>Rail travel is much more common in Japan That's not a cause but a consequence.
It's both; more usage improves the economics and makes it easier to justify improvements and expansion.
Tru tru.
Why Japan has such good railways
551–560 of 609 posts
Re: Why Japan has such good railways
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The removed parking needs to be replaced by transit options people actually want to use. Removing surface lots doesn't immediately mean removing parking . You're still free to build parking - you just have to integrate it into the building it is serving. Which gives you a pretty big incentive to only build the parking you actually need , and share it with neighboring buildings to reduce costs. > Removing parking do…
I agree with you. The person I replied to said, “if you did nothing else that would have a significant positive impact.” Building parking structures is also something else. They would make parking better than the surface lots, but make traffic worse. My objection was so the “nothing else” part. Surface lots are bad, but just removing them doesn’t solve the problem they are currently poorly solving. Larger parking str…
If I may clarify, my intent was just to suggest that if we did nothing else with respect to better transit that removing the surface parking lots and replacing them with something else would have that positive impact. Of course, I didn't clearly state that, but I wanted to let you know what I intended. :)
Re: Why Japan has such good railways
#553Earlier quoted context omitted.
Simpler solution but they’re a strictly worse version of your car and they still depend on highway widening projects. In other words, more of the same. To change the culture in the US we will have to make category changes. Cars and busses are in one category, walking, biking, and rail options in another. We need the latter or we risk just wasting time, effort, and resources. Busses make more sense and work better as…
A typical commute bus would carry 30-80 people so that replaces probably 30-80 cars. I don't know how a bus is worse than a train in this regard. Both need land to be built. Unless you are talking underground but they are expensive. If your city is a shit place to commute adding buses and bus lanes can help. Once you are on a bus zooming past all the traffic you can see. Also important point: I'd do min 300m between…
It's more about changing cultural habits. We already have busses and bus rapid transit, for example, where I live. And while I generally support the effort, it doesn't and won't have the adoption that something like, say, a street car or tram would have going along other various routes. The issue is the bus is just a worse version of your car. Even today people buy cars, drive them, pay $15 to park, rather than hop on our park-and-ride service that are conveniently located in the suburbs. That should tell you something about how difficult it is to change cultural habits.
But rail is a category change. You walk up to it, it takes you somewhere on a fixed line, you hop off. You continue on your walking journey. You expect things to be a little closer, more dense (but not too dense). You're not thinking much about bus time tables, it's new, it's cool, Europe has it. Japan has it. And those are great places you've visited, right?
That's the main difference.
Re: Why Japan has such good railways
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The US is rapidly densifying, and this will get _worse_ as the population starts shrinking in earnest. Japan leads the way here, its population has been going down for a while. Yet Tokyo now is in a real estate bubble. There are a lot of factors that go in to real estate prices, and I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to compare Tokyo to any city in America besides New York in just about any aspect. > Plenty of ci…
> There are a lot of factors that go in to real estate prices, and I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to compare Tokyo to any city in America besides New York in just about any aspect. Yes, it absolutely makes sense. The trend is simple: you build rail transit, you get unaffordable housing. Go on, try to find a counter-example. > Name one. That's not the same thing as NIMBY. No city is actively against growth. Prin…
> Yes, it absolutely makes sense.
It doesn't. Tokyo metro is like, 30+ million people. That has very little in common with, say, where I live which is Columbus, Ohio. You can argue this point but I am closed-minded to any difference of opinion here.
> The trend is simple: you build rail transit, you get unaffordable housing. Go on, try to find a counter-example.
That's because the demand for rail transit is so high that people will pay a premium to live next to it. When you say people really want to live in the suburbs, well, the market disagrees and that is reflected in housing prices.
> Princeton, Texas.
Ok so you've found a city of a little under 40k that is opposed to growth? How so? What article are you referring to? Who specifically from Princeton, Texas is speaking out? Why do you have to go to such a small town to find an example?
> No, it does NOT take cars off.
Ok but it does, because those people have to move around and if they're not using a train or something they'll use a car. I don't know why you're disputing this pretty trivial fact.
> Cars are _vastly_ superior to any transit mode on average, so people almost never give them up.
