The Japanese Experience with Highway Development

Japan now has one of the world’s most highly developed multimodal transport systems. This was only made possible by successfully building an extensive highway network in a short period of time. The two remarkable aspects of this network have been the scale and layout, which were based not only on traffic volume forecasts but also on the principle of equal access. The Japan Highway Public Corporation (JHPC) was instituted in 1956 to oversee the development and expansion of the highway network. Due to the national government’s limited funding capacity, the JHPC initially relied extensively on debt financing, depending on toll revenues to accelerate the nation’s highway development. Eventually the government, seeking to give as many people as possible access to high-speed transport, introduced a pool system of revenues and costs (plus a uniform toll rate system) for all intercity expressway routes. The costs of each route were to be recovered by tolls paid by its users, cross-subsidisation from other routes and public funds. But over the years, the costs of building such a system soared, thereby increasing debt obligations and leading to the disintegration of the JHPC. Japan is now undergoing rapid transition, deregulation and privatisation of its highways, and is on an ambitious debt repayment programme to recover over ¥40 trillion in less than 40 years. This article is a narrative of the post-war historical experience of the development of highways, especially the expressway category of the road sector in Japan.