Half a century ago, Japan built the world's first high-speed rail network—a network that remains the gold standard in train travel today. Currently the country is now helping Texas build its own bullet train, a potential game-changer for transportation in the state.

    When it launched on October 1, 1964, the world's first high-speed rail network was known as the “super-express of dreams.” The first line in Japan's now world-famous shinkansen network was built against all odds, in the face of fierce public opposition, technical difficulties and astronomical costs.

    Half a century ago, the system was far humbler. In 1964, the first track was a 320-mile-long link between Tokyo and Osaka that reduced the trip from six-and-a-half hours (on conventional trains) to three hours and 10 minutes, traveling at a maximum speed of 200 miles per hour. For the first time, workers could get to meetings in one city during the day and be back home drinking a beer in the local pub that night.

    Not only did the train expand mobility profoundly, but also businesses appeared around the major stops as a growing emphasis on productivity swept across Japan. Today, the shinkansen network has 1,487 miles of track, with more set to open in the coming years. It seems that everything the shinkansen touches turns to city, and regions that are off the beaten track, so to speak, benefit greatly from the economic jumpstart brought by the train. New shinkansen lines are often proceeded by aggressive marketing campaigns promoting tourism in those areas, a strategy that seems to work.

    Despite its astronomical costs, it actually has saved more. Today, over 350,000 annual trips transport tens of millions of passengers all over Japan with efficiency—the average delay time is less than a minute. A research report titled 30 Years of High-Speed Railways: Features and Economic and Social Effects of The Shinkansen by Hiroshi Okada, estimates that the economic impact from the shinkansen train network, based on the time saved from faster travel, is approximately ¥500 billion ($4.8 billion USD) per year. Okada stresses that the cultural impact is also significant, a shinkansen offers people living far from urban centers “easy access to concerts, exhibitions, theaters, etc., enabling them to lead fuller lives.”

    Japan has a plan, known as the One-Day Travel Initiative. Its goal: regardless of where you are in Japan, it should only take you three hours to get to the nearest major regional city (Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo or Fukuoka). The planned impact of this hyper-mobility is to discourage the tide of migration toward urban centers, like Tokyo, and encourage decentralization.