> Japan is one of the only countries to have privatized parking. In Europe and North America, vast quantities of parking space is socialized: municipalities own the streets and allow people to park on them at low or zero cost. Initially with the intention of encouraging the provision of more parking spaces, Japan made it illegal to park on public roads or pavements without special permission. Before someone buys a car, they must prove that they have a reserved night-time space on private land, either owned or leased.
This is got to be a huge factor. Making everyone pay for "free parking" through inefficient use of space is such a waste. I strongly recommend everyone to read Donald Shoup's "The High Price of Free Parking".
Street parking makes suburbs worse, too. Almost everybody in my neighborhood has their garages piled to the ceiling with junk and parks in the street, which makes it a pain to weave through even for someone driving a compact crossover… I can’t imagine what kind of hell it is for trash and delivery drivers having to squeeze huge trucks and vans through without swiping peoples’ cars.
This is where legislation can come in - when I bought my house, one provision was that I can't change the front to a garden, it has to remain usable as a parking space for a car. Even if I don't have a car. There's limited extra / visitor parking available. Of course, a lot of people have two cars so it's kinda moot but still.
Now, instead of letting car owners pay for the public space they use (street parking), you are forcing anyone without a car to waste their own private space, in case somebody wants to park there.
It would make a difference in dense cities like San Francisco where many people park on the street. A lot of people would have to give up their cars.
Meanwhile, in rural areas and many suburbs, it would be pointless paperwork, because everyone has a big enough driveway for their cars and nobody parks on the street at night.
So it seems like it would be difficult to get enough people in favor to do it state-wide in California? Wherever it would actually force people to do something, it would be unpopular.
> A lot of people would have to give up their cars.
You don't have to give up the car, you just park it farther away from the dense and crowded downtown and use some other personal transportation (scooter, bike) for the last mile trip.
there is middleground: tax / fines, whatever you name them. It will be free if you filled the paperwork, and it start out cheap, while gradually increase yearly. Can be different depending on the density or how heavy traffic an area is. However you should improve the public transport at the same time too.
Your city/rural distinction is insightful. I think it can be taken into account relatively easily. Name explicitly the cities/locations were the requirement would apply. Possibly based on some objective criteria like population density.
Not sure about the legal frameworks in the US but that’s exactly how it works in most places in the UK. Cities have restrictions for on-street parking (metered, permitted, illegal) whereas the towns and villages don’t (unless they also bring in bylaws to help with congestion).
The main low-hanging fruit is just removing surface parking lots in American downtowns and stopping the development and expansion of highways through the same. If you did nothing else that would have a significant positive impact. For almost all communities those surface parking lots are economic extracts from the community. They're woefully underpriced for tax purposes too.
The removed parking needs to be replaced by transit options people actually want to use.
I live just outside a fairly large city. Getting downtown sucks. Driving is the only real option, but parking is annoying and expensive. Even if it was free, it would still be annoying. I almost exclusively take an Uber because of it. Those can add up and be a mixed bag as well.
There is bus service, but it’s infrequent and quadruples the time. In some cases, the transit directions say 1h 20 minutes, where 47 minutes of that is walking. Meanwhile, a car is under 20 minutes.
I used to live outside of Chicago. The Metra could get me downtown faster than a car (during rush hour) for just a few bucks. The train became the pragmatic choice and dictated where I chose to live.
Removing parking doesn’t build a train, it just raises parking rates, keeping people from even bothering to go downtown.
I agree that surface lots are terrible, but they have to be replaced by something.
This is what the activists think but in reality it just slowly makes everyone's lives worse. There's typically some sort of political or social dysfunction preventing effective transit and reducing parking doesn't magically make that go away. It's analogous to the tired refrain about new technology not fixing social problems.
Buses are a simpler solution. A city should solve the anywhere to downtown is quick on bus or train thing. You need transit lanes and more buses. Ideal is public transit is faster and cheaper. Even someone who already has a car will not use it.
Then once solved, let people get across from one suburb to the next on transit quickly but that is harder to do economically.
Maybe the parking lots, but if you know anything about the major Japanese cities with satisfyingly good train systems then you'll also know they have a lot of expressways running through them.
Yes, I do love the rail system in Japan. Went a few years ago, going back next year most likely. I've also driven in Japan (Osaka). I just meant, in general, a low-hanging fruit we could tackle is making surface parking lots a thing of the past in downtown or urban areas. With actual economically productive constructs there instead, such as business, retail, housing, parks, &c. we could pretty much get to the density where trams make sense, and in some cities we could work on intra-city rail too.
I think where I live (Columbus) is very well positioned for this model if only our civic leaders had courage and stopped thinking of transit as a "blue" thing (also our city council needs to stop suburban thinking). We don't need to build any more expressways or highways. We are maxed out. The only sane option is respecting appropriate density, and focusing on categorical changes in how we move people: walk/bike/rail instead of bus/car/roadways.
> we could pretty much get to the density where trams make sense
That's the key issue. We don't need to launch a war on surface parking to achieve the necessary density. Zoning and mass transit buildout go hand in hand and the problem getting in the way is fundamentally a political one. If the politics is solved and the density increases market forces will cause the surface parking to go away on their own.
Surface parking is a huge waste of space that becomes unusable for pedestrians. You can't apply market forces to it because unpaid roadside parking is effectively a tragedy of the commons.
That is wild, I wouldn't have nearly enough faith in the structural integrity of the doors for that. Not to mention that packing people in like that seems vaguely unsafe.
Their streets tend to be super narrow, with pedestrians and bicycles sharing the shoulder. And back streets are basically alleys with pedestrians sharing the street with cars. Obviously parked cars there would be a disaster.
Also it tends to cost more via tolls to drive any significant distance than to take the train or bus (or plane for that matter), unless you have multiple people in the car. The car situation in Japan strikes me as more a case of regulatory capture than wise use of land. Because even small towns with vast empty spaces operate this way.
It's significantly more efficient to provide services to compact towns than sprawled towns, so I'm not sure this registers to me as a downside.
It's pretty common for small sprawled towns to struggle to keep up with maintenance of roads/water/power, which is less of an issue with compact towns.
The lack of sprawl is also a consequence of how mountainous the country is. While not as bad as a lot of western sprawl, the areas of Japan that are a bit wider and less populated do have an element of car dependent sprawl to them. Then of course the villages that aren't covered by the train network and aren't boxed in by mountains have a pretty similar relationship to cars as a small western town.
Where I think the US and Australia both struggle is trying to make the car work in dense cities as populations grow. We do actually have pretty dense cities in Aus, yet cannot give up the car.
It's worth noting that for a kei car (the small 660cc cars that make up most of japan's car sales) you do not actually need to prove you have parking space in some regions of japan (like you do with non kei cars)
Wow weird. I've lived there and never knew but now that you've pointed that out I'm realizing we never parked on the street. It's always at the house or the parking lot of the place we're going.
Of course 95% of the time we take the train. Only use a car to go to Costco or possibly go out to the country (even then a lot of remote areas are super accessible in public transit)
I like trains but the logic is flawed. If we banned hats, or made it so they were very expensive, less people would wear hats. And sure, probably more places would worry about shade because hats are not an option... But it doesn't really prove that's the right thing to do or that hats are inefficient use of cloth.
Hats are pretty objectively an ineffecient use of cloth, here. Roads are incredibly expensive to maintain societally because cars cause so much wear-and-tear; cars, maintenance, and insurance are expensive on the individual; lack of foot-traffic is expensive for business-owners; individual car-use is much more expensive on the planet and power grid; travel is more difficult & and dangerous for children and old-folks… it goes on and on.
Having sprawling towns that require cars to get around is pretty obviously a bad idea from so many fronts. Trains, trolleys, and bikes are better on all these points.
> Roads are incredibly expensive to maintain societally because cars cause so much wear-and-tear;
Actually the wear and tear due to cars is minimal compared to that of trucks. The relationship of wear to mass is nonlinear. Which isn't to say that buttering half the earth with asphalt isn't a seemingly absurd use of resources.
I think it is. You have to prove that you have a space to park your car and if you have space at your house, they come to measure and verify that you do. I don't mind parking for places that you are visiting, but you need to have your own parking and not depend on the street for it.
Romania. Even its capital and the largest city - Bucharest - is still pretty cheap, sometimes even free like in this example on Google Street View https://maps.app.goo.gl/r6TFFtHbj2SELTqY9
If you're willing to take the risk which is pretty low, you can even park it on the sidewalk like here https://maps.app.goo.gl/y6DNVBdR2KvJsA917
But times are changing. Lanes and sidewalks, sometimes even green spaces, are being converted to parking spaces, so there's less spaces for freeloading. They're also becoming more and more expensive. The residential ones have also been hard to get and it will probably become even harder to get as more drivers will need them as the risk of getting a fine increases.
That's probably an exception. Most cities I know in Europe have crazy expensive parking and usually forbid cars from entering the city center. I would say EU cities are really hostile to cars
You should distinguish between residents and visitors. In Belgium, and I believe in many other European cities, street parking for residents is extremely cheap or free.
Not Paris and especially not if you have an SUV: 225€ for six hours (sic). But unlike Tokyo the average narrow street in Paris is still lined with parked cars from end to end, so apparently the fees are still too low.
I suspect if you live there you can get a parking permit to park relatively cheaply. Where I used to live they introduced paid parking on my street, because people were going out the city center to park in residential areas instead of pay for a parking garage. A permit cost me €75 a year.
"free" just means "publicly subsidized" in these cases. Not that this is a bad thing, but that's really all it is. See also: literally anything any nation pays for using tax money.
Sometimes it’s privately subsidized, too, such as when you go out to eat and your meal costs more because the restaurant provides free parking. People who don’t drive often pay higher prices subsidizing the people who do, which is something we should talk about more directly.
That won’t fix the cost of rail in America, which is the main reason America doesn’t have better rail. Look at California high speed rail or light rail in Seattle. They have insane costs per mile, are still very over budget, falling behind schedule, and basically are forever grifts. The availability of parking is unrelated to these issues. It comes back to mismanagement and corruption.
The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail.
If you try building a single megaproject, nobody knows what they are doing, everything is inefficient, and mistakes will be made. But you learn by doing. If the individual projects are small enough that there are always multiple projects in various stages, you develop and maintain expertise. Then you can build things cost-effectively and finish the projects in time.
I think it's not feasible in America because of the culture. If you have a good chunk of people that are hell-bent against sharing space with others for one reason or another (some are legitimate reasons!), you're already discarding a significant chunk of passengers.
Another hot take is... if you want any of the infrastructure to be mass-used, you have to make it better than the alternatives, so people with the means would use it as well. Like your subway should be faster than the cars, so even affluent people would take it. Your trains should be faster than door-to-door flight time, so people would take that as well. Unfortunately that makes a lot of things more complicated in communities with high income disparity.
> I think it's not feasible in America because of the culture. If you have a good chunk of people that are hell-bent against sharing space with others for one reason or another (some are legitimate reasons!), you're already discarding a significant chunk of passengers.
That's why America never layed any railroads in the 19th century, and everyone just rode by horse instead. Oh wait, that's not what happened at all.
Culturally, though, it’s because that over half of the population doesn’t know that they would benefit from trains? In the same way outside (just as inside) the US there’s an age-old divide between farmers and city folk (see Denmark or France for the most recent protests).
In China, >66% of the population lives in urban areas. In the US, <30% live in proper urban areas (a vast majority, 60%, live in historically car-centric suburban areas mostly developed post WWII).
The issue is not that those areas that would benefit the most don’t support it, it’s that the areas that would benefit the most from it are surrounded by areas that currently have no viable alternatives (and thus knowledge that something else is possible) other than a car. They’re already driving >1hr to get to work or an airport. Therefore, of course they think anything that takes away resources from wider roads is a waste of their own time and tax money, as it does not benefit them.
The reason the California HSR, if ever finished, will actually mark a cultural shift is that it’s the only megaproject attempted since the 21st century that actually puts modern alternatives to the car in rural areas: vast amounts of money could’ve been saved by connecting LA to SF and SD by electrifying and tunneling on the current Amtrak route, but that would’ve left out about half the state.
Was it too ambitious? Maybe. But in 50 years, maybe everyone will be talking about how it changed California, and the US’s, entire attitude toward rail.
> Culturally, though, it’s because that over half of the population doesn’t know that they would benefit from trains
No it’s not. Everyone in America goes to Disney World, which was made by a train nerd and you can’t even drive into the parks. Everyone goes there, rides around the trains and walkable areas, and then goes home to Ohio and drives around in their giant SUV.
It’s not because people don’t know about trains. It’s because they don’t value the things you do, and they value things you don’t, like having distance from strangers and being able to buy a lot of stuff and cart it around with them everywhere.
All my family is immigrants from Bangladesh. They’re not steeped in generations of American car culture. But, for some reason, car culture is the thing they assimilate into most easily. My cousin was living in Queens (where all the recent Bangladeshi immigrants are) and moved to Dallas. She’s thrilled about having all the space for her kids to run around, the apartment with a pool, etc. She doesn’t miss having to schlep her kids on the subway around aggressive homeless people, people singing to themselves, panhandlers, etc.
That’s fun, because I’m from a third generation Dallas family :) I hope they enjoy Dallas and all Texas has to offer.
Dallas, TX has continually voted in expanding its DART Rail funding the past 40 years. It has the most miles of intercity rail in the entirety of the South. It has the most light rail, by mileage, built in the entirety of the US. It just opened up an entirely new rail line through the suburbs (and only the suburbs) in March, and is its third(!) line which connects directly to DFW airport, which makes it the most rail-connected airport in the United States, and tied with Shanghai, Tokyo and London for the world.
I also personally currently live on a farm in California, and am an advocate of HSR. I believe many of those in similar areas are afraid of rail because they have never experienced its benefits, and change without knowledge is scary.
So please forgive me if I say that you are incorrect in both your assessment of how the majority of Dallas, Texas supports rail and your assumption of what I value.
And regarding your point about Disney World, I believe you are actually agreeing with me. Disney is one of the only places in the US it makes more sense to use the train or shuttle than a car. It does not in most of the US. Many people go to Disney World and experience for the first time how well trains can work for day-to-day transit, if designed well and intentionally. People will use what is most convenient, immigrant or not — most people (including me) do not take trains out of some principled stance, they do so when it’s more convenient. And my argument is we should make it more convenient, safety and all.
> Another hot take is... if you want any of the infrastructure to be mass-used, you have to make it better than the alternatives, so people with the means would use it as well. Like your subway should be faster than the cars, so even affluent people would take it.
These days cities often achieve this by purposely hurting the alternatives like driving. And that just isn’t the solution. Mass transit has to be fast period. Not just faster than a bad alternative. And it needs to be safe, and 24x7.
> These days cities often achieve this by purposely hurting the alternatives like driving.
The point is not hurting the alternative of driving, it's to ensure that drivers don't actively hurt the more space-efficient alternatives of biking and walking on foot. The people who still have a real need for driving actually have a far better experience as a result due to the reduced traffic.
I support all kinds of transportation. I think everyone should have access to trains, cars, bikes and etc. But I also think each has its own merits. Like the car ownership over here is huge, but most commute to work on trains because things aren’t really invisibly subsidized.
At the same time, the same government, mysteriously, has no problem building a vast network of roads reaching everywhere and spanning the whole country.
If the US government neglects a section of highway until a city becomes unreachable by roads, there will be riots. The same city losing a train service? Totally expected, trains are supposed to suck.
The sorry state of American public transport is a self-fulfilling prophecy: everybody knows that public transportation sucks, and therefore nothing is done to improve it, because it's a waste of resource.
>the same government, mysteriously, has no problem building a vast network of roads reaching everywhere and spanning the whole country.
Our road-building has slowed dramatically since the 1980s. The Interstate Highway network would be much more expensive and slow to build today.
>If the US government neglects a section of highway until a city becomes unreachable by roads, there will be riots.
Consider John's Island, South Carolina. The highway that was supposed to go there has been delayed for 33 years. Access to the island/town is through two two-lane roads that get backed up to a standstill every night. There's a running "joke" about how everyone is going to die if there's a major hurricane.
That’s maybe the reason today to not build more but not the reason it is bad. America ignored rail for decades in favor of highway systems and now the cost is almost always considered infeasible. We will redo our roads every 5-10 years though.
If it was invested in 50 years ago or more we would be in a different place for sure.
Can you explain how Seattle is an example? They’re opening new lines, Link is packed often, seems like a well used reliable service, but I only visit once or twice a year.
It’s been a while since I read about their system but as I recall, across the entire system something like 100 billion is the total cost. But that’s only for like 75 ish miles. So it’s very expensive. I recently saw a news article saying they’re 30 billion short per their projections and are now cutting lines out of the plan that voters expected when they supported levies, and some surrounding cities where residents have each paid hundreds or more a year for the rail to come to them, now may not get them at all. Even though they’ve been paying into it for a decade or two. Which to me is a form of theft.
The central sections of link were expensive because they're built through the center of the earth with really huge stations, some of this is to avoid impacting cars but much is just to get elevation changes. The connection over lake Washington required a lot of money and work too, as it's a floating bridge.
The less complex sections were mostly on-par with other us cities.
The per mile costs are definitely high in America, for a lot of reasons, often related to laws and policies, but that's not really the issue. At the end of 2025, nearly 20 years since California voters passed Prop 1A, we have spent under $15 Billion on California High Speed Rail. As a point of contrast, the cost of 2025's tax cut extensions is estimated to be $4 Trillion. The fact is that we don't have quality intercity passenger rail in this country because politicians aren't willing to support it and fund it as reasonable levels. Seattle light rail is an interesting example because politicians there are willing to support it and so ... we are building it, despite the relatively high per mile costs. LA Metro is interesting right because the voters passed sales taxes that funded various light rail projects. So LA is building better rail. But the political process means that every district supervisor gets their own rail project and so we have light rail to Pomona but are struggling to get a subway down Wilshire where it's obviously more needed. Anyways, all this is to say, politics is a big part of the reason why we don't have better rail in America. And blaming "grift" is a right-wing political talking point that probably doesn't help.
> political process means that every district supervisor gets their own rail project
This is part of what people mean by “grift.” Anyway, I’m not right wing. I just want cheap rail done competently. That’s not “not the issue.” As a voter, that is very much an issue for me.
Neither LA nor NYC are even vaguely similar to the rest of the nation, so invoking their names when talking about national effects is pretty useless. They're insanely, unbelievably dense locations. The extreme majority of Americans do not live in anything near that dense.
The idea that LA is an unbelievably dense location is puzzling. My Spanish hometown is significantly denser than Los Angeles. Even large parts of NYC are not in any way dense by global urban standards.
As for people parking in the street in the US, you will find them in many smaller cities. Look at random pictures of south St Louis: Plenty of neighborhoods built before every house had a 2 car garage, and therefore with a lot of on-street parking used every day. And that's with single family homes. Hell, you find this in deep suburbs too, where someone decides they want 4 cars, and have the garage full of crap. I could take pictures of at least ten cars parked on the curb, and at least 40 outdoors in driveways if I went for a one mile loop around my 4th ring suburb.
Now, not that this is the main reason Americans still use cars to go anywhere right now, as the rest of the infrastructure around me also makes car mandatory. Suburbs with houses 3 miles from the nearest business, shops inaccessible on foot, streets that, while supposedly crossable, are extremely unsafe to pedestrians... In a world where, say, we limit each household to one car, my entire suburb becomes abandoned, and most businesses collapse, kind of like a place like Madrid collapses if one didn't run any public transit for 4 months.
Over 1/20 Americans live in LA or NYC. Cities in LA county don't show up in a density ranking until 15th with Maywood. WEHO is 20th and its gets less dense from there. Like 80% of Americans live in metro areas.
Right, 19/20 people do not need the same solution as the highly specific ones you would need for some place as dense as Manhattan or LA. You can do things in Seattle that you cannot do in Manhattan - MUCH cheaper things.
If you tried that your politicians would get tossed out of office the next election.
Your argument totally ignores that all this infrastructure was built around using cars. Doing things like banning street parking doesn't magically reorganize the way everything was built out over the last 100 years. Took a 100 years to build this will take 100 or more years to undo it.
I'm also suspicious the people pushing stuff like that would in a different time and place would be wearing hair shirts and flagellating themselves. All nice but that's not most people.
> Where I live in Los Angeles, a very large number of people park their cars primarily or exclusively on the street.
> Such a change would have a significant impact.
What would that impact be? Do you see, or experience, a lot of contention for nighttime parking?
There's plenty of contention for street parking in nonresidential areas. But a nighttime parking certificate doesn't do anything about that. Nighttime parking is done in residential areas.
It's not like you have to get waivers to park your cars in front of your house in Japan. Your car MUST have a designated lot, with proofs(more or less a set of simple declaration forms than anything detailed and concrete), to be registered under your name. Otherwise it cannot be registered. A full waiver for parking violations technically exist, but they are reserved for official and/or actually special vehicles only(like actual fire trucks). The vast majority of cars stay in an off-of-road parking lot of some sort, be it a fancy mechanical one or a crude gravel lot next to apartment complex.
I reckon that not many other country do that kind of legal setup. But Japan is among those very few.
But permission to park in front of your own house is trivial to obtain in the US (as the thread has noted, generally not even necessary to obtain, but in some cases it is necessary to get permission) and would satisfy the requirement.
You can imagine a regime where parking in front of your own house is banned as a policy choice, but that's completely different from a regime where you need to document that you have permission to park somewhere at night. The nighttime parking requirement doesn't make it any harder to own a car, because you're "gatekeeping" ownership with a gate that can't bar anyone.
> You can imagine a regime where parking in front of your own house is banned as a policy choice
Yes, I believe that's exactly what's being referred to. A blanket ban on street parking and requiring documentation of a dedicated off street parking space to register a vehicle.
Of course there would be little to no point to such an exercise in a nation where the majority of the streets have wide shoulders specifically intended for parking. What's happening here is that people with a vested interest in a given political outcome aren't making a rational comparison of the differences between the infrastructure in the two places.
My take is that the anti-car movement broadly engages in a disingenuous tactic where they actively attempt to make the experience of using cars worse in order to drive political change while misrepresenting the nature of their actions. It's an underhanded tactic employed by a vocal minority with the intent of fooling the silent majority.
Not the person you're replying to, but I see the same thing happen in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. Dense neighborhood with a lot of nightlife, but many of its residents exclusively use free street parking to park overnight. There is a lot of contention for spots after about 7pm.
Perhaps you’ve never lived in a large American city? In many cities you can’t even park on the street overnight in residential neighborhoods because the parking is permitted for people who live in that neighborhood. Without the right sticker (or a guest permit from a resident) your car is getting ticketed or towed, formalizing the usage of overnight street parking for residents.
In Chicago, for example, many neighborhoods are full of former single family homes that at some point (often long ago) were converted into 2 or 3 unit residences, but there is still likely only one garage that maybe fits two vehicles. If you’ve got units filled with 2-3 roommates each, there might be 9 cars for a building with only 2 spots.
Obviously I’m not arguing this is good, but that’s the way things are for now.
“Japan’s liberal land use regulation makes it straightforward to build new neighborhoods next to railway lines, giving commuters easy access to city centers. It also enables the densification of these centers, which means that commuters have more places they want to go.”