I don't think anyone needs to give up their car. I certainly don't want to. They're convenient and awesome. But I don't need or want to get in a car and drive 20 miles or something to buy a loaf of bread. That's a dumb and expensive transportation model.
> Except that I'm _also_ paying for all the highway construciton and maintenance in direct user fees ( https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur... ). A transit user does NOT pay for my use of highways, I do.
Not true in all states. Pretty much untrue generally. You're forgetting about the federal highway dollars that go into this stuff, which comes out of general federal taxes. Either way you pay for all sorts of things you don't use all the time. I don't use Social Security or Medicaid. Guess I should start arguing to get rid of those.
> And to give you some perspective, one mile of this failrail will cost about the same as construction of 1000 miles of modern 6-lane freeway. The entire project will cost about the same as the total highway spending for entire WA for 15 years.
Well to start we should just stop building freeways, we already built a lot and don't need them. Second please cite your source. Third, not applicable to all states.
> That's because transit riders in the US (or Europe for that matter) never pay the full fare cost, it's always subsidized.
Very few people pay the full cost for anything, including highways, or the police who have to ticket traffic offenders, or the fire trucks that have to go scrape dead kids off the pavement. Bad argument.
> And the ~$20 number is easy to get. For example, MTA: 1.15 billion annual rides (2023), total _operating_ budget $19.2B. Divide one number by another. And this does not include all the new subway construction cost, which is harder to account for.
You're just cherry-picking random things to argue about. First it's Seattle, then it's NYC, who knows what city you'll pick next to create an arbitrary data point.
> It will within 1-2 years: https://www.prb.org/news/u-s-population-growth-is-slowing-to...
We already have too many people anyway (earth should have closer to a billion). And we can increase the population if we so desire through immigration or benefits to promote procreation. What does this tie to anyway? Was your argument that because population levels are declining, Americans are moving to cities and driving up housing prices? Who cares?
> They don't.
Well they do, otherwise they wouldn't be moving there.
> Most people would prefer to live in suburbs, but they HAVE to live in dense cities.
If most people preferred to live in suburbs they wouldn't be moving to urban areas.
There is only one truly dense city in America and that's NYC and I guess you could argue Chicago. Other cities have some parts that are kind of dense, but even those are very car-centric (DC, Boston, for example).
Also, for whatever it is worth, I'm not in favor of NYC style development. I live in a single family house with a detached garage, with restaurants, parks, coffee shops, grocery, and more within a 15-20 minute walk and of course I can drive to those things too if I want. Initially what I was talking about was a city like where I live where we have these economically destructive surface parking lots and commuter culture which is bad for the city and bad for the economy. Adding transit to my city, particularly a north/south tram line will alleviate congestion, improve quality of life, and attract more people. Our surrounding neighborhoods can continue to have mixes of apartments, single-family homes, duplexes, and more.
Re: Why Japan has such good railways
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is like that phrase “nobody goes there anymore it’s too popular”. The surface parking lots would be replaced with things people want to go downtown for in the first place, never mind additional residences which mean more customers for businesses. Nowhere in the world, and I mean the entire world, has the scenario in which surface parking lots are replaced with other productive uses have resulted in a drop off in…
Nothing against multi-story garages. Just go (or don't go) to places based on how much of a hassle it is to do so. If enough people--local or otherwise--want to visit good for them. I definitely make choices based on how easy or hard it is to get to the destination.
I hear ya. I'm the same way. Funny enough we actually actively try to avoid going to the suburbs in our metro, especially some of the areas with Costco and such because the traffic and anger and road rage is just so god damn stupid and I think, frankly, things have gotten rather dangerous. Maybe I'm getting old. I find it much easier and less stressful to just walk over to somewhere and grab what we need when that is an option.
Re: Why Japan has such good railways
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rough.
Is it rough when a house costs 10-20x less than in countries where the best you can reasonable hope for is a whopping 10% return on your money?
10% is the bog-standard minimum, so you're more hoping for 12-15%, and the houses in Japan are knocked down and rebuilt between essentially every occupant, so they're pieces of garbage meant to last a decade or so, and about as environmentally unfriendly as one can get.
So yeah, it's extremely rough when there's nothing valuable to invest your money in.
Re: Why Japan has such good railways
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it rough when a house costs 10-20x less than in countries where the best you can reasonable hope for is a whopping 10% return on your money?
