024 elections -- has called for the mass deployment of the National Guard across cities “until law and order is restored” in March as response to crime and homelessness in urban areas.63

Will we see metal detectors on New York City subway stations, or the National Guard on the “L” in Chicago, or facial recognition scanners on BART in San Francisco? It still remains highly unlikely. But the answer stands on shaky grounds. What is more solid is that the reader may no longer plead ignorance should this overbearing future arrive at our train stations. The militarizing Metro is ripe for picking.

Activists from the Solidarity Against Disability Discrimination (SADD) are surrounded by Seoul Metro workers and police during a protest on Jan. 3, 2023. (Courtesy: Yonhap News)

In April 2022, I published on this blog an overview of the frequent protests held inside Seoul Metro by the disability activist organization Solidarity Against Disability Discrimination (SADD). When I wrote that piece, the protests were about six months old. The piece was published during a rare detente between the two sides after the South Korean presidential election. I concluded it saying it is “impossible to predict how this will conclude” as neither SADD nor Seoul Metro came together to resolve the ongoing protests.

After requests for a follow-up, I am writing to you nine months later. The protests have continued into its third year. Even within my pessimistic conclusion, I was shocked to see an escalation against SADD (also known in Korean by its abbreviation, 전장연) by some of South Korea’s highest powers: the City of Seoul, Seoul Police and the ruling People’s Power Party. Starting this year, the City of Seoul have responded with “zero tolerance”, running trains through stations wherever there is a SADD protest and barricading the entrances with police with shields.

I write this update in yet another rare moment of detente. After a month of frosty negotiations, SADD and Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon have agreed to an in-person discussion on February 2 with no conditions. City of Seoul representatives have called for a pause in protests until the discussion, stating “due to SADD’s subway protests, the citizens’ patience has reached its limits.”1

Tensions are high between SADD and Oh’s City Hall, and this first in-person meeting does not guarantee a breakthrough. This conflict may continue well into the year; SADD earlier this month declared they will be protesting on Metro Line 4 every weekday excluding holidays until their demands are met.2

What has happened between the nine months, and where does this conflict stand exactly?

A Refresher

For some transit-interested readers, the premise of this prolonged conflict involving Seoul Metro may be confusing. Seoul Metro is often touted as one of the world’s greatest Metro systems. Another confounding factor is that only 19 out of Seoul Metro’s 302 stations are lacking wheelchair-accessible elevators. So what exactly has these protesters so upset?

It cannot be understated that SADD’s demands are more holistic than just accessible Metro stations. Their demands are: more procurement of low-floor buses nationwide; fully accessible subway systems in Seoul and elsewhere; permanent allocation for transit means for the disabled; and a ‘one station, one route’ policy in Seoul Metro which allows for people with disabilities and senior citizens to move between the station platform and the fare gates without requiring special assistance. (Author’s note: the demands may have shifted slightly but I have not found anything to suggest that.)

Only one demand was briefly on the government’s table for negotiation last year. In August, the Ministry of Finance rejected SADD’s budget proposal increase for citizens with disabilities and counter-offered with a budget less than 1% of SADD’s proposal.3 Accordingly, SADD resumed its subway protests in September.

It is critical to also see SADD’s protests as part of a 21-year-long struggle, as they repeatedly stress to the media. In 2001, an elderly couple using a Seoul Metro station wheelchair lift was thrown off; one was severely injured and one died from injuries. This sparked South Korea’s first disability rights demonstrations, with activists from SADD chaining themselves to buses and trains and lying prostate on Metro tracks. SADD claims little has changed since 2001, and they are fed up with 21 years of lies and broken promises from the government.

Since the presidential election of right-wing candidate Yun Suk-yeol in March 2022, the ruling People Power Party has engaged little with SADD. Its former party chairman and erstwhile darling Lee Jun-Seok made headlines last spring lambasting SADD as “minority rule” tyranny emboldened by political correctness. Now, Mayor Oh — the next most recognizable PPP politician after Yun — is leading the charge.

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A New “Zero Tolerance” Policy

On December 26, Oh preemptively declared a “zero tolerance” policy against SADD protests scheduled to begin after New Year’s Day.4 On his Facebook account, Oh wrote "There will be no more generosity toward illegality...As mayor, I can no longer overlook damage and inconvenience inflicted on ordinary citizens." (Are disabled people not "ordinary citizens", a common retort to this announcement goes)

On January 2, the first SADD protest occurred at Samgakji Station on Metro Line 4. SADD protesters on wheelchairs were barricaded from entering approaching trains with eight riot police units dispatched to create the blockade.5 SADD organizers told the press their protest plans were to board a train and leave within five minutes to avoid penalties and not disrupt train service, as mandated in a recent court mediation.

Samgakji station’s platform was overcrowded with SADD protesters, police, staff from the City of Seoul and Seoul Metro and media, and there were minor scuffles were attendees were trying to make space. During SADD's press conference, a Seoul Metro employee representing as Samgakji station’s manager repeatedly broadcasted a pre-written message ordering protesters to leave the station.6 SADD ultimately left Samgakji Station to enter another station to board a train but to no avail.

Oh’s “zero tolerance” policy against SADD riled up liberal and left-wing demographics who have been sympathetic to the cause. The left-leaning newspaper Hankyoreh editorial board wrote the January 2 debut of the zero tolerance rule was “callous” and “clearly an excessive response.” Hankyoreh also reported a mass flurry of sympathizers sharing screenshots of their donations to SADD after Oh’s declaration on social media.7

Hankyoreh also reports the elevator at Samgakji was out of service on January 2 but found no records of this elevator in Seoul Metro’s elevator repair logs. This is significant, as if true, this won’t be Seoul Metro’s first time shutting down elevators to block wheelchaired protesters. In December 2021, Seoul Metro had to issue a public apology after reports surfaced of the agency intentionally shutting down an elevator at Hyehwa Station.8

Nearly all SADD protests in January have accompanied blockades and run-through trains to stymie the protesters. The one exception was at Oido Station on January 22, on the 21st anniversary of the wheelchair lift accident which sparked the modern Korean disability rights movement. After three hours of protesting on the platforms, protesters were allowed to board a train for their court-mandated five minutes on the conditions they not use any speakers or hand out flyers.9

SADD lead organizer Park Gyeong-seok is led through a train car in a steel cage. (Courtesy Seoul Sinmun)

“We Will Pursue Justice ‘Til the End of the World”

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon’s hardline policy was not the first zero tolerance stance taken against SADD. In June, new Seoul Police Chief Kim Gwang-ho criticized the protests, saying they were forcibly “tying the feet of citizens" and his Seoul Police will uphold rule of order against SADD’s increasingly disruptive protests paralyzing Seoul Metro.

“A legal order has been established, and regarding illegal conduct, we will pursue justice 'til the end of the world,” said Kim.10

Soon the prosecutors entered the fray. In July, prosecutors from the Seoul Central District Court recommended SADD’s lead organizer and de-facto leader Park Gyeong-seok six months in prison for a 2021 protest where Park and 20 of his members forced a bus to standstill for 23 minutes during evening rush hour in central Seoul.11 In October, the first court sentenced Park to four months in prison and two years of probation; Park's lawyers appealed the sentence immediately. (Hence Park's visibility in SADD protests since.)12

At his sentencing, Park said “the protests are not illegal…the right to travel for the disabled has not been fully guaranteed, and the low-floor buses currently in use remain difficult for people with disabilities to use smoothly. This defendant was forced to inform this reality desperately and urge policies such as securing the budget (to benefit people with disabilities).”13

Twenty days prior to his sentencing, Park and 10 SADD members protested inside Seoul Metro trains during morning hours. Park, who became paralyzed from waist down after a hang glider accident, entered the trains handcuffed inside a steel cage. Despite numerous complaints from riders, Park insisted the cage symbolized the plight of a Korean citizen with disabilities — unable to join society from the imposed cage.14

SADD Representatives at the Samgakji Station protest on January 2, 2023, with one holding a five-minute timer to follow court-mandated mediation conditions. (Courtesy: JoongAng Ilbo)

Counting Time, Counting Fines

On December 19, a week before Mayor Oh’s “zero tolerance declaration”, the Seoul Central District Court issued a mediation to stop the SADD protests. The Court issued that the remaining 19 Seoul Metro stations without an escalators be installed by 2024, thus making Seoul Metro 100% accessible.15 In this first mediation adjustment, the Court issued that SADD would not be allowed to protest inside a train for more than five minutes as to not impact train service. Going above this five-minute limit would put SADD liable for a 5 Million Won (~$4000) fine.16

As seen on the January 2 protest at Samgakji, SADD organizers brought a timer prop to show they would obey the mediation. Seoul Metro and the City of Seoul, however, never accepted the mediation. On January 10, the Court issued a second mediation offer excluding the five-minute limit. Again, SADD accepted the offer and Seoul Metro and the City of Seoul declined.17 Seoul Metro rejected on the second mediation offer on grounds it would make pursuing fair compensation from SADD for damages difficult, as debt and bonds cannot be claimed.18

Seoul Metro has made pursuing fair compensation for damages against SADD a priority. On January 10, Seoul Metro filed a damages suit against SADD totaling 601.45 million Won (~$490,000) for train delays and other losses on 75 total protests spanning from December 3, 2021 until December 15, 2022.1920 This is the second lawsuit Seoul Metro filed against SADD; in November 2022, Seoul Metro demanded 30 million Won (~$20,000) in damages for protests which occurred in November 2021.

Is There An End?

In April 2022, SADD’s Park Gyeong-seok and then former People Power Party chairman Lee Jun-seok met in a 1-on-1 televised debate. The debate drew widespread interest (currently at 1.3 million views for the full hour debate).

During the debate, they began discussing the logistics of replacing current high-floor buses (“inaccessible buses”, as Park repeatedly interjects) to accessible low-floor buses nationwide. Lee asks if SADD’s request is to discard all high-floor buses now, which Park responds as impractical and something SADD never demanded.

Lee then says if there was a bill to allow for this now, it will still take five to seven years. Park reflexively says that would take 10-plus years, perhaps revealing his distrust after past broken promises. Lee soldiers on saying this is the fastest legal recourse and asks Park if SADD will be “satisfied” by the procurement of low-floor buses (as, Lee notes, his party has endorsed). Park looks for a moment exasperated and says it is not a matter of satisfaction. Even if procurement took more than a decade, says Park, there will be other buses and obstacles for people with disabilities will need to fight for.

This quick-fire moment stood out to me as a snapshot for how wide SADD and the status quo stand apart from each other. SADD’s demands boil down to more equal access in mobility and rights and dignity for people with disabilities. For Lee and the political strata, it is a mere action item to somehow stop these disruptive Metro protests. Caught in the middle, the discourse spins like a hamster wheel, focused on whether the protesters will ever be “satisfied.”

Barring a miracle between Mayor Oh and SADD in the February 2 meeting, the protests will likely continue with no concessions in sight from both sides. With Oh’s zero tolerance policy, the City of Seoul sought to stop SADD's service impacts on its critical Metro. A perhaps ominous twist for the future, the Seoul Central District Public Investigation Department has begun investigations into the SADD protests to determine the legality of these protests.21

On the other side, SADD declared Seoul can expect to see 260 total days of protest in 2023 should it last all year. All sides have dug in their heels. The situation has worsened since April 2022. Unfortunately, things may get worse before they start getting better.

Two JNR staff hold the Japanese National Railways’ flag in 1970. (Source)

In my previous post, I examined the birth of the Japanese National Railways (JNR) and the conditions from 1945 to 1949 which greatly shaped the visions and more importantly, the limits, of JNR’s administrative powers. The American-led Supreme Commander for Allied Powers (SCAP) sought an autonomous, politically robust and financially sustainable JNR public corporation – in the mold of the New Deal-era Tennessee Valley Authority – with strong labor unions as its muscle. But during negotiations in 1948, SCAP’s vision for an autonomous JNR was stripped away by the Japanese political establishment which took advantage of a SCAP increasingly distracted by the spectre of rising communism in Japan (especially in the labor movement) and East Asia. 

JNR’s first decade after its birth in 1949 was wildly successful. JNR enjoyed comfortable profits and increasingly high ridership through the 1950s and the early 1960s. In a postwar Japan simultaneously recovering and setting new standards of postwar economic prosperity, JNR effectively held a land transportation monopoly in both passenger and freight travel. It was during this time JNR leverage its profits and land monopolies to rebuild and expand its rail network at breakneck pace. Electrification of its major trunk intercity lines was completed in the 1950s. In the rapidly growing Tokyo region, JNR invested billions of Yen to expand its train throughput and capacity on five critical trunk lines. In the late 1950s, JNR proposed a new intercity train service to connect Tokyo and Osaka in record time: the Tokaido Shinkansen.

In 1964, the same year JNR opened the Tokaido Shinkansen ten days before the Tokyo Olympics, JNR recorded its first major fiscal deficit. JNR management assured this would be a one-time blip.1 The deficit grew slowly the next few years then exploded in 1968. Any private corporation would have been well liquidated before 1970, but the public JNR soldiered on as it bled profusely every year. After JNR’s multiple failed internal reforms in the 1970s, cries for accountability and administrative reform sparked a niche elitist movement which sped through a staggering pace. Under such momentum, the monolithic JNR was dissolved and split in 1987, its expansive trackage and massive train fleets split between six regional (and one freight) private Japanese Railways (JR) companies.

