WalkBikeNow

Danville, VA councilman Dr. Gary Miller has gone viral on Instagram and TikTok (nearly 5 million views) with his promise to build more sidewalks. Good governance works!

I worked on one stage of the JR privatization and this is greatly oversimplifies what actually happened and ignores some important realities. First, three of the seven JR companies (Hokkaido, Shikoku, Cargo) are still 100% government owned, and were probably never expected to be viable as public enterprises. I was surprised that JR Kyushu was successfully privatized completely - and got Shinkansen - because at the time I was involved (in another company) the conventional wisdom was that only the Honshu companies could succeed as private enterprises. Second, the privatization also involved parking a large chunk of liabilities in a special entity that was NOT privatized. In fact the part of the privatization I worked on was delayed because the government unilaterally decided the new JR companies had not taken enough of the JNR pension liabilities on their books and added some more. Probably one of the most significant aspects of the privatization was the public service workforce reduction it entailed but that was a problem for the government, not the JR companies. Third, the JR companies became private (but first government-owned) companies with valuable assets (the commuter and HSR rail networks) build with public funds as well as a portfolio of highly desirable real estate (high traffic train stations) in choice locations. Fourth, as far as I know any new HSR train lines built since the privatization were publicly funded, since new JR company could afford to build them on a commercially viable basis otherwise. Fifth, train fares are still regulated, and JR East only recently increased fares for the first time in decades… Thus, rather than a simplistic public > private transformation, the whole exercise involved a rebalancing of assets, liabilities and risks between the public and private sector, but both remain important to the whole construct. In any case there was serious planning and government decisions around what was necessary to have at least three commercially-viable JR companies (East, West and Tokai) as a result. So probably more an example of a successfully executed privatization with continuing government involvement, rather than a “private enterprise good, government bad” story.