This is the most important paragraph in the article. It can’t be overstated how ingenious Japan’s system of zoning is and how much this has benefitted their society in ways we can only dream about here in the West.
"West" when we talk about urban spaces, walk-accessible cities and public transportation is, IMHO, the wrong category. Europe and USA are very far apart.
Europe and USA are both huge places so it depends what you mean. If you compare major east coast cities - Boston, DC, and NYC to European metros like Paris/ Madrid/ Lisbon the biggest tax on the citizens is the same in that it’s impossible to build anything so a huge % of income needs to go to housing.
East coast cities were built before modern building codes.
Something that, for some reason, people in the states don't want to accept is that - when given the choice - the vast majority of people prefer living in dense urban environments.
May be an assumption on my part, but the language "people prefer to live in dense urban environment" is typical of urbanism-boosters - who definitely push a lot online that leads one to believe that anything less than inner Tokyo is unacceptable.
Granted I’m approaching it from the perspective of a tourist or business traveler, but 6/6 of the European cities I’ve been in were fully navigable for my purposes via transit. I’d probably guess half or less in the US.
Even in NYC or SFO, the metro areas are so large it really makes the success rates low depending on the trip.
One thing that is critical is that the country hasn't turned home ownership into an ever growing financial asset that is meant to carry the majority of one's wealth into perpetuity
Well, it did at one point, it’s just that the crash that resulted was so nasty it disabused anybody of that notion.
At the peak of the bubble era, just the land underneath the Imperial Palace had an estimated real estate value larger than the entire state of California.
I'm only barely familiar with it so I ask this in good faith: is it really ingenious or is it just more permissive? My bias/priors are that the simpler and truer statement is: it can't be overstated how beneficial more permissive zoning laws are to a society.
There are other aspects beyond simply being more permissive. I recall reading for example that property transfer tax is remarkably less on bare land, enough so that when travelling in Japan you will regularly notice bare lots for sale, as it is beneficial for the seller to tear down a lot before they sell it. This sort of thing encourages churn of housing, and coupled with liberal zoning, enables an accelerated increase in denser building. Tbh it probably encourages lower construction costs since more people are doing construction.
IMO in this whole conversation, whether discussing any jurisdiction not just japan, impacts of zoning is an over emphasized and tax policy under emphasized (ie. almost never discussed).
I have a hard time believing that a tax code that incentives destruction in any capacity is a good thing.
If the land is more valuable without a structure the current owner has natural incentive to do that, or someone else has incentive to buy, demolish and re-list.
I also wonder how much the pressure filled culture of not standing out has something to do with this. My impression is Japanese are under a lot more pressure to not abuse the permissiveness of the zoning laws.
I'm not meaning to take a dig at you, but the fact that you (and presumably many others) can genuinely ask that question serves to illustrate the parent's point quite nicely.
To spell it out, "abuse" here means to engage in behavior that is socially undesirable or disruptive or would generally be expected to upset otherwise reasonable neighbors or whatever while nonetheless falling within the bounds of the law. An alarmingly large amount of what goes on in the US falls into that category IMO.
Not really the same thing. They're much larger already than most stores you'd see in urban Japan.
Think more in terms of small convenience stores ("Spätis" with daily necessities) everywhere. Typical distance to a store is maybe 500-1000m in Germany. In dense areas of Japanese cities it's closer to one store every 100m-200m.
So in Germany it'd be a 10 minute walk, while in Japan most of your "walk" would be getting downstairs.
The flipside of that is that selection is going to be limited compared to what you'd find in Germany.
I see. What you describe does seem to match what I experienced in NYC, Portugal, and Spain? Small supermarkets everywhere with a bit of a random selection of items
> I'm only barely familiar with it so I ask this in good faith: is it really ingenious or is it just more permissive?
Let's start from the glaring problem: The purpose of the US zoning system was institutionalized racism to keep the "undesirables" out rather than anything having to do with development management. Once you realize that, all of the misfeatures (NIMBY, excessive permitting, sclerotic bureaucracy, public participation) make obvious sense.
Practically every zoning system would be better than that.
Dallas-Area Rapid Transit (DART) member cities all had to develop 25-year plans for denser development around station sites as a condition of their membership, if that’s what you mean by “natural”.
> "I think that though we are a railway company, we consider ourselves a city-shaping company. In Europe for instance, railway companies simply connect cities through their terminals. That is a pretty normal way of operating in this industry, whereas what we do is completely different: we create cities and then, as a utility facility, we add the stations and the railways to connect them one with another."
I think this is it. The economic model incentivizes rail development. (Certainly, part of it is also cultural and legal frameworks that in the US make it very hard for this model to work)
Because the railway companies also participate in the economic activity at the destinations, they extract extended value from enabling mobility. Imagine if the rail operators owned a percentage of a stadium or convention center, for example. This then creates the economic incentive to build more connections to this "hub".
It's actually a bad example - there is barely anything around Kyoto station except a few hotels and some shopping malls. The main shopping/entertainment area and almost all tourist attractions are north of it, requiring connection by bus or subway.
The areas around major stations in basically any other city are far more developed. Look at Osaka-Umeda for example. I don't know if that's due to the historical buildings or the relative lack of good railway within the city itself (Kyoto is mostly a hub to get between other lines)
The original comment was "I think that though we are a railway company, we consider ourselves a city-shaping company." Kyoto is absolutely not built around its station. Walk a few blocks away and there's nothing but regular apartments! The true centre is Shijo Kawaramachi.
In my travels through Japan and Taiwan, rail stops are almost always hubs of economic activity of all sorts. It's a selling point when searching for accommodations while planning trips. Easy access to food and shopping. Taiwan night markets in cities, for example, are almost always near major rail station of some kind (light, metro, train). No need to go very far to get from one point of interest to another.
> Certainly, part of it is also cultural and legal frameworks that in the US make it very hard for this model to work
How so? In the United States Congress granted land to railroad companies, and the companies can sell the land to finance building tracks. Many cities started as railroad stops and grew because of the railroad.
I suspect the commenter above is reflecting on 2026 USA and not 1850 USA. The past tense nature of your comment if part of the concern highlights a common recognition that there is limited evidence the country is currently capable of building.
A lot of NIMBY/racism/classism and modern reality of legal delays means that it can be costly.
Zoning laws is another. It's a lot of fun visiting Japan and Taiwan because you can wander around and there's a huge variation of utilization in a given block. US approach to zoning means that I rarely see similar utilization in the US.
Separate from this is politics.
I'm in the NYC metro area and we've been trying to expand access into NYC for decades.
You would think that this would be a no-brainer because it enables so much economic activity in both directions (NY/NJ). Yet, Chris Christie canceled the ARC project (which itself was years in the making) for optics at the time of the Tea Party.
There's an existing disused commuter rail line in NJ near the Hudson that was shut down in the 60s. It still has many of its stations and density to support rail service today but can't be reopened because of the NIMBYs. If they can't make that work, the rest of the country is mostly hopeless.
If we put the same amount of economic pressure on rail that data centers have...the US would have probably have almost as nice infrastructure as China and be significantly better off.
It's facetious to pretend NIMBYs are as such because they're racist and classist, rather than because they just want to protect the single most valuable and future-determining investment they'll make in their entire lives.
Those factors are tied together and aren’t easily separable. The racism and classism comes in because they believe that people of a different race or class will diminish the value of their investment.
Not sure it's a bad thing. So, they would employ maybe 30 people after they're built. Consume a lot of power and water. I'd have to see the details of a specific proposal but I'd probably vote against personally.
The public rail industry has no bribing mechanism unlike the data center industry and the fossil fuel industry. Did I write bribe? Sorry, “campaign contribution.” But sometimes also literally bribes like Tony Soprano cash in the bag.
I believe America has built railway towns. I am surprised why America that’s very fond of capitalism never developed this concept further? With some aggressive horizontal integration you can built your own kingdom. It is brilliant!
I sometimes see the US referred to as a "post-rail" society, meaning that it has outgrown the need for rail for the more intimate, personal transportation methods we see today. I submit that, like other HN commenters say, the US doesn't need rail due to this society. How will US citizens help their friends move or do their large (in terms of volume) Costco grocery shopping without large trucks and only using rail?
I’m probably a top 5% train nerd for the U.S. I took trains to work primarily from 2012-2020, in NYC, Philly, Baltimore, and DC. I used to ride Amtrak from Baltimore to DC every morning. I love Tokyo’s train system. I go there every year and I always take the train. But when I went there with my wife and three kids, I took a lot of Ubers! You can’t fit our double stroller with big America bags of toys and snacks on a business hours subway in Tokyo.
Americans love choice and they love stuff. They fill their cars with their stuff drive around on their own schedule without having to watch a clock or think about what’s near a train line and what isn’t. (Even with Tokyo’s amazing railway network, you have to think about that!) My wife drives to three different grocery stores 20 miles apart to get exactly the products she wants. The idea of just accepting whatever brand of hamburger buns they have at the store that’s conveniently on the train line between our house and work is completely alien.
To live within a Japanese system, Americans would have to change a bunch of other things about their culture. We’d have to give our kids independence to take the train themselves, instead of spending every saturday driving them around to 3 different far flung activities. We’d have to learn to appreciate what’s conveniently available, instead of the exact thing we want.
And not even Tokyo’s amazing train network makes it convenient to juggle two working spouses and school drop off and pickup for three kids. What line is convenient to your house, both parents work, and all three kids’ schools? The Japanese don’t even try to solve that problem.
I lived for many years next to a train station in NJ. I could readily take the train in to Manhattan, but for the hours I'd be there in evenings and on weekends, it was much more convenient and faster to drive in. My town was far enough out that the cost was slightly cheaper to drive (before the congestion fee). I then had the freedom to leave at any time without concern for the schedule.
> My town was far enough out that the cost was slightly cheaper to drive (before the congestion fee)
Aside from culture, this is another aspect which they touch on in the article. Japan doesn't have public parking. You're only allowed to buy a car if you have access to a parking spot. Tokyo is full of lots but they're all paid lots that charge in 30-60 min increments. There's also a lot of congestion zones in Tokyo which make driving in the city very expensive. Companies that do deliveries in the city often have a company car (or fleet of such) which lets them drive to destinations.
Overnight workers who do spend significant times at work before/after the trains stop do drive in. Most Japanese families in Tokyo live in suburbs surrounding the city and will walk, bike, or drive to a nearest train station to commute in.
I'm fairly far out from Boston/Cambridge but I'm pretty much the same situation. Going in for a commute (or 9-5 event), the commuter rail is pretty good; I'm a 7 minute drive to the station. But it's basically unworkable for an evening event (or a day into evening event). Trains are maybe every 90 minutes outside of commuting hours and they're largely empty. I end up suffering the drive in, paying for parking as needed (which isn't an issue if I'm going in for my usual theater), and then a pretty easy drive home. Wouldn't even think about taking rail in for the weekend.
If Tokyo was in America, your situation would be like this: imagine going outside of your home and walk for 10 minutes to a small hamburger shop. It only has 10 seats and it’s run a by hamburger nerd who makes elite hamburgers. This guy grinds his own beef, bakes his own buns and pickles his own pickles and everything is perfect. The burgers are only 8 dollars and you can’t even imagine of making hamburgers yourself.
I know, I’m familiar with Tokyo. But my family would take up half the restaurant, only one of the three kids would like the burger, and the other two would throw a shit fit because the burger guy only sells burgers. Two different societies optimizing for different things.
> We’d have to give our kids independence to take the train themselves, instead of spending every saturday driving them around to 3 different far flung activities.
The shock! The horror!
> The idea of just accepting whatever brand of hamburger buns they have at the store...
How could a family possibly survive! Imagine having to eat a different brand of hamburger buns! Truly, America is a shining beacon of modernity and convenience where I can get the exact, precise, industrially mass produced hamburger bun.
Maybe you misinterpreted the post you replied to? I don't think they were saying this stuff is a crazy proposal, just that it will be a different way of life for most Americans. No need to be so abrasive.
They were reacting to what was presented and saying that it was foolish. It doesn’t matter if the author presented it as “I am saying this” or “Americans think this”.
You’re preaching to the choir. I loved working at a company with a company cafeteria because I hated going out into midtown manhattan every day to choose lunch. But convincing americans that all their “choice” is illusory isn’t a matter of transit policy, it’s something much harder.
The same way people in every other country do it (rental vans)
Rail <-> Road isn't an either or issue. It wasn't in 1850 and it isn't today. The only difference, at least in the US, is that poorly designed government intervention/policies forced low population densities.
Rail and other forms of public transport simply don't work with suburban sprawl. Large roadways also don't work - compare the state of US infrastructure against pretty much every other country out there - it's just that the financial bill from an unbelievable amount of deferred maintenance hasn't come due yet.
> How will US citizens help their friends move or do their large (in terms of volume) Costco grocery shopping without large trucks and only using rail?
Japan happens to be the 4th largest market (by stores) for Costco (US, Canada, Mexico, Japan)
Trucks can be rented. When then-wife and I were remodelling the tired old house we lived in, we didn't own a truck. We talked about it (and in this instance, had space for one), and we mathed it a bit. The numbers quickly showed that it would be very expensive to own a truck, for only a little bit of added, occasional convenience.
When we needed a truck to move cabinets or drywall or whatever, we rented one for that. It didn't cost much.
When we moved houses, we rented a truck for that. It was easier and cheaper to move with one rented huge box truck, than to own something that would be useful for that.
Otherwise: Deliveries. We just had big stuff delivered. No problem. Things like appliances and TVs were simply delivered, and this never added any expense to the purchase.
These days, even Costco delivers stuff just fine. It does tend to cost more than in-store.
Rentals and deliveries can easily cost hundreds of dollars per year. It's not free; it might even be rationalized as being rather expensive.
But owning/insuring/maintaining/fuelling/parking a car (or a truck, just the same) can easily cost thousands. It's a different magnitude.
I ride my cargo bike to Costco. I can fit a full shopping cart on it, getting enough for a family of three regularly and easily. With a small hatchback car I could easily fit way more. If I had a convenient train I'd shop more frequently with a rolling 2 wheel cart.
It's really not difficult to shop large volume thongs without a giant car.
Rail for the US has always been more about moving goods than people. For overland long-haul freight it is significantly cheaper than trucking. Rail allows us to ship goods to places where we don’t have ports or river access. A place like Japan can make such good use of rail simply because it is so densely populated.
The US is also densely populated; when people are talking about high speed rail they are talking about connecting the major, close by metropolitan areas that most people live in.
The Midwest, as an example, has roughly the same size and population as France with a larger economy. In fact, if you overlay the French TGV network onto the Midwest with Chicago where Paris is, you get a pretty good approximation of where major Midwestern cities are located: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/NMr3J3gt8C
Most travel happens between cities that are close together, and Chicago has always been the larger gateway to the rest of the nation and the world.
The French urban areas on the TGV aren’t very big; Montpelier, for example, has a total of 600,000 people in its metro area, which is roughly the same size as Toledo, OH or Wichita, KS.
Montpellier probably gets more tourism than Toledo though. And most people taking the train to Paris are probably not doing it so they can fly somewhere else.
And yeah, there would be a fair amount of demand just to Chicago the same way there is a fair amount of demand to Paris, in that they’re both the regional powerhouses with finance, HQs, etc.
You seem to be using vanilla (or one might say "area-weighted" population density numbers. The article specifically says that they are using population-weighted population density numbers for comparison:
> Population weighted density refers to the density multiplied by the actual number of people living in each area, and more closely reflects the density that people experience.
One indication of this is that they give a different value for London's population density (9.2k / km^2) than you do.
the "city merging" thing also happens in the US! particularly with school districts. this is why many gigantor middle/high schools exist; they serve HUGE coverage areas with many cities that are too small/rural to have their own school districts.
The bus from Cars 3 says “You about to feel the wrath of the Lower Belleville County Unified School District!” - and it works because almost all school districts people are familiar with in the USA have names similar to that, with the combinations and crossings of county and city.
The most core reason should be that they built a dense railway network embedded in cities very early on, and developed in a mutually dependent manner; just as the United States, after large-scale highway infrastructure and becoming a pioneer in civil aviation, was destined to become a nation on wheels. Just look at Tokyo: the total length of various lines exceeds 6,000 km, with seamless transfers between subways and mainline trains.
The most fundamental reason lies in the topography. Japan is a long, narrow country, where two or three mainline railways are enough to connect the country's core regions. This significantly reduces the cost of the railway "network."
Japanese public transport is good, but no match for the Swiss system. Outside of big cities, the coverage is spotty, and even reasonably large towns are only connected by reserved-only trains every couple of hours that get booked out days in advance. The almost complete lack of digitization is also remarkable (reservations have to be made with machines in the stations). There are other annoyances such as the public transport in Tokyo shutting down completely at midnight. In contrast, the Swiss government-owned system delivers usable connectivity to almost any human settlement, even most mountain villages. The ticket prices are also not so different, which is surprising considering the large difference of salaries in the two countries.
It's worth mentioning that swiss is a nation of 9 million, whereas Japan has 128 million people. I'm not sure how comparable it is. You probably don't need to pass through a lot of settlements for any public projects in swiss, for example.
I think it's more politics and economics.
Switzerland is quite a lot richer than Japan and is extremely decentralized politically.
That creates strong incentives to provide good public services even to mountain villages.
It also helps that Switzerland isn't experiencing population decline. The Swiss population as a whole is growing quite rapidly and from what limited data I could find even rural regions are growing.
I think land acquisition doesn't really play a huge role.
They are both mountainous countries where rail projects have to squeeze in valleys or bear the expense of tunnelling.
But you still have to pick up the tickets at the machine. Additionally, my mobile phone internet is not recognized as "being in Japan", so I can't access the QR code needed for the ticket without wifi. You can work around it (save the QR code when you have wifi), but it all just seems so inefficient compared to all the countries where you can _book_ your tickets using a mobile app.
It's generally regarded that Hong Kong has the best subway in the world. There are many reasons for this, but one cannot be overstated: Hong Kong's geography. A huge portion of the city consists of long thin urban corridors sandwiched between mountains and the sea. As a result, Hong Kong need concentrate its funding on only a few subway lines to support a huge portion of the population.
This good article aside, I wonder if the same thing is true about Japan when we're talking about long-distance trains. Compared to France or Germany, Japan is basically a stick. A very large chunk of the populace lies on a single train line running from Kagoshima up to Hakodate, running through Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Osaka, Kyoto, Yokohama, Tokyo, Sendai, etc. So you can slap a single bullet train line there and service all of them.
I think you're broadly correct and that's definitely a reason, and I have another example to support it.
Mumbai too has a very similar structure (the core city is basically a peninsula that goes north-south). Our railway lines run N-S as well, with (till the recent Metros) feeder roads connecting them.
Mumbai is also one of the most densely populated cities in the world (#2 by some metrics).
Our local railways have an annual ridership of 2.26 billion [1]. Pretty much everyone agrees they're vital to the city.
Yes. You get a lot of bang for your buck as far as the number of people served. Hong Kong is less than half the area of Rhode Island, but the populations are 7.5 million for Hong Kong and 1.1 million for Rhode Island. Small area plus high population density is the situation where trains are most valuable.
The Hong Kong Metro is also very well planned, architected, and generally well run operationally. So much that the MTR corporation actually offers international consulting services. And for two decades, they have consulted with many mainland Chinese metro systems, hence it's no coincidence that the Shanghai and Shenzhen metros both look and feel very similar to HK's.
That is a good point but I think it doesn't apply everywhere.that has a similar shape. New Zealand has a similar shape but without railways interconnecting cities. You cannot cross the country, the islands, or even regions by train.
I think this could be a variable to contribute to a good coverage and infrastructure... but there are probably more factors involved.
The population density is probably one factor. New Zealand has 5.34 million people in 103,000 square miles. At the other extreme you have Hong Kong with 7.5 million people in 430 square miles. Each mile of track gives service to a much larger percentage of the population in Hong Kong than New Zealand. The same goes for a lot of the United States. The coastal corridors in the United States are population dense, but the interior less so.
Population density is one thing. Another issue is timing.
New Zealand was a really young country when railway technology came along, and didn't really have enough time or money to invest in a good railway network before other technology came along.
Airplanes are the perfect technology for NZ's geography, because they just fly over everything. There are actually a few places in NZ that received passenger airline service in the 30s before they received a railway connection (namely Gisborne), and many other places that never received railway connections.
At the same time, NZ was one of the fastest adopters of the automobiles, second only to America.
I think viable cars and airplanes had taken another 25 years to arrive, NZ might have had a much more complete railway network, with a much better chance of surviving intact into the modern era.
Didn't know about these historical facts, looks like timing really contributed to the current situation in New Zealand. When I was in Auckland some years ago, I remember NZ trying to bring some railway services back, before the pandemic.
I never got to travel on these, but I'm hoping to do that when I'm there again, probably next year. I see the website is still the same, so if anyone is going to NZ: https://www.greatjourneysnz.com/.
And to be fair, looks like you can more or less cross the country, as long as you don't plan to get all the way to Invercargill.
The railway services NZ are trying to bring back are regional commuter services. Auckland to Hamilton (now in operation); Auckland to Tauranga; Wellington to Palmerston North (Capital Connection, has been in operation for 35 years, about to be upgraded to battery-electric trains, since only half the route is electrified).
And also the vague idea of local rail service around Christchurch (interestingly, a private company bought the old DMUs from Auckland's local fleet after electrification and are just starting to run special trains for Rugby games).
Part of the problem is that there is only really only three metro areas in New Zealand. Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. Everything else isn't really large enough to provide enough demand for a proper intercity route. And Christchurch isn't even on the same island, so you can't have a proper intercity train with the ferry getting in the way.
So the only potentially viable intercity route is Auckland to Wellington.
And apart from Hamilton and Palmerston North, (which already have commuter trains) there is absolutely nothing in the middle. The same distance in Europe or the US's eastern corridor would service 4-6 decently sized metro areas, and provide plenty of extra demand.
There just isn't enough potential demand to put a high-speed rail line through there. And without the high-speed rail, it's a 10 hour train trip that has zero chance of competing with a 1 hour plane ride.
Christchurch to Wellington is even worse. 6 hour train ride, at least an hour waiting for the ferry, 3.5 hour ferry ride. The plane does it in at little as 25 min in the air, there isn't enough time to reach cruising altitude. There is a reason why the route used to be serviced by an overnight ferry.
> And to be fair, looks like you can more or less cross the country, as long as you don't plan to get all the way to Invercargill
Yeah... but those aren't "intercity trains". They are scenic tourist trains that just so happen to be running along old intercity routes. Not bad as a tourism experience, but overpriced and not optimised for transportation needs.
The fact that you can't book both the Interislander ferry and costal pacific on the same website is very telling. They are literally run by the same company.
Same company that's providing the Rugby special trains, but this is using the old Capital Connection rolling stock. The train usually runs day trips up to Arthur's pass for cruise ships, but when there is a gap in that schedule they are running these Christchurch to Dunedin and Christchurch to Invercargill excursions.
Geography like that does help a lot, it’s part of the reason it’s so easy to do really good high-speed rail in Italy over somewhere like Germany that is way more spread out. But it’s only half the picture, you also need the political will to get it built!
