The problem with rail relocations isn't democracy, but its lack...

Miaoli, Taiwan's hidden treasure.

Dafydd Fell on Democracy and Rail location in Taiwan in the Taiwan Sentinel. Fell describes the politics of rail in the 1950-70s and then moves on to discuss the changes in the post-1980 era when local politicians began moving rail lines out of urban areas, and to the present day, when they are moving them underground or elevating them... he concludes...

A related practice that seems especially common in Taiwan is for existing railways to be shifted either underground or on to elevated tracks. Political pressure has again been a critical driving force in such developments. Such projects, however, are extremely expensive. Often it would have been cheaper to build brand new routes to serve areas excluded from the railway network. Such practices have further eroded the possibilities for freight transport as we can see in sections where tracks were taken underground or elevated the original freight terminals have been disconnected. In other words, political pressures have pushed Taiwan’s railway ever closer to becoming essentially a passenger only network.

Even if there was an environmental call for greater freight transport by rail, the trends over the last three decades mean that this will increasingly not be feasible. Thus, though democracy has offered many environmental benefits, it has at times promoted environmentally damaging policies.

The problem with this claim is that democracy is not responsible for or related to these decisions. I have no doubt that if the people had been consulted, they probably would have voted to move the rail lines, but they weren't so the point is moot. The issue was Taiwan's anti-democracy construction-industrial state with its patronage links to local gangsters and businesses hard at work. Take his Kaohsiung example....

As Taiwan moved into the democratic transition era, political pressure became open and for the next decade and a half there were repeated news items of politicians pressuring TSC. In a TV news report from 1986, local KMT politicians demanded the removal of the North South Line tracks through residential areas of Kaohsiung. Similarly, when the track was lifted from Fengshan to Kaohsiung port in 1989, it was clear that this was due to pressure from the county government and local elected politicians. Their dream to turn the tracks into extra parking lots had been achieved. The ultimate outcome of this process has been that all this freight shifted to road transport, increasing air pollution as well as the potential for road accidents.

There were four mayors of Kaohsiung in the 1980s and all were KMT appointed by the KMT central government. The succession of speakers of the city council, one of the dirtiest in Taiwan, were all KMT. The speaker position was so lucrative because it controlled the agenda that in the late 1990s Chu An-hsiung paid US$10 million to buy the speaker election for himself. In the 1980s the city council itself was full of alleged gangsters like Chang Sheng-wu, who was shot by gunmen in 1982, and the Hsu brothers, one of whom got in trouble over a shootout in one of the sex establishments he owned (lest you imagine that this was a KMT problem, a local DPP legislator was once convicted of heroin trafficking). Local organized crime groups were seen as some of the most powerful on the island.

In major infrastructure construction the driver of these projects is their ability to feed and water local patronage networks. If the local population happens to support the infrastructure construction (and when does it not?), so much the better. The Developmentalist State remains a key ideological construct in the minds of many Taiwanese...

No context is provided here by Fell, and it is highly likely that nothing remotely democratic was going on. Rather, this looks like a case of the usual performance art in which local politicians ask for something the central and local governments already planned to give, the decision already being made behind the scenes. Local politicians -- especially in K-town in the 1980s of all places -- aren't going to go on TV to demand something their party/government superiors don't want. The TV appearance was probably made to help put pressure on Taiwan Railways and Taisugar to move their lines out of the city, with this crop of alleged gangsters posing as defenders of the people. Moreover, in those days, to get elected meant getting your face on TV as often as possible, preferably in the defender of the people role.

But what of the democratic era? Tainan is a good example. Talk of placing the rail lines underground began in the late 1980s and early 1990s and predates the democratic era. The project was approved in 2004 but ground was not broken until last year. It frees up a ton of land for developers though the city government insists it will all be public land.. A friend of mine whose family lost land to the project said that when it was first proposed, the new land was defined as public parks, but as-delivered, their land is going to be for private commercial buildings -- a classic construction-industrial state move. Public hearings have been marred by protests from "self-help" groups (often extortionate in nature and run by local gangsters). Then-Mayor William Lai complained about the Ma Administration's attacks on the land expropriation for the project... and local academics demanded that proper procedure be followed in the expriopriations for the project, with the implication that it probably wouldn't be.

How did "democracy" figure in this decision? Largely by its absence, the decision was made by the inertia (or momentum, if you prefer) which governs all construction-industrial state projects (quick, can you think of any that have been killed by public objections?). Once proposed, they gradually become reality in some form. The public seems to have passively accepted these projects, since it regards new infrastructure as "progress", and knows that the island's domestic political economy is driven by infrastructure spending. Only a few hundred families are affected by the relocation of the rail line. Their problem.

In Taichung the rail elevation cost nearly $1.2 billion and the public has complained vociferously about the new station, which takes longer to get in and out of and requires climbing up and down several flights of stairs (the old station was at ground level and you could run right through the ticket machine and onto a train). It is hard to see any of this driven by or related to democracy -- I can't recall even a single poll. Everyone seemed to assume that putting in all this infrastructure was a good idea, because it has always been done that way.

Another example of railway improvement is the relocation of the Taitung Railway Station in the 1990s, which sucked the life out of the city center. As this 2017 news report notes, the area around the new station remains pathetically undeveloped and forlorn...

16 years ago, the Taiwan Railway Administration and Taitung County government discussed the relocation of Taitung Railway Station, to let the old Taitung City urban area expand, so it was moved to the outskirts of Taitung at Yanwanli. However, 16 years later, the land surrounding Taitung Station has become a city planning area, bought and sold by construction companies and financial consortiums to develop into a commercial area, but this still depends on the market mechanism.

The public was never consulted over the move, which was made over public heads by local politicians deciding amongst themselves. I think the motive for placing the station outside of town on undeveloped land is rather obvious...

Fell's major observation, that removing rail lines in urban areas has been very bad for the environment because it leads to more trucks, is entirely correct. But the reasons for such moves have little to do with democracy, but instead are driven by the needs of the construction-industrial state which seems to operate on automatic pilot...

...the other issue with freight, which Fell does not cover, is that trucks are preferred because throughout most of the Taiwan Miracle firms ran on just-in-time type supply systems in heavily networked small firms, whose goods and raw materials were carted around by truck, often by the familiar blue truck. Rail would actually crimp those delivery networks. Moreover, container volume rapidly expanded after the 1980s, more than doubling between 1980 and 2010 (source). It hardly seems possible that rail expansion, especially in cramped urban areas around ports, could have kept pace with this growth. Today roughly 95% of freight travels by truck (source). Coastal shipping, better for the environment, might play a greater role (as it actually does in Japan), but Taiwan's efficient highway network means it is usually faster to put it on a truck then to wait at a crowded port.   

All in all, what these rail relocation, elevation, and burial projects show is the remarkable way in which large infrastructure projects have become insulated from bottom-up democracy on Taiwan. The general public's passive acceptance of these projects demonstrates the underlying ideological continuity between the authoritarian and democratic eras in their regard of big infrastructure projects, the authority of the local and central government to make those decisions, and the supreme importance of the construction-industrial state.
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