21–30 of 204 posts
Well it's not that much different from a school bus that only picks up a single student at a particular bus stop, right?
considering the time it takes to decelerate, stop, accelerate, making this stop adds at least a full minute or minute and a half to one way journey. Everybody who is taking the train during the same leg as her, is essentially chipping in 1 minute of their time to support her transportation. And I think that's just beautiful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generally speaking, the population of Japan is going down and the population of the Greater Tokyo area is going up. Once youth hits college or working age, they disproportionately head for the capitol. But then there's a small counter current where younger (say, 30's) are moving back to their original prefectures as they realize that they might be able to afford a better QoL making less money but also paying much les…
I hope some move back. From what I've seen/heard, the countryside is suffering radical population shifts. The following article has some great graphs to illustrate the point. There is a giant dip in the 20s (school) and a terrifying peak in the 55-60 range. But the greatest disparity is that there are many many more old (70s) than teenagers in the countryside. Across the nation those two groups are roughly equal. htt…
They've been talking about the need to decentralize for decades now. The earthquake showed the risk of centralization and having a single point of failure for the economy and the government (famously, some foreign companies moved HQ and/or datacenters to Osaka). Nothing has changed though. If anything things are becoming even more centralized.
There has been minority political endeavors talking of introducing the concept of "States" to Japan to structurally support this sort of decentralization. At times attempts have come close to fruition (most recently Hashimoto's attempt in Osaka), but none have borne fruit.
Well it's not that much different from a school bus that only picks up a single student at a particular bus stop, right?
Lovely story. Hats off to Japan Railways. I'm also happy that The Atlantic/Citylab decided to publish this story. And thanks 'hudibras for submitting it here! They say that it's the money that makes the world turn, and love only keeps it together. It would be easy for the Railways to ignore that girl. There's no economical reason to keep that station open. It's a waste of time and resources. And yet, someone decided…
Wouldn't it be both cheaper, and friendlier to the environment to hire a person chauffeur for her? This is outrageously inefficient. Public transport only becomes worth it when it achieves relatively high ridership.
But you know what would be the most efficient option, from the point of view of the railroad company? Just ignoring the girl and closing down the station. That it didn't happen suggests that someone, at some point, decided that sometimes you have to sacrifice efficiency in order to be human.
(It's actually a general observation - in current highly optimized economy, being human and humane creates inefficiencies. Or in other words, we need to keep some things from being perfectly optimized, in order to avoid living in a misery. Compare to e.g. various laws protecting employees. They purposefully make businesses less efficient, in order to ensure that employees can work in safe and humane conditions.)
Lovely story. Hats off to Japan Railways. I'm also happy that The Atlantic/Citylab decided to publish this story. And thanks 'hudibras for submitting it here! They say that it's the money that makes the world turn, and love only keeps it together. It would be easy for the Railways to ignore that girl. There's no economical reason to keep that station open. It's a waste of time and resources. And yet, someone decided…
This would never happen in Tokyo. As much as we think of the country as being monolithic (in many ways it is), there are great differences between different regions of the country (much like any country).
Tokyo is a place where a train being 2 minutes late causes ire (and a train conductor once killed himself for a mistake as trivial as this). It's a place where if a person jumps into the train to kill themselves, many will curse under their breaths about being late to work. It's a place where if you faint in the train concourse during the morning rush hour, no one will stop to help you. It's a place where young mothers with strollers are given stinkeye on public transit. If you ask someone (in fluent Japanese) to take a photo for you, you will often be completely ignored. Tokyo is cold.
I agree with you that this story represents the good in us all. But Japan is like a black box to those who don't live there. I would caution you against idolizing it on a national level as a result of stories like this.
Wouldn't it be both cheaper, and friendlier to the environment to hire a person chauffeur for her? This is outrageously inefficient. Public transport only becomes worth it when it achieves relatively high ridership.
It would be even friendlier to the environment if she wasn't formally educated. Will educating her really provide that much for society to make it worthwhile?
Well it's not that much different from a school bus that only picks up a single student at a particular bus stop, right?
When I was little I lived in the country for a while. I was the only kid at my stop. But at least when I got on the bus it was full of other kids, most of whom were also the only kid at each of their stops. This girl is the only person on the train.
Wouldn't it be both cheaper, and friendlier to the environment to hire a person chauffeur for her? This is outrageously inefficient. Public transport only becomes worth it when it achieves relatively high ridership.
The train is already going past the existing station, so I would imagine the additional cost of supporting the station for the two times a day the train stops there is relatively small - additional brake dust in the air, some extra energy burned. It wouldn't surprise me if the accounting/management, HR and maintenance overhead for the station was higher than the cost of having the train make an extra stop twice a day…
What are the opportunity costs of not shutting down this platform years ago? And of getting the train delayed by 40s twice a day for who knows how many passengers plus some minor costs like acceleration, meetings to change the schedule etc. Considering all this it would almost certainly be cheaper to provide her with a taxi at the train cost, maybe only to the next train stop. Maybe given the choice of getting a taxi twice a day or getting the compensation in cash, the girl would even have taken the money and moved closer to school.