The population density of Italy 201/km2 is lower then population density of Germany 241/km2, so from point of view of density, Germany should have more high-speed rail than Italy.
But because cars are major German export driver and car manufacuring is major employment in Germany, anything competing with cars has not much political support.
The population density of Italy 201/km2 is lower then population density of Germany 241/km2, so from point of view of density, Germany should have more high-speed rail than Italy.
That would be if kilometers of rail tracks scaled linearly with population density per unit area. My guess (based on no research at all) is it’s more that there’s a population density tipping point, and after reaching it rail development dramatically increases. I do also think you’re right about the influence of the German car industry.
I'm sure geography helps, but it's certainly not the driver for good train service design. Cities in Japan are definitely not laid out in thin lines, and there's not just a few routes in any given city. I was living in Nagoya back in high school, and its train lines are sprawling.
Side note, there actually isn't one shinkansen from Kagoshima to Hakodate, that route would take you on 5 different shinkansen lines: Kyushu, Sanyo, Tokaido, Tohoku, and Hokkaido. But I get your point.
Even if the geography isn't thin it seems like there are major US cities you could draw a route through that would have similar population distributions. Or at least good enough for the economics to work.
That’s arguably irrelevant to anything except the Shinkansen.
Switzerland has 8m people. Bay Area has 8m people. Switzerland is 1/4th as densely populated as the Bay Area (4x the size) yet they have 10x better transportation
The Swiss public transport system is a century-plus old at this point. Compare pictures of the Zurich tram system in the early 20th century with today - squint your eyes and you won't notice any difference.
That said, I'm willing to bet that San Fransisco and the surrounding communities had comparable public transportation in the 19th and early 20th century. While I can't speak for the bay area, you can still find exposed tram tracks in many US cities - Philadelphia, for instance.
The US's move from having the best to arguably the worst public transportation system in the world among developed countries is a lesson in disastrous government policy.
California is also like this for the most part. Bay Area has 8 m, Los Angeles area has 17 m, and San Diego area has 3 m. 28 out of 39 live in those three. Straight line.
With relatively little between the Bay Area and LA to serve as a viable customer base. Hence, a lot of the problems getting California HSR going. Imagine you had the Boston area and the Washington DC area and took out NYC and Philadelphia in the middle. You'd have the same issue. The Acela isn't the fastest rail service (in part because NYC is in the middle but Boston to NYC and NYC to DC are a lot more practical than the whole route. I did it once when I wasn't in a hurry but it was because I could afford the time.
Isn't this Japanese Railway Thesis that with the railway you build something in that "very little between"? Have the railway company buy up up all that cheap land, develop it into commute hubs with their own walkable retail and use that to fund the railway.
This is a great article, but I think it’s hard to ignore that Japan’s culture of harmony is a big part of why they were able to choose sensible regulations that benefitted everyone. We struggle to pass even the most sensible land use reforms because entrenched interests want to remain entrenched even if it hurts the system overall.
America's culture of individual liberty moved into the national mythos in the last century, replaced by a culture of consumption and commerce over all. People don't have the freedom to build whatever they want because pockets need to be greased, permits need to be reviewed, HOAs need to have their fees, etc.
As an American, I always hear all these weird stories about New York and its subway system. All the random busker type nonsense, the petty crime and the “mugger wallet” type jokes. Not to mention the major crimes that make the news.
I’d rather not deal with it? Yes I know roads are dangerous. I’d still rather not deal with the expected culturally imposed insanity that the Japanese curiously seem to lack.
> All the random busker type nonsense, the petty crime and the “mugger wallet” type jokes.
Most of this is stories. Yeah there are buskers but tbh I like buskers. Music in the public square is a plus not a minus even if it's not my personal preference of music.
Subway crime rates are around 2-4 incidents per million rides. There was a spike during covid and it started to rapidly trend down afterwards. That corresponds with economic desperation during that period pretty cleanly.
But that 2-4 incidents per million rides is roughly comparable to the crime rates at gas stations, etc. The difference is that density is lower so you just see it less often. It happens just about as frequently but you are less likely to witness it because you are less likely to be present when it happens to somebody else at a gas station.
> I’d still rather not deal with the expected culturally imposed insanity that the Japanese curiously seem to lack.
Trust me Japan has just as much of an issue with crime on rail. Arguably they have higher rates but the Japanese police often just don't consider sexual harassment or sexual assault a serious crime and would rather brush it under the rug or otherwise deal with it outside the criminal system to avoid harming the abuser. (ex: an incident that I'm familiar with: "oh we gave the guy who assaulted you on the train your address so they could mail you a hand written apology note instead of charging them with assault")
And the "wacky in your face" crime (intoxicated, mental illness, etc) is still very much an issue in Japan but it's cracked down on by police in places that tourists frequently visit during the day and otherwise everyone just expects it so people who live there don't really mention it to tourists.
I mean hell look at Shibuya Meltdown for some of the more mild "funny" examples.
The only real difference between the NYC metro and the Japanese metro is that it's louder because there's not a social norm to limit talking on the train (until people are drunk ofc). Otherwise it's all the same shit and you see it all when you start commuting.
The weird stories, about anything, are nonsense; sensationalized to either be emotoinally compelling or even active disinformation to serve some political end (especially about American cities, especially about NYC.)
It's just induced fear. Just go to NY and ride the subway. Millions do all the time without any problems, without a second thought. It's really no problem and amazingly convenient. (Busking is people playing music.)
Of course some crime occurs among millions of people but so do lottery grand prizes and heart attacks. I've been on many subway rides without experiencing one crime or even seeing one, and much other public transit.
And when you do, you'll know what to think of the stories and people who tell them.
> It's extremely common for there to be human shit in the train cars, and lunatics going nuts
Where does that come from? Not from your experience. You've never been on NY subways, clearly.
I've never seen feces - and anyway, how could you tell if it's from a dog? Did you examine it? Take it home and test it? It's one of the stories that maybe is slightly plausible, and which yields such strong disgust that rationality is overwhelmed and it makes a sensation - perfectly constructed misinformation or urban myth. Like waking up in a bathtub with a kidney missing.
'Lunatics' is such a loaded (and hateful) word you'll have to specify what you mean, but the occasional person talking to themself is harmless and completely uninterested in you (thus the conversation with themself) - I have never had any problem with such people on public transit or elsewhere. They are the most vulnerable people and compassion is the appropriate response.
As I wrote above, the stories are nonsense and it's induced fear.
I actually am speaking from experience, I saw both of those things my first week in New York. It's really not uncommon, I find it hard to believe that you've never run into shit/barf, usually when a car pulls up that has nobody in it, that's what's in there.
And this is all to say nothing about the decrepit state of the stations and cars themselves.
I've also been to Japan and experienced their trains. It's in such a different league that it's almost comedy.
> It's really not uncommon, I find it hard to believe that you've never run into shit/barf, usually when a car pulls up that has nobody in it, that's what's in there.
NGL this isn't surprising on Japanese trains either. Especially around last train. It's not super common but you see it from time to time and you just use a different car and report it to the staff next time you see someone.
Yes, that’s exactly right. Maximal ‘individual liberty’ is my right to maximize my land’s value. My neighbors either agree to maximize theirs in a way that increases, or doesn’t hinder, mine, or they are my enemy to be litigated to death by my lawyers for damages.
It's also hard to ignore that Japan was bombed to smithereens in the 1940s and undertook a nationwide rebuilding effort that might have contributed to a more uniform approach to land use.
Most people using the term "low trust society" are implying that certain subsets of the population are the cause of it, often with racial (non-white) and/or economic (lower class) components, whereas somebody like me views those groups and their behaviors, to the extent that it's true, as a symptom of the low trust society rather than the root cause. For me, the root cause is systemic corruption all the way to the top, for decade after decade.
the railways are excellent, but it's funny. I was just in Kyoto and saw flyers seemingly at every single temple opposing the Hokuriku Shinkansen extension. apparently this type of opposition has always existed (I looked at the history of trains in Japan and originally most Japanese did NOT want it at all because they thought it looked really ugly), like nimbys in USA, but such decisions are apparently federalized according to some Japanese nationals I spoke to, so the nimbys have no power.
USA should do the same (well, the current federal government is volatile to say, the least, but in general I think it'd be improvement).
They still have influence in Japan. The maglev train has been delayed for years because a small portion passes through Shizuoka, and the local government wouldn't approve construction due to it making no stops in the prefecture and potentially affecting water supplies there.
This delayed the opening of it from 2027 to 2035 at the earliest.
Shizuoka as a whole is unusually screwed by the Shinkansen system. Large cities like Hamamatsu, with 800k people, are passed over by a lot of the Hikari (mid-speed Shinkansen), and the Nozomi (high speed Shinkansen) passes through the prefecture with zero stops whatsoever. However, it stops it cities like Tokuyama, with a whopping population of 100k.
It's a bit ridiculous to imply Tokuyama gets better shinkansen service than Hamamatsu, because it has Nozomi service.
Looking at the schedule towards Tokyo for Monday, April 27th:
Tokuyama has:
4 16 car Nozomi trains to Tokyo
19 8 car Kodoma/Sakura trains to Shin-Osaka
9 8 car Kodoma/Sakura to Okayama
Hamamatsu has:
31 16 car Kodoma to Tokyo
19 16 car Hikari to Tokyo
Keep in mind the fastest Kodoma seems to only take around 1 hr 40 mins to Tokyo, and the fastest Hikaru is only 1 hr 20 mins.
I'm sure it's nice getting a 1 seat ride to Tokyo from Tokuyama if you can get on one of the 4 Nozomis, and unfortunate you can't get a one seat ride past Shin-Osaka from Hanamatsu, but the service levels seem pretty proportionate to me.
Looking only at connections to Tokyo is a bit reductionist (difficult to believe, but yes, there are cities outside of Tokyo that people go to!). As a mere matter of geography, there are unavoidably fewer trains to Tokyo (it's on the opposite side of the island). Using that same methodology, it would be good to see how many trains from Hamamatsu have a direct connection to the biggest metropolis near Tokuyama: Fukuoka. That way we can measure which city is the best for getting to the opposite side.
The total number of trains with a direct connection from Hamamatsu to Fukuoka is, at least based on all the info I can find, zero.
Or even a much closer city that people in Hamamatsu would frequently go to: Hiroshima. Also zero direct connections without a transfer.
People in Tokuyama can go direct to Fukuoka and Tokyo. They can do a transfer at Osaka in the case of non-direct trains. They're very much better set up than Hamamatsu.
The federal government has no influence. Prefectures approve their own construction. Japan's railways are built and operated by corporations, not the government, so the federal government has zero say in the matter.
ah interesting. I wonder why that person mentioned the federal government then. couldn't a single person just refuse to sell their land and block the entire thing then?
Funny how people always endlessly worry about water supply, its one of those things that is very easy to claim but very hard to prove an in 99.9% of times there really isn't an issue.
Ok but here is the thing, Japan had great civil engineering for 100 years, they have made lots and lots and lots of tunnels. Japan overall has fantastic water quality and is globally known for clean and safe bathrooms.
So the argument that 'new train X will destroy the water supply' really needs to be based on a whole stack of good evidence.
Japan has some of the most horrific pollution disasters of the 20th century and had tremendously polluted water. The clean Japan thing is only true because Japan got very serious about safety after companies were ignoring issues and polluting water.
Maybe if the only person that thinks that the water supply is being destroyed is a local politician with a massive axe to grind who is trying to extort a local stop, then maybe we should question that over the engineers who have built tunnels their whole lives.
This is specially true when these tunnel goes along many different areas and seemingly the only that complains and believes is unsafe is also the one that is trying to get a transit station in the district.
I'm sure they have plenty of evidence on why it is safe, like historical examples and such. But how do you 'prove' this to a point a politician can't just say, sure its 99.9999% safe but we can't risk it.
> What does this have to do with water supply? One suspects that you know very little if that's the best evidence you have.
The point is that Japan tends to take safety and cleanness very seriously. And they have built many train-lines and tunnels.
At one point to you personally consider the source of a claim?
At one point to you personally consider the source of a claim?
You like to throw around assertions like "99.9% of times there really isn't an issue" with absolutely zero proof, but have a big problem with someone saying "I don't agree". I don't think you understand what sources, claims and truth actually mean.
Objections to large projects exist everywhere all over the world.
The reason the US has such an issue with this is because of state autonomy (and corruption). Most other places in the world don’t allow subregions of the country to do whatever they want and make up laws etc
The US interstate system is incredible extensive, uniform, and well-maintained (relatively speaking). States love federal dollars, and if there were federal dollars for train lines, they'd fall over themselves to get them. That doesn't seem to happen for a lot of reasons. It seems like there are a lot of corruption problems that seem to eat up train projects, but for some reason the interstate system, though replete with plenty of boondoggles, is an unstoppable road-spreading machine.
The interstate system only succeeded because the federal government took the very rare step of steamrolling all the states and individual landowners. It was done in service of putting people to work and stimulating the economy. But it was not a well-liked project.
Today, it is well-regarded, but when it was being done? No way.
My impression is it's more to do with being able to sue for everything under the sun and block things almost indefinitely under different forms of review, usually environmental.
I am a big infrastructure nerd but I believe they are right, it does change the way idyllic landscapes and towns can look.
But I'm not sure it's a valid reason to block such practical projects. It's the same for cities with building height restrictions (or really very many types of restrictions). It will make an old city look a bit less romantic for sure, but also people have to live and work here. Cities aren't for looking at.
I’m not American, so only have an outsider perspective, but I’m not convinced that’s possible in the US to do the same, because the country has a completely different perspective on individual rights. Land ownership seems to be seen as something sacred that cannot be infringed in any way, meaning a small group of people who own some parts of the land can block any development that would benefit the public at large
Good luck building a bunch of new interstates today. Opposition was already coming in at the end of the interstate system buildout. Drill down and you'll find various odd connections (or lack thereof) throughout the system that resulted from community opposition.
land rights aren't exactly a constitutional right, but the 5th amendment makes it hard to take it, so in practice would probably require a constitutional amendment.
The 5th amendment isn't exactly recent. But a lot of factors make it harder--for better or worse--to exercise eminent domain today than in the past. You could probably never reasonably build the equivalent of the interstate highway system today. (Though even at the time, there were compromises made because of strong community pushback in some cases and there was less developed space than today as well.)
You’d think so, but in fact it’s almost the opposite! You can own your land all you want but your neighbor has a final say on what’s allowed on your land.
Japan isn’t a federal government, so the decision can happen at the national level because prefectural and local governments zoning ability came from the national government.
I don’t think the federal government could de facto change this, though in practice they have levers available.
In the US, we have had a pretty wide-open nation, for much of our history. Population density was low, and many folks were forced to be extremely self-sufficient.
This has resulted in a fiercely independent national zeitgeist.
Asian nations, on the other hand, have been very crowded, for a very long time.
This has resulted in a much more interdependent mindset.
Each has its advantages and disadvantages. There's really no nation on Earth that is as good at "ganging up" on a problem, as Japan. Korea and China are catching up quick, though. The US is very good at manufacturing footguns. We don't tend to play well with others.
It really is hard for exceptional people to make their way, in Japanese society, though. They have a saying "The nail that sticks up, gets hammered down."
Rice cultivation requires collective water management, so you get more collectivist cultures. Growing grain mostly depends on rain, so your harvest depends on your own work.
>In the US, we have had a pretty wide-open nation, for much of our history. Population density was low, and many folks were forced to be extremely self-sufficient.
This has resulted in a fiercely independent national zeitgeist.
Australia is much less dense and more remote that the US (I drove 1,050 miles in Australia through the desert without seeing a vehicle or person, in the US you can’t get more than 100 miles from McDonald’s) but Australian’s work together and don’t have this “ fiercely independent “ nonsense that keeps everyone at each others throats.
I have no strong opinion on the original thesis but your fact doesn't make the point you think it does; you're right that no one lives in most of Australia, nearly everyone is concentrated together on the coast. Australia is a bit more urban than the USA overall from a population perspective, despite being vastly less dense overall due to the areas that no one lives in. So there would be fewer people to carry the cultural individualism.
About 9 out of 10 Americans live in cities (incl burbs) and the same holds for Australians. Sure, there's fewer notable population centers in Australia (Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane and you got nearly everyone), but there's also just 10x fewer people than in the US so that kind of matches too. I think the picture you link to distorts this, it does not account for the fact that there's simply way fewer Australians.
I'm not convinced that if there were 300m Australians, that they'd still all live in those 5 cities (with every city being 10x bigger). I think there'd be more of them.
That's a rather expansive view of cities based on what the US Census categorizes as urban vs. rural. Between myself and a couple neighbors, we're on close to 100 acres, but that's urban according to the census because we're not that far from a major city and fairly close to some smaller ones.
> I'm not convinced that if there were 300m Australians, that they'd still all live in those 5 cities (with every city being 10x bigger). I think there'd be more of them.
I don't think so either, but because of the climate and geography, I also don't think there'd be 10x more cities, similar populations, I think you might end up with 2-3x more, really, at most.
Australia also has many issues the US had. Car dependence. They also don't have high speed rail despite their cities being near perfect for it.
Also in Australia the waste majority of the population arrived much later and most were always attached to coastal cities. These cities were dominated by British aristocrat early on and later the British labor movement and reflects the culture of London. Australia politically was a part of Britain in many ways for 100s of years after the US had gone its own way.
The same is true to a lesser degree for the North East Coast in the US, arguably it works more like Britain/Australia but the South and everything West is quite different.
I think this is not a smart read of the situation. The US has built a tremendous amount of rail and other transit (eg NYC subway) back when it was an even more individualistic society than today.
In fact they country was clearly able to come together for the public good many times throughout their history.
Francis Fukuyama is now arguing that the US in now a substantiantively lower trust society than it was in 1995 when he published his second book "Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity."
>In it I argued that trust is among the most precious of social qualities, because it is the basis for human cooperation. In the economy, trust is like a lubricant that facilitates the workings of firms, transactions, and markets. In politics it is the basis for what is called “social capital”—the ability of citizens to cohere in groups and organizations to seek common ends and participate actively in democratic politics.
>Societies differ greatly in overall levels of trust. In the 1990s, Harvard’s Robert Putnam wrote a classic study of Italy which contrasted the country’s high-trust north with its distrustful south. Northern Italy was full of civic associations, sports clubs, newspapers, and other organizations that gave texture to public life. The south, by contrast, was characterized by what an earlier social scientist, Edward Banfield, labeled “amoral familism”: a society in which you trust primarily members of your immediate family and have a wary attitude towards outsiders who are, for the most part, out to get you.
I didn't realize the link but I agree with the decline in trust.
One obvious axis is that in 1995 (I came to the US right around then) the country had a high church attendance rate, racial homogeneity, % of people who are parents, and % of people who were born here.
In the 30 years that passed all of these numbers had become significantly lower and obviously each factor on its own contributed to a decline in societal trust.
Most all of that old rail was done by private companies seeking to make a profit. Just like Japan. Look at nyc subway building rates after it was publicly owned. Almost zero expansion. Contractions even.
Same in The Netherlands. There are companies that buy plots of lands near existing rail just to massively screw over the government if they ever want to expend rail. Double digit million euro deals over small patches of land.
I love the Japanese rail system. I am retired, now, so don't travel there, anymore, but I always used to cry, after coming back to the US, and getting on LIRR trains.
The most amazing thing, is how on-time they are, and how precise their stops are. They have marks on the platform, showing exactly where the doors will open (Protip: Don't stand directly in front of the doors, when they open). I hear that this is the result of human drivers; not robots. Apparently, engineer training in Japan is pretty intense.
As a European I can only dream of having such a rail system.
When I have to buy six individual tickets for triple digit prices to get somewhere and the train ends up slower than going by car I wonder why I would even try.
Alright whippersnappers, let's chat about the history of railroads in the US.
In the early 20th century, US rail companies were beholding a very favorable situation: high demand to run loads of heavy freight all over the country, high demand to ferry passengers all over the country, and basically no serious competitors to either revenue source.
Now freight revenue was never going to be transformative to the industry, but it had the benefits of being reliable, un-fussy, and fairly easy to build a financial business around. Passengers, on the other hand, offered huge revenue potential, but had the downsides of being very fussy about things like safety and comfort and timeliness, along with wanting stations in convenient places and an ever-expanding rail network.
Students of US business management history should be unsurprised, then, that while evaluating the market that offered reliable revenue, versus the market that wanted large capital investments, the railroads overwhelmingly chose the freight market. In other words, US the railroad companies spoke and said we do not want passengers loudly and clearly.
The thinking was: passengers can do take the wagons and busses and cars and these newfangled airplane thingies, but freight is a guaranteed market for us! So the passengers slowly migrated to other form of transportation. But the kicker was, freight also wanted things like timeliness and access to an expanding transport network and, shockingly for the railroad execs, were willing to pay for it.
Add about 80 years, declining rail traffic, and tons of corporate mergers, and we have the sad state of US railways today: many residents have never seen a railway expansion or shiny new rail equipment, much less a real functioning passenger train. It's easy and comfortable to say that zoning or regulations or market forces allowed US rail to languish, but that would be ignoring the part where the industry did not want the customers in the first place.
Japan also has amazing car infrastructure too! Last time I was there visiting family in the mountains, I was quite impressed by the number and quality of tunnels and spiral ramps. The highways are similarly privatized, with tolls like train fares reducing the need for government subsidies.
I live in Tokyo. The rail network here is so dense that even
locals like me still get confused figuring out transfers sometimes.
One thing I don't see discussed enough: the cost of car ownership in Tokyo is a huge factor. Monthly parking alone can cost as much as renting a studio apartment. In central Tokyo, parking for a single day can run close to $200.
When your country is this small and land is this expensive, trains just make more sense for most people. I think the rail network developed as much out of necessity as anything else.
The article is great and very informative. But I feel there's a general vibe of "privatizations are great". For example, they do mention that privatizations didn't work in Argentina (they were a total mess and the total railway went from something like 50k kilometers to two thirds of that - if) but they don't mention enough of it - or other cases - to understand which regulations and why worked the way they did. It feels too much like it's all about integrating corporations, and that's it.
If I remember correctly, the privatization of JNR was mostly political, and has little relation to the subsequent successes or failures of the railways. In other words, keeping it public would not necessarily have changed the outcome for passengers.
I'm not surprised that the article has that vibe and that you noticed it. Works in Progress, the magazine that published the article, is notorious for having a preference for market-oriented solutions, "laissez faire" policies and neoliberalism. They are open about it. Nothing wrong with that, of course.
This article is dishonest about the level of privatization in the JR's.
Yes, they're private companies, and they do diversification like investing in real estate around their rail cooridors to grow towns and grab people looking to do some shopping in their adjacent department store as passengers are walking through the stations. This is transit-oriented development at its best. (Also, ask google why land property lines in the US western states often look like big checkerboards)
But there's no mention of the Japan Railway Construction, Transport and Technology Agency (JRTT). That's the government entity that builds many new Shinkansen lines. It then leases them to the JR companies at a fixed rate for 30 years. This keeps massive construction costs off the private companies' balance sheets.
