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Why Japan has such good railways

worksinprogress.co

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Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#361

Post by connorboyle »

decimalenough wrote: post #283

This made it to the HN front page 4 days ago, under its (terrible) previous name "The secrets of the Shinkansen": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762060 And the top comment was mine, pointing out a bunch of factual mistakes and misleading claims: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47765032

You seem to be using vanilla (or one might say "area-weighted" population density numbers. The article specifically says that they are using population-weighted population density numbers for comparison:

> Population weighted density refers to the density multiplied by the actual number of people living in each area, and more closely reflects the density that people experience.

One indication of this is that they give a different value for London's population density (9.2k / km^2) than you do.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#362

Post by llbeansandrice »

infecto wrote: post #140
nottorp wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I also wonder how much the pressure filled culture of not standing out has something to do with this. My impression is Japanese are under a lot more pressure to not abuse the permissiveness of the zoning laws.

What do you mean by “abuse”?

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#363

Post by christina97 »

dublinstats wrote: post #292
vantassell wrote: post #174

> Japan is one of the only countries to have privatized parking. In Europe and North America, vast quantities of parking space is socialized: municipalities own the streets and allow people to park on them at low or zero cost. Initially with the intention of encouraging the provision of more parking spaces, Japan made it illegal to park on public roads or pavements without special permission. Before someone buys a ca…

Their streets tend to be super narrow, with pedestrians and bicycles sharing the shoulder. And back streets are basically alleys with pedestrians sharing the street with cars. Obviously parked cars there would be a disaster. Also it tends to cost more via tolls to drive any significant distance than to take the train or bus (or plane for that matter), unless you have multiple people in the car. The car situation in J…

So in other words… they internalized a number of heavily subsidized externalities of individual transportation by car?

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#364

Post by presentation »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #47
presentation wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Did you read what I said? The whole Japanese system is for profit and the one of the biggest reasons for Japan’s system being so pleasant is that it is done for commercial purposes.

If the incentives are right American companies can make good things, but usually they are not so because of poor policy.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#365

Post by carefree-bob »

I am skeptical of these "learn the secret of how other culture does X" because it almost always reflects the concerns of the person writing the article rather than shedding light on how a nation does X well. That's because we view the world through the prism of our own concerns, but when we encounter a society that is substantially different from ours -- such as any East Asian society -- then they will have a broad basket of different concerns.

Imagine, for example, that you stumble upon an island of amazing acrobats, they can do fantastic feats. And they are also cannibals. Now the temptation is just too great to say "cannibalism aids in acrobatic skills. Learn from the secrets of the best acrobats". In other words, when looking at a different society, there are just too many differences for you to identify what makes a specific industry work, and what is just cannibalism, unless you do some very, very serious investigative analysis, which this article is not, and even though what you are doing will have high error rates. What you need is the opposite -- a society very close to the US, but with amazing rail. Then emphasizing differences is much more likely to hit on something important for rail.

I could argue the reason Japan has amazing rail was the deflationary period in which the government went on a massive infrastructure spree to stimulate the economy via deficit spending, and this was because of the high Japanese propensity to save in the aftermath of the Plaza accords, and profound risk aversion, as well as their extremely peaceful and law abiding social norms. Good luck on having any of those approaches work well in the US. But hey, once again people focus on their own concerns. I'm sure for someone obsessed with, say, land use rights, they will point out that the what is preventing us from having amazing rail is lack of a Japanese style land management system. And for someone else focused on toll roads, they will say if we had more toll roads, then we would have great public transportation. Of course, India is filled with toll roads, and they are not known for great public transportation. And I could also give examples of nations that did huge infrastructure deficit spending, and they didn't get great infrastructure. Etc. Everyone sees the world through the lens of their own concerns. Articles like this, that don't even try to rebut the counter arguments or account for concern-bias, are not impressive.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#366

Post by tokioyoyo »

