Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Japan has such good railways

worksinprogress.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 609 posts

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#41

Post by thekyle »

dgellow wrote: post #5
amazingamazing wrote: post #3

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 acc…

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

[dead]

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#42

Post by floatrock »

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.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#43

Post by rwmj »

rayiner wrote: post #35
rwmj wrote: post #31

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?

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#44

Post by Avicebron »

drunner wrote: post #39
rwmj wrote: post #31

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.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#45

Post by [deleted] »

panick21_ wrote: post #32
testing22321 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 f…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#46

Post by SeanLuke »

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.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#47

Post by bluefirebrand »

presentation wrote: post #24
thegreatpeter wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#48

Post by tjpnz »

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.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#49

Post by [deleted] »

SeanLuke wrote: post #46

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 won…

[deleted]

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#50

Post by Fricken »

xyzelement wrote: post #29
testing22321 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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...

Post reply on HN