10% is the bog-standard minimum, so you're more hoping for 12-15%, and the houses in Japan are knocked down and rebuilt between essentially every occupant, so they're pieces of garbage meant to last a decade or so, and about as environmentally unfriendly as one can get. So yeah, it's extremely rough when there's nothing valuable to invest your money in.
I live in Japan by the way. It’s no where as dire as you make it sound. The houses are mostly knocked down because of the cultural attitude towards them and people’s lack of DIY knowledge when it comes to renovations. Many young people in the country side a slowly changing attitudes but the bones of many of their houses are no less garbage than anywhere else in the world. If your house costs $6k USD, then it leaves you a lot of left over money for renovations.
I’ll agree it sucks you can’t have a really cheap house an 15% return on your money (which seems like an exaggeration). But with some ingenuity I think people could make the lower property and house prices work for them a lot more than they do.
Re: Why Japan has such good railways
#558Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are a lot of factors that go in to real estate prices, and I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to compare Tokyo to any city in America besides New York in just about any aspect. Yes, it absolutely makes sense. The trend is simple: you build rail transit, you get unaffordable housing. Go on, try to find a counter-example. > Name one. That's not the same thing as NIMBY. No city is actively against growth. Prin…
> Yes, it absolutely makes sense. It doesn't. Tokyo metro is like, 30+ million people. That has very little in common with, say, where I live which is Columbus, Ohio. You can argue this point but I am closed-minded to any difference of opinion here. > The trend is simple: you build rail transit, you get unaffordable housing. Go on, try to find a counter-example. That's because the demand for rail transit is so high t…
> Tokyo metro is like, 30+ million people.
Yes, and this exactly is the problem. WHY is it a city of 30 million when the country's population is shrinking?
> That's because the demand for rail transit is so high that people will pay a premium to live next to it. When you say people really want to live in the suburbs, well, the market disagrees and that is reflected in housing prices.
No. There is NO demand for transit from people living in the city. None. The demand is from _companies_ that force people to work in/near dense city cores.
> Ok so you've found a city of a little under 40k that is opposed to growth? How so?
Moving goalposts?
> You're just cherry-picking random things to argue about. First it's Seattle, then it's NYC, who knows what city you'll pick next to create an arbitrary data point.
I'm sorry. I can't argue with you in good faith. You have zero understanding of the problem, and when confronted with facts or examples, you slink away from them. Because they are not to your liking.
For what city do you want me to give you the data? I can assure you that I'm not cherry-picking, and that NYC is actually one of the better-run transits.
> Well they do, otherwise they wouldn't be moving there. > If most people preferred to live in suburbs they wouldn't be moving to urban areas.
Spoken like a true privileged dude. Have you ever heard of doing what you hate because you _have_ to? That's exactly what is happening with cities.
> There is only one truly dense city in America and that's NYC and I guess you could argue Chicago. Other cities have some parts that are kind of dense, but even those are very car-centric (DC, Boston, for example).
The problem is that cities are getting _more_ dense. Not the absolute density.
Re: Why Japan has such good railways
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a hard enough time dealing gracefully with moderately congested trains in a place like DC. How do you coordinate your positioning so you can get off at the correct stop if the train gets packed this tightly?
From another city where things can get quite packed on some lines at rush hour: People in front of the door know that people will get out so they step outside to let the flow out and are the first ones to get back in, giving them the opportunity to go further inside so that they don't have to do it at every stop. Might even get a seat at some point (the longer the travel, the most likely to get a seat) I have been st…
> Also if it's really too packed, just wait 2 minutes for the next one
Except that the next one will be just as crowded.
Re: Why Japan has such good railways
#560> The Midwest was once criss-crossed by a network of ‘interurbans’, essentially intercity trams. In the United States, these lines have vanished They just "vanished"! Man, I hate it when that happens. You leave a railroad outside with out a lid on it for too long and it just, you know, evaporates! What a drag... What an amazing evasion of reality/truth, another classic use of the passive voice...
It would be more illuminating to reference the General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy directly, in which GM and other defendants (Firestone, tyre company, Standard Oil of California, Philips Petroleum, and Mac Trucks) were convicted of violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act in both monopolising the market for buses and the demolition of extant streetcar lines in numerous US cities:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...>