The Shinkansen system was designed to relieve congestion by providing high-speed transportation between the nation’s largest cities, such as the Tokaido line that links Tokyo to Nagoya and Osaka. The research covered the 1970s and ’80s, when Japan’s economy exploded, and the decades-long stagnation that followed. By mining a data set that included macroeconomic and sociodemographic information, the researchers were able to compare economic growth and land prices on a prefectural level prior to and after the construction of Shinkansen. Japan is divided into 47 regions or prefectures. By helping cities to ”decentralize,“ the HSR reduced the growth in land prices across the region. The findings suggest that by making it easier for workers to move out of the city, the high-speed rail line shifted the demand for property from the higher-cost cities to the lower-cost suburbs and rural areas. But it does indicate a significant slowdown in prefecture-wide land price increases the year after a new rail line was introduced. The study showed prefectures that received a new HSR line did not experience an improvement in overall GDP, even with a burst in spending when the rail line was being built. Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Jose rank among the nation’s most expensive places to live. While there are many differences between Japan’s and California’s economies and cultures, the results suggest HSR might help slow the rise in California housing costs. UCLA Anderson’s Jerry Nickelsburg, University of New Mexico’s Saurabh Ahluwalia and the International Monetary Fund’s Yang Yang employ a half-century of data on the extensive Japanese high-speed rail (HSR) system, known as Shinkansen, to measure economic impact. That point of view might help California’s high-speed rail project between San Francisco and Los Angeles, estimated to cost more than $70 billion, to win over a few of its many critics, a working paper suggests. The solution is more housing and improved transit systems, not just one or the other. Policymakers increasingly see the West Coast housing shortage - and commuter congestion worsened by workers’ moves to distant, lower-priced housing - as a single problem of poorly thought-out urban development. In Japan, speedier commutes let workers live farther from jobs, taking some pressure off high-priced housing markets
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