Or when they do need large capital spends, there's no mention of the Fiscal Investment and Loan Program (FILP) which provides loans in the form of low-interest credit backed by government guarantees. Their creditors are effectively lending to the Japaneese government, not the JR company.
Is that kind of system really privatized? It's hybridized at best, and it shows that you really need government support of some sort to push country-scale infrastructure like this forward. Sorry free-market absolutists.
It is not at all dishonest to talk about their privatization.
It’s dishonest to hand wave it away while pretending that because there are government controls for construction and financing that it would go even better if it was more government or “more hybridized”. With no source, just opinion.
No one that has ever had to switch blue to red to green in toyko just cash, buying a new ticket at each stop only to go a couple miles, has ever forgotten how privatized Japans railways are.
I expected to see comments about how good it is, how most people love it, how it’s highly privatized, and of course about how to make it better with more government.
You misunderstand me... I'm not saying the privatization is a bad thing, handwaving it away, or saying lets throw government at it. I'm merely pointing out that in a 4,000 word essay trying to explain all the factors that let Japan have such a good railway system, there's a huge amount of emphasis on the privatization part, and zero mention of all the public sector subsidies that enable the entire system.
It's fine to talk about the efficiency of the private operators. No problem there. The dishonesty is in omitting any discussion of how the tracks that the whole system depends are built with heavy government support. Without that, one could be forgiven for reading that article and thinking "oh, just privatize it and you'll be as successful as Japan."
I think the take-away here should be more along the lines of what a working public-private partnership can look like and what roles each can play. I'd love to see a 4,000-word article that compares this model to the regional transit authority models we have in the US.
Did you miss this paragraph? They do talk about the subsidies from the national and prefectural governments.
> Carefully designed public subsidies also play a useful role. Although Japanese railways do not receive subsidies for day-to-day operations, they do receive government loans and grants for capital investments. These are typically tied to public priorities, such as disability access or earthquake-proofing, or to projects that have large spillovers that the railway company would be unable to internalize, like removing level crossings, or elevating at-grade railways or trams in order to reduce road congestion and accident risk. Generally, the local prefectural government will match the contribution of the national government. Larger new build projects are subject to lease back or debt-payment conditions that fare revenue is expected to pay back.
Unless this was added after the fact, I think this is mostly an issue of careful reading. To me, the article absolutely says that it's a hybridized system like you mention.
In the West some private equity company would be buying these up, selling off the land and separate businesses, and screwing the rail passengers for all they can, until the whole thing sinks in a sea of debt. Then repeating the formula.
"Today, the most striking institutional feature of Japanese rail is that it is privately owned by a throng of competing companies." ...
"Core rail operations are profitable for every Japanese private railway company, but they usually only account for a plurality or a small majority of revenue. The rest is contributed by their portfolio of side businesses."
It's like a textbook good application of capitalism that unsurprisingly the US can't seem to get right.
JR was only privatized in 1987 after the previous state owned railway company borrowed too much to fund its infrastructure projects like high speed rails.
But by companies that care about running railways, not by vultures that want to rip the companies apart and load them up with debt for their own short-term profits.
The point is that Japan has a well-established private-equity industry [1] so the fact that PE firms haven't ruined Japanese railways suggests that PE firms aren't universal corrosive solvents like you seem to want us to believe they are.
Or it could be there are Japanese laws or customs preventing them from doing it. The article mentions maximum fare prices for example. Japanese antitrust law is strong and thoroughly enforced.
Most likely more long term thinking in culture. Where as in West every single person just think of ways to profit in absolute shortest possible ways. Even if that were to kill untold trillions of human beings. After all what does a few hundred million dead matter if you can make extra cent from your company.
Your first sentence might in fact be true, but you've presented no evidence or argument that it is, so all you've done so far is make a cheap dig at America's private-equity industry with nothing to back it up.
I fail to see how the topic of this comment thread (namely "why Japan has such good railways") sheds any light on the US PE industry or vice versa. Maybe you can explain the link. (If you can't then your cheap dig is also off-topic.)
(And I fail to see how antitrust law in particular might constrain a PE firm in any way.)
Additionally, the stations are generally owned by private companies—including the the development rights at the station. This means that the Japanese private rail companies capture a portion of the value created by the rail service, which otherwise would be an externality. So the companies have an incentive, as landowners, for rail ridership to stay high.
Japan's railways are amazing. They are amazing because the workers have low wages, so the companies can afford to over-employ, so they have workers that are doing things like wiping the handrails every hour, and ensuring that the bathrooms are meticulous. The trains are very clean and very safe, which encourages use more to the point where everyone uses them and alternatives are starved for money.
Workers can afford to live off low wages because the cost of goods is low. A meal in Japan, a very, very good and delicious meal of pork curry is about $8 USD. That's it.
In the US it's the opposite. Wages are high. Cost of food and rent is very high. That means that they have to charge high prices. But then it's so high people look for alternatives and then traffic drops. Then they cut jobs so it's dirty, unkept and dangerous. It's a vicious cycle.
This tweet finds that US systems like BART and MTA have more employees, when adjusted by number of riders or miles of track, than JR East, which seems to contradict your comment.
Been trying to implement the Japanese point-and-call systems they use for railway safety in LLm work with some success. Think it should theoretically be a good verbose way
WRT the west coast, mostly. It's about as long as Japan, but only about half the population. It's certainly populated enough that it's not justifiable that rail travel is so slow.
Less so for the east coast though. From roughly DC to Boston is decently connected with rail, but is not nearly as direct of a corridor as Japan.
Cars were already popular in the US and good enough of a solution in conjunction with the highway system, maybe. If basic transportation is solved, it probably reduces the impetus to build passenger rail for rail's sake.
Really? Take it all the time going to NYC even though it's not really very convenient for me to get to a northern station. Amtrak is priced to make it a good idea to book tickets in advance. Shinkansen isn't cheap either, especially if you don't have a pass--not sure of current details.
It's true to some degree now. But it wasn't very true -- or expected to be true -- back when train lines were being established. That was during westward expansion.
I'm very aware! I live in NYC and have taken many trains up/down the corridor. But it still pales in comparison to the experience I get in Japan (which is cheaper, nicer, faster, more frequent, often more direct, connects up better to local transit within cities, etc.)
> This liberal zoning system is reinforced by private access to city planning powers. Thirty percent of Japan’s urban land has been subject to land readjustment, where agreement among two thirds of residents and landowners in an area is enough to allow its replanning, including compulsorily taking and demolishing land for amenities and infrastructure.
I think this is the key paragraph because (like it or not) a lot of Americans would be philosophically opposed to this sort of process (the Kelo decision on eminent domain notwithstanding.)
I’m glad the article confronts the “culture versus policy” argument. But I think it overlooks the degree to which policy reflects culture. Japanese rail policy reflects a combination of Big Government regulation and privatization that has no significant constituency in the U.S.
In the U.S., the folks who like public transit would never go for having rail stations be owned by conglomerates that get nearly half their profit from retail and real estate activities adjacent to the stations: https://www.patiencerealty.com/post/the-story-of-how-privati.... It makes perfect economic sense. Transit creates a positive value for the land around each station. Having the rail operators own the station gives them a stake in the value created and incentivizes them to prioritize good rail service that brings people to the hotels and retail the companies own near the stations. But Americans are ideological, not pragmatic, and an idea like that is DOA here.
Japan's geography also a biggest factor in using trains over roads. Next comes population density. Resource constraints make them use rails over roads for efficiency. We cannot compare US & Japan.
The good thing that happened seems to be that China has essentially 10xed the Japan railways template. I wonder how bad a car centric China would've had been.
In urban areas China is just as car centric. A lot of cities look like Robert Moses wet dreams[1]. Beijing and Shanghai have so many expressways, ring roads and arterial streets they look like they were built by Americans. The rail network in the country to get from city to city is great but the urban planning is taken out of Metropolis
Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong are simply in a class of their own. imo, Shanghai and Guangzhou have decent systems.
Compare China's urban areas to Asia's other major developing nations: Jakarta, Bangkok, Manila. China can do much better, but there's also much, much worse urban planning out there.
A decentralized alternative would be making proportional ownership of railway stock, relative to distance from a rail station, a condition of business permits.
Suddenly all the businesses will be very pro-rail, as they benefit both directly and indirectly from its competent management, capacity growth and reach, even far from their own business. Especially far from their business.
Not claiming to know this works, but there are often many ways to solve a problem once the problem is well characterized. This insight that rail creates a great deal of indirect value is really helpful.
Indirect value is a battery. Voltage. Ready to power economic growth along whatever path the created-value to investment-return circuit gets closed.
one thing worth pointing out is that the legacy private railways work because they were never nationalized and had decades to quietly buy up land around stations before it was worth anything. That's really hard to replicate from scratch. This model is great in dense cities but even Japan is still struggling with rural lines
Exactly this. And the European case is the opposite starting point. Paris already had 2+ million people when the Metro opened in 1900. You're not building rail to create land value, you're building it because the existing density already demands it. Which is why European systems basically all require public subsidy while the Japanese private lines could turn a profit. The preconditions are just so different that copying either model somewhere else rarely works. IME the people pushing "just do what Tokyo does" tend to skip over this part.
Exactly. Tokyu's model of building a train line from the city center to rural areas and then building suburban developments in the rural areas the line traverses doesn't work in already built-up areas. Hence, there are still publicly-owned lines in areas where that model doesn't work. A great example is the Yokohama Municipal Subway. It is publicly owned and serves areas that were generally already built before the subway line was built.
I am skeptical of these "learn the secret of how other culture does X" because it almost always reflects the concerns of the person writing the article rather than shedding light on how a nation does X well. That's because we view the world through the prism of our own concerns, but when we encounter a society that is substantially different from ours -- such as any East Asian society -- then they will have a broad basket of different concerns.
Imagine, for example, that you stumble upon an island of amazing acrobats, they can do fantastic feats. And they are also cannibals. Now the temptation is just too great to say "cannibalism aids in acrobatic skills. Learn from the secrets of the best acrobats". In other words, when looking at a different society, there are just too many differences for you to identify what makes a specific industry work, and what is just cannibalism, unless you do some very, very serious investigative analysis, which this article is not, and even though what you are doing will have high error rates. What you need is the opposite -- a society very close to the US, but with amazing rail. Then emphasizing differences is much more likely to hit on something important for rail.
I could argue the reason Japan has amazing rail was the deflationary period in which the government went on a massive infrastructure spree to stimulate the economy via deficit spending, and this was because of the high Japanese propensity to save in the aftermath of the Plaza accords, and profound risk aversion, as well as their extremely peaceful and law abiding social norms. Good luck on having any of those approaches work well in the US. But hey, once again people focus on their own concerns. I'm sure for someone obsessed with, say, land use rights, they will point out that the what is preventing us from having amazing rail is lack of a Japanese style land management system. And for someone else focused on toll roads, they will say if we had more toll roads, then we would have great public transportation. Of course, India is filled with toll roads, and they are not known for great public transportation. And I could also give examples of nations that did huge infrastructure deficit spending, and they didn't get great infrastructure. Etc. Everyone sees the world through the lens of their own concerns. Articles like this, that don't even try to rebut the counter arguments or account for concern-bias, are not impressive.
Japan has some of the best infrastructure anywhere. It will be interesting to see if they can keep it that way with their population changing and becoming more geriatric.
successful train lines in Japan are all built between CBD and some spots / attractions. Odakyu: odawara / hakone, Seibu: chichibu, keiou: Takao, toukyuu: Nikko / kinugawa, nankai: Takao.
Tourists spots are usually in the mountains and the CBD is near the sea. And residential area is developed between them along the lines so the trains carry bidirectional passengers to work or relax on the same line, higher utilization keeps ticket fare low.
In Japan there's a cross party political consensus that public transport projects are a net positive for society. That's important when you have work which could take a decade or more to complete - the Chuo maglev project for instance will be complete when my kids are approaching adulthood and they're still not in primary school. I often wonder what we might be able to do in New Zealand (where I'm from) if we had the money and population to support it. But then I remember that one of the two major political parties always cancels or scales back anything ongoing which is public transport related, every single time they're elected, so nothing ever gets done.
One word dedication of Japanese people. They care very dedicated to their country. I respect this thing the most in them. They are very hardworking also.
Japanese railways are indeed amazing, but it should be pointed out that peripheral routes are being dismissed everywhere in the country side, often isolating people and killing places.
Infrastructure is also dated in many places.
It's not a criticism to Japan, I think they are just facing the fact that many people move to the cities and the country is on a population decline as well.
When was the last time you had to travel between Moscow and St Petersburg? Sapsan trains are always sold out from my experience. And those night trains don't always fit your needs, although they are plentiful and dirt cheap. They are supposedly building a dedicated high-speed rail line, but I don't have much faith in that, especially in the current situation.
So every time a post about successful public transit comes up, we get the full gamut of responses:
- "This wouldn't work in the US because of X". X is usually land area. Ok, but what about China?
- "We should fix some [corner case]" like the cost of parking;
- "It's too expensive here". Why is it expensive?
The key theme from all of this is central planning. You might be tempted to say that Japanese railways are private. Yes and no. And they certainly didn't start that way.
Back to the article, I find it weird to write an article in 2026 about the effectiveness of railways without talking about China. China is only mentioned once and that was in terms of passenger numbers.
Also, China's railroad network largely didn't even exist in 2005, certainly not the high speed rail. Look at the top metro systems by rail length [1] and 11 of the top 12 are in China (Moscow is the outlier). All of those systems are pretty new too. Chengdu at #4 was started in 2010.
According to this [2], Chengdu's population in 2010 was ~7.5 million. So you can't really argue the city was designed for it or it built early.
Most arguments against regional and metro rail systems can be debunked with "But China".
The Chinese high speed rail network is completely utterly insane. Funny, the overhead line equipment (power lines) looks identical to the high speed lines in Europe!
Countries like Japan seem to make policy that serves the people.
Other countries decisions serve politicians, corporates, the rich, and maybe possibly finally, the citizens.
Here in Melbourne a city of 5 million people we don’t have a train from the airport to the city despite decades of political talk about it. But why not? Because the Airport Coporation makes vast unfathomable profit on car parking. What’s most important? Just look around.
like many other places, there is a airport bus in Melbourne as I recall. there is (or was) a train from Melbourne to Canberra too (with a short bus transfer on the Canberra side). it was very difficult to figure out how to buy a ticket for it!
Works in progress also had a great article recently (also discussed on hacker news) about how Japanese railways are private, profit earning real estate development corporations. [1]
Unfortunately, people from western countries have very negative views toward the privatization of mass transit despite the wild success that Japan has experienced. The model makes so much sense: if trains are just a way to get people to the real estate that you developed, then you’re going to make sure that the trains AND the destinations are really nice, which also turns out to be very lucrative (at least in densely populated areas) as a cherry on top.
And even worse, like this commenter above alludes to, it is trendy in the West to believe that real estate developers are evil, and that corporations that make money are sucking the life out of society. This kind of degrowth populism pretty much guarantees that the successful Japanese model is out of reach for most countries, because it is exactly the pursuit of profit that makes Japan’s system so nice - not some edicts from a benevolent and extremely capable government.
> Unfortunately, people from western countries have very negative views toward the privatization of mass transit despite the wild success that Japan has experienced
Japanese culture would frown heavily on enshittifying the transit experience to earn more profit. Western culture mass transit is already often shitty, and I cannot imagine how shit it would become if a for profit corporation took it over and started to squeeze it to make more money
Did you read what I said? The whole Japanese system is for profit and the one of the biggest reasons for Japan’s system being so pleasant is that it is done for commercial purposes.
If the incentives are right American companies can make good things, but usually they are not so because of poor policy.
> The Midwest was once criss-crossed by a network of ‘interurbans’, essentially intercity trams. In the United States, these lines have vanished
They just "vanished"! Man, I hate it when that happens. You leave a railroad outside with out a lid on it for too long and it just, you know, evaporates! What a drag...
What an amazing evasion of reality/truth, another classic use of the passive voice...
The tragedy of the commons doesn't seem to exist in Japan to the same extent it does in Western nations, especially the US. As you said: that's largely due to reasons not mentioned in the article.
This happened in, what like 15 years? The trains are truly a disaster. In 2022 i missed like 3 days of various conferences and workshops because trains would just not come :/
The introduction lost me. To quote: "Japan’s vast railway network", but it does not address the mouse in the room. Japan is approximately the size of California with a population density that is three times that of California. I would argue that a comparison of rail systems without addressing those critical issues may be interesting but isn't really informative. The issues are complex.
> Japan is one of the only countries to have privatized parking. In Europe and North America, vast quantities of parking space is socialized: municipalities own the streets and allow people to park on them at low or zero cost. Initially with the intention of encouraging the provision of more parking spaces, Japan made it illegal to park on public roads or pavements without special permission. Before someone buys a car, they must prove that they have a reserved night-time space on private land, either owned or leased.
This is got to be a huge factor. Making everyone pay for "free parking" through inefficient use of space is such a waste. I strongly recommend everyone to read Donald Shoup's "The High Price of Free Parking".
Street parking makes suburbs worse, too. Almost everybody in my neighborhood has their garages piled to the ceiling with junk and parks in the street, which makes it a pain to weave through even for someone driving a compact crossover… I can’t imagine what kind of hell it is for trash and delivery drivers having to squeeze huge trucks and vans through without swiping peoples’ cars.
This is where legislation can come in - when I bought my house, one provision was that I can't change the front to a garden, it has to remain usable as a parking space for a car. Even if I don't have a car. There's limited extra / visitor parking available. Of course, a lot of people have two cars so it's kinda moot but still.
This is crazy car-centric legislation.
Now, instead of letting car owners pay for the public space they use (street parking), you are forcing anyone without a car to waste their own private space, in case somebody wants to park there.
my absolute biggest pet peeve about living in "modern" suburbs and a large contributing factor behind why i wanted to (and eventually did) leave them.
imagine having the only well-maintained sidewalk for a good ways out be blocked by cars whose owners have 2+ car garages!
Blocking the sidewalk should be fineable?
Such rules are often not enforced.
And that's without mentioning what's like for the lowest of the low (in the USA): pedestrians.
It would make a difference in dense cities like San Francisco where many people park on the street. A lot of people would have to give up their cars.
Meanwhile, in rural areas and many suburbs, it would be pointless paperwork, because everyone has a big enough driveway for their cars and nobody parks on the street at night.
So it seems like it would be difficult to get enough people in favor to do it state-wide in California? Wherever it would actually force people to do something, it would be unpopular.
> A lot of people would have to give up their cars.
You don't have to give up the car, you just park it farther away from the dense and crowded downtown and use some other personal transportation (scooter, bike) for the last mile trip.
there is middleground: tax / fines, whatever you name them. It will be free if you filled the paperwork, and it start out cheap, while gradually increase yearly. Can be different depending on the density or how heavy traffic an area is. However you should improve the public transport at the same time too.
Your city/rural distinction is insightful. I think it can be taken into account relatively easily. Name explicitly the cities/locations were the requirement would apply. Possibly based on some objective criteria like population density.
Can such policies be implemented individually by cities?
Not sure about the legal frameworks in the US but that’s exactly how it works in most places in the UK. Cities have restrictions for on-street parking (metered, permitted, illegal) whereas the towns and villages don’t (unless they also bring in bylaws to help with congestion).
The main low-hanging fruit is just removing surface parking lots in American downtowns and stopping the development and expansion of highways through the same. If you did nothing else that would have a significant positive impact. For almost all communities those surface parking lots are economic extracts from the community. They're woefully underpriced for tax purposes too.
The removed parking needs to be replaced by transit options people actually want to use.
I live just outside a fairly large city. Getting downtown sucks. Driving is the only real option, but parking is annoying and expensive. Even if it was free, it would still be annoying. I almost exclusively take an Uber because of it. Those can add up and be a mixed bag as well.
There is bus service, but it’s infrequent and quadruples the time. In some cases, the transit directions say 1h 20 minutes, where 47 minutes of that is walking. Meanwhile, a car is under 20 minutes.
I used to live outside of Chicago. The Metra could get me downtown faster than a car (during rush hour) for just a few bucks. The train became the pragmatic choice and dictated where I chose to live.
Removing parking doesn’t build a train, it just raises parking rates, keeping people from even bothering to go downtown.
I agree that surface lots are terrible, but they have to be replaced by something.
If you remove parking spaces it solves itself because traffic is reduced and transit options become more efficient AND more financially sound.
This is what the activists think but in reality it just slowly makes everyone's lives worse. There's typically some sort of political or social dysfunction preventing effective transit and reducing parking doesn't magically make that go away. It's analogous to the tired refrain about new technology not fixing social problems.
Buses are a simpler solution. A city should solve the anywhere to downtown is quick on bus or train thing. You need transit lanes and more buses. Ideal is public transit is faster and cheaper. Even someone who already has a car will not use it.
Then once solved, let people get across from one suburb to the next on transit quickly but that is harder to do economically.
Maybe the parking lots, but if you know anything about the major Japanese cities with satisfyingly good train systems then you'll also know they have a lot of expressways running through them.
Yes, I do love the rail system in Japan. Went a few years ago, going back next year most likely. I've also driven in Japan (Osaka). I just meant, in general, a low-hanging fruit we could tackle is making surface parking lots a thing of the past in downtown or urban areas. With actual economically productive constructs there instead, such as business, retail, housing, parks, &c. we could pretty much get to the density where trams make sense, and in some cities we could work on intra-city rail too.
I think where I live (Columbus) is very well positioned for this model if only our civic leaders had courage and stopped thinking of transit as a "blue" thing (also our city council needs to stop suburban thinking). We don't need to build any more expressways or highways. We are maxed out. The only sane option is respecting appropriate density, and focusing on categorical changes in how we move people: walk/bike/rail instead of bus/car/roadways.
> we could pretty much get to the density where trams make sense
That's the key issue. We don't need to launch a war on surface parking to achieve the necessary density. Zoning and mass transit buildout go hand in hand and the problem getting in the way is fundamentally a political one. If the politics is solved and the density increases market forces will cause the surface parking to go away on their own.
Surface parking is a huge waste of space that becomes unusable for pedestrians. You can't apply market forces to it because unpaid roadside parking is effectively a tragedy of the commons.
> The main low-hanging fruit is just removing surface parking lots
You're pre-supposing that transit is _better_ than cars. It's not. ESPECIALLY the Japanese transit.
I certainly don't want to suffer through this bullshit every day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9Xg7ui5mLA
That is wild, I wouldn't have nearly enough faith in the structural integrity of the doors for that. Not to mention that packing people in like that seems vaguely unsafe.
Their streets tend to be super narrow, with pedestrians and bicycles sharing the shoulder. And back streets are basically alleys with pedestrians sharing the street with cars. Obviously parked cars there would be a disaster.
Also it tends to cost more via tolls to drive any significant distance than to take the train or bus (or plane for that matter), unless you have multiple people in the car. The car situation in Japan strikes me as more a case of regulatory capture than wise use of land. Because even small towns with vast empty spaces operate this way.
It's significantly more efficient to provide services to compact towns than sprawled towns, so I'm not sure this registers to me as a downside.
It's pretty common for small sprawled towns to struggle to keep up with maintenance of roads/water/power, which is less of an issue with compact towns.
The same applies at the city level, of course.
