$85 Toll Discourages Traffic : Japan’s Dream Bridge Carries Forbidding Price

Japan built a high-technology wonder of a bridge to bring a small island into the modern era, but local residents and industries say they can’t afford the $85 round-trip toll.

The six-mile Seto Inland Sea Bridge, which opened more than a year ago to connect Japan’s Honshu Island with Shikoku Island, was the final ground link in a long-held dream to connect Japan’s four main islands.

Excitement and local pride built to a fever pitch at the opening of the bridge in April, 1988, because it meant that Shikoku’s 4.2 million people would have a link to Honshu, Japan’s largest island.

Rite of Passage

During 10 years of construction, they viewed the double-tiered network of six bridges and connecting viaducts as a rite of passage into Japan’s modern era.

Residents on both sides of the Seto Inland Sea believe that the bridge has given the region a psychological boost.

“Before the bridge, the Seto Inland Sea divided the cultures of the islands and isolated Shikoku,” said Teruo Hamaie, a newscaster on the TV network RSK in Okayama, a city of 600,000 people on Honshu. “But now, the two peoples feel integrated.”

However, the $85 toll, designed to offset the $7.79-billion cost of the bridge, doesn’t entice many motorists or truckers. The bridge has increased tourism--it has become a curiosity--but it has brought little concrete benefit to Shikoku’s industrial quarter.

Local fisheries and produce growers looked forward to the bridge because it would mean that they no longer would have to rely on ferry boats, often subject to the area’s unpredictable weather, for deliveries.

Firms Depend on Ferries

But, they say, their delivery trucks continue to use the ferries.

Although ferry tolls are also high--about $95 one way for the 90-mile trip from Shikoku to the port of Kobe--regular users get up to 40% discounts and save on the bridge toll, gasoline, and tolls for new highways on the Honshu side of the bridge.

The companies say they save money by transporting their goods by sea as far as possible and that their drivers get a chance to rest.

Katsushige Matsuda, manager of the Kagawa Fishery Cooperatives, said that on bad days, his trucks will wait for hours for fog to lift rather than use the bridge. When Shikoku’s new Takamatsu airport is completed this year, the cooperative will invest in air-delivery service rather than use the bridge.

“We can’t say that the bridge has had any merit for the fishing industry,” Matsuda said.

The high toll also has kept regular motorists off the bridge as well.

Less than half the expected daily traffic was recorded in the first year of the bridge’s operation. An average of 10,800 vehicles crossed every day, and projected revenues fell short by $137 million.

Rail Traffic Rises

But railway traffic during the period was higher than expected. For about $2.70 per ticket, about 30,000 passengers rode the Japan Railways trains that speed across the bridge’s lower deck 144 times a day in both directions.

In a boon for the tourist industry, more than twice as many visitors as in 1987 flocked to Shikoku’s Kagawa Prefecture in 1988, most of them drawn by the bridge itself. In the process, they booked 5,000 more hotel rooms than the year before and consumed thousands of tons of udon noodles, a local specialty.

In the town of Sakaide on Shikoku, a 520-foot tower for viewing the Seto Inland Sea and the bridge was built for the new flow of tourists.

Marine Park to Open

Across the island-studded sea in Okayama Prefecture, a major tourism makeover is taking shape. The city of Uno, a down-at-the-heels port since the decline of Japan’s shipbuilding industry, is the site of a $137-million “Spanish Village,” a vast amusement and marine park to open in 1992.

Century Park Tivoli, a $343.5-million amusement center based on one in Copenhagen, is expected to open in 1994.

“These projects wouldn’t have come to this region without the interest generated by the bridge,” said Douglas Smith, an American who is the coordinator of international relations in Okayama’s commerce and industry department.

“There is a sense that 1988 wasn’t the big year in Okayama, that there is more to come.”