Most prosaic explanations diagnose JNR’s downfall in an Edward Gibbons-esque prose: a bloated, rotten, bankrupt public entity corrupted by lazy union workers hastened the need for radical change in the neoliberalism-crazed 1980s. But this has always been too juvenile a history, wholly unable to capture the velocity and weight of the collapse. Economic narratives work better; JNR lost its land transportation monopoly as both passenger and freight transportation slid in market share to private automobiles and trucks. By 1970, cars and trucks would surpass railways in transportation market share, and JNR was unable to overcome their market share decline. But the broad strokes miss out on the fine details.

This two-parter aims to explore not only the progression of that narrative but plug holes. Readily available explanations rarely explain how JNR’s debt ballooned to the size comparable to sovereign nations (its cumulative deficit mark hit the 20 trillion Yen, or roughly $87 billion in 1981 USD, mark); why the debt crisis got this bad; where exactly JNR failed in its revenue earning capabilities; where and when the privatization movement began; and how such a movement was achieved in a few years.2 Other public national railways in developed nations have their flaws but none have been dissolved into history like JNR. What made this case so exceptional?

It is the emphasis of this post to prescribe the death of the 38-year-old Japanese National Railways as a political murder, ranging between a mercy killing and an assassination depending on your sympathies for JNR and its conditions. As JNR became insolvent in the 1960s, the Diet and the Ministry of Transport – the two final arbiters of JNR’s annual budgets – refused to allay the situation until the 1980s. Despite attempts at internal reform, JNR was at the whims of Diet politicians who used it as an open check for their own easy political wins. Starting in the 1970s, a small group of politicians, bureaucrats and academics pushed for administrative reform across all of government but only through political savvy was JNR targeted in the open as the sacrificial lamb at the altar of neoliberalism in the 1980s. It took a wily, experienced Prime Minister once derided as the “weathervane” to make the JNR privatization his signature political achievement come true.3

In this history of the dissolution and privatization of JNR, we delve into the conditions which fostered the administrative reform movement, the motivations of the reformers, the gradual blossoming of the movement, and the political and media influences which effectively sealed victory for the reformers. The JNR privatization was, as one observer put it, was a “coup d’etat within the court”: a revolution inside the bounds of civil government.4 Understanding this history will either elicit admiration or disgust based on your personal political leanings. It also may elucidate what it takes to realize such a change, how to do it and exactly how much is transferable to other countries – should one want it so.

Author’s Note

When discussing the issue of privatization in passenger rail on a national scale, proponents often point to the stellar success of JR as proof of transferability. JR, indeed, has been a favorite example neoliberals point for the success of privatization. The discourse, however, can only remain shallow without understanding a more comprehensive history of its predecessor, JNR. This is the second of a multi-part examination of JNR’s history, and aforementioned, a critical timeline and history in understanding both the fall of JNR and birth of JR.

To accomplish this work, I rely heavily on two English-language papers found online: University of Stirling academic Ian Smith’s 1996 study “The Privatisation of the JNR in Historical Perspective: An Evaluation of Government Policy on the Operation of National Railways in Japan” and Ohio State University academic Eunbong Choi’s 1991 study “The Break-up and Privatization Policy of the Japan National Railways, 1980-87: A Case Study of Japanese Public Policy-Making Structure and Process.”

As with all previous S(ubstack)-Bahn posts on Japan, I welcome all feedback, including corrections, to any facts listed in this article. I do not speak Japanese and acknowledge I am working with a fractional amount of literature on this topic only available in English. In fact, in the months of research, reading and writing, I can sense there is much literature in Japanese on this topic that is not easily available to an English speaker in the United States. But nonetheless, thanks to the written works of Smith and Choi, I feel compelled to explore and examine to the best I can. I consider this — and all I write on S(ubstack)-Bahn — to be incomplete, amateur histories for myself and others to build upon, not to settle as gospel.

The Emergent Debt Crisis

On October 1, 1964, the Tokaido Shinkansen opened to the world’s awe as the first bullet train in the world. The Shinkansen reduced a trip from Tokyo to Osaka which took nearly seven hours by more than half at just over three hours. Opened just 10 days before the start of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the Shinkansen was Japan’s grand proclamation to the world that a prosperous, high-technology post-war Japan had arrived. 

In 1964, Japanese National Railways, the builder and operator of the Tokaido Shinkansen, marked its first deficit since its foundation in 1949 at 30 billion Yen. Its worst previous lossmaking year was 1955 at 183 million Yen, but a 226 million Yen profit the next year quickly erased the deficit and related concerns.5 Despite a much higher 30 billion Yen deficit, the Japanese government in 1964 regarded it as a “temporary phenomenon.”6 The Diet – who gives final approval to JNR’s operating and capital budgets – clearly was not fazed: in 1965, the Diet approved JNR’s Third Five Year Long Term Plan which included capital investments of 1,420 billion Yen, including for the Commuting Five Directions Operation to fix Tokyo’s rail congestion problems.7

1964 was a long time coming. Through the 1950s and 1960s, its market share of passenger and freight travel has slipped to the private automobile and truck, respectively. In 1950, JNR commanded 60% and 52% of Japan’s passenger and freight travel market shares, respectively; by 1965, the shares slipped to 45% and 30%.8 Private automobiles by 1965 made up 35% and 26% of the market share in passenger and freight travel. Cars and trucks would surpass railways in this race by 1970. 

JNR’s 1964 deficit was accumulated mainly from the increasingly unprofitable operations in the local passenger and freight services connecting rural towns and villages distant from rapidly growing cities. It should be noted that the Tokaido Shinkansen, JNR’s shiny new toy, did not add to this annual deficit. The Tokaido Shinkansen project broke ground in 1959 with a 159 billion Yen budget, made entirely of government loans, railway bonds and a low-interest $80 million loan from the World Bank. Largely due to the sharp price increases in land acquisition, the Tokaido Shinkansen’s budget doubled to 380 billion Yen – the extra burden of which were paid with more loans.9 Nevertheless, the Tokaido Shinkansen was an instant financial success and would remain JNR’s most profitable golden goose in generating rail-related revenue, even after future Shinkansen lines came into service.

Increasingly unprofitable local passenger lines, especially on the main Honshu Island, mushroomed in trackage. JNR was obligated by the Diet to operate additional railway lines being built in rural areas with little wiggle room for the corporation to give feedback or object. In 1951, the government established the Railway Construction Council to manage railway construction on behalf of the national interest. For the next thirteen years, the Railway Construction Council ordered JNR to construct 80 new railway lines – in mostly rural areas – which JNR would have to operate indefinitely.10 This Council had 29 members but only one was a JNR representative. Perhaps more egregiously, the 80 new lines were determined using a plan for a comprehensive national rail network set in 1922 – a whole generation before World War II and the total postwar reshuffling of Japan’s demographics.11

In 1964, the government replaced the Railway Construction Council with the Japan Railway Construction Public Corporation to allow the latter to provide funding for railway construction projects in both the public and private sectors.12 The Japan Railway Construction Public Corporation however worsened JNR’s position, as it directly funded new railway constructions which JNR would have to operate. Under the previous Council, JNR were still able to make objections to newly planned railway lines and offer revisions. This mechanism, however lacking to JNR’s bottom line, was stripped away with the arrival of the new corporation. As Smith notes with the new corporation, “the Diet effectively removed the impetus of JNR opposition to the continuation of the policy of building lines which even at the outset were known to be unprofitable.”13 Adding salt to the wound, Japan Railway Construction Public Corporation continued to use the 1922 framework to lay out future new lines all the way into the late 1970s. By 1980, when the practice was stopped under the new JNR Reconstruction Act, rural routes accounted for 40% of JNR’s total trackage but only 5% of its ridership.14

Chart of JNR Revenues and Costs, divided between the trunk lines and local lines. Source: Ian Smith’s “The Privatisation of the JNR in Historical Perspective: An Evaluation of Government Policy on the Operation of National Railways in Japan.”

In 1966, JNR reported an operating loss of 123 billion Yen, four times the loss it reported in 1964.15 JNR’s reserves were obliterated. Had it been a private company, JNR would have declared bankruptcy and been liquidated with such a loss. JNR’s capital budget was similarly obliterated in 1967, when JNR’s financing scheme for the Diet-approved Third Five Year Long Term Plan collapsed, leaving JNR responsible for a mountain of high-interest bonds. In 1965, JNR issued large amounts of railway bonds without a government guarantee to fund the plan after Ministry of Finance disapproved entrance to its government-backed Fiscal Investment and Loan Program (FILP).16 The Ministry of Finance effectively balked at the huge spike of annual investments requested by JNR compared to past years, and JNR went its own way to raise funds. Within two years of issuance, JNR was reduced to “issuing tokubetsu (special) bonds to meet the interest payments on its railway bonds.”17 While the national government began to provide subsidies to ease the capital debt burden starting in 1969 (the operating subsidies would come to rescue in the 1970s), researcher Nobuo Takahashi writes this financing scheme failure as the “direct cause” of JNR’s bankruptcy and downfall. 18

Despite the alarming consecutive years in the red, the Diet pressed for expansionary spending from JNR throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was financial prudence thrown out the window, but it was sound politics within the contours of the Liberal Democratic Party, which maintained a one-party rule in Japan since 1955. The first decades of LDP’s big tent coalition was founded upon a high and ironclad rural turnout. Keeping its main rivals the Socialist Party at arm’s length from power, the Dietary LDP sought to score easy political wins for their rural or small town constituency, and the path of least resistance often was a new or improved JNR rail line. Many elected LDP members were retired senior bureaucrats who were intimately close to their successors and well-versed in party machine politics.19 The elitist, incestual Japanese bureaucracy which the American occupiers in the 1940s worried would consume Japanese politics turned out to be prescient.

Under hypnotic political influence despite heavy hemorrhaging, JNR from 1969 to 1973 proposed more spending. After the premature end of the Third Five Year Long Term Plan in 1968 (and the financing scheme disaster), JNR’s new Reconstruction Plan in 1969 called for the construction of the Tohoku Shinkansen, connecting the northern half of Honshu Island to Tokyo.20 In its 1972 Corporate Plan (scrapped before put into action) and 1973 Reconstruction Plan, JNR sought to match the ambitious tone of new LDP Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, who in June 1972 proclaimed the remodeling of the Japanese archipelago, with new industrial centers away from Tokyo and Osaka and huge infrastructural projects to deliver prosperity to Japan. 21New Shinkansen lines would be the crown jewel to connect Tanaka’s Japan and expand the “National Railway Empire”;  JNR proposed plans in the Reconstruction Plan for 11 new Shinkansen lines, including the Joetsu Shinkansen which would connect Tokyo to Niigata – Tanaka’s beloved hometown.22 Unlike the Tokaido Shinkansen, Tohoku and Joetsu Shinkansen would prove to be instantly and incredibly unprofitable operations once it opened for revenue service in the 1980s. Their opening would only accelerate JNR’s exponentially growing deficit figures in its final years.

JNR’s acquiescence was not due to a lack of effort. In 1968, JNR management proposed to close a large number of its unprofitable local lines, but they were rebuffed by the Ministry of Transport.23 In its deliberations for the Five Year Long Term Plan in 1965, JNR proposed the ability to issue domestic bonds of its own and a revision of the tariff rate to be able to raise passenger fares and freight rates to balance their manageable debt. Both were struck down by the Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, citing concerns of escalating inflation.24 (Not to mention the Ministry of Finance rejected JNR's request for government-backed FILP bonds en masse, per Takahashi) Concerns were raised inside JNR and outside sources in the early 1970s to scale down JNR’s rapidly unprofitable freight operations but was swiftly ignored by the JNR Board and, more importantly, the Diet who were fully committed to Tanaka’s expansionary and industrialized remodeling dream.25

For Tanaka, his Dietary LDP, and JNR, the dream would come crashing down in the Oil Shock of 1973. As the second largest importer in the world after the U.S., and one whose petroleum supply was wholly imported, the Oil Shock profoundly shook the Japanese economy.26 The government was suddenly strapped for capital, and a real estate boom – partly caused by Tanaka’s bold proclamations – collapsed.27 The Japanese economy went into a recession, as did much of the developed world. The Reconstruction Plan was scrapped in less than a year. JNR missed yet another stop for reclamation.

The Asahi Shinbun newspaper on a passenger riot on April 25, 1973 at Akabane Station in Tokyo. The photo shows a train lit on fire. The riot was sparked by frustrated riders impacted by JNR unions’ slow-down strike. The article also writes a total of 26 JNR stations were vandalized and destroyed by similar riots. (Source)

The Reform Circus

By 1969, the fifth consecutive year being in the red, JNR was ready to take action to fix itself. From 1969 until 1980, JNR proposed a total of seven reform plans to do just that. None of them made any inroads toward solvency; the deficit would continue to spiral. If anything, the most impactful proposals would harm JNR’s relationships with two closest allies: unionized workers and the national ridership.

