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Why Japan has such good railways

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Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#501

Post by QGQBGdeZREunxLe »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #393
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Street parking makes suburbs worse, too. Almost everybody in my neighborhood has their garages piled to the ceiling with junk and parks in the street, which makes it a pain to weave through even for someone driving a compact crossover… I can’t imagine what kind of hell it is for trash and delivery drivers having to squeeze huge trucks and vans through without swiping peoples’ cars.

This is where legislation can come in - when I bought my house, one provision was that I can't change the front to a garden, it has to remain usable as a parking space for a car. Even if I don't have a car. There's limited extra / visitor parking available. Of course, a lot of people have two cars so it's kinda moot but still.

In England, so many people are living at home due to the housing issues that some houses have 3-4 cars and no driveway. Streets are nowhere near as wide as Norther America so two cars cannot pass easily and drivers have to find gaps between cars to pass each other.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#502

Post by kettlecorn »

skybrian wrote: post #496
crote wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile, in rural areas and many suburbs, it would be pointless paperwork, because everyone has a big enough driveway for their cars and nobody parks on the street at night. ... which is exactly why it can have a huge impact! The default American suburban street is insanely wide due to the assumption that people will need on-street parking. Get rid of the unused on-street parking spaces and you immediately increa…

> Get rid of the unused on-street parking spaces and you immediately increase a suburb's density by something like 5%-10%. As you say, only for new construction. The lack of new construction is itself the problem.

A problem is that most municipalities require excessively wide streets with on street parking for any new developments.

Japan-width streets, despite their increased safety & land-use efficiency, are prohibited most places.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#503

Post by balderdash »

The problem with rail in many places like the US just comes down to door to door times. NE corridor train times are ok as long as your not going Boston Washington (even though it’s slower than it should be) and your going you can go downtown to downtown pretty easily - other than that there’s really not much intercity travel that makes sense by train. I’d super happily take the train if it was faster than driving or flying in the US. As an aside even for intercity travel it’s crazy the us doesn’t have more specialized trains like the Heathrow express even to make airport travel easier)

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#504

Post by iknowstuff »

7bit wrote: post #438
crote wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a city with a properly-designed transit system you wouldn't need a car at all. I think it is quite telling how car ownership is viewed here: it it something you "have to" "give up". Car use has been normalized to such a point that it is viewed as a necessity, almost a God-given right, rather than just another mode of transport to get you from A to B. Even in bike-heavy and transit-heavy cities you'll be hard-press…

> In a city with a properly-designed transit system you wouldn't need a car at all. That's the wrong argument. People stay in traffic for hours, being frustrated about the waste of time. Yet, when asked why they wouldn't take public transport, you hear a bunch of dumb arguments why public transport is shit. I experience this all of the time in my city. Public transport is awesome and you get around just as fast as wi…

I take the subway all the time in SF but usually won’t take buses because they rattle, feel like the cheapest afterthought, are cramped, and make me feel poor. The quality of the experience matters too.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#505

Post by ssl-3 »

tuna74 wrote: post #478
ssl-3 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trucks can be rented. When then-wife and I were remodelling the tired old house we lived in, we didn't own a truck. We talked about it (and in this instance, had space for one), and we mathed it a bit. The numbers quickly showed that it would be very expensive to own a truck, for only a little bit of added, occasional convenience. When we needed a truck to move cabinets or drywall or whatever, we rented one for that.…

And you also realise that for most things a van is more practical than a pickup truck.

It is.

The work I do requires me to have things like tools and ladders with me. A sedan doesn't quite cut it (I've tried), and SUVs are awful for every practical road-going purpose.

So these tools and ladders are out in the van (a top-trim Honda Odyssey) right now. It does OK on gas, it's very comfortable, it keeps everything nice and dry with 3 zones of HVAC, and it's passively theft-deterrant: Nothing about it says "steal these tools" to a would-be thief at all.

It's really good.

If I did work that didn't require a vehicle like that then I'd just have a small sedan. (I live in a very car-centric area of Ohio, as do the people I'm fond of being near. I either need a car or I need to change my views about what I find important in life; that's the way the cookie crumbles.)

And if I lived in an area with actually-good public transportation and the kinds of neighborhood shops that this promotes, then I probably wouldn't even want a small sedan. I like walking and riding a bike. And I'd rather buy a transit pass and spend more time reading, than pay for all the things that having a car requires me to pay for.

Adding the occasional train ticket (that never needs new tires, or an oil change, or a timing belt) for longer trips would be cheaper than owning a car, too.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#506

Post by zozbot234 »

Nasrudith wrote: post #491
zozbot234 wrote: post #407

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. That's why America never layed any railroads in the 19th century, and everyone just rode by horse instead. Oh wait, that's not what happened at all.

You are ignoring major cultural shifts - people also lived tightly packed into tenements then too. The tolerance for such space sharing without common purpose has declined.