SilverElfin wrote: post #344
tokioyoyo wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's not feasible in America because of the culture. If you have a good chunk of people that are hell-bent against sharing space with others for one reason or another (some are legitimate reasons!), you're already discarding a significant chunk of passengers. Another hot take is... if you want any of the infrastructure to be mass-used, you have to make it better than the alternatives, so people with the means…

> Another hot take is... if you want any of the infrastructure to be mass-used, you have to make it better than the alternatives, so people with the means would use it as well. Like your subway should be faster than the cars, so even affluent people would take it. These days cities often achieve this by purposely hurting the alternatives like driving. And that just isn’t the solution. Mass transit has to be fast peri…

I support all kinds of transportation. I think everyone should have access to trains, cars, bikes and etc. But I also think each has its own merits. Like the car ownership over here is huge, but most commute to work on trains because things aren’t really invisibly subsidized.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#367

Post by ehnto »

BirdieNZ wrote: post #305
dublinstats wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their streets tend to be super narrow, with pedestrians and bicycles sharing the shoulder. And back streets are basically alleys with pedestrians sharing the street with cars. Obviously parked cars there would be a disaster. Also it tends to cost more via tolls to drive any significant distance than to take the train or bus (or plane for that matter), unless you have multiple people in the car. The car situation in J…

It's significantly more efficient to provide services to compact towns than sprawled towns, so I'm not sure this registers to me as a downside. It's pretty common for small sprawled towns to struggle to keep up with maintenance of roads/water/power, which is less of an issue with compact towns. The same applies at the city level, of course.

The lack of sprawl is also a consequence of how mountainous the country is. While not as bad as a lot of western sprawl, the areas of Japan that are a bit wider and less populated do have an element of car dependent sprawl to them. Then of course the villages that aren't covered by the train network and aren't boxed in by mountains have a pretty similar relationship to cars as a small western town.

Where I think the US and Australia both struggle is trying to make the car work in dense cities as populations grow. We do actually have pretty dense cities in Aus, yet cannot give up the car.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#368

Post by otterley »

kulahan wrote: post #313
CharlieDigital wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NIMBY is stopping data centers. Maine set to become first state with data center ban: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/09/maine-data-center-ban.html Also, it's a different kind of more insidious and visceral NIMBY rooted in racism and classism.

It's facetious to pretend NIMBYs are as such because they're racist and classist, rather than because they just want to protect the single most valuable and future-determining investment they'll make in their entire lives.

Those factors are tied together and aren’t easily separable. The racism and classism comes in because they believe that people of a different race or class will diminish the value of their investment.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#369

Post by thenthenthen »

jmyeet wrote: post #334

So every time a post about successful public transit comes up, we get the full gamut of responses: - "This wouldn't work in the US because of X". X is usually land area. Ok, but what about China? - "We should fix some [corner case]" like the cost of parking; - "It's too expensive here". Why is it expensive? The key theme from all of this is central planning . You might be tempted to say that Japanese railways are pri…

The Chinese high speed rail network is completely utterly insane. Funny, the overhead line equipment (power lines) looks identical to the high speed lines in Europe!

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#370

Post by kalleboo »

ghaff wrote: post #189
renewiltord wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California is also like this for the most part. Bay Area has 8 m, Los Angeles area has 17 m, and San Diego area has 3 m. 28 out of 39 live in those three. Straight line.

With relatively little between the Bay Area and LA to serve as a viable customer base. Hence, a lot of the problems getting California HSR going. Imagine you had the Boston area and the Washington DC area and took out NYC and Philadelphia in the middle. You'd have the same issue. The Acela isn't the fastest rail service (in part because NYC is in the middle but Boston to NYC and NYC to DC are a lot more practical tha…

Isn't this Japanese Railway Thesis that with the railway you build something in that "very little between"? Have the railway company buy up up all that cheap land, develop it into commute hubs with their own walkable retail and use that to fund the railway.
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