Post #2526518

one thing that the book goes into is station placement. when the tokaido shinkansen was being planned, they had some tough choices to make about stations. should the line terminate at the existing tokyo station or should they build a new station on the outskirts? the latter would have been much easier, but they ultimately chose the difficult path of acquiring all of the very expensive land and building the necessary elevated structures to get the shinkansen into the existing station. on the flip side, they did the opposite in yokohama, just outside of tokyo. rather than build in the dense part of yokohama, they built the station in a rice field away from the city center. because the shinkansen was successful as a whole, development sprung up around the station and caused an urban sprawl to encompass it, and soon enough the rice fields were gone. the lesson I take from this is that it's worth the additional complexity and expense to get the train into the center of the largest cities being served so that it's a convenient service but there is some room for a "build it and they will come" attitude elsewhere, but be aware that you *will* be causing sprawl.