In 1969, JNR made its first reform attempt in the only manner they knew then: expanding its network and increasing investment to combat the rising market share of private automobiles. The plan was soon scrapped, as was the 1972 Corporate Plan and the 1973 Reconstruction Plan. After the 1973 plan was scrapped due to the Oil Shock, only then did JNR management muster the courage to abandon its expansionary pitches and look toward rehabilitation by reducing its workforce, requesting sustainable sources of government subsidies and limiting its expansions.28

In 1975, the fourth reform plan proposed workforce rationalization and more government aid but also with a 50% increase in passenger fares nationwide. The fare increase was allowed after the government finally relaxed its tariff rate controls after nearly two decades of suppressed fare increases. Repeated Diet pressures to keep fares artificially low as part of its domestic economic policy contributed to very affordable fares lagging far behind annual inflation rates. A sudden, 20-year-high jump in fare prices angered riders and depressed JNR’s ridership as choice riders in larger metropolitan areas opted for now-cheaper private railways (they were adjusting fares accordingly in the same timespan) or resorting to use of private automobile. To keep up its debt obligations and catch up to the rate of inflation, JNR running under relaxed tariff controls increased passenger fares between 4% and 16% and freight rates — despite transport volumes virtually collapsing behind the truck industry in the 1970s — between 3% and 10% every year from 1978 until 1987.29

The reforms targeted inside the house as well. Arguably the most important reform plan of the 1970s was the Productivity Increase Movement (Marusei Undon), a multi-year effort declared by management to reduce labor waste, improve productivity and synchronize management-labor relations. The main objective for the movement was to offload much of a 430,000 strong workforce which was aging and soon in need of pensions — something a destitute JNR had little reserves to fund.30

The Productivity Increase Movement’s legacy, however, was the destruction of most remaining goodwill between management and the labor unions – and among the various JNR labor unions themselves. A new moderate and pro-management labor union Tetsuro emerged during this time period and rapidly expanded due to its acquiescence to the Productivity Increase Movement and warm relationship to management.31 The pre-existing unions, Kokuro and Doro, were radicalized by a hostile management and Tetsuro’s concurrent moves to alienate and fracture their labor front. Between 1973 and 1975, unions held illegal slowdowns and walk-outs to protest against its management.

Riders across Japan did not handle the sudden disruptions well; during the March 1973 slowdown, enraged commuters stranded at Ageo Station in suburban Tokyo rampaged and destroyed the station, took hostage the stationmaster and stoned the unmoving trains.32 A month later, another slowdown strike led to 26 stations being vandalized and destroyed, with an undisclosed amount of trains set on fire. Popular discontent against JNR unions for these actions began to brew from these impacts, and such bitter memories would prove to be a powerful source for anti-public corporation sentiment during the lead-up to JNR privatization in the 1980s.

A video on the 1973 train riots above

Starting in 1977, the government began relaxing many of its fiscal restraints put against JNR for almost 30 years. The Diet relinquished its controls on the tariff rate altogether and ended restrictions on investments outside the mainstream railway business in 1977. In 1980, the JNR Reconstruction Act passed by the Diet finally released JNR from the obligation to help construct and operate new rail lines and abandoned the 1922 framework used to plan new, unprofitable rail lines in rural areas.33 Also in 1980, the JNR Management Improvement Plan was drafted with the intent to establish a fiscally sound JNR operation by 1985. The days of JNR’s expansionary modus operandi were over, albeit very overdue. The delay would prove indeed too late; the 1980 plan would be the last reform plan from JNR to fix its finances before its privatization seven years later. 

By the late 1970s, a national disillusion had set in among elite bureaucratic circles on Japan’s economic direction. Japan’s public finances was dangerously over-reliant on government bonds by 1980, with nearly a third of Japan’s total revenue met with money raised by national bonds. The Ministry of Finance warned it as an emergency.34 Government spending rocketed in the 1970s, as its welfare state grew in volume largely to accommodate medical and pension costs to an aging population. Select bureaucrats and academics looked abroad and towards a new economic movement called neoliberalism and sought to import that to Japan. Some adopted the slogan “Financial Reconstruction Without a Tax Increase” to begin the push for neoliberal-flavored administrative reforms to correct the state’s course.35

The administrative reform movement had been born in the late 1970s, but it had no tangible agenda and no target in its early years. But things soon would break their way: as the 1980s unfolded, the movement’s leaders were rather catapulted into strategic positions of influence deep inside the state to push for their reforms. After their ascension, they needed a target, a white whale, for their movement’s growth. The JNR, bloated by its titanic debt, looked like an easy kill.

The Wheels Turn for Big Change

It must be stressed that despite JNR’s 20 trillion Yen deficit by 1983 – which at the time was equivalent to national debts of at least two South American countries combined – JNR’s day-to-day operations were not impacted in any meaningful manner.36 Even with the ugly explosions of labor strife in the mid-1970s, JNR was highly popular and its workforce still carried the spirit of pride working for the national railways, a tradition carried over from before World War II.

Despite the struggling rural lines and a decline in transport market shares, JNR through the 1960s and 1970s maintained the high level of service frequency, cleanliness and organization renowned internationally to this day. It is evidenced by the continued growth in ridership in the Tokaido Shinkansen and its trunk lines, mainly between and in the Tokyo and Osaka metropolitan areas. Smith writes that the post-privatization accounts of attributing JNR’s demise to its falling quality of life are mere revisionism: (bold for emphasis)37

It is ironic, therefore, that the picture painted of worsening labour relations, and of conflict between management and the unions – used later by the pro-JNR reform movement shold have produced, in reality, relatively little disruption to rail services. Whatever other sins of remission can be laid at the door of the JNR, the failure to maintain regular, prompt and efficient train services was manifestly not of them. There were commuter protests…but, in the main, the level of service provided to the public was kept at a level of which any other national railway would be immensely proud. In any case, the number of disruptions had already started to decline dramatically, several years before the administrative reform process moved into action. It remains a moot point, therefore, whether the reform policies were formulated in relation to the reality of the state of labour relations in the JNR in the early 1980s, or in line with some image of strife and conflict which by then was not supported by fact.

The administrative reform movement entered the mainstream as a vague government promise during a snap Diet election in 1980. Liberal Democrat Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira died of a heart attack during the campaign, and the LDP rallied around Ohira’s death to win back a Diet majority. Ohira’s successor, Zenko Suzuki, was keenly aware of the growing desire to hold unelected powerful bureaucrats accountable and of concerns over Japan’s overly reliant bond financing. Suzuki pledged to resolve the public financing crisis with reforms the public can trust.38

In November 1980, the Second Ad Hoc Administrative Reform Commission (or Second Rincho, as both Smith and Choi calls it) was created and held deliberations the next year. In its first report to the government, the Second Rincho called for welfare cuts to its next fiscal budget; JNR was hardly mentioned.39 As Second Rincho continued to convene, the focus turned to bureaucracies and public corporations where the committee can find recommendations for improvement. Soon, the Second Rincho locked eyes on the three public corporations, known as San Kocha, as a package to cut fat and subsidy reliance: Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT); Japan Tobacco and Salt Public Corporation; and the Japanese National Railways.40

After the first report, the Second Rincho in fall 1981 split into four subcommittees to diversify and narrow from its broader aims of administrative reform to more direct and tangible reforms. The Fourth Subcommittee would focus on the San Kocha as a whole and would soon become the only subcommittee worthy of intrigue.41 At its inception, the subcommittee’s aims were more at the NTT and the Japan Tobacco and Salt Public Corporation, as its overseeing ministries commanded little power and more pliable to outside change and recommendations from the subcommittee.42 But as the subcommittee delved in its discovery phase, its aim to reform all three public corporations would quickly narrow to a full-throated offensive to privatize and split JNR. This quick pivot would prove possible because of a handful of men coming together for, even in early 1982, just five years before privatization, a mere political pipe dream.

The influential and octogenarian businessman Toshio Doko. (Source)

All the Prime Minister’s Men

Two men at the helm of the Second Rincho and the Fourth Subcomittee steered the ship. Toshiwo Doko was appointed by Prime Minister Suzuki to chair the Second Rincho. Doko was the former President of Federation of Economic Organizations (Keidanren), Japan’s largest and most powerful big business association. Doko was ardently pro-business and anti-taxation and came into his new appointment with a “telling conviction” that reform without taxation was the tonic which would spur new prosperity to the nation.43 His leanings were reflected in the Second Rincho’s composition, as business interests and a journalist from the right-wing newspaper Nikkei Shinbun created the majority over labor union delegates.44

The contours of privatization began to take shape under the Fourth Subcommittee and its chair Hiroshi Kato, who reported to Doko. Kato, a professor at Keio University, sought to compose his subcommittee free from bureaucratic interests; only five of the 16 members were former and current public sector employees.45 While Kato himself was initially not convinced of privatization for JNR, his subcommittee included academics with an extensive record advocating for privatization or criticizing JNR’s freight business model.46 The Fourth Subcommittee submitted its first report in April 1982, submitting – for the first time in any reform group so far – recommendations to privatize and divide JNR into sectional companies.47 Three months later, the subcommittee submitted another report, officially confirming its stance for the first time that JNR be broken up.48

JNR’s board and upper management’s reaction at the time was opaquely muted and delayed in public, but internally it clearly showed a “high degree of complacency and lack of concern” according to Smith.49 They also seemed to be rather unaware of enemies already inside the gate. Three mid-level executives, eager for reform, would covertly work with Doko and Kato to pressure JNR for systemic change and soon lead an internal campaign to dissolve JNR. Known as the San Nin Gumi (Group of Three), the three executives did not believe the 1980 Management Improvement Plan would succeed and held a longstanding antipathy toward JNR labor unions.50

While the San Nin Gumi were nominally part of a larger pro-reform faction inside JNR, the three conspirators took things further. In an early-stage senior management meeting to discuss how to respond to the Second Rincho, the San Nin Gumi proposed to their higher-ups the dissolution of JNR and dismissal of all its employees to start over and then left their seats. After the theatrics which shocked JNR senior management, “there were no organized, calm discussions within the JNR concerning what the future national railway should be like,” according to a former JNR executive.51

The San Nin Gumi also worked to influence the ruling Liberal Democratic Party to their privatization agenda. To match the alarming pace at which Kato’s Fourth Subcommittee moved forward, the LDP in February 1982 launched its own subcommittee to explore the issue of JNR reform from the Party’s perspective. Much of the LDP apparatus was vehemently opposed to any JNR reform; they were worried any reform would impact the web of “vested interests” which materially benefitted railway management, Diet politicians, and construction and supply companies.52 The San Nin Gumi, however, were quietly influencing and conspiring with the subcommittee chair Hiroshi Mitsutaka by feeding him inside information. The working relationship needed to be covert, so Mitsutaka and the three executives would often meet at nights at the Imperial Hotel in central Tokyo so documents can be drafted for the subcommittee.53

In June 1982, a month before the Fourth Subcommittee’s July report, the LDP Mitsutaka Subcommittee submitted its own report, concluding that systemic changes, including privatization, should be supported on the condition that the 1980 Management Improvement Plan would not succeed. The conclusion shocked much of LDP’s leadership and rank-and-file, as it crossed the Party’s unofficial line and sided with the Second Rincho. With alignment between the reformist-minded Second Rincho and ostensibly the LDP, the ammunition — at least in the working papers department — to privatize and split JNR was fully stocked. After the July report from the Fourth Subcommittee officially calling for privatization, preparations immediately began to form a JNR Reform Commission (which would begin the next year) to dictate the recommendation into law. In September 1982, the Suzuki government announced firm plans to reconstruct JNR within five years.54

The announcement is a very long way from where Suzuki must have imagined when he created the Second Rincho in November 1980 to stamp his approval to the popular but nascent administrative reform movement. Within two years, privatization of JNR (and the NTT and Japan Tobacco and Salt Public Corporation) emerged from a pipe dream to a serious proposal. However, at the end of 1982, such ideas were still constrained mostly in committee meetings, lacking the political muscle to push it over the finish line. Suzuki – who faced constant Cabinet instability due to LDP factionalism – stepped down in November 1982. The next Prime Minister would need to expend huge personal political capital and navigate a still-murky political landscape to accomplish what, even in 1982, must have been seen still as improbable.

First responders carry the casket of JNR President Sadanori Shimoyama after his body was found dismembered on the Joban Line in Abachi on July 6, 1949. (Source)

On the morning of July 5, 1949, Sadanori Shimoyama went into a department store in central Tokyo to buy a birthday gift for his wife. Less than 24 hours later, he was found dead on the rail tracks in the suburbs of Tokyo, his body dismembered after a freight train struck him in the dead of night.1

The death of Shimoyama – on his 35th day into his new job as the first President of a new Japanese National Railways (JNR) – shocked a nation still inured to civilian deaths just four years prior in the final months of World War II. The inconclusive investigation on Shimoyama’s death and its motives continue to grip Japan to this day as one of its great postwar mysteries. To present day, Shimoyama lives on in mystery novels and manga books, the latter drawn by the legendary cartoonist Osamu Tezuka.2

The ‘Shimoyama Incident’ was an ominous start to JNR, a new public corporation overseeing all national rail in Japan. JNR was the brainchild of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) staff led by American general Douglas MacArthur, who sought to rebuild postwar Japan in his image of a democratized and demilitarized nation tightly within the United States’ orbit. As Japan needed to rebuild after surrendering to the Allies, SCAP stressed the importance of an efficient national rail system to its economic recovery and purposefully intervened in the formation of JNR.3 Unlike its predecessor, the Japanese Government Railways, a branch of the Ministry of Transport, JNR was envisioned by SCAP as a profitable public corporation with great autonomy and independent of political influences – both aimed to permanently weaken the remnants of pre-war Japan’s political establishment.

