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Why Japan has such good railways

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Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#591

Post by ericmay »

Timon3 wrote: post #573
cyberax wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 transi…

> 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. Am I missing an obvious joke here? Because I've lived in multiple cities with great public transit, and this quote couldn't be further from the truth - the people love their public transit options, and they keep voting to build it out further.

The cost of housing further backs this claim. The market is usually right - and amenities like a tram or great public transit lead to higher prices particularly near the stops or in a certain proximity. With extra travelers you get shops and small business that spring up that corporations like Starbucks can't as readily compete against. That further drives interest and development and you create a positive economic feedback loop.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#593

Post by plumbees »

al_borland wrote: post #340
ericmay wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main low-hanging fruit is just removing surface parking lots in American downtowns and stopping the development and expansion of highways through the same. If you did nothing else that would have a significant positive impact. For almost all communities those surface parking lots are economic extracts from the community. They're woefully underpriced for tax purposes too.

The removed parking needs to be replaced by transit options people actually want to use. I live just outside a fairly large city. Getting downtown sucks. Driving is the only real option, but parking is annoying and expensive. Even if it was free, it would still be annoying. I almost exclusively take an Uber because of it. Those can add up and be a mixed bag as well. There is bus service, but it’s infrequent and quadr…

Something that peeves me where I'm at is that the transportation system here (not Chicago) is not coordinated across the systems. Here there's a bus that could take me to where I work, but it stops once every hour and is often late by 20 minutes. Local businesses also sponser a "free trolley" that follows the same route. It's overfull at peak hours and as a form of transportation the seats and setup make it much less safe for passengers. (Park benches as seats, and when the driver breaks you're holding on for life) The worse part is that this "free option" now competes with an existing valid option that cost a dollar. But that means that based on fares it's likely they will reduce stops and reduce hours (they have) it would have been better had the business incentive had just sponsered the existing bus route instead. Additionally comparing to china's awesome bus system (depending on the city), there, there is always two buses that come every 20 minutes. So you're never really ever suffereing. (Major cities anyways) The trolly is poorly managed and often three of them will come at once as they don't sync them when they run late they just all go so often you have three trolleys following each other and a very late bus. So it just... I never understood with the advent of GPS why buses aren't syncing so that they could just be traffic bound instead of time bound That way a bus could always arrive every x minutes instead of well the bus is scheduleed to arrive at x time and it might not arrive due to traffic woes. This should be syncable. ... Like why is the system so... I can't avoid saying it... capitalistically bound instead of populas bound. I mean it would better for capalism if that was more human centric. /political rant blah blah

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#594

Post by johnea »

dredmorbius wrote: post #560
johnea wrote: post #258

> 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…

Thank you for the link!

Here in San Diego we're still suffering from those removals.

New trolley lines aren't installed in a way to serve daily resident commutes, as the original trolley lines did, instead they're primarily organized to serve as tourist disneyland rides...

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#596

Post by cassepipe »

cyberax wrote: post #559
cassepipe wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No probably a better. Never had to let more than 2 trains go but mostly just one, but even in rush hour the most common though is there is just enough space so I don't have miss any train.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#597

Post by bamboozled »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #586
kulahan wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My internal Brandolini's Law alarm is sounding loud and clear from this post. If you think real investors should make 12-15%, you are essentially bankrupting the next generation. (Even 10% annualised would do it.) That is enormous intergenerational wealth transfer, ensuring the next generation cannot own a home before they are 50 years old or they rent forever. Outside of central Tokyo (the most central ku's surround…

Agree, most homes have been built to strict codes since the 80s, due to earthquakes and typhoons, which means by default, they're not "rubbish". There are many places with a crap finish, poorly insulated etc, but as I said in another comment, they're not by default trash.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#598

Post by mmooss »

superdisk wrote: post #580
mmooss wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> weekly or monthly basis So not "extremely common" as the commenter upthread said. > liquid left on seats As in, something spilled? > litter Lol. Only on a weekly or monthly basis? > gag-inducing smelly people I think some people are looking to be judgmental. > antisocial behavior That's taking it pretty far; it's easy to ignore these things which are almost always harmless - none have ever affected my life. Maybe b…

You can plug your ears and accept riding run-down trains full of shit, litter, puke, and threatening mentally ill people, in the name of not being "hateful," or as a society you can choose to have dignity and not put up with that.

Now the personal attacks; I'd rather ride with the person who talks to themself than the person telling me what I must think (or else I lack dignity!) - which of course is what they think.

> not put up with that

That's a bit controlling, insisting the world and other people must be your way. Freedom means something very different. No wonder you don't like NY.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#599

Post by dnnddidiej »

ericmay wrote: post #553
dnnddidiej wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

The bus is way more nice to get suburbs to city than my car though. It is actually quicker. And that is with a walk both ends and leaving at $random time. Make it a better car and people will switch. Part of it is making the car crapper. Bus lanes do that. Limited parking does it.

Of course if there were a train nearby I would probably get it. I'd pay an extra 10 mim commute time for that smooth ride (e.g. if train stops further away as they likely are). But if you are low on trains, buses can do a great job.

And if people won't shift make them free. Might be cheaper than building more roads anyway.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#600

Post by kj4211cash »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #583
kj4211cash wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The per mile costs are definitely high in America, for a lot of reasons, often related to laws and policies, but that's not really the issue. At the end of 2025, nearly 20 years since California voters passed Prop 1A, we have spent under $15 Billion on California High Speed Rail. As a point of contrast, the cost of 2025's tax cut extensions is estimated to be $4 Trillion. The fact is that we don't have quality interc…

You raise some very good points about the expansion of rail in Los Angeles basin. However, this part: "struggling to get a subway down Wilshire where it's obviously more needed". As I understand, it is incredibly complex to build subways in that part of LA basin due to natural gas deposits that make tunnelling dangerous and expensive.

The tunneling in that area is done now so we can see what happened. It was slightly more expensive and slower to tunnel in that area due to the tar sands and methane. But what was really expensive and time consuming was the NIMBY lawsuits and actual laws passed that used the methane as an excuse to try to stop the project.
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