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How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart

arun.is

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Re: How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart

#51

Post by toast0 »

Shitty-kitty wrote: post #9

The U.S had the greatest rail network and then we built the Interstate Highway system and abandoned rail. Truth is that nobody funds multiple competing transportation network. Japan chose rail, we chose highways.

Rail is great when you have a lot of people or things moving on the same path.

Highways are great when everyone has a different path.

Japan has most (but not all) of its large destinations on the pacific coast, which works great for rail.

I'm sure passenger rail networks used to have more routing options than amtrak does now, but it's hard to get between a lot of places by rail without going through Chicago. In the western US, you can go north/south in the pacific states or near the missisipi. Sure mountains are hard to cross, but there's no north/south in the plains either... Or Atlanta to Florida, etc.

Re: How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart

#52

Post by tonyhart7 »

razorbeamz wrote: post #44
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #4

I've always thought the JR logo looked like 駅, the kanji for “train station”, and assumed it was deliberate. Perhaps that was a factor in them settling on the JR name?

I think that's just coincidental. I've mentioned it to Japanese people before and they can't see the connection at all.

well because they see kanji and "english" differently

Re: How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart

#53

Post by ddrmaxgt37 »

waterTanuki wrote: post #47

Something I don't see mentioned in this article is the nation-wide adoption of a universal transit-payment system: IC Card (Suica is only one of several companies, but often used colloquially to mean train card). This makes it so easy to board any bus/ferry/train without worrying about setting up 30 different accounts each with its own card system. I've lived in Japan for 4 years now and it was a bit of a culture sho…

Been wanting to write about this. The graph of interoperability agreements that makes this possible is crazy.

My first visit to Japan, there were still places that would only accept a subset of IC cards and not all.

Re: How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart

#54

Post by queenkjuul »

socalgal2 wrote: post #35
pibaker wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is about the JR branding and design, not train operations. The title may be overstating the case, but the content is definitely not drawing over generalized conclusions about railroads in Japan. Not to mention the idea that JR is only 7% of Japanese railroad makes little sense in real life. JR carries a majority of rail passengers in Japan. The long tail of non JR railroad companies in Japan are small, r…

JR is big, but 62% of passenger volume is not JR and that remaining 38% is split by 7 companies Further, in the big metro areas, the private trains do just fine. JR East is #1, Tokyo Metro is #2, JR West is #3, Tokyu is #4, ... the next JR, JR Central is down at #9 with #5 #6 #7 #8 all private. Tokyo Metro is private, Toei (is the city run subway, it has 4 lines as is far down the list).

At least where i live, subways and railways aren't really considered to be the same thing

Re: How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart

#55

Post by queenkjuul »

alephnerd wrote: post #28
Klonoar wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech industry needlessly idolizes the country, so you're unfortunately bound to read this slop until the heat death of the universe.

It's an age thing. Most HNers are in their 30s-50s so would have been impressed by Japan in the 1990s-2000s. Japan is a decent country but everyone who writes about it tends to overindex on the posh parts of Tokyo.

While i am admittedly in my 30s-50s i don't believe this to be an age problem; Japan is still held on a pedestal in a lot of American pop culture

Re: How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart

#56

Post by Pooge »

For those of you planning to go to Japan, please make sure you actually calculate how much JR train trips would cost you. They upped the price a few years ago and, since then, it's basically impossible for the JR Pass to be more affordable than single tickets.

For one of my recent trips, I was actually more better served with a local pass (Kansai Wide Pass) than the JR Pass.

Too bad because it used to be a really good deal...

Re: How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart

#57

Post by queenkjuul »

tonyhart7 wrote: post #52
razorbeamz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's just coincidental. I've mentioned it to Japanese people before and they can't see the connection at all.

well because they see kanji and "english" differently

So a Japanese designer probably didn't consider it?

Re: How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart

#58

Post by bobthepanda »

queenkjuul wrote: post #54
socalgal2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JR is big, but 62% of passenger volume is not JR and that remaining 38% is split by 7 companies Further, in the big metro areas, the private trains do just fine. JR East is #1, Tokyo Metro is #2, JR West is #3, Tokyu is #4, ... the next JR, JR Central is down at #9 with #5 #6 #7 #8 all private. Tokyo Metro is private, Toei (is the city run subway, it has 4 lines as is far down the list).

At least where i live, subways and railways aren't really considered to be the same thing

Japan operates a kind of hybrid system where the subway (at least in Tokyo) mostly consists of tracks that connect to private operators on either end, and a train will just run through from the private parts of the track to the subway parts with no interruption whatsoever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_through_trains_in_Japa...

Re: How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart

#60

Post by historical1234 »

waterTanuki wrote: post #47

Something I don't see mentioned in this article is the nation-wide adoption of a universal transit-payment system: IC Card (Suica is only one of several companies, but often used colloquially to mean train card). This makes it so easy to board any bus/ferry/train without worrying about setting up 30 different accounts each with its own card system. I've lived in Japan for 4 years now and it was a bit of a culture sho…

The IC card system is one of those things people don't appreciate until they travel somewhere without it.

I remember reading that interoperability between Suica, Pasmo, ICOCA and the others didn't happen overnight. A lot of agreements had to be worked out between companies that were technically competitors.

It's interesting how much invisible coordination goes into making a system feel simple

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