MacArthur and SCAP however were full of contradictions in the critical formation process of JNR from 1947 to 1949. They envisioned a strong union presence for JNR but repeatedly undermined them until openly declaring hostilities by 1949. They dreamed of an autonomous public corporation free from political influence but co-signed the handover of JNR’s most important decision-making powers to the Diet, Japan’s national parliament. They sought to break the remnants of the pre-war, elitist bureaucracy but relinquished control of the JNR to that exact cohort.

Any unfinished business to remold the JNR in SCAP’s image after Shimoyama’s death would be abandoned within a year. By summer of 1950, MacArthur was occupied with Korea, where a civil war would commence in June. He would soon leave Japan to oversee the war efforts. MacArthur would famously be relieved of his duties by President Harry Truman in 1951 due to increasing feuds over the Korean War; a year later in 1952, SCAP would close shop after the United States and Japan signed the Treaty of San Francisco.

The fundamental friction undermining administrative clarity would eventually spiral JNR — which rebuilt and modernized its national rail network, including the new Shinkansen, within 15 years’ span of its creation — into massive debts starting in the 1960s. A vague and byzantine political hierarchical leadership, shortsighted political meddling and the Diet’s general resistance to JNR’s own requested reforms dug JNR further in insolvency, culminating in an eye-watering 37.3 trillion Yen debt by the mid-1980s.4 A frustrated JNR workforce and a hamstrung JNR management – casualties of that aforementioned friction – feuded constantly and built over time longstanding public perceptions of a JNR filled with lazy, uncaring and undisciplined employees in a country with a famed overwork culture.

It all climaxed on April 1, 1987, when JNR was dissolved, privatized and broken up into six Japanese Railways (JR) passenger companies and one freight company through seven legislations passed by the Diet – the supreme powers which catalyzed JNR’s political and financial crises in the first place.

SCAP’s incomplete and inconsistent legacy and its continuous meddling especially on the labor front were foreboding to JNR’s fortunes as much as Shimoyama’s infamous death. The American occupiers had a chance to truly remake Japanese railways – and Japanese public services – in the victor’s vision back in 1945 until as late as 1948. But new priorities, unintended consequences and successful resistance by Japanese political establishment distracted SCAP from achieving its true vision, leaving only compromised realizations. SCAP achieved its base objective – birth of a new Japanese national railway agency – but its successive yield was far more catastrophic. As the academic Ian Smith would stress, and as this author would testify, “the seeds of the ultimate destruction of the JNR were sown at the outset.”5

Author’s Note

When discussing the issue of privatization in passenger rail on a national scale, proponents often point to the stellar success of JR as proof of transferability. The discourse, however, can only remain shallow without understanding a more comprehensive history of its predecessor, JNR. This is the first of a multi-part examination of JNR’s history, starting from the very beginning of postwar Japan through the dissolution of JNR and the birth of JR.

To accomplish this work, I rely heavily on two English-language papers found online: University of Stirling academic Ian Smith’s 1996 study “The Privatisation of the JNR in Historical Perspective: An Evaluation of Government Policy on the Operation of National Railways in Japan” and Ohio State University academic Eunbong Choi’s 1991 study “The Break-up and Privatization Policy of the Japan National Railways, 1980-87: A Case Study of Japanese Public Policy-Making Structure and Process.”

As with all previous S(ubstack)-Bahn posts on Japan, I welcome all feedback, including corrections, to any facts listed in this article. I do not speak Japanese and acknowledge I am working with a fractional amount of literature on this topic only available in English. I recognize the immense disadvantage I am working with to produce these amateur historical examinations. But nonetheless, thanks to the written works of Smith and Choi, I feel compelled to explore and examine to the best I can.

On November 4, 1945 (Showa 20), a train headed for Tokyo with full passengers. This photo was taken in Chiba Prefecture on the way home from shopping for food such as potatoes. (Source: Asahi Shimbun)

Postwar Survival on Rail

On August 15, 1945, Japan unconditionally surrendered to the Allies. During the war years, Japan’s economy and society became entirely dependent on rail as the singular mode for transportation of people and goods. As petroleum supply was choked out by Allied advances in Southeast Asia, gasoline for private automobile use was severely rationed. Trains moved soldiers, rice and most importantly, coal, which provided the country with much-needed energy for its domestic front.6 It is said that even on the day of surrender, when Emperor Hirohito announced the news on radio, some Japanese took solace in the fact that at least the trains were running.7

Despite wholesale bombings by the United States which flattened cities and much of the urban rail infrastructure, the national rail network operated by Japanese Government Railways remained intact. Unlike in the European Theater, where railroads were a crucial and frequent target for Allied bombers, Japanese rail was relatively spared.8 One postwar Japanese economic report tallied only a 10% loss in its rail assets between 1935 and 1945, compared to 81% loss in all commercial ships, another crucial mode of transporting goods through the archipelago nation.9 Despite the relatively light damage, Allied air raids still killed more than 4,400 railway employees and 1,400 passengers.10

Rail became even more central to the Japanese after the surrender. In fact, daily survival depended on trains. Rationed food and supplies were woefully insufficient, and a 1945 rice crop failure exacerbated the critical food shortage nationwide. From November 1945 to October 1946, the daily staple ration for a Japanese adult was 1,042 calories – half of the recommended daily caloric intake for an adult.11 Urban residents would take the train to rural villages to barter their possessions for food. Black markets were prevalent everywhere, especially near train stations in cities. (Black markets over time became present-day alleyways and neighborhoods full of bars and restaurants adored in Tokyo)12 Amid the desperation came depravity; serial killer Yoshio Kodaira targeted young women at busy train stations in Tokyo to rape and murder. Kodaira murdered at least seven women between 1945 and 1946 before being arrested and later executed.13

Despite the reliance on trains, the network itself was in a “state of collapse” by 1945 due to decades of negligence and wartime destruction.14 Since the 1930s, the Japanese Government Railways has appropriated funds reserved for new rolling stock and capital improvements to the nation’s imperialist military efforts. During wartime, profits from railway services were diverted to support armament production.15 The lack of investment, heavy wartime destruction and the rise of passenger volume led to major accidents with heavy casualties. From August 1945 to 1946, Japan recorded 13 rail derailments or accidents which killed more than 10 passengers. Solely from these major accidents, 367 were killed with more than 1,200 injured in total.16 In 1947, a packed wooden train derailed on the Hachiko Line north of Tokyo, killing 184 passengers. The Hachiko Line derailment remains the worst railway accident recorded in Japan.

Despite the anemic conditions of the national rail network, employees and management both maintained huge pride in working for the railways. In the pre-war days, working for the railways was deemed the "pinnacle of the government service in Japan" outside its imperialist operations.17 After the war, the pride continued but combined with a new powerful social force: the emergent labor unions, encouraged by MacArthur in the first year of his command of Japan as a pillar of his democratization efforts of Japan.

In August 1946, a year after the surrender, railway workers tested their new powers when they resisted a government proposal to lay off 130,000 temporary workers to give those jobs to ex-servicemen and repatriates returning from the war fronts or former colonies. Fearing a national rail strike crippling the country already on the brink, Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida compromised to hire some 168,000 ex-servicemen and repatriates without laying off any temporary workers.18 In early 1947, the same workers won from the government wage increases after threatening another national rail strike.19 These early victories for railway workers would carry ramifications for the yet-to-be-born JNR as its overlords sought to wrest societal control back by any means necessary.

The Reverse Course

General Douglas MacArthur landed in Tokyo on August 30, 1945 to take command of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers and reshape postwar Japan at America’s behest. MacArthur would become the ultimate political power in Japan. Under MacArthur’s mandate, SCAP’s Civil Transportation Section (CTS) immediately assessed the condition of the national railway and urged administrative reforms of the Japanese Government Railways as it discovered heavy graft, waste and political interference:

Operated by and as a bureau of the Government, political aims predominated throughout the railway system. Wasteful practices resulted from the emphasis on serving local communities where political leaders would gain benefits…Accounting practices and methods, moreover, made it possible to conceal deficits in such a way that an appearance of prosperity was maintained until 1945.20

The CTS recommendations were in line with MacArthur’s own vision for postwar Japan. MacArthur envisioned the national railway to be independent of general government financing – and of general government encroachment. SCAP staff and an academic committee to restructure the national railway noted the pre-war Ministry of Transport’s penchant for intrusion into railway affairs and finances and recommended their removal from rail operations. The committee closely studied New Deal agencies in the United States – mainly the Tennessee Valley Authority – and public sector corporations in the Soviet Union as models for a new Japanese national rail corporation.21

SCAP sought a mass trade union movement to provide the muscle for their new New Deal-inspired public corporations. In December 1945, the Diet passed the Trade Union Law, which granted workers in both public and private sectors to belong to unions, collectively bargain and take part in strikes. The Trade Union Law was based upon the 1935 Wagner Act in the United States, one of Roosevelt's New Deal Coalition’s hallmark legislations.22 Subsequent pro-union laws in the following months helped the explosion of unions in the Japanese workforce; union membership in the transportation sector alone ballooned from 66,000 in 1945 to 993,000 two years later.23 Overnight, new rail unions like the National Railway Workers Union (nicknamed Kokuro) commanded immense popularity and political will. 

SCAP initially hoped that the liberalization of trade unions would spur an empowered but non-confrontational movement much like the British Labour Party, who were swept into Parliamentary power in 1945.24 In 1947, the Japanese Socialist Party won the most Diet seats and elected its first socialist Prime Minister (who lasted a year). However, SCAP increasingly became alarmed by the unions’ aggression and emboldenment and, most importantly, its increasing affiliation with the Communist Party. The Communists were a fringe political group in Japan, liberated from prison by SCAP after the war and allowed to run for elections under MacArthur’s good graces. Only nine months after allowing Communists and Socialists to hold a May Day parade in 1946, despite threats to MacArthur’s life, SCAP prohibited a general strike in 1947 in its first salvo against the Japanese Left.25 Future tolerance for strikes or progress in protecting labor rights has run out, as SCAP signaled a shift in its governance of Japan known as the “Reverse Course” (Gyaku kosu). The days of a labor-friendly, often Left-leaning SCAP were over.

May Day in Tokyo, Japan; May 1, 1946. More than half a million people attended May Day parades in Japan allowed by General Douglas MacArthur. (National Guardian Photographs; PHOTOS 213; Box 4; Folder 47; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.)

The Mashokan

On July 22, 1948, a letter signed by General MacArthur was delivered to the Japanese Prime Minister Ashida Hitoshi, who took the office from the Socialists four months prior. The letter, known in Japan as the Mashokan, was focused on the National Public Service Law passed in 1947 which established labor rights for public sector employees. MacArthur all but ordered Hitoshi to restrict collective bargaining rights and prohibit strikes by government employees enshrined in the National Public Service Law. Hitoshi complied rapidly, issuing a government ordinance on July 31. In December, the National Public Service Law was revised to MacArthur’s liking. The Mashokan sent shockwaves through Japan’s public sector and labor unions, who were still coming to terms with the Reverse Course.26

Arguably as important as MacArthur’s words on the National Public Service Law was his recommendations for establishing public corporations. The Mashokan specifically called out railways, salt and tobacco as three industries for where public corporations would be best suited to infuse spirits of public service and enterprise.27 In exchange for overhauling its operational structures, a new, more flexible public sector labor relations law was drafted and passed for the three soon-to-arrive public corporations: the Japanese National Railways (known in Japanese as Kokutetsu); Nippon Telegraph and Telephone; and Japan Tobacco and Salt Corporation.28 As MacArthur, the Supreme Commander, wanted, MacArthur received.

But MacArthur’s vision for JNR was limited to the very broad contours, and SCAP staff would feud with each other and the Japanese politicians to define his vision. In the six months of deliberations in 1948 to determine the powers of a new national rail corporation, SCAP’s Civil Transportation Section – who ran the 1945 assessment of the state of Japan’s railways –  insisted on a high degree of independence for JNR, including a Board of Directors, a new government-free accounting system, power of issuance of bonds and ability to dictate its passenger fares and freight rates. But CTS staff faced heavy opposition from the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Transport and the Diet, who wanted JNR to be under its sphere of influence. The scales tipped toward government influence when SCAP’s Economic and Scientific Section ultimately sided with Japan’s government establishment over its CTS peers.29

In December 1948, the JNR Law established JNR as its own public corporation. But it was a far cry from CTS’s initial recommendation of a Tennessee Valley Authority-esque national rail network. If anything, the structures were opposite of what CTS envisioned: The law safeguarded senior civil servants who fought against autonomy and locked in their high status within the company.30 Bonds would have to be issued with Ministry of Transport approval. Annual budgets and accounts will need the Diet’s approval. Setting fares and freight rates would also need Diet’s final approval – with Ministry of Transport approval first. As one observer noted, “the politicians and government officials didn’t want to lose their power…It was ridiculous to expect efficient operation from this organization.”31

Others involved in the formation of JNR have pointed the finger back at SCAP as the reason for their futility. Despite the presence of several successful public corporations in Japan, such as the Teito Rapid Transit Authority which was the main operator of Tokyo’s subways, the CTS ignored such models and opted for American or Soviet replications. The insistence of importing foreign models irked the Japanese counterparts and made them more resistant to sweeping change. The ignorance of Japanese advice by SCAP during their occupation remained a sore point for many involved in the discussions. Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, who served through most of SCAP’s seven-year occupation wrote of the American occupiers in his memoir: 

The Occupation, with all the power and authority behind its operation, was hampered by its lack of knowledge of the people it had come to govern, and even more so, perhaps, by its generally happy ignorance of the amount of requisite knowledge it lacked.32

The reduced political autonomy reserved for the embryonic JNR caused consternation immediately after the passage of the JNR Law and hamstrung qualified candidates to lead the agency. In one telling story, Yoshida’s staff reached out to a qualified candidate who served as a long-time president for a private passenger rail company. After mulling the position, this candidate came back to the staff “in a fury” and said:

I had my subordinates check out [the JNR Law] and I’m quite shocked. It is clear that according to the Law the JNR budget is decided by the Diet through the Transport Ministry, and the government decides everything from line construction to transport related business. The wages of the employees must also be decided within the budget…In what area does the President have any authority? Why isn’t the President in charge of business operations? It’s not like Miyajima [Yoshida’s staff who asked directly] to ask me to do a job where I just sit around…Tell him I won’t do it.33

Yoshida eventually settled on a lesser-qualified candidate with no experience running a railway to take over as JNR President starting June 1, 1949: Sadanori Shimoyama.