The lack of sprawl is also a consequence of how mountainous the country is. While not as bad as a lot of western sprawl, the areas of Japan that are a bit wider and less populated do have an element of car dependent sprawl to them. Then of course the villages that aren't covered by the train network and aren't boxed in by mountains have a pretty similar relationship to cars as a small western town.
Where I think the US and Australia both struggle is trying to make the car work in dense cities as populations grow. We do actually have pretty dense cities in Aus, yet cannot give up the car.
“Regulatory capture”? This term means something very specific and doesn’t apply in this case at all.
So in other words… they internalized a number of heavily subsidized externalities of individual transportation by car?
It's worth noting that for a kei car (the small 660cc cars that make up most of japan's car sales) you do not actually need to prove you have parking space in some regions of japan (like you do with non kei cars)
Wow weird. I've lived there and never knew but now that you've pointed that out I'm realizing we never parked on the street. It's always at the house or the parking lot of the place we're going.
Of course 95% of the time we take the train. Only use a car to go to Costco or possibly go out to the country (even then a lot of remote areas are super accessible in public transit)
I like trains but the logic is flawed. If we banned hats, or made it so they were very expensive, less people would wear hats. And sure, probably more places would worry about shade because hats are not an option... But it doesn't really prove that's the right thing to do or that hats are inefficient use of cloth.
Hats are pretty objectively an ineffecient use of cloth, here. Roads are incredibly expensive to maintain societally because cars cause so much wear-and-tear; cars, maintenance, and insurance are expensive on the individual; lack of foot-traffic is expensive for business-owners; individual car-use is much more expensive on the planet and power grid; travel is more difficult & and dangerous for children and old-folks… it goes on and on.
Having sprawling towns that require cars to get around is pretty obviously a bad idea from so many fronts. Trains, trolleys, and bikes are better on all these points.
> Roads are incredibly expensive to maintain societally because cars cause so much wear-and-tear;
Actually the wear and tear due to cars is minimal compared to that of trucks. The relationship of wear to mass is nonlinear. Which isn't to say that buttering half the earth with asphalt isn't a seemingly absurd use of resources.
I think it is. You have to prove that you have a space to park your car and if you have space at your house, they come to measure and verify that you do. I don't mind parking for places that you are visiting, but you need to have your own parking and not depend on the street for it.
In which part of Europe is cheap to park?
Romania. Even its capital and the largest city - Bucharest - is still pretty cheap, sometimes even free like in this example on Google Street View https://maps.app.goo.gl/r6TFFtHbj2SELTqY9 If you're willing to take the risk which is pretty low, you can even park it on the sidewalk like here https://maps.app.goo.gl/y6DNVBdR2KvJsA917
But times are changing. Lanes and sidewalks, sometimes even green spaces, are being converted to parking spaces, so there's less spaces for freeloading. They're also becoming more and more expensive. The residential ones have also been hard to get and it will probably become even harder to get as more drivers will need them as the risk of getting a fine increases.
That's probably an exception. Most cities I know in Europe have crazy expensive parking and usually forbid cars from entering the city center. I would say EU cities are really hostile to cars
You should distinguish between residents and visitors. In Belgium, and I believe in many other European cities, street parking for residents is extremely cheap or free.
Not Paris and especially not if you have an SUV: 225€ for six hours (sic). But unlike Tokyo the average narrow street in Paris is still lined with parked cars from end to end, so apparently the fees are still too low.
I suspect if you live there you can get a parking permit to park relatively cheaply. Where I used to live they introduced paid parking on my street, because people were going out the city center to park in residential areas instead of pay for a parking garage. A permit cost me €75 a year.
Makes you consider the cost of anything that is “free”
"free" just means "publicly subsidized" in these cases. Not that this is a bad thing, but that's really all it is. See also: literally anything any nation pays for using tax money.
Sometimes it’s privately subsidized, too, such as when you go out to eat and your meal costs more because the restaurant provides free parking. People who don’t drive often pay higher prices subsidizing the people who do, which is something we should talk about more directly.
A lot of the time the businesses don’t have an option to not have parking as it is enforced by zoning laws/regulations.
Though they can make that mandatory parking paid but often the social norm is for it to be free (at least for the first hour or two)
Same with credit cards.
A fellow Shoupista!
That won’t fix the cost of rail in America, which is the main reason America doesn’t have better rail. Look at California high speed rail or light rail in Seattle. They have insane costs per mile, are still very over budget, falling behind schedule, and basically are forever grifts. The availability of parking is unrelated to these issues. It comes back to mismanagement and corruption.
The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail.
If you try building a single megaproject, nobody knows what they are doing, everything is inefficient, and mistakes will be made. But you learn by doing. If the individual projects are small enough that there are always multiple projects in various stages, you develop and maintain expertise. Then you can build things cost-effectively and finish the projects in time.
I think it's not feasible in America because of the culture. If you have a good chunk of people that are hell-bent against sharing space with others for one reason or another (some are legitimate reasons!), you're already discarding a significant chunk of passengers.
Another hot take is... if you want any of the infrastructure to be mass-used, you have to make it better than the alternatives, so people with the means would use it as well. Like your subway should be faster than the cars, so even affluent people would take it. Your trains should be faster than door-to-door flight time, so people would take that as well. Unfortunately that makes a lot of things more complicated in communities with high income disparity.
> I think it's not feasible in America because of the culture. If you have a good chunk of people that are hell-bent against sharing space with others for one reason or another (some are legitimate reasons!), you're already discarding a significant chunk of passengers.
That's why America never layed any railroads in the 19th century, and everyone just rode by horse instead. Oh wait, that's not what happened at all.
Yes, but with caveats.
Culturally, though, it’s because that over half of the population doesn’t know that they would benefit from trains? In the same way outside (just as inside) the US there’s an age-old divide between farmers and city folk (see Denmark or France for the most recent protests).
In China, >66% of the population lives in urban areas. In the US, <30% live in proper urban areas (a vast majority, 60%, live in historically car-centric suburban areas mostly developed post WWII).
The issue is not that those areas that would benefit the most don’t support it, it’s that the areas that would benefit the most from it are surrounded by areas that currently have no viable alternatives (and thus knowledge that something else is possible) other than a car. They’re already driving >1hr to get to work or an airport. Therefore, of course they think anything that takes away resources from wider roads is a waste of their own time and tax money, as it does not benefit them.
The reason the California HSR, if ever finished, will actually mark a cultural shift is that it’s the only megaproject attempted since the 21st century that actually puts modern alternatives to the car in rural areas: vast amounts of money could’ve been saved by connecting LA to SF and SD by electrifying and tunneling on the current Amtrak route, but that would’ve left out about half the state.
Was it too ambitious? Maybe. But in 50 years, maybe everyone will be talking about how it changed California, and the US’s, entire attitude toward rail.
> Culturally, though, it’s because that over half of the population doesn’t know that they would benefit from trains
No it’s not. Everyone in America goes to Disney World, which was made by a train nerd and you can’t even drive into the parks. Everyone goes there, rides around the trains and walkable areas, and then goes home to Ohio and drives around in their giant SUV.
It’s not because people don’t know about trains. It’s because they don’t value the things you do, and they value things you don’t, like having distance from strangers and being able to buy a lot of stuff and cart it around with them everywhere.
All my family is immigrants from Bangladesh. They’re not steeped in generations of American car culture. But, for some reason, car culture is the thing they assimilate into most easily. My cousin was living in Queens (where all the recent Bangladeshi immigrants are) and moved to Dallas. She’s thrilled about having all the space for her kids to run around, the apartment with a pool, etc. She doesn’t miss having to schlep her kids on the subway around aggressive homeless people, people singing to themselves, panhandlers, etc.
That’s fun, because I’m from a third generation Dallas family :) I hope they enjoy Dallas and all Texas has to offer.
Dallas, TX has continually voted in expanding its DART Rail funding the past 40 years. It has the most miles of intercity rail in the entirety of the South. It has the most light rail, by mileage, built in the entirety of the US. It just opened up an entirely new rail line through the suburbs (and only the suburbs) in March, and is its third(!) line which connects directly to DFW airport, which makes it the most rail-connected airport in the United States, and tied with Shanghai, Tokyo and London for the world.
I also personally currently live on a farm in California, and am an advocate of HSR. I believe many of those in similar areas are afraid of rail because they have never experienced its benefits, and change without knowledge is scary.
So please forgive me if I say that you are incorrect in both your assessment of how the majority of Dallas, Texas supports rail and your assumption of what I value.
And regarding your point about Disney World, I believe you are actually agreeing with me. Disney is one of the only places in the US it makes more sense to use the train or shuttle than a car. It does not in most of the US. Many people go to Disney World and experience for the first time how well trains can work for day-to-day transit, if designed well and intentionally. People will use what is most convenient, immigrant or not — most people (including me) do not take trains out of some principled stance, they do so when it’s more convenient. And my argument is we should make it more convenient, safety and all.
> Another hot take is... if you want any of the infrastructure to be mass-used, you have to make it better than the alternatives, so people with the means would use it as well. Like your subway should be faster than the cars, so even affluent people would take it.
These days cities often achieve this by purposely hurting the alternatives like driving. And that just isn’t the solution. Mass transit has to be fast period. Not just faster than a bad alternative. And it needs to be safe, and 24x7.
> These days cities often achieve this by purposely hurting the alternatives like driving.
The point is not hurting the alternative of driving, it's to ensure that drivers don't actively hurt the more space-efficient alternatives of biking and walking on foot. The people who still have a real need for driving actually have a far better experience as a result due to the reduced traffic.
I support all kinds of transportation. I think everyone should have access to trains, cars, bikes and etc. But I also think each has its own merits. Like the car ownership over here is huge, but most commute to work on trains because things aren’t really invisibly subsidized.
> The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail.
The cost of passenger rail is high in America because America has 11% of the population (read: customer) density of Japan.
(For cities, NYC has 25% lower population density than Tokyo.)
Dividing population by total land area is a horribly misleading way to understand density. There are alternatives, like population-weighted density, that give you a better picture: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3119965 Here's a blog post where somebody re-invented the concept and analyzed density in Europe: https://theconversation.com/think-your-country-is-crowded-th...
The population-weighted density of the US is roughly similar to continental Europe.
There's this one neat trick where you only build the rail where the people go!
At the same time, the same government, mysteriously, has no problem building a vast network of roads reaching everywhere and spanning the whole country.
If the US government neglects a section of highway until a city becomes unreachable by roads, there will be riots. The same city losing a train service? Totally expected, trains are supposed to suck.
The sorry state of American public transport is a self-fulfilling prophecy: everybody knows that public transportation sucks, and therefore nothing is done to improve it, because it's a waste of resource.
>the same government, mysteriously, has no problem building a vast network of roads reaching everywhere and spanning the whole country.
Our road-building has slowed dramatically since the 1980s. The Interstate Highway network would be much more expensive and slow to build today.
>If the US government neglects a section of highway until a city becomes unreachable by roads, there will be riots.
Consider John's Island, South Carolina. The highway that was supposed to go there has been delayed for 33 years. Access to the island/town is through two two-lane roads that get backed up to a standstill every night. There's a running "joke" about how everyone is going to die if there's a major hurricane.
That’s maybe the reason today to not build more but not the reason it is bad. America ignored rail for decades in favor of highway systems and now the cost is almost always considered infeasible. We will redo our roads every 5-10 years though.
If it was invested in 50 years ago or more we would be in a different place for sure.
Can you explain how Seattle is an example? They’re opening new lines, Link is packed often, seems like a well used reliable service, but I only visit once or twice a year.
It’s been a while since I read about their system but as I recall, across the entire system something like 100 billion is the total cost. But that’s only for like 75 ish miles. So it’s very expensive. I recently saw a news article saying they’re 30 billion short per their projections and are now cutting lines out of the plan that voters expected when they supported levies, and some surrounding cities where residents have each paid hundreds or more a year for the rail to come to them, now may not get them at all. Even though they’ve been paying into it for a decade or two. Which to me is a form of theft.
The central sections of link were expensive because they're built through the center of the earth with really huge stations, some of this is to avoid impacting cars but much is just to get elevation changes. The connection over lake Washington required a lot of money and work too, as it's a floating bridge.
The less complex sections were mostly on-par with other us cities.
The per mile costs are definitely high in America, for a lot of reasons, often related to laws and policies, but that's not really the issue. At the end of 2025, nearly 20 years since California voters passed Prop 1A, we have spent under $15 Billion on California High Speed Rail. As a point of contrast, the cost of 2025's tax cut extensions is estimated to be $4 Trillion. The fact is that we don't have quality intercity passenger rail in this country because politicians aren't willing to support it and fund it as reasonable levels. Seattle light rail is an interesting example because politicians there are willing to support it and so ... we are building it, despite the relatively high per mile costs. LA Metro is interesting right because the voters passed sales taxes that funded various light rail projects. So LA is building better rail. But the political process means that every district supervisor gets their own rail project and so we have light rail to Pomona but are struggling to get a subway down Wilshire where it's obviously more needed. Anyways, all this is to say, politics is a big part of the reason why we don't have better rail in America. And blaming "grift" is a right-wing political talking point that probably doesn't help.
> political process means that every district supervisor gets their own rail project
This is part of what people mean by “grift.” Anyway, I’m not right wing. I just want cheap rail done competently. That’s not “not the issue.” As a voter, that is very much an issue for me.
> Before someone buys a car, they must prove that they have a reserved night-time space on private land, either owned or leased.
> This is got to be a huge factor.
If the USA implemented that exact rule, it would change almost nothing. People already need nighttime parking for non-legal reasons.
You are dramatically misinformed. Where I live in Los Angeles, a very large number of people park their cars primarily or exclusively on the street.
Such a change would have a significant impact.
Neither LA nor NYC are even vaguely similar to the rest of the nation, so invoking their names when talking about national effects is pretty useless. They're insanely, unbelievably dense locations. The extreme majority of Americans do not live in anything near that dense.
The idea that LA is an unbelievably dense location is puzzling. My Spanish hometown is significantly denser than Los Angeles. Even large parts of NYC are not in any way dense by global urban standards.
As for people parking in the street in the US, you will find them in many smaller cities. Look at random pictures of south St Louis: Plenty of neighborhoods built before every house had a 2 car garage, and therefore with a lot of on-street parking used every day. And that's with single family homes. Hell, you find this in deep suburbs too, where someone decides they want 4 cars, and have the garage full of crap. I could take pictures of at least ten cars parked on the curb, and at least 40 outdoors in driveways if I went for a one mile loop around my 4th ring suburb.
Now, not that this is the main reason Americans still use cars to go anywhere right now, as the rest of the infrastructure around me also makes car mandatory. Suburbs with houses 3 miles from the nearest business, shops inaccessible on foot, streets that, while supposedly crossable, are extremely unsafe to pedestrians... In a world where, say, we limit each household to one car, my entire suburb becomes abandoned, and most businesses collapse, kind of like a place like Madrid collapses if one didn't run any public transit for 4 months.
Over 1/20 Americans live in LA or NYC. Cities in LA county don't show up in a density ranking until 15th with Maywood. WEHO is 20th and its gets less dense from there. Like 80% of Americans live in metro areas.
Right, 19/20 people do not need the same solution as the highly specific ones you would need for some place as dense as Manhattan or LA. You can do things in Seattle that you cannot do in Manhattan - MUCH cheaper things.
Have you actually been to LA? It's not that dense. Miami, Boston, Detroit, Chicago are just as or more dense depending on the neighborhood.
If you tried that your politicians would get tossed out of office the next election.
Your argument totally ignores that all this infrastructure was built around using cars. Doing things like banning street parking doesn't magically reorganize the way everything was built out over the last 100 years. Took a 100 years to build this will take 100 or more years to undo it.
I'm also suspicious the people pushing stuff like that would in a different time and place would be wearing hair shirts and flagellating themselves. All nice but that's not most people.
> Where I live in Los Angeles, a very large number of people park their cars primarily or exclusively on the street.
> Such a change would have a significant impact.
What would that impact be? Do you see, or experience, a lot of contention for nighttime parking?
There's plenty of contention for street parking in nonresidential areas. But a nighttime parking certificate doesn't do anything about that. Nighttime parking is done in residential areas.
It's not like you have to get waivers to park your cars in front of your house in Japan. Your car MUST have a designated lot, with proofs(more or less a set of simple declaration forms than anything detailed and concrete), to be registered under your name. Otherwise it cannot be registered. A full waiver for parking violations technically exist, but they are reserved for official and/or actually special vehicles only(like actual fire trucks). The vast majority of cars stay in an off-of-road parking lot of some sort, be it a fancy mechanical one or a crude gravel lot next to apartment complex.
I reckon that not many other country do that kind of legal setup. But Japan is among those very few.
But permission to park in front of your own house is trivial to obtain in the US (as the thread has noted, generally not even necessary to obtain, but in some cases it is necessary to get permission) and would satisfy the requirement.
You can imagine a regime where parking in front of your own house is banned as a policy choice, but that's completely different from a regime where you need to document that you have permission to park somewhere at night. The nighttime parking requirement doesn't make it any harder to own a car, because you're "gatekeeping" ownership with a gate that can't bar anyone.
> You can imagine a regime where parking in front of your own house is banned as a policy choice
Yes, I believe that's exactly what's being referred to. A blanket ban on street parking and requiring documentation of a dedicated off street parking space to register a vehicle.
Of course there would be little to no point to such an exercise in a nation where the majority of the streets have wide shoulders specifically intended for parking. What's happening here is that people with a vested interest in a given political outcome aren't making a rational comparison of the differences between the infrastructure in the two places.
My take is that the anti-car movement broadly engages in a disingenuous tactic where they actively attempt to make the experience of using cars worse in order to drive political change while misrepresenting the nature of their actions. It's an underhanded tactic employed by a vocal minority with the intent of fooling the silent majority.
Not the person you're replying to, but I see the same thing happen in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. Dense neighborhood with a lot of nightlife, but many of its residents exclusively use free street parking to park overnight. There is a lot of contention for spots after about 7pm.
>Do you see, or experience, a lot of contention for nighttime parking?
In the Hudson Waterfront of New Jersey, yes.
Perhaps you’ve never lived in a large American city? In many cities you can’t even park on the street overnight in residential neighborhoods because the parking is permitted for people who live in that neighborhood. Without the right sticker (or a guest permit from a resident) your car is getting ticketed or towed, formalizing the usage of overnight street parking for residents.
In Chicago, for example, many neighborhoods are full of former single family homes that at some point (often long ago) were converted into 2 or 3 unit residences, but there is still likely only one garage that maybe fits two vehicles. If you’ve got units filled with 2-3 roommates each, there might be 9 cars for a building with only 2 spots.
Obviously I’m not arguing this is good, but that’s the way things are for now.
“Japan’s liberal land use regulation makes it straightforward to build new neighborhoods next to railway lines, giving commuters easy access to city centers. It also enables the densification of these centers, which means that commuters have more places they want to go.”
This is the most important paragraph in the article. It can’t be overstated how ingenious Japan’s system of zoning is and how much this has benefitted their society in ways we can only dream about here in the West.
"West" when we talk about urban spaces, walk-accessible cities and public transportation is, IMHO, the wrong category. Europe and USA are very far apart.
Europe and USA are both huge places so it depends what you mean. If you compare major east coast cities - Boston, DC, and NYC to European metros like Paris/ Madrid/ Lisbon the biggest tax on the citizens is the same in that it’s impossible to build anything so a huge % of income needs to go to housing.
Well, Japan isn't much different in terms of the share of income that goes to housing: https://housingpolicytoolkit.oecd.org/2.H_conso.html
East coast cities were built before modern building codes.
Something that, for some reason, people in the states don't want to accept is that - when given the choice - the vast majority of people prefer living in dense urban environments.
OP addresses that. Japan is not particularly dense, especially outside of core downtowns.
You see the same dynamics in London and Paris.
People do not "prefer to live in dense urban environments" by urbanist standards.
They prefer to live in dense urban environments by North American standards, which can still be far less dense than urbanists really want.
> which can still be far less dense than urbanists really want.
And this was my comparison?
May be an assumption on my part, but the language "people prefer to live in dense urban environment" is typical of urbanism-boosters - who definitely push a lot online that leads one to believe that anything less than inner Tokyo is unacceptable.
Do you have a source for this? What threshold is needed for it to be 'dense'?
My source -> https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/003/033/089/164...
Great point.
Granted I’m approaching it from the perspective of a tourist or business traveler, but 6/6 of the European cities I’ve been in were fully navigable for my purposes via transit. I’d probably guess half or less in the US.
Even in NYC or SFO, the metro areas are so large it really makes the success rates low depending on the trip.
they might mean west of japan ;)
Go far enough and Japan is west of Japan, several times over. You can always keep heading west.
One thing that is critical is that the country hasn't turned home ownership into an ever growing financial asset that is meant to carry the majority of one's wealth into perpetuity
Well, it did at one point, it’s just that the crash that resulted was so nasty it disabused anybody of that notion.
At the peak of the bubble era, just the land underneath the Imperial Palace had an estimated real estate value larger than the entire state of California.
What major investments do they make instead? Or do they just not have much of a financial ladder?
Postal savings at 2% interest. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2005/08/how-did-japan-s-...
Rough.
>how ingenious Japan’s system of zoning is
I'm only barely familiar with it so I ask this in good faith: is it really ingenious or is it just more permissive? My bias/priors are that the simpler and truer statement is: it can't be overstated how beneficial more permissive zoning laws are to a society.
There are other aspects beyond simply being more permissive. I recall reading for example that property transfer tax is remarkably less on bare land, enough so that when travelling in Japan you will regularly notice bare lots for sale, as it is beneficial for the seller to tear down a lot before they sell it. This sort of thing encourages churn of housing, and coupled with liberal zoning, enables an accelerated increase in denser building. Tbh it probably encourages lower construction costs since more people are doing construction.
IMO in this whole conversation, whether discussing any jurisdiction not just japan, impacts of zoning is an over emphasized and tax policy under emphasized (ie. almost never discussed).
I have a hard time believing that a tax code that incentives destruction in any capacity is a good thing.
If the land is more valuable without a structure the current owner has natural incentive to do that, or someone else has incentive to buy, demolish and re-list.
From what I remember, Japanese zoning allows small shops (there's a size limit) in any residential zone.
That means no car trips when you run out of bread or milk.
Smartest property of that zoning system IMO.
I also wonder how much the pressure filled culture of not standing out has something to do with this. My impression is Japanese are under a lot more pressure to not abuse the permissiveness of the zoning laws.
If a law allows a store up to a certain size, and someone builds a store of that size, has the law been abused?
What do you mean by “abuse”?
I'm not meaning to take a dig at you, but the fact that you (and presumably many others) can genuinely ask that question serves to illustrate the parent's point quite nicely.
To spell it out, "abuse" here means to engage in behavior that is socially undesirable or disruptive or would generally be expected to upset otherwise reasonable neighbors or whatever while nonetheless falling within the bounds of the law. An alarmingly large amount of what goes on in the US falls into that category IMO.
Fwiw that’s what we have in Germany, unless you live in remote places. You always have a Lidl, Aldi, or REWE you can walk or bike to.
No idea what our local zoning laws are
Even the smallest Lidl, Aldi, or REWE are not small shops in the sense meant here.
