Japanese Shinkansen: Catalyst for the renaissance of rail, The

Journal of Transport History, The, Sep 2003 by Smith, Roderick A

The Shinkansen system is undoubtedly the world's leader in terms of volume, safety and punctuality. It has enabled trains to retain a much higher mode share of passenger traffic than in any other country. Switzerland, with 15 per cent rail/road passenger kilometres, leads in Europe. The ratio in Japan is a massive 57 per cent, despite the rise in automobile use in the last fifty years. The role of the Shinkansen in contributing to this figure is clearly shown in Figure 2, where passenger journeys of 400 km length are equally divided between road and the Shinkansen, which captures the lion's share before airlines take a larger share over 1,000 km.

There have been no derailments or collisions in over thirty-five years of service and hence no passenger fatalities or injuries from such causes. However, a major catastrophe was narrowly avoided on 17 January 1995 when the Kobe earthquake occurred some fourteen minutes before Shinkansen services started running. Damage to bridges and elevated sections took three months to repair. The importance of Automatic Train Control (ATC) was illustrated by an incident in February 2003. The driver of an express on the Sanyo Shinkansen fell asleep in his cab whilst the train was travelling at 275 km hr carrying 800 passengers, but the train stopped automatically, on schedule, at Okayama station. The punctuality is legendary. In 1998, out of a total of more than 200,000 train departures on the Tokaido Shinkansen, 96.1 per cent arrived exactly on time at Tokyo or Osaka and 99.1 per cent arrived within nine minutes of schedule.18

Despite this superb performance, future expansion of the system is likely to be limited. It must be remembered that the Tokaido Shinkansen serves an area which creates the largest and most stable demand in the world. The greater Tokaido area is 17 per cent of Japan's land area but houses 40 per cent of the population and produces 49 per cent of GDP. The other Shinkansen lines do not have this benefit of concentration. Work is in hand in the JR East region to extend the Tohoku line from Morioka to Aomori and the Nagano line to Joetsu. At the opposite end of Japan, the Sanyo line is being extended to form the Kyushu Shinkansen from Hakata in the north to Kagoshima in the south. It is difficult to see significant expansion beyond these schemes in the future.19 In essence the obvious and profitable routes have been built and low densities of traffic at the extremities are likely to prove unfavourable. Environmental opposition mainly concerned with noise and vibration is also gathering strength, and is likely to prevent significant speed-up of existing lines. Furthermore, the millstone of debt from the former JNR will remain a stumbling block. As distances from Tokyo grow, so time competition from the airlines becomes more difficult for the train to match, and price competition on the existing routes is becoming more severe as the internal airlines are liberalised. Travel conditions in the major cities is becoming yet more difficult despite extensive networks of public transport. The time taken to travel to and from the Shinkansen station is becoming an ever-increasing and significant proportion of door-to-door journey times. Therefore national priority is likely to shift to these urban transport problems.