The train which crashed out of the tracks at Mitaka Station, July 15, 1946.

Summer of 1949

The Reverse Course was in full swing by the start of 1949, with SCAP increasingly taking antagonistic relations with the trade unions and the emergent Japanese Left. MacArthur in Tokyo and President Harry S. Truman in Washington were increasingly concerned of the increasing gravitational pull of the Communists across East Asia: mainly, the Chinese Communist Party crushing the Kuomintang in the final months of the decades-long Chinese Civil War and of the presence of Communist North Korea led by Kim Il-Sung. Japan was still mired in postwar destitution, which attracted millions to their own Communist Party. In the January 1949 Diet elections, Yoshida led his new coalition party to a majority, but perhaps more important was the Japanese Communist Party winning 10 percent of the popular vote and 35 seats, 31 more than in the previous election. 

In January 1949, American economist Joseph Dodge visited Japan to advise SCAP on how to combat inflation and foster economic growth -- and help wean Japan off SCAP resources. Two months later, Dodge presented his plan to resuscitate Japan’s economy. The “Dodge Line”, as it is known, emphasized the need for a balanced government budget by raising taxes and reducing government spending. Yoshida was hesitant as spending reduction meant massive public sector layoffs in a shrunken economy; the United States dangled an extra $100 million in loans to Yoshida as a carrot if he followed through.34

The national railways (soon to be JNR) at the time was one of the largest public sector employers with a whopping 618,000 employees. The 1947 decision by Yoshida (in his first term) to retain temporary workers and employ ex-servicemen and repatriates greatly ballooned the headcount which remained through 1949. It thus became a supple target for mass reductions. The day before JNR officially came into being, SCAP and the Diet codified the need for labor reduction into law, instructing JNR and new President Shimoyama to fire almost 100,000 employees.35

The National Railway Workers Union (Kokuro) was incensed by the order to lay off a sixth of their workforce the day before JNR’s official opening. As Kokuro would learn in the coming weeks, the labor relations arbitration processes, ensured in another recent watered-down public sector labor law, was insufficient for Kokuro to protect its workers’ employment. Kokuro was dealt another blow when its wage increase proposals were rejected for the inaugural JNR budget in 1950 despite the increases being within budget. These rejections and the increasing whiplash felt by union workers of a labor-hostile SCAP – who only four years ago blessed its entrance and growth – left “an undercurrent of bitterness which had a lasting effect on labor relations” in JNR, according to Smith.36

Caught between a demanding SCAP and Yoshida Cabinet and an apoplectic Kokuro was Shimoyama himself, who would be found dead on train tracks operated by his JNR. Mysteries abound about the cause of Shimoyama’s death. The mainstream hypothesis is suicide, of a man so overwhelmed by the thankless task ahead of him. The counter theory is murder by one of many suspects: by either disgruntled JNR employees facing termination, Communist Party members taking action against an ostensibly anti-labor bureaucrat, or SCAP members frustrated by Shimoyama’s slowness in the mass firings. The inconsistencies in the autopsy findings – such as the lack of blood found around his dismembered body – fuels the mystery surrounding the Shimoyama Incident to present day. 

The Shimoyama Incident is usually discussed with two other JNR incidents that summer which would shock the nation. Ten days after Shimoyama’s death, a JNR train derailed at Mitaka Station in Tokyo, killing six people. The train conductor and nine others – all but the conductor were Communist Party members – were arrested. Despite denying any involvement, the conductor was later found to be the sole conspirator and was sentenced to death before being reduced to life imprisonment. (The conductor’s son has fought to exonerate his father, who died in prison, as late as 2019.)37

A month later, another train derailed at Matsukawa north of Tokyo. Ten members of the Communist Party and ten Kokuro members were arrested for sabotage. Seventeen total were found guilty, with four receiving the death sentence and two to life imprisonment. Upon appeal, the Japanese Supreme Court overturned all seventeen convictions. Both the Mitaka Incident and Matsukawa Incident remain unsolved mysteries as to who and why committed the deadly accidents. The incidents did help cement a growing narrative of Communists sabotaging an newborn JNR, including murdering their bespectacled, weary-looking President.

SCAP Peaces Out – to War

In early June 1950, a few weeks before North Korea’s invasion into South Korea, General MacArthur wrote a letter to Prime Minister Yoshida. In the letter, MacArthur wrote his concerns of a new opponent to his democratic values he sought to implant in Japan, “a new and no less sinister groupment has injected into the Japanese political scene.” This group “if achieved, surely lead Japan to an even worse disaster.” While the word Communist was never mentioned in the letter, MacArthur no doubt was signaling to Yoshida that the Communist presence in Japan must be uprooted. 38

SCAP and the Yoshida cabinet partnered to lead a nationwide red purge to remove Communists or left-wing activists from positions of power. The purge was wholesale, as the Yoshida administration demanded the same accountability from the private sector. Tens of thousands of Communist activists and suspected Communists were fired across Japan. Within the Japanese National Railways alone, 467 employees defined as left wing activists were terminated. 39

As labor languished in death by a thousand cuts, the post-Shimoyama JNR management expressed optimism believing it to be an improvement over the Japanese Government Railways. But it quickly disappeared. Despite believing they had internal decision-making powers, JNR management’s initial decisions on tariff policy and wage increases in 1949 ultimately needed the sign-off from the elected officials at the Diet.40

Further dreams were crushed in 1950. JNR proposed to increase freight rates to reduce passenger fare costs to welcome riders to a new era of Japanese rail. In September 1949, the Transport Council approved the plan for a 90% increase in freight tariff to subsidize passenger fares. But the Diet hemmed and hawed until the winter of 1950 and limited the freight tariff hike. Due to the Diet delay with the freight rate increase, JNR missed its timing and scrapped the fare reduction plan altogether. It was yet another reminder for the management that nothing can be done without the Diet’s approval.41

Any window of opportunity to perhaps revisit the JNR Law and fix the administrative shortcomings closed shut by the summer of 1950. From June 25, Korea was the total focus for MacArthur, who would lead an amphibious landing invasion at the port town of Incheon in September. Japan became an afterthought for MacArthur and SCAP as they were fully committed to the Korean War. If anything for SCAP, the Korean War helped resolve the economic malaise which ailed Japan since 1945; the Japanese economy boomed as Japan became the supply depot and war manufacturer for the Korean War. The effect in Japan had SCAP officials claim that “Korea came along and saved us.”42

As the economy boomed, so did JNR’s coffers. JNR’s passenger volume grew 150% from 1950 to 1965. JNR was responsible for 60% of all passenger transport volume and 52% of freight volume in the 1950s.43 The country was getting quickly wealthy per capita – but not wealthy enough to afford the high-luxury goods, like a private automobile. Within this sweet spot, JNR held a monopoly in land transportation until the mid-1960s.

Despite financial success in the 1950s, neither the JNR management or Kokuro were content with their political conditions. Despite SCAP’s well-to-do intentions, both sides became distrustful of the scope of their own powers, to each other, and to their new higher powers in the Diet and the Ministry of Transport, after their own experiences of rejection between 1945 and 1950. Ian Smith summarizes the situation: 

The weaknesses in the arbitration machinery convinced Kokuro that the public corporation’s management had little to no authority to deal with labor issues, and the draconian left wing purge further demonstrated that the government – strongly backed the SCAP administration – was an implacable opponent of progressive labor policies. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that these weaknesses from the outset, by entrenching the attitudes of government management and labor unions, had a profound effect on the later performances of the Japanese National Railways. This factor, combined with the effect of the drafting out of the clauses which would have ensured the autonomous operation of the National Railway Public Corporation, goes a long way to explain the JNR’s lack of enterprise and its ultimate demise.44

Aftermath of the Matsukawa derailment on August 17, 1949. (Source: Wikipedia)

Closing Thoughts

From its birth, JNR was responsible for two purposes: maintain good financial health expected of a public service, and to maintain and develop a societal good in the form of a national rail network. The two came into conflict immediately as JNR had no control over its own financial future but was expected to maintain a growing national rail network. JNR management learned quickly that the societal good aspect could prove to be a useful political asset to allow the Diet to pass a growing budget every year. JNR passed the buck of their financial well-being to the Diet politicians, who gladly signed the budget as long as there was a tangible benefit for their own constituents.45

To win over the Diet, JNR needed the Ministry of Transport as a key ally. While the Ministry was no longer directly responsible for railway operations as they had in pre-JNR days, it still advised the Diet on the budget, operations, and capital investments. But an alliance was hard to find. JNR carried a reputation of being a more prestigious agency to work than the Ministry of Transport, with JNR getting first choice on the most qualified engineers for hire. In fact, when JNR opened in 1949, the Ministry of Transport was located on the first floor of the new JNR headquarters.46 JNR’s perceived elitism stewed over decades to develop a spirit of opposition among the Ministry staff against JNR’s internal reforms. This lopsided rivalry would devastate JNR in its final days in the 1980s, when they desperately needed government allies for self-preservation.

Structural problems were rife within JNR but they are not enough to adequately explain why JNR underwent full dissolution, privatization and division in 1987. For one, it does not adequately explain how JNR accumulated a 37.3 trillion Yen debt between 1964 and 1987. The enablers of JNR’s debt crisis – the Diet – would ultimately serve as the JNR’s hangman. In the next posts, we will review the granular processes which led to the death of JNR and the birth of its privatized successor, Japanese Railways (JR). 

From our perch of history, it must be emphasized one last time SCAP set the first domino for JNR’s downfall. SCAP’s failure to remove political machinations from the new JNR would have two effects: hinder any progress meant to be attained from a wholly new public corporation, and foster the perception the failing JNR in the second half of its 38-year life was a foreign imposition on Japanese public service. As explored in the next post, the media rhetoric in the 1980s push for privatization often centered JNR’s failures to a foreign miasma plaguing the pride of Japanese infrastructure. JNR was “sick”, as if its rails were snake-bitten.47 Foreign toxins would have to be removed to save the host’s life. “Japanised” medicine would be the only solution for this sickness.48

The defining mural of my childhood. Hotel Figueroa, facing Staples Center. Source

Much like the birth of Jesus Christ, there is one event which shaped how I understand the grand flow of time. The event’s Gregorian date is July 21, 2007. The perceived salvatory effect was on par with the birth in Bethlehem. Like Before Christ and Anno Domini, I posit the following for chronicling Downtown Los Angeles in the 21st century: Before Ralph’s and After Ralph’s.

It was a very hot July morning on the corner of 9th and Flower. More than a thousand people waited in line to enter the first grocery store to open in Downtown in 57 years. The food desert Berlin Wall was coming down, and its guards served free food samples, according to the Los Angeles Times.1 Traffic officers were called in to control the swelling crowd.

Per The Times: 

As the 11:30 opening time for the store approached, the crowd, chanted, “Open! Open!” Carol Schatz, chief executive of the Downtown Center Business Improvement District, did her best to quiet the shoppers.

“We’ve been waiting 50 years for this,” she said. “You can wait five more minutes.”

Then-Mayor Antonio Villaragoisa joined the stage as Ralph’s made a $730,000 donation made to local charities, schools and community programs. Coupons were mailed out to local residents weeks in advance, as a house-warming gift. For Ralph’s, it was more of a homecoming: the first Ralphs opened in 1873 on Sixth and Spring streets, just four blocks north and six blocks east.2

I was part of that impatient crowd that morning. As a teenager on summer break, I lived just a block away, on Olympic and Hope. Excitement of a next door Ralph’s inside Hope Village – a 66-unit rent-subsidized apartment complex housing Koreans, Blacks and Latinos, including my family for the past six years – was palpable. I saw Villaragoisa cut the Ralph’s logo-red ribbon and was flooded into the glass-and-stainless-steel store. Even the vegetables looked polished that day. I think I got fried chicken for lunch.

Every local in that crowd understood what Ralph’s would mean to their shopping behaviors. For me, the new Ralph’s equaled less car trips to Costco in Los Feliz, or bus trips to Koreatown. An octogenarian living in 3rd and Olive since the 1980s was so excited she called the mailer to check if this was a hoax, per The Times.3 A tech worker living in Downtown said this will help cut back her trips to Japanese markets in Little Tokyo. “Everything was a big schlep,” she told Los Angeles Downtown News.4

But everyone, including myself, was blind to what was to come. Ralph’s was the first nice amenity which arrived in the neighborhood – and the waves kept coming. Nice third wave cafes, juice and cocktail bars, frozen yogurt shops, and Chipotle restaurants arrived in force shortly after Ralph’s. In 2010, I left for school in the Bay Area. Two years later, my parents moved out of our home of 11 years due to rising rents and increasing hostilities from the management. The last neighbor we knew at Hope Village was out by 2014. The rate of change has only accelerated since. When I visit Downtown every two, three years, I’m left stunned by the condos, grocery stores, bars, cafes, shops and restaurants lining every street. They even have a protected bike lane on Figueroa Street!