Not really the same thing. They're much larger already than most stores you'd see in urban Japan.
Think more in terms of small convenience stores ("Spätis" with daily necessities) everywhere. Typical distance to a store is maybe 500-1000m in Germany. In dense areas of Japanese cities it's closer to one store every 100m-200m.
So in Germany it'd be a 10 minute walk, while in Japan most of your "walk" would be getting downstairs.
The flipside of that is that selection is going to be limited compared to what you'd find in Germany.
I see. What you describe does seem to match what I experienced in NYC, Portugal, and Spain? Small supermarkets everywhere with a bit of a random selection of items
You haven’t lived until you have experienced the Japanese Kombini (convenience store).
There's a lot of places to get decent fried chicken, onigiri, and snacks. It's just 7 and I holdings still let's the US 711 suck
That's a big part of it. They also do zoning mostly at the federal level, meaning local opposition isn't relevant.
> I'm only barely familiar with it so I ask this in good faith: is it really ingenious or is it just more permissive?
Let's start from the glaring problem: The purpose of the US zoning system was institutionalized racism to keep the "undesirables" out rather than anything having to do with development management. Once you realize that, all of the misfeatures (NIMBY, excessive permitting, sclerotic bureaucracy, public participation) make obvious sense.
Practically every zoning system would be better than that.
Sometimes permissive zoning laws don’t actually encourage positive urban development outcomes.
Example: Texas
Zoning has to both exist and be well-designed.
Texas zoning isn't nearly as permissive as Japan's. Setbacks are a big added requirement. Minimum parking requirements too though that is changing.
But it would not be legal to build japanese neighbourhoods in Texas.
Texas zoning is only “permissive” relative to other states. Relative to Japan it’s quite restrictive.
I bet you'd see natural market driven concentration around rail stations in Texas too, if they had a useful rail network.
Dallas-Area Rapid Transit (DART) member cities all had to develop 25-year plans for denser development around station sites as a condition of their membership, if that’s what you mean by “natural”.
You might be surprised, look at Dallas. They have a pretty extensive rail network.
Dallas does not have permissive zoning, even in comparison to a city like Seattle.
A great video on the zoning laws in Japan if anyone wants to nerd out on them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlwQ2Y4By0U
Ingenious? It's a system that endorses hyper-capitalism through sub-9m² kyosho jutaku.
That isn't ingenious, it's battery farming.
Because the railway companies also participate in the economic activity at the destinations, they extract extended value from enabling mobility. Imagine if the rail operators owned a percentage of a stadium or convention center, for example. This then creates the economic incentive to build more connections to this "hub".
Kyoto station is a great example of this. It's enormous inside, with a hotel on the top, event facilities, and a ton of retail all over.
https://www.kyotostation.com/kyoto-station-building-faciliti...
It's actually a bad example - there is barely anything around Kyoto station except a few hotels and some shopping malls. The main shopping/entertainment area and almost all tourist attractions are north of it, requiring connection by bus or subway.
The areas around major stations in basically any other city are far more developed. Look at Osaka-Umeda for example. I don't know if that's due to the historical buildings or the relative lack of good railway within the city itself (Kyoto is mostly a hub to get between other lines)
> there is barely anything around Kyoto station
This is simply not true. Kyoto station is probably the most densely packed shopping / entertainment area in the city.
Source: I live in Kyoto.
I don't live there now but I did for a long time.
The original comment was "I think that though we are a railway company, we consider ourselves a city-shaping company." Kyoto is absolutely not built around its station. Walk a few blocks away and there's nothing but regular apartments! The true centre is Shijo Kawaramachi.
In my travels through Japan and Taiwan, rail stops are almost always hubs of economic activity of all sorts. It's a selling point when searching for accommodations while planning trips. Easy access to food and shopping. Taiwan night markets in cities, for example, are almost always near major rail station of some kind (light, metro, train). No need to go very far to get from one point of interest to another.
> Certainly, part of it is also cultural and legal frameworks that in the US make it very hard for this model to work
How so? In the United States Congress granted land to railroad companies, and the companies can sell the land to finance building tracks. Many cities started as railroad stops and grew because of the railroad.
I suspect the commenter above is reflecting on 2026 USA and not 1850 USA. The past tense nature of your comment if part of the concern highlights a common recognition that there is limited evidence the country is currently capable of building.
A lot of NIMBY/racism/classism and modern reality of legal delays means that it can be costly.
Zoning laws is another. It's a lot of fun visiting Japan and Taiwan because you can wander around and there's a huge variation of utilization in a given block. US approach to zoning means that I rarely see similar utilization in the US.
Separate from this is politics.
I'm in the NYC metro area and we've been trying to expand access into NYC for decades.
You would think that this would be a no-brainer because it enables so much economic activity in both directions (NY/NJ). Yet, Chris Christie canceled the ARC project (which itself was years in the making) for optics at the time of the Tea Party.
There's an existing disused commuter rail line in NJ near the Hudson that was shut down in the 60s. It still has many of its stations and density to support rail service today but can't be reopened because of the NIMBYs. If they can't make that work, the rest of the country is mostly hopeless.
NIMBY seems to have a hard time stopping data centers. Why do they have more success stopping renewables and rail?
If we put the same amount of economic pressure on rail that data centers have...the US would have probably have almost as nice infrastructure as China and be significantly better off.
NIMBY is stopping data centers.
Maine set to become first state with data center ban: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/09/maine-data-center-ban.html
Also, it's a different kind of more insidious and visceral NIMBY rooted in racism and classism.
It's facetious to pretend NIMBYs are as such because they're racist and classist, rather than because they just want to protect the single most valuable and future-determining investment they'll make in their entire lives.
Those factors are tied together and aren’t easily separable. The racism and classism comes in because they believe that people of a different race or class will diminish the value of their investment.
If enough people believe this then it is true. That's just how markets work.
Not sure it's a bad thing. So, they would employ maybe 30 people after they're built. Consume a lot of power and water. I'd have to see the details of a specific proposal but I'd probably vote against personally.
Sure, it’s stopping some, but not most/all even with strong public opposition.
See: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/small-missouri-to...
Yes, see the famous essay, Nimby Good When My Neighborhood by I Hyppocrit.
The public rail industry has no bribing mechanism unlike the data center industry and the fossil fuel industry. Did I write bribe? Sorry, “campaign contribution.” But sometimes also literally bribes like Tony Soprano cash in the bag.
I believe America has built railway towns. I am surprised why America that’s very fond of capitalism never developed this concept further? With some aggressive horizontal integration you can built your own kingdom. It is brilliant!
I sometimes see the US referred to as a "post-rail" society, meaning that it has outgrown the need for rail for the more intimate, personal transportation methods we see today. I submit that, like other HN commenters say, the US doesn't need rail due to this society. How will US citizens help their friends move or do their large (in terms of volume) Costco grocery shopping without large trucks and only using rail?
I’m probably a top 5% train nerd for the U.S. I took trains to work primarily from 2012-2020, in NYC, Philly, Baltimore, and DC. I used to ride Amtrak from Baltimore to DC every morning. I love Tokyo’s train system. I go there every year and I always take the train. But when I went there with my wife and three kids, I took a lot of Ubers! You can’t fit our double stroller with big America bags of toys and snacks on a business hours subway in Tokyo.
Americans love choice and they love stuff. They fill their cars with their stuff drive around on their own schedule without having to watch a clock or think about what’s near a train line and what isn’t. (Even with Tokyo’s amazing railway network, you have to think about that!) My wife drives to three different grocery stores 20 miles apart to get exactly the products she wants. The idea of just accepting whatever brand of hamburger buns they have at the store that’s conveniently on the train line between our house and work is completely alien.
To live within a Japanese system, Americans would have to change a bunch of other things about their culture. We’d have to give our kids independence to take the train themselves, instead of spending every saturday driving them around to 3 different far flung activities. We’d have to learn to appreciate what’s conveniently available, instead of the exact thing we want.
And not even Tokyo’s amazing train network makes it convenient to juggle two working spouses and school drop off and pickup for three kids. What line is convenient to your house, both parents work, and all three kids’ schools? The Japanese don’t even try to solve that problem.
I lived for many years next to a train station in NJ. I could readily take the train in to Manhattan, but for the hours I'd be there in evenings and on weekends, it was much more convenient and faster to drive in. My town was far enough out that the cost was slightly cheaper to drive (before the congestion fee). I then had the freedom to leave at any time without concern for the schedule.
> My town was far enough out that the cost was slightly cheaper to drive (before the congestion fee)
Aside from culture, this is another aspect which they touch on in the article. Japan doesn't have public parking. You're only allowed to buy a car if you have access to a parking spot. Tokyo is full of lots but they're all paid lots that charge in 30-60 min increments. There's also a lot of congestion zones in Tokyo which make driving in the city very expensive. Companies that do deliveries in the city often have a company car (or fleet of such) which lets them drive to destinations.
Overnight workers who do spend significant times at work before/after the trains stop do drive in. Most Japanese families in Tokyo live in suburbs surrounding the city and will walk, bike, or drive to a nearest train station to commute in.
I'm fairly far out from Boston/Cambridge but I'm pretty much the same situation. Going in for a commute (or 9-5 event), the commuter rail is pretty good; I'm a 7 minute drive to the station. But it's basically unworkable for an evening event (or a day into evening event). Trains are maybe every 90 minutes outside of commuting hours and they're largely empty. I end up suffering the drive in, paying for parking as needed (which isn't an issue if I'm going in for my usual theater), and then a pretty easy drive home. Wouldn't even think about taking rail in for the weekend.
If Tokyo was in America, your situation would be like this: imagine going outside of your home and walk for 10 minutes to a small hamburger shop. It only has 10 seats and it’s run a by hamburger nerd who makes elite hamburgers. This guy grinds his own beef, bakes his own buns and pickles his own pickles and everything is perfect. The burgers are only 8 dollars and you can’t even imagine of making hamburgers yourself.
I know, I’m familiar with Tokyo. But my family would take up half the restaurant, only one of the three kids would like the burger, and the other two would throw a shit fit because the burger guy only sells burgers. Two different societies optimizing for different things.
Maybe you misinterpreted the post you replied to? I don't think they were saying this stuff is a crazy proposal, just that it will be a different way of life for most Americans. No need to be so abrasive.
They were reacting to what was presented and saying that it was foolish. It doesn’t matter if the author presented it as “I am saying this” or “Americans think this”.
You’re preaching to the choir. I loved working at a company with a company cafeteria because I hated going out into midtown manhattan every day to choose lunch. But convincing americans that all their “choice” is illusory isn’t a matter of transit policy, it’s something much harder.
Damn, we get it, USA is a dystopia. No need to keep scaring us with those stories.
The same way people in every other country do it (rental vans)
Rail <-> Road isn't an either or issue. It wasn't in 1850 and it isn't today. The only difference, at least in the US, is that poorly designed government intervention/policies forced low population densities.
Rail and other forms of public transport simply don't work with suburban sprawl. Large roadways also don't work - compare the state of US infrastructure against pretty much every other country out there - it's just that the financial bill from an unbelievable amount of deferred maintenance hasn't come due yet.
Apparently, it works just fine.
Trucks can be rented. When then-wife and I were remodelling the tired old house we lived in, we didn't own a truck. We talked about it (and in this instance, had space for one), and we mathed it a bit. The numbers quickly showed that it would be very expensive to own a truck, for only a little bit of added, occasional convenience.
When we needed a truck to move cabinets or drywall or whatever, we rented one for that. It didn't cost much.
When we moved houses, we rented a truck for that. It was easier and cheaper to move with one rented huge box truck, than to own something that would be useful for that.
Otherwise: Deliveries. We just had big stuff delivered. No problem. Things like appliances and TVs were simply delivered, and this never added any expense to the purchase.
These days, even Costco delivers stuff just fine. It does tend to cost more than in-store.
Rentals and deliveries can easily cost hundreds of dollars per year. It's not free; it might even be rationalized as being rather expensive.
But owning/insuring/maintaining/fuelling/parking a car (or a truck, just the same) can easily cost thousands. It's a different magnitude.
I ride my cargo bike to Costco. I can fit a full shopping cart on it, getting enough for a family of three regularly and easily. With a small hatchback car I could easily fit way more. If I had a convenient train I'd shop more frequently with a rolling 2 wheel cart.
It's really not difficult to shop large volume thongs without a giant car.
Rail for the US has always been more about moving goods than people. For overland long-haul freight it is significantly cheaper than trucking. Rail allows us to ship goods to places where we don’t have ports or river access. A place like Japan can make such good use of rail simply because it is so densely populated.
The US is also densely populated; when people are talking about high speed rail they are talking about connecting the major, close by metropolitan areas that most people live in.
The Midwest, as an example, has roughly the same size and population as France with a larger economy. In fact, if you overlay the French TGV network onto the Midwest with Chicago where Paris is, you get a pretty good approximation of where major Midwestern cities are located: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/NMr3J3gt8C
Even if it would serve the same population, I don’t think a system like this would have the same level of demand as France’s high speed rail.
Frankly, these don’t look like locations that that many people want to travel between.
Most travel happens between cities that are close together, and Chicago has always been the larger gateway to the rest of the nation and the world.
The French urban areas on the TGV aren’t very big; Montpelier, for example, has a total of 600,000 people in its metro area, which is roughly the same size as Toledo, OH or Wichita, KS.
Montpellier probably gets more tourism than Toledo though. And most people taking the train to Paris are probably not doing it so they can fly somewhere else.
You actually can book an Air France/TGV combo ticket: https://wwws.airfrance.fr/en/information/prepare/voyages-com...
And yeah, there would be a fair amount of demand just to Chicago the same way there is a fair amount of demand to Paris, in that they’re both the regional powerhouses with finance, HQs, etc.
Everything you’re saying is true but I don’t think any of it contradicts what I’m saying.
People in Japan also move and go shopping.
Who says anything about “only?” Japan is home to a thriving car industry.
If anything, right now America is tilted heavily to car-only.
This made it to the HN front page 4 days ago, under its (terrible) previous name "The secrets of the Shinkansen":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762060
And the top comment was mine, pointing out a bunch of factual mistakes and misleading claims:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47765032
You seem to be using vanilla (or one might say "area-weighted" population density numbers. The article specifically says that they are using population-weighted population density numbers for comparison:
> Population weighted density refers to the density multiplied by the actual number of people living in each area, and more closely reflects the density that people experience.
One indication of this is that they give a different value for London's population density (9.2k / km^2) than you do.
the "city merging" thing also happens in the US! particularly with school districts. this is why many gigantor middle/high schools exist; they serve HUGE coverage areas with many cities that are too small/rural to have their own school districts.
The bus from Cars 3 says “You about to feel the wrath of the Lower Belleville County Unified School District!” - and it works because almost all school districts people are familiar with in the USA have names similar to that, with the combinations and crossings of county and city.
The most core reason should be that they built a dense railway network embedded in cities very early on, and developed in a mutually dependent manner; just as the United States, after large-scale highway infrastructure and becoming a pioneer in civil aviation, was destined to become a nation on wheels. Just look at Tokyo: the total length of various lines exceeds 6,000 km, with seamless transfers between subways and mainline trains. The most fundamental reason lies in the topography. Japan is a long, narrow country, where two or three mainline railways are enough to connect the country's core regions. This significantly reduces the cost of the railway "network."
Japanese public transport is good, but no match for the Swiss system. Outside of big cities, the coverage is spotty, and even reasonably large towns are only connected by reserved-only trains every couple of hours that get booked out days in advance. The almost complete lack of digitization is also remarkable (reservations have to be made with machines in the stations). There are other annoyances such as the public transport in Tokyo shutting down completely at midnight. In contrast, the Swiss government-owned system delivers usable connectivity to almost any human settlement, even most mountain villages. The ticket prices are also not so different, which is surprising considering the large difference of salaries in the two countries.
It's worth mentioning that swiss is a nation of 9 million, whereas Japan has 128 million people. I'm not sure how comparable it is. You probably don't need to pass through a lot of settlements for any public projects in swiss, for example.
I think it's more politics and economics. Switzerland is quite a lot richer than Japan and is extremely decentralized politically. That creates strong incentives to provide good public services even to mountain villages. It also helps that Switzerland isn't experiencing population decline. The Swiss population as a whole is growing quite rapidly and from what limited data I could find even rural regions are growing. I think land acquisition doesn't really play a huge role. They are both mountainous countries where rail projects have to squeeze in valleys or bear the expense of tunnelling.
You can make reservations online: https://www.eki-net.com/en/jreast-train-reservation/Top/Inde...
But you still have to pick up the tickets at the machine. Additionally, my mobile phone internet is not recognized as "being in Japan", so I can't access the QR code needed for the ticket without wifi. You can work around it (save the QR code when you have wifi), but it all just seems so inefficient compared to all the countries where you can _book_ your tickets using a mobile app.
How could a route busy enough to completely fill a train every few hours not justify some kind of regularly scheduled service?
Most cities at least have night busses. Tokyo has 0 options after midnight.
It's generally regarded that Hong Kong has the best subway in the world. There are many reasons for this, but one cannot be overstated: Hong Kong's geography. A huge portion of the city consists of long thin urban corridors sandwiched between mountains and the sea. As a result, Hong Kong need concentrate its funding on only a few subway lines to support a huge portion of the population.
This good article aside, I wonder if the same thing is true about Japan when we're talking about long-distance trains. Compared to France or Germany, Japan is basically a stick. A very large chunk of the populace lies on a single train line running from Kagoshima up to Hakodate, running through Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Osaka, Kyoto, Yokohama, Tokyo, Sendai, etc. So you can slap a single bullet train line there and service all of them.
I think you're broadly correct and that's definitely a reason, and I have another example to support it.
Mumbai too has a very similar structure (the core city is basically a peninsula that goes north-south). Our railway lines run N-S as well, with (till the recent Metros) feeder roads connecting them.
Mumbai is also one of the most densely populated cities in the world (#2 by some metrics).
Our local railways have an annual ridership of 2.26 billion [1]. Pretty much everyone agrees they're vital to the city.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai_Suburban_Railway
Yes. You get a lot of bang for your buck as far as the number of people served. Hong Kong is less than half the area of Rhode Island, but the populations are 7.5 million for Hong Kong and 1.1 million for Rhode Island. Small area plus high population density is the situation where trains are most valuable.
The Hong Kong Metro is also very well planned, architected, and generally well run operationally. So much that the MTR corporation actually offers international consulting services. And for two decades, they have consulted with many mainland Chinese metro systems, hence it's no coincidence that the Shanghai and Shenzhen metros both look and feel very similar to HK's.
That is a good point but I think it doesn't apply everywhere.that has a similar shape. New Zealand has a similar shape but without railways interconnecting cities. You cannot cross the country, the islands, or even regions by train.
I think this could be a variable to contribute to a good coverage and infrastructure... but there are probably more factors involved.
The population density is probably one factor. New Zealand has 5.34 million people in 103,000 square miles. At the other extreme you have Hong Kong with 7.5 million people in 430 square miles. Each mile of track gives service to a much larger percentage of the population in Hong Kong than New Zealand. The same goes for a lot of the United States. The coastal corridors in the United States are population dense, but the interior less so.
Population density is one thing. Another issue is timing.
New Zealand was a really young country when railway technology came along, and didn't really have enough time or money to invest in a good railway network before other technology came along.
Airplanes are the perfect technology for NZ's geography, because they just fly over everything. There are actually a few places in NZ that received passenger airline service in the 30s before they received a railway connection (namely Gisborne), and many other places that never received railway connections.
At the same time, NZ was one of the fastest adopters of the automobiles, second only to America.
I think viable cars and airplanes had taken another 25 years to arrive, NZ might have had a much more complete railway network, with a much better chance of surviving intact into the modern era.
Didn't know about these historical facts, looks like timing really contributed to the current situation in New Zealand. When I was in Auckland some years ago, I remember NZ trying to bring some railway services back, before the pandemic.
I never got to travel on these, but I'm hoping to do that when I'm there again, probably next year. I see the website is still the same, so if anyone is going to NZ: https://www.greatjourneysnz.com/.
And to be fair, looks like you can more or less cross the country, as long as you don't plan to get all the way to Invercargill.
The railway services NZ are trying to bring back are regional commuter services. Auckland to Hamilton (now in operation); Auckland to Tauranga; Wellington to Palmerston North (Capital Connection, has been in operation for 35 years, about to be upgraded to battery-electric trains, since only half the route is electrified).
And also the vague idea of local rail service around Christchurch (interestingly, a private company bought the old DMUs from Auckland's local fleet after electrification and are just starting to run special trains for Rugby games).
Part of the problem is that there is only really only three metro areas in New Zealand. Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. Everything else isn't really large enough to provide enough demand for a proper intercity route. And Christchurch isn't even on the same island, so you can't have a proper intercity train with the ferry getting in the way.
So the only potentially viable intercity route is Auckland to Wellington.
And apart from Hamilton and Palmerston North, (which already have commuter trains) there is absolutely nothing in the middle. The same distance in Europe or the US's eastern corridor would service 4-6 decently sized metro areas, and provide plenty of extra demand.
There just isn't enough potential demand to put a high-speed rail line through there. And without the high-speed rail, it's a 10 hour train trip that has zero chance of competing with a 1 hour plane ride.
Christchurch to Wellington is even worse. 6 hour train ride, at least an hour waiting for the ferry, 3.5 hour ferry ride. The plane does it in at little as 25 min in the air, there isn't enough time to reach cruising altitude. There is a reason why the route used to be serviced by an overnight ferry.
> And to be fair, looks like you can more or less cross the country, as long as you don't plan to get all the way to Invercargill
Yeah... but those aren't "intercity trains". They are scenic tourist trains that just so happen to be running along old intercity routes. Not bad as a tourism experience, but overpriced and not optimised for transportation needs.
The fact that you can't book both the Interislander ferry and costal pacific on the same website is very telling. They are literally run by the same company.
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If you are serious about the Christchurch to Invercargill, there is now a private company offering the occasional weekend trip: https://www.mainlander.co.nz/train-trips/the-mainlander-rail...
Same company that's providing the Rugby special trains, but this is using the old Capital Connection rolling stock. The train usually runs day trips up to Arthur's pass for cruise ships, but when there is a gap in that schedule they are running these Christchurch to Dunedin and Christchurch to Invercargill excursions.
Even more touristy than great journeys.
That is definitely a factor, especially comparing Japan & HK with NZ.
Population density is not accidental. HK has towers and greenery vs Anglophone culture which is to build homes sprawled into the greenery.
The US urban sprawl in 50s, 60s was not cultural and not by accident but planed part of civil defense.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47815910
didn't NZ have a decent inter-city train service in the past but no longer does bc cars won out in the end?
Geography like that does help a lot, it’s part of the reason it’s so easy to do really good high-speed rail in Italy over somewhere like Germany that is way more spread out. But it’s only half the picture, you also need the political will to get it built!
The population density of Italy 201/km2 is lower then population density of Germany 241/km2, so from point of view of density, Germany should have more high-speed rail than Italy.
But because cars are major German export driver and car manufacuring is major employment in Germany, anything competing with cars has not much political support.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-merz-pledges-to-resist-2035-eu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschlandticket
Density is not that important. It's the distribution. Japan for example has most of the population concentrated close to coast.
