This is another example of private railway and its station. Here is the station and this is the railway line. You can see shopping center here and there, provided by private railway companies and other private firms, which enable you to internalize the development benefit safely. You can also see the station plats here and parking facilities, developed by local government for the better transfer between railway and other transport modes, such as buses, bicycles and cars.
Another typical type of the railway development was railway development combined with large-scale development of new town promoted by central and local governments.
This figure shows the map of new town developed in the 1970s in the suburb of Tokyo by private sector. The area of which is 30km2, and the planned population is 300,000 people. You can find 2 stations here and here of commuter railway, which connect the area to Central Tokyo within one hour. These connection railways are private ones, but were constructed with the financial support from the new town development sector. This is also a kind of internalization of development benefit, which I mentioned.
The forth type is subway development in built-up area. The pace of construction is not so rapid due to the limited government budget.
So, we can summarize the private sector contribution to urban rail development as follows:
・Combine development with houses, with shopping centers and with leisure facilities, which I did not explain in details.
・Terminal/station development for commercial and business use.
・Reliable operation with comparatively low costs.
And following are the key points of public sector in Japan.
・Coordination and authorization of project,
・Financial support for rail construction,
・Building connection facilities
・Transit-oriented city development around railway station
・Coordination policy with other transport mode
I am going to show an example of city development around rail stations. This map shows one of the typical examples in the downtown of Tokyo, which has six railway lines. The lower map shows the land use type, and you can find commercial and business users concentrated around and near the stations.
The upper map shows the density of floor development. The areas around the stations are very intensively developed. This sort of land use provides you less environmental problem and less traffic congestion, because people tend to use the railway.