The Downtown Los Angeles of my childhood of the 2000s was an exurban neighborhood plonked at the center of a worldly metropolis, or perhaps a recently opened containment zone after a meteor very tactically wiped out a half-mile radius of any desirable urban living. When all bankers or fashion students left Downtown by 7pm, the neighborhood was reduced to a husk of its daytime self. The Downtown Los Angeles I knew was a sundown town of its own making at the end of history. No children in our apartment had a bicycle because it was too dangerous to bike in Downtown. Everyone in the apartments looking for human connection drove to Koreatown or South Central. Any group of non-locals milling about outside was usually intuited as there being a Lakers game that night at Staples Center two blocks west.

This is an ode to the anti-urbanist, Before Ralph’s-era Downtown Los Angeles that, upon my last visit in summer of 2020, I can testify no longer exists. As the years pass, I start doubting whether such a Downtown, the locale of my childhood, even existed. Along with Ralph’s on 9th and Flower, I picked out four more locations in Downtown that meant something in the Before Ralph’s era and to me dearly in my personal formation. I intend to relive, revisit and remember in the face of a smoldering question which I’ve asked myself for a decade: If your neighborhood got gentrified but no one was there to see it, were you really gentrified out of your neighborhood?

Author’s Note

This is a different post than usual. I’ve been wanting to write something about my rather unique upbringing in Downtown Los Angeles for a long time but have put if off. It can be intimidating to write about yourself. The timing (recovering from a surgery) and my inspirations aligned, finally, to produce this in record time.

The biggest inspiration, as I think will be made very evident, was the historian and Angeleno Mike Davis. I’ve read his works since college, but have avoided his opus history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz. It was really just ego that made me not want to read about something I thought I knew innately. But I wolfed down City of Quartz in two days, and I wrote 4,800 words right after finishing. If this feels like a blatant rip-off of Davis’s writing style and substance of City of Quartz, it is because it is. I just hope it is a worthy emulation. Consider reading this beautiful paean to Mike Davis, “a titan”, from Defector. All the best wishes to the Davis family as Mike enters palliative care. Thank you for everything, you’re an inspiration.

Waiting…Source

LA Central Library

The Central Library has seen them come and go. From its perch at the base of Bunker Hill just north, the library was born out of the City Beautiful Movement in the 1920s on the parcel which once housed the predecessor to UCLA. Through the Great Depression, the automobilization of Los Angeles, the postwar decay of Downtown’s political power, the subsequent skyscraperization of Downtown, the 1986 arson fires which damaged its books and structure but galvanized the library as a civic symbol, and the next era of redevelopment of Downtown in the 21st century, the Art Deco building stood resolutely as a public, altruistic institution in an ever hyper-charged capitalist neighborhood. 

The Library has seen me come and go several hundred times through its doors. It’s pretty neat to have the largest library west of the Mississippi as your neighborhood one. In my teenhood, to get away from my parents, my hormonal angers and my deep teenage anxieties, I would pack up on weekend mornings and head to the library five blocks away by foot. I would usually stay until closing most weekends. I would take care of lunch and even dinner at the Panda Express on the first floor, next to the western exit facing the Maguire Gardens. 

And that Panda Express…To this day, that Panda Express’ orange chicken is by far the best I’ve ever had it — anywhere, including Michelin-worthy Chinese restaurants. I’ve told friends about it. I’ve dreamed about it. I’ve revisited it as an adult, and it has not disappointed me. Sure, this is all heavily tainted by saccharine nostalgia, but when I sit outside on the patio looking toward the garden and Flower Street picking out chunks of orange chicken with a plastic fork, I have felt total serenity like I have felt only a few times prior. I find myself getting younger and wiser at the Library eating orange chicken.

Growing up on Hope Street, which gets cut off on Sixth Street for the Central Library, this was the northern boundary of what I considered “my” Downtown. Until I was in deep into high school, I would rarely venture north of Fifth Street (more on this later). Bunker Hill on the other side of Fifth Street was a business park wasteland, and I innately understood it was no space for a sloppy, acne-filled Asian boy to hang around. It turns out, per historian Mike Davis, that was exactly the plan for Bunker Hill, when it evicted residents and created a financial sector complex from scratch with taxpayer money in the 1960s:5

Like similar megalomaniac complexes, tethered to fragmented and desolated Downtowns…Bunker Hill and the Figueroa corridor provoked a storm of liberal objections against their abuse of scale and composition, their denigration of street landscape, and their confiscation of so much of the vital life activity of the center, now sequestered within subterranean concourses or privatized malls…

The goals of this strategy may be summarized as a double repression: to raze all association with Downtown’s past and to prevent any articulation with the non-Anglo urbanity of its future. Everywhere on the perimeter of redevelopment this strategy takes the form of a brutal architectural edge or glacis that defines the new Downtown as a citadel vis-à-vis the rest of the central city.

It seems like a miracle in hindsight that the Central Library was not demolished, as it was proposed in the 1970s.6 The space serves a diametrically opposite purpose to its neighbor in Bunker Hill and its surrounding skyscrapers which came as Los Angeles joined the Pacific Rim co-prosperity sphere of the 1970s and 1980s. Whereas Bunker Hill malls are coated spaceship-white with random postmodern artwork splayed around, the Library (at least the original Goodhue building) is Mediterranean warmth in its color palette and filled with symbolism-laden murals and statues harkening to some ancient civilization in the Old World. As the architect Bertram Goodhue intended, you knew by sight, smell and sound this was a “temple to knowledge itself.”7

But it is also a monastery, or perhaps a cathedral like the one on Skid Row: doors open to all who need shelter. It was at the Library I had my first and frequent exposures to unhoused people, often smelling of urine but totally unable to harm. It was at the top floor at the fiction department, where I saw a homeless man masturbate while reading. I felt only pity with no judgment. Like him, we are here to escape. I felt no right to indignation. In an astonishingly harsh anti-homeless city like Los Angeles, the Library was a true societal center for all – warts, acne, sperm and all. They really don’t build them like they used to.

Can such a space survive in Los Angeles in the 21st century? I’ll hedge my bets. As long as they keep selling orange chicken there, I can buy into it.

Staples Center before L.A. Live. Source

Staples Center Parking Lot (Now site of L.A. Live)

It is rather absurdly funny that only an Angeleno can appreciate that when the city of Los Angeles, AEG and Majestic Realty Co. agreed on the construction of Staples Center on the corner of 11th and Figueroa in 1997 two huge surface parking lots accompany the arena. Despite being only four blocks’ walk from the Downtown nexus of the LA Metro rail system, which opened only seven years prior to the agreement, giant asphalt parking lots served as the red carpet for visitors coming across Olympic Boulevard.

Lots like that were readily available in Downtown in 2001, when my family moved to the neighborhood, and the Staples Center parking lots were the crown jewels. No one I recall questioned the incredible waste of land use: how else were Lakers fans supposed to go watch Shaq and Kobe in the middle of their legendary three-peat? If anything, the parking lot was welcomed as a quasi-containment zone for street parking and drunk fans. It also served as a part-time neighborhood park when there were no scheduled events. When I and other children in the apartment were young enough, and the adults weren’t too bored or jaded by the new neighborhood, we would be chaperoned to that parking lot two blocks away to kick a soccer ball on a cooling summer night. I recall a few kids in their scooter and rollerblade fads would be accompanied to ride around there. On the corner of Olympic and Figueroa, the children played. On an asphalt plain as far as the eyes can see, we had fun.

Not like there were many options. Grand Hope Park was across the street, overlooked by the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising and its student dorms, but it would be closed before sunset and the hawkish security guards made it too hostile a space for high-energy youths to frolic. Pershing Square five blocks north was larger but had a rap for visible drug use; the only times anyone went to Pershing Square were when the local non-profits would give us free tickets to their winter ice skating events. I was explicitly told by the adults to never walk past Main Street five blocks east and Pico Boulevard two blocks south; the city through infrastructure implicitly told me not to pass the 110 three blocks west and Fifth Street six blocks north by foot. So the parking lots it was for some needed R&R.

These parking lots often gave back tokens of gratitude. Every summer, the X-Games would descend on the parking lot, setting up skyscraper-tall ramps and skate parks to create an amusement park overnight. X-Games would mail out free tickets to the apartment complex for the children, and I have been to two, three X-Games. I like to imagine I saw 13-year-old Ryan Sheckler win a gold medal in Skateboard Park in 2003. Ten years later, the 23-year-old Sheckler waxed poetic about the parking lot, by then fully developed into the L.A. Live entertainment complex which opened in 2007. “It's only been 10 years, but it seems longer,” said Sheckler.8

In my patchy memory bank, L.A. Live too was built overnight like Skateboard Park. One blink, the Microsoft Theater and Nokia Plaza was up. Two blinks, Grammy Museum. Three blinks, the 54-story Ritz-Carlton and the Regal Theaters megaplex. The notoriously nicknamed “Times Square West” landed on our rather moribund neighborhood overnight like a UFO and kept its huge bright screens on 24 hours a day.9 Our family would try to make the most of this new space by grabbing coffee and enjoying the outdoor shade at at L.A. Live’s Starbucks, and my sister and I would go watch movies at the Regal Theaters. But the arrival of L.A. Live signaled the beginning of the end for our time in the neighborhood. Whatever developer-rentier contract was arranged for our move-in to Downtown in the first place was running out of time. Downtown was moving in a new direction without us.

As The Times’ architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne wrote of L.A. Live in 2008:10

For cities, the benefit of a gargantuan new development is not only the boost it gives to the tax base but also, in urban terms, its spillover effect -- energy and people flowing into the surrounding area. The entirety of the AEG development downtown -- Staples plus L.A. Live -- is designed like an airtight cruise ship, turning not a welcoming face but the architectural equivalent of a massive hull to the neighbors. Its spillover effect may be measured not in gallons but in drops…

I have written before about how the plaza, which sits entirely on property owned by the developer, creates an impressive stage-set version of a public square. The problem is not just that the space is primarily aimed at visitors to L.A. Live’s concerts and restaurants rather than local apartment- and condo-dwellers; it is that it actively discourages any of the activities we traditionally associate with the use of collective space in a city: talking, reading, sitting under a tree, even pausing with a friend for a cup of coffee.

Perhaps it was arrogant of me to expect anything otherwise from this part of Los Angeles. As I thought of myself as a Downtown expert, I started with the base notion that Downtown once cared for me and wants me to stay. But then I did not know the fact 250 residents – mostly low-income Latino families – were evicted rapidly out of their long-neglected apartments, which were razed to make space for Staples Center in the late 1990s. For all the talk of Chavez Ravine, the South Park displacement is hardly known. 11

One evicted resident told The Times in 1999: “They are going to make an awful lot of money off of the arena…I think they could have provided more for the families.”12 They were the first wave, and I was the second wave, caught between the openings of Staples Center and L.A. Live. In the eyes of our beholders, all waves ebb and flow. The water recycles without memories or sympathy. Of course we had to leave.

Grab a popcorn…Source

Laemmle’s Grande 4 Plex

I almost hate to write review for fear the secret will get out about this theater. Although there's nothing foo-foo shi-shi about this theater, it's appeal comes from it's simplicity..

The seats are uncomfortable, But the popcorn is delicious. The drink holders are flimsy. But parking is only 2 dollars (with validation) and never an issue finding a park. Again, I hate to make this theater sound appealing to you, because I don't want the word getting out. I hope to never run into you there!!

-Yelp review from 200913

It was a natural passing of the torch. When Laemmle’s Grande 4 Plex movie theater on 4th and Figueroa closed in October 2009, it was timed with the opening of the Regal Theaters’ megaplex at L.A. Live seven blocks south. Grande 4 Plex has been struggling to break even for years and was hit hard during the 2008 Great Recession. The four-screen theater, built like an underground grotto underneath the Marriott Hotel, was not only out of time but out of place in a new era of Downtown. 

As I entered full-blown teenhood, I craved more escapism. The Library was the base but I wanted bright lights too. So I ventured north, past Bunker Hill and Bonaventure Hotel, and found an outpost in Laemmle’s Grande 4 Plex. I watched most of the blockbusters from 2006-2009 at this theater, including some French and Japanese art movies that were on rotation. The theater had a huge poster of the French movie Amelie with actress Audrey Tautou smiling devilishly at the viewer. Right before the theater closed, I asked if I could buy it without any money or plans for storage. The manager told me it was not for sale.

I kept pushing up north. During one summer, I got a membership at the YMCA at 4th and Hope – the mountaintop of Bunker Hill – to relearn to swim. I would lunch at One California Plaza, the most whitewashed and sterile urban space west of Las Vegas built solely for the 9-5 workers in business casual. I’ve traversed Bunker Hill west to east and headed downhill to check out Grand Central Market for the first time despite living in Downtown for nine years. I soon reached the end of my world on foot: City Hall on First and Main. Ironically, I would run into Mayor Villaraigosa several times around Fifth and Flower, where the ritzy California Club resided next to the Central Library and steakhouses were readily around. 

