2020 Volume 72 Issue 2 Pages 107-121
Because of the shift to automobile traffic and the decrease in the users, the rail line abandonments have been occurred mainly in the rural areas in Japan. In addition, there are some existing rail lines which are planned for their future abandonments. The number of rail lines that will be difficult to be maintained by railway companies will increase further in the rural parts of Japan. This study retrospectively assessed the possible impacts of rail line abandonments on the temporal changes in population and income levels in local governments along the abandoned rail lines by using regression models. The results of the analysis indicated that the high population decline rates observed in the region where rail lines have been abandoned were not accelerated by the rail line abandonments. We obtained a similar finding about impacts on income-level changes indicating no statistical differences of average annual changes of income per capita between before and after the railway abandonments, as well as between the regions where rail lines have been abandoned and those where rail lines have been maintained throughout the study period.
