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.
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.
“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.
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.
These two sentences don't fit together. Living next to major sources of pollution - and yes, noise is pollution as well - has been shown numerous times to be bad for the health of the people [1], leading to increased costs for healthcare systems [2], and to make it worse living near noisy traffic infrastructure (both rail and road) is closely correlated to poverty [3], which means poorer people are (as usual) being punished for being poor.
And on top of that, densification leads to worse mental health for the inhabitants [4] - particularly in Japan it's undeniable given phenomena such as "hikikomori".
Fight densification wherever someone tries to push it. People aren't poultry, and even in poultry or pig herds we know it's bad for their mental and physical health, why should humans be different?
I live a 3-minutes walk from a busy train station in Switzerland and I don't even hear the trains. I also happened to live just next to it (my windows facing the rails) and that was horrible. So it's just a matter of some space and noise barriers.
> So it's just a matter of some space and noise barriers.
And guess what's often hotly contested. Noise barriers tend to draw complaints because they ruin the sightline, are either ugly from the start or end up being "decorated" not by good art but quick throw tags. And landlords are often too much penny-pinchers to install decent windows unless you legally require them to, which is often impossible for already constructed buildings. The landlords don't have to live with the noise after all, and in overheated housing markets people are forced to live in what they can get.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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’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
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 hamstrung by its government design separating and/or conflicting regional transit planning duties between states, counties, cities, and the federal government.
It’s really hard to get a solid regional transit plan going when every town has its own local ordinances and zoning laws, the state has different priorities than the city, and funding for large projects tends to come from the federal government.
Land ownership doesn’t even seem to frequently be the problem in most US projects. It definitely can be like with California high speed rail where land purchases are a massive expense, but I think most issues with regional transit planning come from different root causes.
For example, until this year after legislative reform, the suburban and city transit authorities in Chicago didn’t work together and operated as independent entities. I imagine that this type of lack of cooperation within the same metro area might seem a little crazy in some places.
I’ve even read an articles about how the US bus manufacturing industry is highly consolidated because US metropolitan transit agencies over-customize their orders rather than agreeing on standardized designs across the country to make a more competitive vendor environment possible. US agencies overpay for buses compared to European and Asian transit authorities.
I also think that the US has lacked a lot of creativity when it comes to transit fiscal sustainability. The existing 90%+ of people who primarily use cars to get around can barely imagine a comprehensive public transit system existing, and they don’t want to fund it, and certainly can’t imagine a system where it’s sustainable and even profitable. Since the majority of people live this way in a car-dependent world, those are also the majority of people who make up our legislative bodies.
I’ve heard all the excuses before: “we can’t be like Europe or Asia living on top of each other, giving up cars would be going backwards, I live in a small town [1] we can’t have public transit here, there are homeless people on the bus, it’s not safe…”
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.)
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.
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."
>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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
"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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
You can make reservations online: https://www.eki-net.com/en/jreast-train-reservation/Top/Inde...
“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.
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.
>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.
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.
That's a big part of it. They also do zoning mostly at the federal level, meaning local opposition isn't relevant.
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 is only “permissive” relative to other states. Relative to Japan it’s quite restrictive.
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.
I bet you'd see natural market driven concentration around rail stations in Texas too, if they had a useful rail network.
A great video on the zoning laws in Japan if anyone wants to nerd out on them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlwQ2Y4By0U
> new neighborhoods next to railway lines
> ingenious Japan’s system of zoning
These two sentences don't fit together. Living next to major sources of pollution - and yes, noise is pollution as well - has been shown numerous times to be bad for the health of the people [1], leading to increased costs for healthcare systems [2], and to make it worse living near noisy traffic infrastructure (both rail and road) is closely correlated to poverty [3], which means poorer people are (as usual) being punished for being poor.
And on top of that, densification leads to worse mental health for the inhabitants [4] - particularly in Japan it's undeniable given phenomena such as "hikikomori".
Fight densification wherever someone tries to push it. People aren't poultry, and even in poultry or pig herds we know it's bad for their mental and physical health, why should humans be different?
[1] https://www.vrso.de/de/verband/veroeffentlichungen/veroeffen...
[2] https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/17/026/1702638.pdf
[3] https://www.rnd.de/mobilitaet/teure-mobilitaet-wie-armut-die...
[4] https://www.aerzteblatt.de/archiv/risiko-fuer-psychische-erk...
I live a 3-minutes walk from a busy train station in Switzerland and I don't even hear the trains. I also happened to live just next to it (my windows facing the rails) and that was horrible. So it's just a matter of some space and noise barriers.
> So it's just a matter of some space and noise barriers.
And guess what's often hotly contested. Noise barriers tend to draw complaints because they ruin the sightline, are either ugly from the start or end up being "decorated" not by good art but quick throw tags. And landlords are often too much penny-pinchers to install decent windows unless you legally require them to, which is often impossible for already constructed buildings. The landlords don't have to live with the noise after all, and in overheated housing markets people are forced to live in what they can get.
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?
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
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.
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.
didn't NZ have a decent inter-city train service in the past but no longer does bc cars won out in the end?
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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’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.
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 hamstrung by its government design separating and/or conflicting regional transit planning duties between states, counties, cities, and the federal government.
It’s really hard to get a solid regional transit plan going when every town has its own local ordinances and zoning laws, the state has different priorities than the city, and funding for large projects tends to come from the federal government.
Land ownership doesn’t even seem to frequently be the problem in most US projects. It definitely can be like with California high speed rail where land purchases are a massive expense, but I think most issues with regional transit planning come from different root causes.
For example, until this year after legislative reform, the suburban and city transit authorities in Chicago didn’t work together and operated as independent entities. I imagine that this type of lack of cooperation within the same metro area might seem a little crazy in some places.
I’ve even read an articles about how the US bus manufacturing industry is highly consolidated because US metropolitan transit agencies over-customize their orders rather than agreeing on standardized designs across the country to make a more competitive vendor environment possible. US agencies overpay for buses compared to European and Asian transit authorities.
I also think that the US has lacked a lot of creativity when it comes to transit fiscal sustainability. The existing 90%+ of people who primarily use cars to get around can barely imagine a comprehensive public transit system existing, and they don’t want to fund it, and certainly can’t imagine a system where it’s sustainable and even profitable. Since the majority of people live this way in a car-dependent world, those are also the majority of people who make up our legislative bodies.
I’ve heard all the excuses before: “we can’t be like Europe or Asia living on top of each other, giving up cars would be going backwards, I live in a small town [1] we can’t have public transit here, there are homeless people on the bus, it’s not safe…”
[1] population: 30,000
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.)
The US is the country that originated Georgism.
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/...
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.
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."
>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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
The east coast ("Amtrak") rail blows. Expensive, and slow.
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.
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.
Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677481
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Japanese are the original micro-optimisers. Kaizen.
South Koreans then took over. In between were the Taiwanese.
The next wave will be mainland China.
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
Because they have bad something else.