“My” Downtown was expanding in size and was changing at a furious clip. I found the flow of investment capital flowing into the neighborhood for the first time exhilarating. But no locale thrill could match the exclusivity I felt going to the Grande 4 Plex. For around $5, I was welcomed into a dungeon to enjoy myself unreservedly for two hours. The theater was always empty but I kept running into three, four elderly moviegoers along with a handful of middle-aged theater employees. We always exchanged conversation before and after the movies. In the dingiest pit of Downtown, a community in the loosest sense of the word had once lived. 

Thirteen years later, nothing has replaced the space formerly occupied by the Grande 4 Plex. In 2018, there was some work being done outside in the small amphiteater/staircase leading one down to the theaters.14 Now its street entrance is part of a homeless encampment underneath the 4th St overpass which hovers above the 110, one of many one can find in Downtown in the current national housing crisis. In Downtown of the 21st century, it seems the only way to survive is to go big, bright and loud, like the Regal movie theaters in L.A. Live. Small, dark and quiet belong only to the most depraved and destitute. There used to be a third space for those who wanted to find life away from the bright lights.

Hope Village

Home. Photo from me, in 2020

Sixty-six families today will receive keys to new Downtown apartments featuring such amenities as walk-in closets big enough to double as home offices, modern decor, colorful wall-to-wall carpeting and cable and Internet access.

But these are not loft conversions or Bunker Hill penthouses. Rather, these units, some up to 1,276 square feet, make up a unique subsidized housing project. Hope Village Apartments doesn't look like "low-rent housing," because that's the idea.

"You look at Hope Village and it looks like a market-rate apartment building," said Ralph Contrares, construction manager for Togawa & Smith, Inc., the architectural firm that designed the project. "Just because it's for poor families doesn't mean it has to be treated badly architecturally."

-Los Angeles Downtown News, March 26, 200115

I was eight years old when I came to America from South Korea in June 2000. Housing was not lined up prior to our family’s emigration, and we bounced around homes of friends and church pastors the first few months. Then for several weeks, we lived in motels – my only faint brush with homelessness – which I seemed to have memory-holed entirely. We soon found a two-bedroom apartment in a dingbat on Rosewood and Western Avenues, just a block from the famous postmodern KFC.16 I liked the area; I loved the wacky KFC. But my parents wanted to move out quickly after a spate of shootings in the neighborhood, an entirely foreign concept to us then. 

Perhaps it was this urgency why I have no recollection when and how we moved to Downtown. One day in 2001, we were on the northwestern corner of Koreatown; the next, we were next to Staples Center. It was an incredible three-story apartment with modern kitchen appliances and a small veranda. Right below our veranda was a daycare and children services center, which would get very loud with shrieking toddlers around lunchtime. Our front door would open toward a large central courtyard, with a basketball court, playground and a community laundry room. I grew up in bliss not knowing this was a complex built for poor people. 

Rents at Hope Village range from roughly $400 to $750 a month, depending on tenant income, and the $12 million development is only the seventh neighborhood apartment building to offer subsidized affordability…

"Our mission is to provide service-enriched housing," said Dr. DarEll T. Weist, president and CEO of 1010 Development Corp., as well as executive pastor of Downtown's First United Methodist Church. "The very people who qualify for affordable housing also need help in putting together their lives.

"As far as I'm concerned, it makes no sense for a faith-based development corporation-which is what we are-to build housing only. We want to empower people, to make their lives better."

-Los Angeles Downtown News, March 26, 200117

I remember the First United Methodist Church members as gift-bringers. Every Christmas, all the children received toys. Every summer, the church and the 1001 Development Corp. staff would throw a barbecue in the daycare space, at which I had my first tastes of ribs, sloppy Joe’s, collard greens, and mac ‘n’ cheese. Before they too became jaded, the staff would offer us field trips and chaperones to Clippers games (the affordable team). I knew some Korean parents in the complex didn’t let their kids accept any of the offerings because of their deep distrust of Blacks. They frequently evoked Sa-I-Gu, or the riots back in 1992, as a righteous reason for their distance.

There were simmering resentments to each other between the majority Koreans and the minority Blacks and Latinos in the complex I only now recognize as an adult. But that racial leeriness never trickled down to the children. We all hung out and played in the courtyard without fail until our parents would yell to order us home for dinner. A Black kid a few years older than me, Abraham, taught me how to play basketball, telling me to defend by looking at the chest, not the ball. But Hope Village was a mere oasis, not a sanctuary. Whatever the adults had to sow at Koreatown, South Central, Vernon, Alhambra, and Commerce were reaped at home. Many parents beat their kids, some got into messy divorces, a few got deported. Just before my move to Berkeley, I learned Abraham was arrested and in jail for selling drugs. His grandmother was devastated and moved shortly after.

Hope Village represents a growing trend away from previous efforts at subsidized housing. "It started with the government trying to do it, and they're blowing all those buildings up now," Weist explained. "And for a brief time, the for-profit community decided they wanted to do it, but that fell apart because there's no money in it. So the non-profits took over-about 20 years ago."

-Los Angeles Downtown News, March 26, 200118

Where would I be had the lottery (more than 500 families entered for 66 units) not broken our way? I’m too scared to even ask. I’ve confronted this question every time I’m back in Downtown and walk to the corner of Olympic and Hope. Facing Figueroa and L.A. Live, Hope Village now has a mural of two hand palms — one black, one white — reaching toward the sky. The mural, to me, has felt like a throwaway attempt to fit in with the blindingly colorful canvas of the new bougie Downtown. The surface parking lot on Olympic and Flower – owned by the Methodist church and once discussed as the site for another Hope Village – remains as it was in 2001, allowing the mural to be visible if standing on Olympic facing east.

Mural of now. Photo from me, in 2020

The promise of more affordable housing in Downtown made at the turn of the millennium was never fulfilled. Glassy luxury condos and hotels now flank Hope Village in all directions, especially on the south side between 11th Street and Pico Boulevard. The allure of catering to moneyed millennials yearning the urbanist life steamrolled through whatever morsels of rent-subsidized housing idealism remained. Akin to the Central Library, Hope Village’s exterior paint job of olive green, beige white and terra cotta brown looks inadequate and warm for a neighborhood with rum bars, spray tan salons and Whole Foods. Hope Village still looks nice and new — but increasingly dated. It took a village to build Hope Village; what if the village now wants mojitos and ahi tuna tacos at this prime real estate space?

When Hope Village is converted to luxury family housing or repurposed or demolished, which I believe will happen because this is my hometown Los Angeles after all, truly then my Downtown of my childhood would be in the history books. No one will cry for them, no one will wax nostalgia about them, no one will commodify and fetishize them to prompt a mutated comeback in the future. This is not Boyle Heights, or Koreatown, or Leimert Park. Downtown is an amnesiac neighborhood, where every generation believes they were the first of its kind before they are pushed out forcibly or passively. You and I will forget this history ever existed in Downtown Los Angeles in the 21st century. 

"Nobody ever thinks about these people," said Contrares. "They don't make a lot of money, so they can't afford market-rate apartments. But they'd like to live near where they work."19

Surf’s up, mate! (Courtesy Australian War Memorial via Wikimedia)

After World War II, the Anglosphere committed an act of heinous self-harm: they tore out their cities’ most prized rails.

Within a generation after its wartime victory in 1945, cities and mid-sized towns on both hemispheres rid themselves of struggling tram networks, ripping out its rails to make space for automobiles. This phenomenon was found globally among the former Allied victors, from Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia. 

In my home region of the San Francisco Bay Area, we lost not one but two streetcar (more commonly called trams outside North America) networks on both sides of the Bay. The Key System in the East Bay received an unceremonious death, led by experts like Arthur C. Jenkins, who I detailed in a previous S(ubstack)-Bahn post on a new history on why Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) never made it on the Golden Gate Bridge. As a consultant in the late 1940s and 1950s, Jenkins led a massacre of declining tram networks across western United States in cities like San Diego, Fresno, Phoenix, Long Beach, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland.

Read more about Jenkins here

Jenkins was a military man, serving under the Navy during World War II. One may wonder if the experience hardened Jenkins’ perspectives against rail and for cars. But another military man on the opposite side of the globe charted a wholly different relationship to mass transport. Like Jenkins, he worked in streetcar networks before the war. His military upbringing played an immense impact in his postwar career to preserve one of the great streetcar networks of the world. 

As brethren cities like Sydney, Perth and Brisbane abandoned their trams, this military man fought the press, public opinion, local politicians and a global industry consensus to preserve Melbourne’s trams. He fought for them – with the spartan utilitarianism befitting a military engineer – because he believed trams simply were the most efficient mode of mass transport available for Melbourne. His imposing presence and total control of his political environs has been credited as to why no politician dared touch the trams.

Cities like Sydney and Adelaide have since rued their decisions and revived tram lines fractional to their former glory. But it is Melbourne who now boasts the largest tram network in the world, with 24 lines in service and 250 kilometers of track laid for service. The trams serve now as a civic symbol for the city and a core engine for the city’s modern successes. It is also a historic symbol of what went right for once in the postwar era in public transit.

In public transit, heroes are far and few between; the modus operandi has always been that an invisible transit network is the best network. But like in any occupation, we need our heroes and myths. For transit mythology may I propose the third chairman of the Melbourne and Metropolitan Tramways Board (M&MTB): ​​Sir Robert Joseph Henry Risson.

Author’s Note

This story is the second installment of what I hope to be a running series in identifying and delving more into the men (it’s all men) of the post-World War II era who called the shots to irrevocably reshape urban mass transport across the world. I consider my story on Jenkins to be the first of that series.

Many discussions online eulogize the death of the streetcar/trams — but they rarely, if ever, delver into who killed them. Conspiracies or not, I think there is merit to uncovering the people who made these consequential decisions and learning (and hopefully not repeating) their thoughts and shortcomings.

I want to thank the academic Graeme Turnbull who have not one but two biographies on Risson available online, which I found to be comprehensive, thorough and filled with appropriate respect for Risson. I want to thank also the National Library of Australia and their online depository, Trove, which houses and digitizes millions of newspaper articles. I used Trove to get extra newspaper coverage of Risson from the 1950s and 1960s to add more color and my own research to Turnbull’s biography.

Sir R.J.H. Risson (Courtesy Wikimedia)

A Tram Man Goes to War

Risson was born in 1901 in South East Queensland, where he spent his youth and education to graduate as a civil engineer. In 1923, he joined the newly formed Brisbane Tramways Trust, getting his first hands-on experience working with trams. He joined the Australian Army Engineers in 1933; by the time of his enlistment in 1939 to fight in World War II for the Allied, he was the Permanent Way Engineer of the Brisbane Tramways which was expanding rapidly then.1

Risson was involved in Australia’s most involved campaigns of the war. Risson went to the Middle East to command a field company of engineers during the 1941 siege of Tobruk, a port city in Libya. For seven months, outnumbered and mostly Australian Allied troops defended the city from surrounding Axis troops led by Erwin Rommel in their campaign to seize North Africa. From March to May, just before the siege commenced, Risson played a critical role in improving Tobruk’s defenses.2 The Australians defended Tobruk with legendary fierceness, earning the nickname (coined by a British Nazi collaborator) “Rats of Tobruk.” 3

Risson was given command of the 7th Divisional Engineers to bolster Allied defenses in Syria. Then he commanded the 9th Divisional Engineers in Egypt during the two-part Battle of El Alamein in the fall and winter of 1942. During the battle, Risson helped clear seven Axis-laid minefields critical for Allied advances. In November, Risson was wounded in battle. He won Distinguished Service Order for his gallantry. 4

Risson returned to Australia to recuperate and was promoted to chief engineer. In April 1943, Risson led the 9th Division who returned home from North Africa through the streets of Brisbane – literally marching along the permanent tram right-of-way of his peacetime employer. The next year Risson was dispatched to Papua New Guinea, where Allied forces were engaged in a brutal, prolonged war campaign against Japan. 5

After the War, Risson returned to Brisbane to become Assistant General Manager of the city council’s Transport Department. Brisbane, under Risson and the General Manager Sydney Quinn, were all in on trams, experimenting with new technologies to make trams more resilient and modern. Brisbane’s aldermen proclaimed then Brisbane “led the way in the construction of the finest tramcars in the world.”6

Even during wartime, Risson never forgot his love of trams. Per one Australian historian who met Risson during wartime: 

“The Chief Engineer on Corps was Brigadier Bob Risson. He was a splendid man and greatly devoted to trams as a means of transport. If the DDMS [Deputy Director of Medical Services], Harry Furnell, thought things were getting dull in the mess, he would tell Bob that steel-on-steel was an outdated form of transport. The CE [Chief Engineer] would then explain very convincingly why it was not. He became head of the [Melbourne and] Metropolitan Tramways Board after the war.” 7

Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester shakes hands with Lieutenant Colonel Risson, before inspecting the 9th Division, engineers, Tripoli, Syria, 1942. (Courtesy Wikimedia)

Melbourne at the Crossroads

Since the 1880s, Melbourne saw a rapid boom in tramways. Private companies laid track and cables at a furious pace to connect suburbs to the core. The cable trams were so popular that Melbourne adopted electric trams at a much slower clip than its counterparts in Australia and worldwide. By 1918, a collection of private and municipally owned tramway companies carried 113 million passengers.8

In 1918, the Victoria State Government appointed a Board of Inquiry to survey tram traffic congestion in Melbourne. The next year, the Board was consolidated into the Melbourne and Metropolitan Tramways Board (M&MTB), an independent board which took over operations and planning for nearly all existing and proposed tramways within city proper.9

M&MTB’s first chairman, Alexander Cameron, carved a career in Melbourne’s tram industry prior. He was so highly sought that one local newspaper reported “there was only one man in sight (for the Chairman position), and he was Cr. Alexander Cameron.” Cameron was a big believer in the superiority of trams as an efficient mode of transport, and his 1923 visit to Europe convinced him further to double down on M&MTB’s investments into the tram network.10 Under Cameron, M&MTB began the citywide conversion to electric traction.

