Photo/Illutration A local train in Iwate Prefecture (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

East Japan Railway Co. on July 28 revealed there were 66 sections along 35 of its lines with an average daily number of passengers per 1 kilometer under 2,000, and they were losing money.

"We hope this serves as a catalyst for discussions about other transportation options besides railways,” a JR East source said.

The money-losing sections for JR East totaled about 2,200 km, or about 35 percent of all its local train lines.

This is the first time JR East has released loss figures for each line. Four of the other JR companies have already released such figures to raise awareness that something needed to be done about money-losing lines usually in rural areas, including seeking other forms of transportation for the sections where losses were particularly high.

The source admitted the company had ignored the deficit lines for a while under its watch because it could depend on the large commuter volume around the greater Tokyo metropolitan area and earnings from the Shinkansen lines it operates.

But the novel coronavirus pandemic has led to more employees working from home, and “revenues in urban areas have also fallen, leading to the release of the loss figures for rural lines, which had long been neglected," the source said.

The largest money loser for JR East is the section on the Rikuuto Line between Mogami Station in Yamagata Prefecture and Naruko Onsen Station in Miyagi Prefecture. In fiscal 2020, the company had to spend 22,149 yen ($166) in operating expenses to gain 100 yen in revenues along that section.

The 66 unprofitable sections of JR East had combined losses of about 69.3 billion yen in fiscal 2019 before the negative economic effects from the pandemic emerged. The combined loss in the following fiscal year was about 70.7 billion yen.

JR East's announcement comes just days after a panel of experts under the transport ministry released a recommendation calling on railway companies to enter into discussions with relevant local governments about reviewing operations along sections where the average daily number of passengers per kilometer has fallen to under 1,000.

That benchmark is much more lenient than the one in the 1980s that called for a review when passenger numbers fell under 4,000 per kilometer.

Central Japan Railway Co. is the only company that has yet to release loss figures for its rural lines in large part because of the company’s earnings from the Tokaido Shinkansen line.

(This article was written by Takashi Ogawa and Shinya Matsumoto.)