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0 pointsmakeitdouble1y ago0 comments

Companies paying for public transport is a matter of flooring the commute cost: (almost) nobody lives in an area with no public transportation and car commute costs more, so companies will pay the price for lowest commute and you get to decide what you do with it.

Same thing if your train transit costs 440 yens at base rate but you decide to ride first class or even one of the special luxury trains at a thousand+ yens, you'll only get the base 440 yens from your company.

On profitability, as mentioned by sister comment, they all have a realtor arm and also rent the space surrounding the stations to shopping malls and department stores, sometimes own or revenue share with the attractions in the town that will bring more visitors and they'll talk with he city planners to foster a whole ecosystem, JR famously gets a cut from every Suica transaction etc.

They don't need to make it all from the ride ticket, even if it's price appropriately. Government has little to do with most of it, subsidies only matter on the smaller, super low volume lines where rising prices would kill the traffic.

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lmm1y ago

> Companies paying for public transport is a matter of flooring the commute cost: (almost) nobody lives in an area with no public transportation and car commute costs more, so companies will pay the price for lowest commute and you get to decide what you do with it.

If that was the reason they would simply not pay for commutes at all, as is normal in most other countries.

> Government has little to do with most of it, subsidies only matter on the smaller, super low volume lines where rising prices would kill the traffic.

Nah. Both the railway companies and the government lean into the myth of their being private operations because it suits everyone, but the "private" railway companies were set up with immensely valuable government funded capital assets and would never have been able to operate without them, they rely on government support for any substantial new capital investments, and they have the relevant governments as significant investors, in many cases the largest investors. Yes JR central is immensely profitable if you accept the accounting fiction that the tokaido shinkansen simply popped into existence one day and is worth nothing.

makeitdoubleOP1y ago

> If that was the reason they would simply not pay for commutes at all, as is normal in most other countries.

Paying for commute is mostly a tax thing. It's the same kind of adjustement as doing BYOD or giving employees PCs that have passed their business depreciation value instead of doing leases.

It's way easier to do with train transit, as train companies will give traceability/limitations on the commute and it's way easier to explain that just paying for a week's worth of gasoline or a car's insurance, or other costs.

If a country doesn't have any arrangement to make these expenses easier to pass on the company, I see how commute would just be cover privately by the employee.

> "private" railway companies were set up with immensely valuable government funded capital assets and would never have been able to operate without them,

Fundamentally no business of significant size operates without any gov. oversight nor preferential treatment. Tim Cook shaking Trump's hand is not the outlier, and at the size of a railroad company you better be in good terms with regulators if you want anything done.

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