Italy has a few major population centers south of dome but sparsely populated otherwise.
And so on...
The population density of Italy 201/km2 is lower then population density of Germany 241/km2, so from point of view of density, Germany should have more high-speed rail than Italy.
That would be if kilometers of rail tracks scaled linearly with population density per unit area. My guess (based on no research at all) is it’s more that there’s a population density tipping point, and after reaching it rail development dramatically increases. I do also think you’re right about the influence of the German car industry.
I'm sure geography helps, but it's certainly not the driver for good train service design. Cities in Japan are definitely not laid out in thin lines, and there's not just a few routes in any given city. I was living in Nagoya back in high school, and its train lines are sprawling.
Side note, there actually isn't one shinkansen from Kagoshima to Hakodate, that route would take you on 5 different shinkansen lines: Kyushu, Sanyo, Tokaido, Tohoku, and Hokkaido. But I get your point.
Even if the geography isn't thin it seems like there are major US cities you could draw a route through that would have similar population distributions. Or at least good enough for the economics to work.
That’s arguably irrelevant to anything except the Shinkansen.
Switzerland has 8m people. Bay Area has 8m people. Switzerland is 1/4th as densely populated as the Bay Area (4x the size) yet they have 10x better transportation
The Swiss public transport system is a century-plus old at this point. Compare pictures of the Zurich tram system in the early 20th century with today - squint your eyes and you won't notice any difference.
That said, I'm willing to bet that San Fransisco and the surrounding communities had comparable public transportation in the 19th and early 20th century. While I can't speak for the bay area, you can still find exposed tram tracks in many US cities - Philadelphia, for instance.
The US's move from having the best to arguably the worst public transportation system in the world among developed countries is a lesson in disastrous government policy.
California is also like this for the most part. Bay Area has 8 m, Los Angeles area has 17 m, and San Diego area has 3 m. 28 out of 39 live in those three. Straight line.
With relatively little between the Bay Area and LA to serve as a viable customer base. Hence, a lot of the problems getting California HSR going. Imagine you had the Boston area and the Washington DC area and took out NYC and Philadelphia in the middle. You'd have the same issue. The Acela isn't the fastest rail service (in part because NYC is in the middle but Boston to NYC and NYC to DC are a lot more practical than the whole route. I did it once when I wasn't in a hurry but it was because I could afford the time.
Isn't this Japanese Railway Thesis that with the railway you build something in that "very little between"? Have the railway company buy up up all that cheap land, develop it into commute hubs with their own walkable retail and use that to fund the railway.
This is a great article, but I think it’s hard to ignore that Japan’s culture of harmony is a big part of why they were able to choose sensible regulations that benefitted everyone. We struggle to pass even the most sensible land use reforms because entrenched interests want to remain entrenched even if it hurts the system overall.
So America's culture of individual liberty is why people don't have the freedom to build whatever they want on the land that they own?
America's culture of individual liberty moved into the national mythos in the last century, replaced by a culture of consumption and commerce over all. People don't have the freedom to build whatever they want because pockets need to be greased, permits need to be reviewed, HOAs need to have their fees, etc.
American's culture of me, me, me, now, now, now is why.
If it doesn't benefit the individual almost immediately they're strongly opposed.
They want the benefits of strong infrastructure but let someone else build it without inconveniencing ME or costing ME a dime.
It is a culture that teaches greed is good and society should be built around all gain no cost.
> They want the benefits of strong infrastructure but let someone else build it without inconveniencing ME or costing ME a dime.
Which is what the Japanese have. private railways
As an American, I always hear all these weird stories about New York and its subway system. All the random busker type nonsense, the petty crime and the “mugger wallet” type jokes. Not to mention the major crimes that make the news.
I’d rather not deal with it? Yes I know roads are dangerous. I’d still rather not deal with the expected culturally imposed insanity that the Japanese curiously seem to lack.
> All the random busker type nonsense, the petty crime and the “mugger wallet” type jokes.
Most of this is stories. Yeah there are buskers but tbh I like buskers. Music in the public square is a plus not a minus even if it's not my personal preference of music.
Subway crime rates are around 2-4 incidents per million rides. There was a spike during covid and it started to rapidly trend down afterwards. That corresponds with economic desperation during that period pretty cleanly.
But that 2-4 incidents per million rides is roughly comparable to the crime rates at gas stations, etc. The difference is that density is lower so you just see it less often. It happens just about as frequently but you are less likely to witness it because you are less likely to be present when it happens to somebody else at a gas station.
> I’d still rather not deal with the expected culturally imposed insanity that the Japanese curiously seem to lack.
Trust me Japan has just as much of an issue with crime on rail. Arguably they have higher rates but the Japanese police often just don't consider sexual harassment or sexual assault a serious crime and would rather brush it under the rug or otherwise deal with it outside the criminal system to avoid harming the abuser. (ex: an incident that I'm familiar with: "oh we gave the guy who assaulted you on the train your address so they could mail you a hand written apology note instead of charging them with assault")
And the "wacky in your face" crime (intoxicated, mental illness, etc) is still very much an issue in Japan but it's cracked down on by police in places that tourists frequently visit during the day and otherwise everyone just expects it so people who live there don't really mention it to tourists.
I mean hell look at Shibuya Meltdown for some of the more mild "funny" examples.
The only real difference between the NYC metro and the Japanese metro is that it's louder because there's not a social norm to limit talking on the train (until people are drunk ofc). Otherwise it's all the same shit and you see it all when you start commuting.
> I always hear all these weird stories
The weird stories, about anything, are nonsense; sensationalized to either be emotoinally compelling or even active disinformation to serve some political end (especially about American cities, especially about NYC.)
It's just induced fear. Just go to NY and ride the subway. Millions do all the time without any problems, without a second thought. It's really no problem and amazingly convenient. (Busking is people playing music.)
Of course some crime occurs among millions of people but so do lottery grand prizes and heart attacks. I've been on many subway rides without experiencing one crime or even seeing one, and much other public transit.
And when you do, you'll know what to think of the stories and people who tell them.
It's extremely common for there to be human shit in the train cars, and lunatics going nuts. It's absolutely nothing like Japan.
> It's extremely common for there to be human shit in the train cars, and lunatics going nuts
Where does that come from? Not from your experience. You've never been on NY subways, clearly.
I've never seen feces - and anyway, how could you tell if it's from a dog? Did you examine it? Take it home and test it? It's one of the stories that maybe is slightly plausible, and which yields such strong disgust that rationality is overwhelmed and it makes a sensation - perfectly constructed misinformation or urban myth. Like waking up in a bathtub with a kidney missing.
'Lunatics' is such a loaded (and hateful) word you'll have to specify what you mean, but the occasional person talking to themself is harmless and completely uninterested in you (thus the conversation with themself) - I have never had any problem with such people on public transit or elsewhere. They are the most vulnerable people and compassion is the appropriate response.
As I wrote above, the stories are nonsense and it's induced fear.
I actually am speaking from experience, I saw both of those things my first week in New York. It's really not uncommon, I find it hard to believe that you've never run into shit/barf, usually when a car pulls up that has nobody in it, that's what's in there.
And this is all to say nothing about the decrepit state of the stations and cars themselves.
I've also been to Japan and experienced their trains. It's in such a different league that it's almost comedy.
> It's really not uncommon, I find it hard to believe that you've never run into shit/barf, usually when a car pulls up that has nobody in it, that's what's in there.
NGL this isn't surprising on Japanese trains either. Especially around last train. It's not super common but you see it from time to time and you just use a different car and report it to the staff next time you see someone.
Yes, that’s exactly right. Maximal ‘individual liberty’ is my right to maximize my land’s value. My neighbors either agree to maximize theirs in a way that increases, or doesn’t hinder, mine, or they are my enemy to be litigated to death by my lawyers for damages.
It's also hard to ignore that Japan was bombed to smithereens in the 1940s and undertook a nationwide rebuilding effort that might have contributed to a more uniform approach to land use.
> because entrenched interests want to remain entrenched even if it hurts the system overall.
You might say it's because we live in a "low trust society," but not for the reasons the people who usually invoke that term claim.
What are the reasons people usually invoke? And what are the "true reasons"?
Most people using the term "low trust society" are implying that certain subsets of the population are the cause of it, often with racial (non-white) and/or economic (lower class) components, whereas somebody like me views those groups and their behaviors, to the extent that it's true, as a symptom of the low trust society rather than the root cause. For me, the root cause is systemic corruption all the way to the top, for decade after decade.
And they are obviously correct as the per capita statistics prove out over and over and over and over and over again.
> Japan’s culture of harmony is a big part of why they were able to choose sensible regulations that benefitted everyone.
Is there evidence of that? It sounds like a broad stereotype of a complex, large country by an ignorant outsider.
> entrenched interests want to remain entrenched even if it hurts the system overall
Another way to look at that is prioritzing the individual over the system, a hallmark of liberty and human rights.
the railways are excellent, but it's funny. I was just in Kyoto and saw flyers seemingly at every single temple opposing the Hokuriku Shinkansen extension. apparently this type of opposition has always existed (I looked at the history of trains in Japan and originally most Japanese did NOT want it at all because they thought it looked really ugly), like nimbys in USA, but such decisions are apparently federalized according to some Japanese nationals I spoke to, so the nimbys have no power.
USA should do the same (well, the current federal government is volatile to say, the least, but in general I think it'd be improvement).
They still have influence in Japan. The maglev train has been delayed for years because a small portion passes through Shizuoka, and the local government wouldn't approve construction due to it making no stops in the prefecture and potentially affecting water supplies there.
This delayed the opening of it from 2027 to 2035 at the earliest.
Shizuoka as a whole is unusually screwed by the Shinkansen system. Large cities like Hamamatsu, with 800k people, are passed over by a lot of the Hikari (mid-speed Shinkansen), and the Nozomi (high speed Shinkansen) passes through the prefecture with zero stops whatsoever. However, it stops it cities like Tokuyama, with a whopping population of 100k.
It's a bit ridiculous to imply Tokuyama gets better shinkansen service than Hamamatsu, because it has Nozomi service.
Looking at the schedule towards Tokyo for Monday, April 27th: Tokuyama has: 4 16 car Nozomi trains to Tokyo 19 8 car Kodoma/Sakura trains to Shin-Osaka 9 8 car Kodoma/Sakura to Okayama
Hamamatsu has: 31 16 car Kodoma to Tokyo 19 16 car Hikari to Tokyo
Keep in mind the fastest Kodoma seems to only take around 1 hr 40 mins to Tokyo, and the fastest Hikaru is only 1 hr 20 mins.
I'm sure it's nice getting a 1 seat ride to Tokyo from Tokuyama if you can get on one of the 4 Nozomis, and unfortunate you can't get a one seat ride past Shin-Osaka from Hanamatsu, but the service levels seem pretty proportionate to me.
Looking only at connections to Tokyo is a bit reductionist (difficult to believe, but yes, there are cities outside of Tokyo that people go to!). As a mere matter of geography, there are unavoidably fewer trains to Tokyo (it's on the opposite side of the island). Using that same methodology, it would be good to see how many trains from Hamamatsu have a direct connection to the biggest metropolis near Tokuyama: Fukuoka. That way we can measure which city is the best for getting to the opposite side.
The total number of trains with a direct connection from Hamamatsu to Fukuoka is, at least based on all the info I can find, zero.
Or even a much closer city that people in Hamamatsu would frequently go to: Hiroshima. Also zero direct connections without a transfer.
People in Tokuyama can go direct to Fukuoka and Tokyo. They can do a transfer at Osaka in the case of non-direct trains. They're very much better set up than Hamamatsu.
is this because of the federal government capitulating or is it because the small group inherently has influence structurally?
The federal government has no influence. Prefectures approve their own construction. Japan's railways are built and operated by corporations, not the government, so the federal government has zero say in the matter.
ah interesting. I wonder why that person mentioned the federal government then. couldn't a single person just refuse to sell their land and block the entire thing then?
Funny how people always endlessly worry about water supply, its one of those things that is very easy to claim but very hard to prove an in 99.9% of times there really isn't an issue.
People can live without a high speed train. They cannot live without a clean water supply
Seems to me that the priorities are correct
Ok but here is the thing, Japan had great civil engineering for 100 years, they have made lots and lots and lots of tunnels. Japan overall has fantastic water quality and is globally known for clean and safe bathrooms.
So the argument that 'new train X will destroy the water supply' really needs to be based on a whole stack of good evidence.
Japan has some of the most horrific pollution disasters of the 20th century and had tremendously polluted water. The clean Japan thing is only true because Japan got very serious about safety after companies were ignoring issues and polluting water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Big_Pollution_Diseases_of...
And I don't even get the clean bathrooms connection. Sounds like a random TikTok meme with zero relevance. Half the bathrooms don't even have soap.
> And I don't even get the clean bathrooms connection
It's simple. If it is Japan, someone will glaze it.
The burden of proof should be on not contaminating the water supply. That is too dangerous to risk.
> Japan had great civil engineering for 100 years, they have made lots and lots and lots of tunnels. Japan overall has fantastic water quality ...
Does it? And if so, maybe that's because they make sure projects like this one don't contaminate the water supply.
> ... globally known for clean and safe bathrooms
What does this have to do with water supply? One suspects that you know very little if that's the best evidence you have.
Maybe if the only person that thinks that the water supply is being destroyed is a local politician with a massive axe to grind who is trying to extort a local stop, then maybe we should question that over the engineers who have built tunnels their whole lives.
This is specially true when these tunnel goes along many different areas and seemingly the only that complains and believes is unsafe is also the one that is trying to get a transit station in the district.
I'm sure they have plenty of evidence on why it is safe, like historical examples and such. But how do you 'prove' this to a point a politician can't just say, sure its 99.9999% safe but we can't risk it.
> What does this have to do with water supply? One suspects that you know very little if that's the best evidence you have.
The point is that Japan tends to take safety and cleanness very seriously. And they have built many train-lines and tunnels.
At one point to you personally consider the source of a claim?
At one point to you personally consider the source of a claim?
You like to throw around assertions like "99.9% of times there really isn't an issue" with absolutely zero proof, but have a big problem with someone saying "I don't agree". I don't think you understand what sources, claims and truth actually mean.
Hard to imagine how a train that has no emissions itself as its catenary powered causes your water supply to be unclean.
pretty sure it's the tunneling not the train itself
Trains bring people who drink water.
If the train doesn't make stops in your prefecture, it sure doesn't bring people.
Objections to large projects exist everywhere all over the world.
The reason the US has such an issue with this is because of state autonomy (and corruption). Most other places in the world don’t allow subregions of the country to do whatever they want and make up laws etc
The US interstate system is incredible extensive, uniform, and well-maintained (relatively speaking). States love federal dollars, and if there were federal dollars for train lines, they'd fall over themselves to get them. That doesn't seem to happen for a lot of reasons. It seems like there are a lot of corruption problems that seem to eat up train projects, but for some reason the interstate system, though replete with plenty of boondoggles, is an unstoppable road-spreading machine.
The interstate system only succeeded because the federal government took the very rare step of steamrolling all the states and individual landowners. It was done in service of putting people to work and stimulating the economy. But it was not a well-liked project.
Today, it is well-regarded, but when it was being done? No way.
My impression is it's more to do with being able to sue for everything under the sun and block things almost indefinitely under different forms of review, usually environmental.
Switzerland is even more regional than the US. Yet they seem to have built an excellent rail system.
We need to stop pretending it isn't corruption and conflict of interest
I am a big infrastructure nerd but I believe they are right, it does change the way idyllic landscapes and towns can look.
But I'm not sure it's a valid reason to block such practical projects. It's the same for cities with building height restrictions (or really very many types of restrictions). It will make an old city look a bit less romantic for sure, but also people have to live and work here. Cities aren't for looking at.
I’m not American, so only have an outsider perspective, but I’m not convinced that’s possible in the US to do the same, because the country has a completely different perspective on individual rights. Land ownership seems to be seen as something sacred that cannot be infringed in any way, meaning a small group of people who own some parts of the land can block any development that would benefit the public at large
This is mostly true until it's time to build an interstate.
Good luck building a bunch of new interstates today. Opposition was already coming in at the end of the interstate system buildout. Drill down and you'll find various odd connections (or lack thereof) throughout the system that resulted from community opposition.
a small group of people who own some parts of the land can block any development
Almost all NIMBY opposition to development comes from people who do not own the land in question.
land rights aren't exactly a constitutional right, but the 5th amendment makes it hard to take it, so in practice would probably require a constitutional amendment.
The 5th amendment isn't exactly recent. But a lot of factors make it harder--for better or worse--to exercise eminent domain today than in the past. You could probably never reasonably build the equivalent of the interstate highway system today. (Though even at the time, there were compromises made because of strong community pushback in some cases and there was less developed space than today as well.)
You’d think so, but in fact it’s almost the opposite! You can own your land all you want but your neighbor has a final say on what’s allowed on your land.
The US is the country that originated Georgism.
Eminent domain is designed for this. People are compelled to sell.
And you'd better be prepared to fight for it through the courts. Might take a decade or more if someone is really opposed to selling.
There's a 'build the Japanese train system' board game "1889" -- https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/23540/shikoku-1889 -- https://www.amazon.com/Shikoku-1889-Railways-Players-Minute/...
Japan isn’t a federal government, so the decision can happen at the national level because prefectural and local governments zoning ability came from the national government.
I don’t think the federal government could de facto change this, though in practice they have levers available.
It can’t work in the US, because it’s not a society that works together for the collective good, or to raise everyone’s quality of life.
It’s a bunch of individuals in a dog eat dog situation who happen to live nearby.
I was just thinking about this, this morning.
In the US, we have had a pretty wide-open nation, for much of our history. Population density was low, and many folks were forced to be extremely self-sufficient.
This has resulted in a fiercely independent national zeitgeist.
Asian nations, on the other hand, have been very crowded, for a very long time.
This has resulted in a much more interdependent mindset.
Each has its advantages and disadvantages. There's really no nation on Earth that is as good at "ganging up" on a problem, as Japan. Korea and China are catching up quick, though. The US is very good at manufacturing footguns. We don't tend to play well with others.
It really is hard for exceptional people to make their way, in Japanese society, though. They have a saying "The nail that sticks up, gets hammered down."
Grain culture vs rice culture.
Rice cultivation requires collective water management, so you get more collectivist cultures. Growing grain mostly depends on rain, so your harvest depends on your own work.
That's an interesting theory. Makes just as much sense as mine.
It’s really hard to be empirical, in these types of things.
>In the US, we have had a pretty wide-open nation, for much of our history. Population density was low, and many folks were forced to be extremely self-sufficient. This has resulted in a fiercely independent national zeitgeist.
Australia is much less dense and more remote that the US (I drove 1,050 miles in Australia through the desert without seeing a vehicle or person, in the US you can’t get more than 100 miles from McDonald’s) but Australian’s work together and don’t have this “ fiercely independent “ nonsense that keeps everyone at each others throats.
I have no strong opinion on the original thesis but your fact doesn't make the point you think it does; you're right that no one lives in most of Australia, nearly everyone is concentrated together on the coast. Australia is a bit more urban than the USA overall from a population perspective, despite being vastly less dense overall due to the areas that no one lives in. So there would be fewer people to carry the cultural individualism.
https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/1nbrov9/australi...
About 9 out of 10 Americans live in cities (incl burbs) and the same holds for Australians. Sure, there's fewer notable population centers in Australia (Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane and you got nearly everyone), but there's also just 10x fewer people than in the US so that kind of matches too. I think the picture you link to distorts this, it does not account for the fact that there's simply way fewer Australians.
I'm not convinced that if there were 300m Australians, that they'd still all live in those 5 cities (with every city being 10x bigger). I think there'd be more of them.
That's a rather expansive view of cities based on what the US Census categorizes as urban vs. rural. Between myself and a couple neighbors, we're on close to 100 acres, but that's urban according to the census because we're not that far from a major city and fairly close to some smaller ones.
> I'm not convinced that if there were 300m Australians, that they'd still all live in those 5 cities (with every city being 10x bigger). I think there'd be more of them.
I don't think so either, but because of the climate and geography, I also don't think there'd be 10x more cities, similar populations, I think you might end up with 2-3x more, really, at most.
Fair. It'd turn into a Japan and a half (big one on the right, small one the left)
I don’t know.
Most Aussies I’ve known are quite independent.
I really like them; maybe because we share so many traits.
Also, the US was where the British sent their convicts, until we had a big prison riot.
Yes, but Aussies work together for the collective good of society. High taxes. Universal Healthcare. Higher education, etc etc.
Aussies are friendly and kind, not locked in a dog eat dog world.
The USA was founded in rebellion against high taxes and heavy-handed central government. That is still an essential component of our philosophy.
Agree. Which is why I
, at the top of this comment chain, that it can’t work in the US because people don’t work together.
Australia also has many issues the US had. Car dependence. They also don't have high speed rail despite their cities being near perfect for it.
Also in Australia the waste majority of the population arrived much later and most were always attached to coastal cities. These cities were dominated by British aristocrat early on and later the British labor movement and reflects the culture of London. Australia politically was a part of Britain in many ways for 100s of years after the US had gone its own way.
The same is true to a lesser degree for the North East Coast in the US, arguably it works more like Britain/Australia but the South and everything West is quite different.
Australia has higher taxes, universal healthcare, higher education, etc etc.
Aussies work together, not against each other
I think this is not a smart read of the situation. The US has built a tremendous amount of rail and other transit (eg NYC subway) back when it was an even more individualistic society than today.
In fact they country was clearly able to come together for the public good many times throughout their history.
You could consider other causes.
Francis Fukuyama is now arguing that the US in now a substantiantively lower trust society than it was in 1995 when he published his second book "Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity."
>In it I argued that trust is among the most precious of social qualities, because it is the basis for human cooperation. In the economy, trust is like a lubricant that facilitates the workings of firms, transactions, and markets. In politics it is the basis for what is called “social capital”—the ability of citizens to cohere in groups and organizations to seek common ends and participate actively in democratic politics.
>Societies differ greatly in overall levels of trust. In the 1990s, Harvard’s Robert Putnam wrote a classic study of Italy which contrasted the country’s high-trust north with its distrustful south. Northern Italy was full of civic associations, sports clubs, newspapers, and other organizations that gave texture to public life. The south, by contrast, was characterized by what an earlier social scientist, Edward Banfield, labeled “amoral familism”: a society in which you trust primarily members of your immediate family and have a wary attitude towards outsiders who are, for the most part, out to get you.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-world-simply-does-not...
I didn't realize the link but I agree with the decline in trust.
One obvious axis is that in 1995 (I came to the US right around then) the country had a high church attendance rate, racial homogeneity, % of people who are parents, and % of people who were born here.
In the 30 years that passed all of these numbers had become significantly lower and obviously each factor on its own contributed to a decline in societal trust.
Most all of that old rail was done by private companies seeking to make a profit. Just like Japan. Look at nyc subway building rates after it was publicly owned. Almost zero expansion. Contractions even.
I agree w that and disagree what the person's I replied to dumb premise.