Cameron’s successor in the 1930s, Hector Hercules Bell, was not a tram loyalist. In 1938, Bell traveled abroad to learn foreign trends in mass transport and fell in love with London’s double-decker buses. He was so enamored by them that he phoned home to Melbourne to immediately stop the planning of converting cable trams to electric on Bourke Street.11

Bourke Street is one of Melbourne’s central thoroughfares, dotted with theaters, restaurants and shops. Akin to Market Street in San Francisco or Madison Avenue in New York City, Bourke Street is the commercial and civic heart of Melbourne. Bell’s decision to introduce double-decker buses on Bourke Street in lieu of trams turned out to be unsuccessful. Despite the buses able to carry the high demand of Bourke Street, riders complained of slow loading times with one entrance, crowding and the excessive fumes. By 1943, M&MTB reversed its decision on Bourke Street and voted to return to electric trams. Due to wartime shortages, the conversion would take several years.12

Bourke Street with the double-decker buses (Courtesy of State Library Victoria via Melbourne Tram Museum)

In 1948, Victoria’s Premier Thomas Holloway returned from an overseas trip of his own and noted other countries have begun abandoning their tram networks. His Government requested an urgent report on the merits of trams, trolleybuses and buses on Bourke Street from M&MTB. Bell delivered the report and convinced Holloway to continue the Bourke Street electric tram conversion; it would be one of his last acts as M&MTB Chairman before stepping down in 1949.13

In postwar Australia, like other Allied nations including the United States, tramways were out of vogue and active plans were being made to replace them with buses. But unlike most cities, Melbourne already experimented with replacing trams with buses on Bourke Street – and realized its shortcomings rapidly. Despite rising pressure, especially from the automotive industry groups such as the Chamber of Automotive Industries, Melbourne was holding onto its trams as Bell retired. They would need a new Chairman to champion trams in face of increasing hostility.

Risson Fights a Lonely War

The 48-year-old Risson walked into M&MTB facing a litany of issues beyond tram retention. The postwar euphoria had worn off by 1949. Australia faced major shortages in goods and supplies. A strong labor movement, including Melbourne’s tram workers, were demanding higher salaries (and equal pay for women who joined M&MTB). Despite strong union presence, M&MTB faced major staff shortages. 

To overcome critical staff shortages, Risson and his Board purchased suburban hostels for recently arrived migrants who could provide staffing for a desperately short-staffed workforce. This decision caused a political maelstrom, with one Victoria Legislative Assemblymember calling for Risson to be fired, Bell to be reinstated and a Commission created to investigate this scandal.14

Risson weathered media-made storms as well as political ones. From the first years of Chairman, Risson defended his trams. In 1952, Risson told The Herald that while trolleybuses may be introduced it could never replace trams as trams could move more people.15 In 1953, Risson defended the still-ongoing Bourke Street electric tram conversion to the Minister of Transport, justifying trams as more efficient in moving larger groups of people and that buses required fuel and rubber, which Australia was short on at the time.16 By 1956, the conversion to electric trams on Bourke Street was complete and Melbourne’s tram network grew – a total anomaly compared to national trends.17

The dismantling of tram networks was in full swing nationwide, and most state capital cities in Australia stopped running its trams by 1960. Perth was first in 1958; then followed Adelaide and Hobart. The biggest kill came from Melbourne’s archrival, Sydney.18

Sydney boasted the largest tram network in the Southern Hemisphere and second largest in the Commonwealth behind London. The rise of the private automobile starting in the 1930s created congestion and road space issues across the city. During World War II, much of the network fell into disrepair.19

In the late 1940s, the New South Wales government commissioned experts from London to write a report on Sydney's public transport system. The report, authored by London Transport executives GF Sinclair, AF Andrews and ER Ellen, concluded with recommendation for the total closure of Sydney’s tramways in phases by 1960. In 1953, the Minister of Transport announced New South Wales will not be purchasing any more new trains and existing services will be replaced into buses.20  In 1957, another report from New York-based transport consultants Ebasco seconded the continued replacement of trams for buses in Sydney, putting the coup de grace on the dying network.21 On February 25, 1961, the very last tram in Sydney concluded its final journey.

Farewell notices on a tram at the Watsons Bay terminus on the last day of operations on that line, 10 July 1960. (Courtesy Peter Sage/Lindsay Bridge Collection via The Guardian)

In Risson’s hometown of Brisbane, the end of the tram came much later but just as swiftly as Sydney’s. In 1962, a tram depot fire destroyed 20 percent of Brisbane’s fleet. The fire was a golden opportunity for Brisbane’s Lord Mayor Clem Jones who – after being enamored with the American transportation bombast of highways and large roads for cars – commissioned a report which put in writing the total replacement of Brisbane’s trams with diesel buses.22

Despite sustained local resistance to its closures, and a major labor strike in 1968 to save the trams, Brisbane – who a generation ago under Risson and his boss Sydney Quinn boasted its fleet had the finest technology found anywhere – held its last tram ride in November 1969.23 Melbourne was the last city standing.

Leading the Men Into Action

A month after Brisbane shuttered its tram network, the Metropolitan Transport Committee – led by the Victoria state government under Liberal Premier Henry Bolte – released the 1985 Transport Plan for Melbourne. The plans called for heavy investments in freeways and car-centric transport but Risson and M&MTB scored a triumph unfound anywhere in Australia: Melbourne’s trams were to be retained indefinitely, and even invested for future expansions.24

For Robert Risson, who chaired M&MTB for two decades, the Transport Plan was the culmination of his work. His job was not easy in face of a nationwide pressure to move past trams and his M&MTB had to make sacrifices. M&MTB replaced all-night tram services and select Sunday tram routes with buses in the 1950s. No new tram extensions were developed after his retirement. In the entire 1960s, there were no new tram rolling stock to replenish the aging Melbourne fleet. Tram ridership kept declining since its post-war peak.25

But Risson had some wins, too. When the city planned road improvements on St. Kilda Road, a major thoroughfare just south of the city core, M&MTB successfully convinced to place the tram tracks in the center median strip separate from the roadway — a practice adapted recently and widely in European cities with tram networks. St. Kilda now runs nine of Melbourne’s 24 tram lines, making it one of the busiest tram corridors in the world.26

Through the 1950s and 1960s, Risson continued to support Melbourne’s trams at any speaking opportunity. In April 1963, at the Institution of Engineers conference in Adelaide, Risson said for a modern city to prosper, modern transportation facilities were necessary and needed support. He also reaffirmed his policy of retaining trams in Melbourne and spoke hopefully of underground tramways under Bourke and Swanston Streets in the city core. 

In 1970, Risson spoke at the “Y” Club on the topic “Transport Present and Future.” Risson recently came back from an overseas trip through Europe and North America and spoke highly of tram networks still preserved in the cities, such as Boston, San Francisco and Toronto. He declared trams were still the “In Thing,” according to The Australian Jewish News. 

“People who tell you trams are finished don’t know what they are talking about,” said Risson.

As a decorated Major-General from his World War II days, Risson ran M&MTB like a military unit and carried a reputation of being pompous, brutally honest and intimidating. He was tall and spoke with a booming voice. Many staff remembered his zero-tolerance for any activities he considered “improper” and the distinct way he said the word. 

In the 1960s, tramway workers’ union hoped for a relaxing of its uniform code during the brutally hot Australian summers, with shorts being in play. Risson, who always wore a suit with a Homburg hat, rebuffed, believing in no shortcuts for professionalism.

Like he did in Tobruk or El Alamein, Risson never shied away from being an example to his subordinates. In 1963, a tram driver died after he fell from the roof of a tram while attempting to replace an overhead trolley pole after the rope snapped. The tram depots issued a ban on drivers climbing the tram roof to replace the trolley pole. Risson wrote to the trams that the ban be lifted as he argued was safe if instructions were followed.

Upon request from the secretary of the employees’ association to “lead his men into action’ as deemed appropriate, the next day Risson himself climbed atop a tram to demonstrate how to replace an overhead trolley pole in front of workers and a media scrum who gathered to televise Risson’s repairs.27

Risson demonstrating the replacement of a trolley pole. (Courtesy The Age via Melbourne Tram Museum)

Risson retired in 1970 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II that year. Only shortly after his retirement, public opinion in Australia began to turn back onto mass public transportation, such as trams. In 1971, Victoria State Transport Minister Vernon Wilcox told the press “‘I had my doubts about the future of trams a few years ago, but no longer.” 28

In 1974, transportation academic Derek Scrafton credited Risson for “his faith in trams, along with a few others in a handful of cities in North America and mainland Europe when other cities in Australia followed the British example and got rid of trams as fast as possible.

“The world has now vindicated Sir Robert with talk of new interurban light rapid transit, supertrams or whatever you care to call them,” said Scrafton.29

Risson was active in public life until his death in 1992 at the age of 82. Two years after his death, a tram terminus on Elizabeth Street was named after Risson and a plaque was placed at the terminus to memorialize his 21 years of service.

Sir Robert Risson Tram Terminus on Elizabeth Street. (Courtesy of Trams Downunder)

Risson, Vindicated? Closing Thoughts

Risson was a tram man, but he was not dogmatic to one mode of public transport. For one, in 1968, Risson spoke highly of trolleybuses which like trams were out of favor. 

“Trolleybuses, I regret, are out of fashion and will disappear altogether, wrongly in my opinion,” said Risson giving a lecture at Melbourne University. “They are excellent vehicles, smooth, quiet, odourless, with good hill climbing characteristics, using locally generated power. I think it is a mistake to let them go, but going they are.”30

Risson, I imagine, would have spoken highly of our more high-capacity modes of public transport as well. But he was a tram man, not only because he was molded by trams through his entire career, but Melbourne too was shaped by trams as well. Melbourne’s flat topography, wide city streets and grid layout lent favorably to trams in its adolescence. Time and time again, Risson has remained consistent on why he supported trams: it was the most efficient mode available to Melbourne to move large volumes of people from the city center to its suburbs. Buses and private automobiles were simply too insufficient to give up entirely on trams. Subways and Metros were never in the picture for Risson.

This line of thinking is in direct contrast to Arthur C. Jenkins, the Bay Area-based transportation consultant who persuaded many western U.S. cities to abandon the streetcars for buses at the same time Risson was head of M&MTB. He was utterly convinced urban rail was a folly from an antiquated time. In 1949, Jenkins wrote this in the modernization plan he penned for Los Angeles which led to the dismantling of the Pacific Electric Railways, the largest interurban streetcar network in the United States:

The theory so often propounded that retention of rail lines enhances public values and adds intrinsic importance to the community it serves is as obsolete as the rail equipment itself… [No other industry is] so persistently beset with militant opposition in its efforts to follow the natural course that good business judgment dictates, in attempting to maintain a reasonable margin between revenue and cost of providing service. It is inconceivable that anyone could advocate the preservation of outmoded facilities whose cost of operation far exceeds the revenues earned and insist upon further heavy capital investment to insure the preservation of such a losing project.”

Risson privately told his friends that the credit for retaining the trams in Melbourne was a collective effort. Some have questioned Risson’s impact as there was no formal proposal to abandon Melbourne’s trams. But as academic Graeme Turnbull notes, Risson “had the war won before the battle started” on the question of trams in Melbourne by being an immensely vocal supporter with the personality and the military decorations to match.31 No government body or outside influences could penetrate Risson’s ironclad support for trams. Political maneuvering to convince the Board outside Risson would have been impossible too; Risson has been heard saying “I am the Board” or “I am the hierarchy” in an outburst.32

If there is credit to be shared as Risson confided, it should be with the governance and institutions set up before Risson appeared on set. Melbourne was uniquely protected thanks to the formation of the public-owned M&MTB (which became defunct in 1983 due to multiple mergers of other transit agencies). Risson’s predecessors Cameron and Bell laid strong foundations for his work. Bell’s dalliance with buses on Bourke Street gave Melbourne a rare pre-WWII taste of ridding trams, to which Melburnians reacted very negatively and laid valuable experience for M&MTB once the reckoning came against trams internationally. M&MTB’s board structure allowed Victoria Premiers and State Transport Ministers to be unable to bully Risson and the management to submission, as was evident in Sydney during its consultant-backed movement to shut down the much larger tram network.

In online spaces where public transit is positively viewed, the mid-century international trend of clearing away streetcars wholesale for cars and buses have always drawn deep confusion, anger, sadness and nostalgia. With the benefit of hindsight, we know it was a calamitous decision to abandon them. But now, through Risson, we also now know there were people at the top of municipal mass transport who recognized it was a calamitous decision as it was occurring. Risson clears the air: there were people with power who did the right thing.

Nearly a half-century later, we can now see Risson’s resolve in full bounty. The only regret remaining for us, perhaps, is what it could have been had we had less Arthur Jenkinses and more Robert Rissons.