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Why Japan has such good railways

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Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#601

Post by iggldiggl »

IshKebab wrote: post #483
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…

Another crucial difference is that energy supply (as in selling energy to end users – physically providing electric energy to the grid on the other hand does require sufficient physical transport capacity in some ways) and internet access are much more virtual things – the mere existence of an additional company offering those services doesn't directly congest the infrastructure as such.

Trains on the other hand are decidedly physical things that take up a significant amount of space on the infrastructure, and they do so as soon you start offering the service, no matter whether people actually use it or not. This means that railway networks can only support a very limited amount of competing companies before you start running out of capacity to run additional trains, and it's especially easy to run out of capacity when you're talking about mixed-traffic railways where fast long-distance services intermingle with slower regional and/or freight services.

And as soon as you run out of capacity, train operating companies have to start battling each other for train paths instead of passengers, a situation that can have completely different incentives which aren't necessarily best aligned with passengers' actual interests.

Another difference is that competing trains obviously cannot run at exactly the same time, which again makes competition less efficient because trains running at differing times cannot be perfect substitutes for each other, which becomes relevant once you add passengers' external schedule-constraints (having to arrive in time for work or whatever appointment they might have and maybe cannot really influence) into the mix. (Long-distance leisure travel is probably less affected by that, because people are regularly willing to flex their schedules for that, but other kinds of traffic aren't as flexible.)

This effect then only gets magnified further once connections come into play, because with different trains along the same route always having to be separated by at least a few minutes, it's impossible to offer equally attractive connections between e.g. a branch line (which might run only hourly or half-hourly at best) and all the various hypothetical competing services on the main line.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#602

Post by YmiYugy »

mastermage wrote: post #578
YmiYugy wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more politics and economics. Switzerland is quite a lot richer than Japan and is extremely decentralized politically. That creates strong incentives to provide good public services even to mountain villages. It also helps that Switzerland isn't experiencing population decline. The Swiss population as a whole is growing quite rapidly and from what limited data I could find even rural regions are growing.…

Quite alot richer than the 4th richest Economy in the world?

In a per capita sense of course. But it does pose an interesting question. To what degree does the quality of rail scale with absolute investments vs per capita investments. On the face of it rail is almost entirely fixed cost. The capital investment for tracks, trains and the operating cost for staff and energy are fixed to matter how many or few people the trains are serving. The crux is that for a given cost the quality scales inversely with the population and covered area. Transplant the Swiss rail expenses to Japan and it would make for a pitiful experience. Stretching over an area 9x larger and having to serve 12x more people, simply requires a lot more rolling stock, track and personell to offer a similar level of experience. In particular when talking about rural rail service it's most apt to compare areas of similar size and population and in this local sense Switzerland is not just richer per capita but absolutely.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#603

Post by Schiendelman »

mjevans wrote: post #226
Schiendelman wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we relaxed our zoning, your low quality apartment would be much cheaper, and you would be able to afford something better.

I do strongly agree about specific kinds of relaxing. * Clear and concise approvals process * No more NIMBY BS * Impact based assessment (similar to Japans) * Possibly goals to encourage desired types of use (but not hard LIMIT beyond disallowed!) While at the same time, the quality of built items should be increased. That is the minimum code should reflect a value that produces a good quality of life for those in th…

Generally, deregulation in housing would lead directly to improved quality. Right now, almost all new housing is built to minimum building code, because we are so supply constrained that there's no incentive to differentiate.

If you allow anyone to build (aka if you let people build on their land even if they're next to houses), you create space for quality differentiation in the market.

Note: land use code and building code are almost always different parts of law. You can simply delete land use code without having any impact on building quality.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#604

Post by throwaway2037 »

kj4211cash wrote: post #600
throwaway2037 wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you for the follow-up. What laws were passed that slowed/delayed the project?

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#605

Post by kj4211cash »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #604
kj4211cash wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you for the follow-up. What laws were passed that slowed/delayed the project?

Here's a bill that repealed a previous bill that slowed/delayed the project: https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/4653

I can't find the laws it's repealing immediately, but they must exist.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#606

Post by kulahan »

otterley wrote: post #487
tormeh wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Desirable things become expensive and undesirable things become inexpensive.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#607

Post by llbeansandrice »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #408
llbeansandrice wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by “abuse”?

I'm not meaning to take a dig at you, but the fact that you (and presumably many others) can genuinely ask that question serves to illustrate the parent's point quite nicely. To spell it out, "abuse" here means to engage in behavior that is socially undesirable or disruptive or would generally be expected to upset otherwise reasonable neighbors or whatever while nonetheless falling within the bounds of the law. An al…

The parent comment is specifically talking about abusing zoning laws. It’s also a very generic term and I’m interested in what would be an abuse of zoning laws specifically.

There are many kinds of zoning laws going as far as to say how tall and how open fences have to be depending on the type of yard the fence encloses. Eg a backyard can have a 7ft high 100% closed fence while a front yard is limited to 4ft and must be 50% open.

How someone can “abuse” sections of the law that can get so wildly specific as to restrict paint color is lost on me.

I don’t buy into the Japanese exceptionalism in such generic terms. Show your work.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#608

Post by llbeansandrice »

infecto wrote: post #459
llbeansandrice wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by “abuse”?

The other responder called it out well but to add. Abuse would be anything that disturbs others and out of the norm. Smells, pollution, noise etc. Japanese culture is much more considerate than a lot of western culture because of the social pressure to not standout. I would imagine this plays a large role in this.

Does this truly play out? I’m sorry but I don’t buy that this is true based on a stereotypical Japanese exceptionalism trope.

Re: Why Japan has such good railways

#609

Post by presentation »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #449
presentation wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If the incentives are right American companies can make good things, but usually they are not so because of poor policy I disagree. The incentives are never right for American companies because the only incentive they care about is making money at all costs. They don't even care about their reputations anymore if they can sell their rep for money

That's the point, you need to make making money = improving society. If you think that's impossible in the USA, then the USA is doomed and maybe you should look for the door. I am not that pessimistic.
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