Same in The Netherlands. There are companies that buy plots of lands near existing rail just to massively screw over the government if they ever want to expend rail. Double digit million euro deals over small patches of land.
I love the Japanese rail system. I am retired, now, so don't travel there, anymore, but I always used to cry, after coming back to the US, and getting on LIRR trains.
The most amazing thing, is how on-time they are, and how precise their stops are. They have marks on the platform, showing exactly where the doors will open (Protip: Don't stand directly in front of the doors, when they open). I hear that this is the result of human drivers; not robots. Apparently, engineer training in Japan is pretty intense.
The Densha de Go game series lets you experience a bit of what it’s like to drive a Japanese train.
There’s also Hmmsim 2 on iOS, which may be easier to get/run.
As a European I can only dream of having such a rail system.
When I have to buy six individual tickets for triple digit prices to get somewhere and the train ends up slower than going by car I wonder why I would even try.
Alright whippersnappers, let's chat about the history of railroads in the US.
In the early 20th century, US rail companies were beholding a very favorable situation: high demand to run loads of heavy freight all over the country, high demand to ferry passengers all over the country, and basically no serious competitors to either revenue source.
Now freight revenue was never going to be transformative to the industry, but it had the benefits of being reliable, un-fussy, and fairly easy to build a financial business around. Passengers, on the other hand, offered huge revenue potential, but had the downsides of being very fussy about things like safety and comfort and timeliness, along with wanting stations in convenient places and an ever-expanding rail network.
Students of US business management history should be unsurprised, then, that while evaluating the market that offered reliable revenue, versus the market that wanted large capital investments, the railroads overwhelmingly chose the freight market. In other words, US the railroad companies spoke and said we do not want passengers loudly and clearly.
The thinking was: passengers can do take the wagons and busses and cars and these newfangled airplane thingies, but freight is a guaranteed market for us! So the passengers slowly migrated to other form of transportation. But the kicker was, freight also wanted things like timeliness and access to an expanding transport network and, shockingly for the railroad execs, were willing to pay for it.
Add about 80 years, declining rail traffic, and tons of corporate mergers, and we have the sad state of US railways today: many residents have never seen a railway expansion or shiny new rail equipment, much less a real functioning passenger train. It's easy and comfortable to say that zoning or regulations or market forces allowed US rail to languish, but that would be ignoring the part where the industry did not want the customers in the first place.
Japan also has amazing car infrastructure too! Last time I was there visiting family in the mountains, I was quite impressed by the number and quality of tunnels and spiral ramps. The highways are similarly privatized, with tolls like train fares reducing the need for government subsidies.
I live in Tokyo. The rail network here is so dense that even locals like me still get confused figuring out transfers sometimes.
One thing I don't see discussed enough: the cost of car ownership in Tokyo is a huge factor. Monthly parking alone can cost as much as renting a studio apartment. In central Tokyo, parking for a single day can run close to $200.
When your country is this small and land is this expensive, trains just make more sense for most people. I think the rail network developed as much out of necessity as anything else.
This makes sense, because parking a car does take a similar amount of space as a studio apartment.
The article is great and very informative. But I feel there's a general vibe of "privatizations are great". For example, they do mention that privatizations didn't work in Argentina (they were a total mess and the total railway went from something like 50k kilometers to two thirds of that - if) but they don't mention enough of it - or other cases - to understand which regulations and why worked the way they did. It feels too much like it's all about integrating corporations, and that's it.
S.Y. Lee wrote an excellent series on the privatization of Japan National Railways (JNR). This is part 4 of 4: https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-japans-...
If I remember correctly, the privatization of JNR was mostly political, and has little relation to the subsequent successes or failures of the railways. In other words, keeping it public would not necessarily have changed the outcome for passengers.
I'm not surprised that the article has that vibe and that you noticed it. Works in Progress, the magazine that published the article, is notorious for having a preference for market-oriented solutions, "laissez faire" policies and neoliberalism. They are open about it. Nothing wrong with that, of course.
This article is dishonest about the level of privatization in the JR's.
Yes, they're private companies, and they do diversification like investing in real estate around their rail cooridors to grow towns and grab people looking to do some shopping in their adjacent department store as passengers are walking through the stations. This is transit-oriented development at its best. (Also, ask google why land property lines in the US western states often look like big checkerboards)
But there's no mention of the Japan Railway Construction, Transport and Technology Agency (JRTT). That's the government entity that builds many new Shinkansen lines. It then leases them to the JR companies at a fixed rate for 30 years. This keeps massive construction costs off the private companies' balance sheets.
Or when they do need large capital spends, there's no mention of the Fiscal Investment and Loan Program (FILP) which provides loans in the form of low-interest credit backed by government guarantees. Their creditors are effectively lending to the Japaneese government, not the JR company.
Is that kind of system really privatized? It's hybridized at best, and it shows that you really need government support of some sort to push country-scale infrastructure like this forward. Sorry free-market absolutists.
It is not at all dishonest to talk about their privatization.
It’s dishonest to hand wave it away while pretending that because there are government controls for construction and financing that it would go even better if it was more government or “more hybridized”. With no source, just opinion.
No one that has ever had to switch blue to red to green in toyko just cash, buying a new ticket at each stop only to go a couple miles, has ever forgotten how privatized Japans railways are.
I expected to see comments about how good it is, how most people love it, how it’s highly privatized, and of course about how to make it better with more government.
You misunderstand me... I'm not saying the privatization is a bad thing, handwaving it away, or saying lets throw government at it. I'm merely pointing out that in a 4,000 word essay trying to explain all the factors that let Japan have such a good railway system, there's a huge amount of emphasis on the privatization part, and zero mention of all the public sector subsidies that enable the entire system.
It's fine to talk about the efficiency of the private operators. No problem there. The dishonesty is in omitting any discussion of how the tracks that the whole system depends are built with heavy government support. Without that, one could be forgiven for reading that article and thinking "oh, just privatize it and you'll be as successful as Japan."
I think the take-away here should be more along the lines of what a working public-private partnership can look like and what roles each can play. I'd love to see a 4,000-word article that compares this model to the regional transit authority models we have in the US.
Did you miss this paragraph? They do talk about the subsidies from the national and prefectural governments.
> Carefully designed public subsidies also play a useful role. Although Japanese railways do not receive subsidies for day-to-day operations, they do receive government loans and grants for capital investments. These are typically tied to public priorities, such as disability access or earthquake-proofing, or to projects that have large spillovers that the railway company would be unable to internalize, like removing level crossings, or elevating at-grade railways or trams in order to reduce road congestion and accident risk. Generally, the local prefectural government will match the contribution of the national government. Larger new build projects are subject to lease back or debt-payment conditions that fare revenue is expected to pay back.
Unless this was added after the fact, I think this is mostly an issue of careful reading. To me, the article absolutely says that it's a hybridized system like you mention.
In the West some private equity company would be buying these up, selling off the land and separate businesses, and screwing the rail passengers for all they can, until the whole thing sinks in a sea of debt. Then repeating the formula.
Japan railways are mostly (all?) privately owned.
Yes.
From the article:
"Today, the most striking institutional feature of Japanese rail is that it is privately owned by a throng of competing companies." ...
"Core rail operations are profitable for every Japanese private railway company, but they usually only account for a plurality or a small majority of revenue. The rest is contributed by their portfolio of side businesses."
It's like a textbook good application of capitalism that unsurprisingly the US can't seem to get right.
JR was only privatized in 1987 after the previous state owned railway company borrowed too much to fund its infrastructure projects like high speed rails.
But by companies that care about running railways, not by vultures that want to rip the companies apart and load them up with debt for their own short-term profits.
So western MBAs are the problem. I’ve long held this view.
The japanese railroads are owned by private companies.
Yes. How would private equity buy them unless they were private companies already?
By privatizing them. Look at European rail in the past 50 years.
The point is that Japan has a well-established private-equity industry [1] so the fact that PE firms haven't ruined Japanese railways suggests that PE firms aren't universal corrosive solvents like you seem to want us to believe they are.
[1] https://flippa.com/blog/pe-funds/japan-private-equity-firms/
Or it could be there are Japanese laws or customs preventing them from doing it. The article mentions maximum fare prices for example. Japanese antitrust law is strong and thoroughly enforced.
Most likely more long term thinking in culture. Where as in West every single person just think of ways to profit in absolute shortest possible ways. Even if that were to kill untold trillions of human beings. After all what does a few hundred million dead matter if you can make extra cent from your company.
Your first sentence might in fact be true, but you've presented no evidence or argument that it is, so all you've done so far is make a cheap dig at America's private-equity industry with nothing to back it up.
I fail to see how the topic of this comment thread (namely "why Japan has such good railways") sheds any light on the US PE industry or vice versa. Maybe you can explain the link. (If you can't then your cheap dig is also off-topic.)
(And I fail to see how antitrust law in particular might constrain a PE firm in any way.)
I thought the rails were owned by the government, leased to the companies?
Some of them are, like the Shinkansen lines. Others are both owned and operated by private companies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dkaid%C5%8D_Main_Line.
Additionally, the stations are generally owned by private companies—including the the development rights at the station. This means that the Japanese private rail companies capture a portion of the value created by the rail service, which otherwise would be an externality. So the companies have an incentive, as landowners, for rail ridership to stay high.
Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677481
Japan's railways are amazing. They are amazing because the workers have low wages, so the companies can afford to over-employ, so they have workers that are doing things like wiping the handrails every hour, and ensuring that the bathrooms are meticulous. The trains are very clean and very safe, which encourages use more to the point where everyone uses them and alternatives are starved for money.
Workers can afford to live off low wages because the cost of goods is low. A meal in Japan, a very, very good and delicious meal of pork curry is about $8 USD. That's it.
In the US it's the opposite. Wages are high. Cost of food and rent is very high. That means that they have to charge high prices. But then it's so high people look for alternatives and then traffic drops. Then they cut jobs so it's dirty, unkept and dangerous. It's a vicious cycle.
This tweet finds that US systems like BART and MTA have more employees, when adjusted by number of riders or miles of track, than JR East, which seems to contradict your comment.
https://xcancel.com/shinobu_books/status/2043991756291879024
Been trying to implement the Japanese point-and-call systems they use for railway safety in LLm work with some success. Think it should theoretically be a good verbose way
I’d think Japan being a long, skinny, population dense country has to help. There’s just more potential in every km of rail laid.
Is that not similar to both the west and east coasts of the US?
WRT the west coast, mostly. It's about as long as Japan, but only about half the population. It's certainly populated enough that it's not justifiable that rail travel is so slow.
Less so for the east coast though. From roughly DC to Boston is decently connected with rail, but is not nearly as direct of a corridor as Japan.
Cars were already popular in the US and good enough of a solution in conjunction with the highway system, maybe. If basic transportation is solved, it probably reduces the impetus to build passenger rail for rail's sake.
The east coast ("Amtrak") rail blows. Expensive, and slow.
Really? Take it all the time going to NYC even though it's not really very convenient for me to get to a northern station. Amtrak is priced to make it a good idea to book tickets in advance. Shinkansen isn't cheap either, especially if you don't have a pass--not sure of current details.
It's true to some degree now. But it wasn't very true -- or expected to be true -- back when train lines were being established. That was during westward expansion.
The Northeast Corridor in the USA has great rail service. Its the best way to travel between DC and NYC.
I'm very aware! I live in NYC and have taken many trains up/down the corridor. But it still pales in comparison to the experience I get in Japan (which is cheaper, nicer, faster, more frequent, often more direct, connects up better to local transit within cities, etc.)
> This liberal zoning system is reinforced by private access to city planning powers. Thirty percent of Japan’s urban land has been subject to land readjustment, where agreement among two thirds of residents and landowners in an area is enough to allow its replanning, including compulsorily taking and demolishing land for amenities and infrastructure.
I think this is the key paragraph because (like it or not) a lot of Americans would be philosophically opposed to this sort of process (the Kelo decision on eminent domain notwithstanding.)
Americans are very comfortable with eminent domain, as long as it is applied to brown people.
I’m glad the article confronts the “culture versus policy” argument. But I think it overlooks the degree to which policy reflects culture. Japanese rail policy reflects a combination of Big Government regulation and privatization that has no significant constituency in the U.S.
In the U.S., the folks who like public transit would never go for having rail stations be owned by conglomerates that get nearly half their profit from retail and real estate activities adjacent to the stations: https://www.patiencerealty.com/post/the-story-of-how-privati.... It makes perfect economic sense. Transit creates a positive value for the land around each station. Having the rail operators own the station gives them a stake in the value created and incentivizes them to prioritize good rail service that brings people to the hotels and retail the companies own near the stations. But Americans are ideological, not pragmatic, and an idea like that is DOA here.
Japan's geography also a biggest factor in using trains over roads. Next comes population density. Resource constraints make them use rails over roads for efficiency. We cannot compare US & Japan.
The good thing that happened seems to be that China has essentially 10xed the Japan railways template. I wonder how bad a car centric China would've had been.
In urban areas China is just as car centric. A lot of cities look like Robert Moses wet dreams[1]. Beijing and Shanghai have so many expressways, ring roads and arterial streets they look like they were built by Americans. The rail network in the country to get from city to city is great but the urban planning is taken out of Metropolis
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing%E2%80%93Tongzhou_Expre...
Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong are simply in a class of their own. imo, Shanghai and Guangzhou have decent systems.
Compare China's urban areas to Asia's other major developing nations: Jakarta, Bangkok, Manila. China can do much better, but there's also much, much worse urban planning out there.
A decentralized alternative would be making proportional ownership of railway stock, relative to distance from a rail station, a condition of business permits.
Suddenly all the businesses will be very pro-rail, as they benefit both directly and indirectly from its competent management, capacity growth and reach, even far from their own business. Especially far from their business.
Not claiming to know this works, but there are often many ways to solve a problem once the problem is well characterized. This insight that rail creates a great deal of indirect value is really helpful.
Indirect value is a battery. Voltage. Ready to power economic growth along whatever path the created-value to investment-return circuit gets closed.
I have a hard time believing China doesn't make the list with how much rail they have.
Every mode of transportation has a sweet spot in terms of range
If you can drive somewhere in an hour - you would never take a commercial plane, etc etc
Trains peak around the 2-5 hour driving range. Which is perfect for Japan’s geographies
So the reason trains are good in Japan is that they’re best suited for the distances present in Japan
one thing worth pointing out is that the legacy private railways work because they were never nationalized and had decades to quietly buy up land around stations before it was worth anything. That's really hard to replicate from scratch. This model is great in dense cities but even Japan is still struggling with rural lines
Exactly this. And the European case is the opposite starting point. Paris already had 2+ million people when the Metro opened in 1900. You're not building rail to create land value, you're building it because the existing density already demands it. Which is why European systems basically all require public subsidy while the Japanese private lines could turn a profit. The preconditions are just so different that copying either model somewhere else rarely works. IME the people pushing "just do what Tokyo does" tend to skip over this part.
Exactly. Tokyu's model of building a train line from the city center to rural areas and then building suburban developments in the rural areas the line traverses doesn't work in already built-up areas. Hence, there are still publicly-owned lines in areas where that model doesn't work. A great example is the Yokohama Municipal Subway. It is publicly owned and serves areas that were generally already built before the subway line was built.
I am skeptical of these "learn the secret of how other culture does X" because it almost always reflects the concerns of the person writing the article rather than shedding light on how a nation does X well. That's because we view the world through the prism of our own concerns, but when we encounter a society that is substantially different from ours -- such as any East Asian society -- then they will have a broad basket of different concerns.
Imagine, for example, that you stumble upon an island of amazing acrobats, they can do fantastic feats. And they are also cannibals. Now the temptation is just too great to say "cannibalism aids in acrobatic skills. Learn from the secrets of the best acrobats". In other words, when looking at a different society, there are just too many differences for you to identify what makes a specific industry work, and what is just cannibalism, unless you do some very, very serious investigative analysis, which this article is not, and even though what you are doing will have high error rates. What you need is the opposite -- a society very close to the US, but with amazing rail. Then emphasizing differences is much more likely to hit on something important for rail.
I could argue the reason Japan has amazing rail was the deflationary period in which the government went on a massive infrastructure spree to stimulate the economy via deficit spending, and this was because of the high Japanese propensity to save in the aftermath of the Plaza accords, and profound risk aversion, as well as their extremely peaceful and law abiding social norms. Good luck on having any of those approaches work well in the US. But hey, once again people focus on their own concerns. I'm sure for someone obsessed with, say, land use rights, they will point out that the what is preventing us from having amazing rail is lack of a Japanese style land management system. And for someone else focused on toll roads, they will say if we had more toll roads, then we would have great public transportation. Of course, India is filled with toll roads, and they are not known for great public transportation. And I could also give examples of nations that did huge infrastructure deficit spending, and they didn't get great infrastructure. Etc. Everyone sees the world through the lens of their own concerns. Articles like this, that don't even try to rebut the counter arguments or account for concern-bias, are not impressive.
Japan has some of the best infrastructure anywhere. It will be interesting to see if they can keep it that way with their population changing and becoming more geriatric.
successful train lines in Japan are all built between CBD and some spots / attractions. Odakyu: odawara / hakone, Seibu: chichibu, keiou: Takao, toukyuu: Nikko / kinugawa, nankai: Takao.
Tourists spots are usually in the mountains and the CBD is near the sea. And residential area is developed between them along the lines so the trains carry bidirectional passengers to work or relax on the same line, higher utilization keeps ticket fare low.
In Japan there's a cross party political consensus that public transport projects are a net positive for society. That's important when you have work which could take a decade or more to complete - the Chuo maglev project for instance will be complete when my kids are approaching adulthood and they're still not in primary school. I often wonder what we might be able to do in New Zealand (where I'm from) if we had the money and population to support it. But then I remember that one of the two major political parties always cancels or scales back anything ongoing which is public transport related, every single time they're elected, so nothing ever gets done.
One word dedication of Japanese people. They care very dedicated to their country. I respect this thing the most in them. They are very hardworking also.
I've been in Kyushu, in the south.
Japanese railways are indeed amazing, but it should be pointed out that peripheral routes are being dismissed everywhere in the country side, often isolating people and killing places.
Infrastructure is also dated in many places.
It's not a criticism to Japan, I think they are just facing the fact that many people move to the cities and the country is on a population decline as well.
They are facing this very masterfully.
Russian or Chinese one way better.
When was the last time you had to travel between Moscow and St Petersburg? Sapsan trains are always sold out from my experience. And those night trains don't always fit your needs, although they are plentiful and dirt cheap. They are supposedly building a dedicated high-speed rail line, but I don't have much faith in that, especially in the current situation.
the article didn't even compare with China railways, that's weird.
It would make writing about the Shinkansen insignificant :p
So every time a post about successful public transit comes up, we get the full gamut of responses:
- "This wouldn't work in the US because of X". X is usually land area. Ok, but what about China?
- "We should fix some [corner case]" like the cost of parking;
- "It's too expensive here". Why is it expensive?
The key theme from all of this is central planning. You might be tempted to say that Japanese railways are private. Yes and no. And they certainly didn't start that way.
Back to the article, I find it weird to write an article in 2026 about the effectiveness of railways without talking about China. China is only mentioned once and that was in terms of passenger numbers.
Also, China's railroad network largely didn't even exist in 2005, certainly not the high speed rail. Look at the top metro systems by rail length [1] and 11 of the top 12 are in China (Moscow is the outlier). All of those systems are pretty new too. Chengdu at #4 was started in 2010.
According to this [2], Chengdu's population in 2010 was ~7.5 million. So you can't really argue the city was designed for it or it built early.
Most arguments against regional and metro rail systems can be debunked with "But China".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems
[2]: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20480/chen...
The Chinese high speed rail network is completely utterly insane. Funny, the overhead line equipment (power lines) looks identical to the high speed lines in Europe!
Countries like Japan seem to make policy that serves the people.
Other countries decisions serve politicians, corporates, the rich, and maybe possibly finally, the citizens.
Here in Melbourne a city of 5 million people we don’t have a train from the airport to the city despite decades of political talk about it. But why not? Because the Airport Coporation makes vast unfathomable profit on car parking. What’s most important? Just look around.
like many other places, there is a airport bus in Melbourne as I recall. there is (or was) a train from Melbourne to Canberra too (with a short bus transfer on the Canberra side). it was very difficult to figure out how to buy a ticket for it!
most of the japanese railway system is private. their 2 largest companies are some of the largest publicly traded companies in the world.
Works in progress also had a great article recently (also discussed on hacker news) about how Japanese railways are private, profit earning real estate development corporations. [1]
Unfortunately, people from western countries have very negative views toward the privatization of mass transit despite the wild success that Japan has experienced. The model makes so much sense: if trains are just a way to get people to the real estate that you developed, then you’re going to make sure that the trains AND the destinations are really nice, which also turns out to be very lucrative (at least in densely populated areas) as a cherry on top.
And even worse, like this commenter above alludes to, it is trendy in the West to believe that real estate developers are evil, and that corporations that make money are sucking the life out of society. This kind of degrowth populism pretty much guarantees that the successful Japanese model is out of reach for most countries, because it is exactly the pursuit of profit that makes Japan’s system so nice - not some edicts from a benevolent and extremely capable government.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762060
> Unfortunately, people from western countries have very negative views toward the privatization of mass transit despite the wild success that Japan has experienced
Japanese culture would frown heavily on enshittifying the transit experience to earn more profit. Western culture mass transit is already often shitty, and I cannot imagine how shit it would become if a for profit corporation took it over and started to squeeze it to make more money
Did you read what I said? The whole Japanese system is for profit and the one of the biggest reasons for Japan’s system being so pleasant is that it is done for commercial purposes.
If the incentives are right American companies can make good things, but usually they are not so because of poor policy.
>Rail travel is much more common in Japan
That's not a cause but a consequence.
I love how the bar graph didn’t include China because China is such a small place, basically a rounding error.
Japanese are the original micro-optimisers. Kaizen.
South Koreans then took over. In between were the Taiwanese.
The next wave will be mainland China.
China is not about optimising, its about maximising
I honestly had no idea they’re so libertarian-capitalist. I figured it was government-led, government-run.
> The Midwest was once criss-crossed by a network of ‘interurbans’, essentially intercity trams. In the United States, these lines have vanished
They just "vanished"! Man, I hate it when that happens. You leave a railroad outside with out a lid on it for too long and it just, you know, evaporates! What a drag...
What an amazing evasion of reality/truth, another classic use of the passive voice...
I know why Japan has such good railways, and I can also tell you that this blog article doesn't mention any them.
If it did it would be [flagged][dead] in minutes. HN is a wildly dishonest website.
The tragedy of the commons doesn't seem to exist in Japan to the same extent it does in Western nations, especially the US. As you said: that's largely due to reasons not mentioned in the article.
Hear, hear! Fun fact: Germany was once famous for its on-time trains. You are now lucky if they show up at all.
This happened in, what like 15 years? The trains are truly a disaster. In 2022 i missed like 3 days of various conferences and workshops because trains would just not come :/
Because they have bad something else.
The introduction lost me. To quote: "Japan’s vast railway network", but it does not address the mouse in the room. Japan is approximately the size of California with a population density that is three times that of California. I would argue that a comparison of rail systems without addressing those critical issues may be interesting but isn't really informative. The issues are complex.