Which means that culture could easily shift again. It's not like Europe wasn't just as car-obsessed immediately after WWII (and East Asia a few decades after that), they just realized that it was a bad idea and that cars were fundamentally incompatible with dense settlements.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#507

Post by cyberax »

ericmay wrote: post #498
tnk0 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a Tokyo local and yes, this is real. Even I find it uncomfortable. On the Yamanote Line during rush hour, trains come every 2-3 minutes and it can still look close to this. That said, most people's daily commute isn't this extreme -- it depends heavily on the line and direction. The tradeoff most Tokyo residents accept is: 30 minutes of crowded train vs. hours stuck in traffic with nowhere to park.

The OP is missing that you do the same thing you just do it in a car in a congested highway with your road rage, spend a lot of money, and all of that to avoid the impression of a subway ride that would never happen in an American city except maybe New York because these cities obviously lack population density at the scale of Tokyo . Oh and you get in car crashes and die. This isn’t an anti-car rant. I’m actually tr…

That's because subways are a dead end. They need to be removed entirely, and the dense cities need to be de-densified. That's the long-term plan.

> I’m actually trying to just get folks who don’t want to drive and shouldn’t be driving off the road so we can save money and do more with the infrastructure

Can we PLEASE just stop with the "saving money" and "off the road" nonsense? Please.

Adding transit does NOT reduce congestion (see: .https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/7/does-buildi... ). And it is NOT cheaper than owning a car.

If you dream of rail going to every city block like in NYC, then you should think about its other side effects: toxic densification, unaffordable housing, depopulation.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#508

Post by iggldiggl »

ericmay wrote: post #468
fc417fc802 wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what the activists think but in reality it just slowly makes everyone's lives worse. There's typically some sort of political or social dysfunction preventing effective transit and reducing parking doesn't magically make that go away. It's analogous to the tired refrain about new technology not fixing social problems.

Not in this case. Traffic and the movement of people are a bit like water. Path of least resistance. Make parking more difficult and folks will take transit, or live closer to work. Both options are better for local economies and save everyone money.

> or live closer to work

Which means you also need to battle the housing problem, too, though, plus changes in settlement patterns take years to decades to manifest. In the meantime, you might have to weather quite some griping about it or even serious pushback.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#509

Post by ericmay »

cyberax wrote: post #507
ericmay wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP is missing that you do the same thing you just do it in a car in a congested highway with your road rage, spend a lot of money, and all of that to avoid the impression of a subway ride that would never happen in an American city except maybe New York because these cities obviously lack population density at the scale of Tokyo . Oh and you get in car crashes and die. This isn’t an anti-car rant. I’m actually tr…

That's because subways are a dead end. They need to be removed entirely, and the dense cities need to be de-densified. That's the long-term plan. > I’m actually trying to just get folks who don’t want to drive and shouldn’t be driving off the road so we can save money and do more with the infrastructure Can we PLEASE just stop with the "saving money" and "off the road" nonsense? Please. Adding transit does NOT reduce…

> That's because subways are a dead end. They need to be removed entirely,

I certainly agree subways aren't the way of the future, at least in America. Too expensive and, frankly, unnecessary. We are already de-densified (which is why I find your below comment bizarre)

> and the dense cities need to be de-densified. That's the long-term plan.

Can you point to a single elected official in an American city that has a plan of reducing density in their city? I'm curious.

> Can we PLEASE just stop with the "saving money" and "off the road" nonsense? Please.

> Adding transit does NOT reduce congestion (see: .https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/7/does-buildi... ). And it is NOT cheaper than owning a car.

Well, no, I won't stop because it's true and arguments to the contrary are faulty for various reasons. For example, suggesting that transit doesn't reduce congestion misses the fact that you can't count future growth that didn't occur. Every single person riding transit would be driving, if there was no transit. It's just logically false. It's also ignoring the fact that growth and congestion and transit typically go hand-in-hand.

> And it is NOT cheaper than owning a car.

The only way for this to be true is to ignore all of the factors of car ownership. Even then it's probably still false.

> If you dream of rail going to every city block like in NYC, then you should think about its other side effects: toxic densification, unaffordable housing, depopulation.

No I don't. Also NYC is the most populous city in America so depopulation here as an argument yet again makes 0 sense. Housing is unaffordable precisely because of the density and demand, which go hand-in-hand.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#510

Post by coel »

rayiner wrote: post #166
Freedom2 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes see the US referred to as a "post-rail" society, meaning that it has outgrown the need for rail for the more intimate, personal transportation methods we see today. I submit that, like other HN commenters say, the US doesn't need rail due to this society. How will US citizens help their friends move or do their large (in terms of volume) Costco grocery shopping without large trucks and only using rail?

I’m probably a top 5% train nerd for the U.S. I took trains to work primarily from 2012-2020, in NYC, Philly, Baltimore, and DC. I used to ride Amtrak from Baltimore to DC every morning. I love Tokyo’s train system. I go there every year and I always take the train. But when I went there with my wife and three kids, I took a lot of Ubers! You can’t fit our double stroller with big America bags of toys and snacks on a…

> school drop off and pickup for three kids

When we were in Japan my son walked to school when he was 6. Parts of the walk close to the school were supervised. It wasn't just allowed, it was expected.

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