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Why Japan has such good railways

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Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#481

Post by tuna74 »

superdisk wrote: post #291
mmooss wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's extremely common for there to be human shit in the train cars, and lunatics going nuts Where does that come from? Not from your experience. You've never been on NY subways, clearly. I've never seen feces - and anyway, how could you tell if it's from a dog? Did you examine it? Take it home and test it? It's one of the stories that maybe is slightly plausible, and which yields such strong disgust that rationalit…

I actually am speaking from experience, I saw both of those things my first week in New York. It's really not uncommon, I find it hard to believe that you've never run into shit/barf, usually when a car pulls up that has nobody in it, that's what's in there. And this is all to say nothing about the decrepit state of the stations and cars themselves. I've also been to Japan and experienced their trains. It's in such a…

Barf and shit are two very different things.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#483

Post by IshKebab »

codethief wrote: post #455

> In 1982, Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone started to privatize the railways. Unlike other countries, Japan simply returned to the traditional private railway model of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: tracks, trains, stations, and yards were owned by vertically integrated regional conglomerates. There are substantial advantages to vertical integration. Railways are a closed system that has to be planned…

> The rational solution is to build the infrastructure once, as a shared, neutral asset, and let different companies compete to provide the service over that infrastructure. That’s how water works. That’s how electricity works in most places. And in Switzerland, that’s how fiber optic internet works.

This isn't a magic bullet. It normally works for electricity because it's relatively cheap to transport electricity so consumer have a choice and can provide strong selective pressure. Fibre internet is similar to that (at least in the UK).

It doesn't make as much sense for water or rail because consumers have no choice. The "competition" is companies making impossible bids to the government and then getting bailed out. It definitely hasn't worked in the UK.

There is currently a major scandal about underinvestment by water companies leading them to releasing raw sewage into waterways, and trains are notoriously expensive and unreliable here (though I would still say apart from the price the UK train experience is pretty good compared to most countries).

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#484

Post by kjkjadksj »

ghaff wrote: post #223
kjkjadksj wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eminent domain is designed for this. People are compelled to sell.

And you'd better be prepared to fight for it through the courts. Might take a decade or more if someone is really opposed to selling.

People say that but I’m not sure, it seems state of california manages to pull it off pretty well, thinking in terms of recent history it was used a couple years ago for highway expansion in bakersfield for example, using it on 900 homes. Pretty sure they must have used it recently in the owens valley when they widened 395 as well.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#485

Post by numpad0 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #444
fc417fc802 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can imagine a regime where parking in front of your own house is banned as a policy choice Yes, I believe that's exactly what's being referred to. A blanket ban on street parking and requiring documentation of a dedicated off street parking space to register a vehicle. Of course there would be little to no point to such an exercise in a nation where the majority of the streets have wide shoulders specifically i…

> Yes, I believe that's exactly what's being referred to. A blanket ban on street parking and requiring documentation of a dedicated off street parking space to register a vehicle. Not at all. I agree with you that that's what they're hoping to express. But it's not what they said. The proposal is just "a reserved nighttime space on private land". Street parking in front of your house is not necessarily banned by tha…

IANAL anywhere, but the actual law[1] is a blanket ban on roadside parking as means of storage. The blurbs around overnight and proofs are just implementation details. Both the spirit and the reality is no one shall leave cars on curbs. I believe this includes privately owned access roads due to technicality combos with building codes that require roads adjoining properties for fire safety reasons(but sort of inexplicably not driveways).

Anyways, the point is, it actually is a nationwide prohibition of curbside parking as a car ownership strategy, and vast majority do comply with it.

1: https://laws.e-gov.go.jp/law/337AC0000000145/

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#486

Post by CharlieDigital »

rjh29 wrote: post #251
zdw wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kyoto station is a great example of this. It's enormous inside, with a hotel on the top, event facilities, and a ton of retail all over. https://www.kyotostation.com/kyoto-station-building-faciliti...

It's actually a bad example - there is barely anything around Kyoto station except a few hotels and some shopping malls. The main shopping/entertainment area and almost all tourist attractions are north of it, requiring connection by bus or subway. The areas around major stations in basically any other city are far more developed. Look at Osaka-Umeda for example. I don't know if that's due to the historical buildings…

Eh.

The station itself is a pretty active hub. We arrived there 9:30 AM to visit teamLabs Kyoto (which is just walking distance away from the station) and it was already pretty packed in the station.

But I think your observation/comment maybe misses the mark: the rail operators may still end up owning some of the commercial real estate nearby whether it's office buildings, hotels, etc. It doesn't all have to be shopping or dining, just that the rail operating owning the real estate near the transit hubs provides an incentive to provide service to that hub to create more value from those holdings.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#487

Post by otterley »

tormeh wrote: post #380
otterley wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If enough people believe this then it is true. That's just how markets work.

It is how (unregulated) markets work, but is this the right outcome? What do you think would happen if this were allowed to play out to its logical extent?

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#488

Post by eloisant »

jayd16 wrote: post #324
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…

I like trains but the logic is flawed. If we banned hats, or made it so they were very expensive, less people would wear hats. And sure, probably more places would worry about shade because hats are not an option... But it doesn't really prove that's the right thing to do or that hats are inefficient use of cloth.

It's not about artificially increasing car ownership price, it's about making people pay for what they use (parking space) instead of having it paid for by the whole society like a socialized good.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#489

Post by eloisant »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #297
jltsiren wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail. If you try building a single megaproject, nobody knows what they are doing, everything is inefficient, and mistakes will be made. But you learn by doing. If the individual projects are small enough that there are always multiple projects in various stages, you develop and maintain expertise. Then you can build things cost-effect…

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…

Funny enough, Americans are usually happy to use public transportation when the travel in Europe or in Japan. Also most New Yorkers use the subway every day.

It's just their own public transit infrastructure they don't like, and I understand them.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#490

Post by throwaway2037 »

wallst07 wrote: post #415
jltsiren wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail. If you try building a single megaproject, nobody knows what they are doing, everything is inefficient, and mistakes will be made. But you learn by doing. If the individual projects are small enough that there are always multiple projects in various stages, you develop and maintain expertise. Then you can build things cost-effect…

>The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail. This seems backwards to me tbh. Is this a feeling or backed by hard data? As much as anti-american sentiment is right now, there are still great engineering feats pulled off all the time. Construction is expensive because we value public insight into projects and health factors for workers and everyone [and the environment] els…

    > Construction is expensive because we value public insight into projects and health factors for workers and everyone [and the environment] else impacted. Other countries not so much.
Railway construction in Spain and France is at least half the cost of the United States. Both "value public insight into projects and health factors for workers and everyone [and the environment] else impacted".
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