Why Japan has such good railways

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.

I go there every here 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.

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?

Apparently, it works just fine.

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completely makes sense when you realise it is all just an elaborate system to avoid being around the small part of the population that commit insane amounts of violent crime in the US with no motive

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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.

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.

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).

That means no car trips when you run out of bread or milk.

Smartest property of that zoning system IMO.

Example: Texas

Zoning has to both exist and be well-designed.

What do you really mean? On that basis, we all would live on isolated farms on the prarie.

Humans are social animals that live in groups, just like other primates. Humans like living in dense cities so much that they pay far more for much smaller spaces in the most dense cities.

That doesn't make all density good but 'fight all densification' is not a real solution. When is it good and when bad? How much desnity in those situations? Those are some of the real questions.

See: https://secure.okbiz.jp/eki-net/faq/show/4131?category_id=23...

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.

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.

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

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.

Almost all NIMBY opposition to development comes from people who do not own the land in question.

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 fact they country was clearly able to come together for the public good many times throughout their history.

You could consider other causes.

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.

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.

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.

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