It reads like fucking science fiction about an improbable alternate universe where everybody grows up into intelliegent well adjusted indivuals that can express themselves in a group without focusing on conflict and meaningless competition.
Any where else in the "universe" this has lead to corporate standoffs and litigation that has fall out for generations, and even killings and corporate subsidised wars in the developing world.
Except of course China, where the level of engineering prowess and scale of machinery and projects is rapidly building out a backbone transport system for themselves, and there customers.ie: they can lay down new, high speed rail lines, ready for use, at a steady walking pace, and are, at multiple locations in China and in other countrys.
How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart
91–100 of 158 posts
Re: How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart
#92[flagged]
The miracle of Indian Railways is largely that it operates despite the numerous challenges of operating any business in India. The sheer passenger volume of something like the Mumbai suburban railways (7.5 million passengers per day!) is mind-boggling.
Re: How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart
#93My personal experience of the multiple operators in Tokyo while traveling there only once for tourism was that it is a mess and not very convenient for users. Like having a station with almost a same name but different operator, a few hundred meters or a km away. And the difficulty of commuting between lines.
Confusing, perhaps. Inconvenient, not really, the same Suica/Pasmo cards work everywhere and handle transfers seamlessly.
Re: How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Too bad because it used to be a really good deal... Considering the environmental woes & collapses coming down the pike, I'd like to see a trans-border effort to drive down the price of mass transit _everywhere_. Put it on the G7 agenda, the OECD agenda, the UN General Assembly agenda, ...
The JR Pass has never been (and still is not) aimed at locals, who are not even allowed to buy it. It's for tourists only.
Yes, I was talking about tourists. Regional passes are available for locals as well but are more expensive.
Re: How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can tell this is a true success in Germany because 95% of local passengers now use it. It also caused a significant increase in ridership, putting the already overloaded rail system under a lot more pressure while taking away income from the rail companies (after making it cheaper).
Well yes, the idea is to have more people use the trains, so yes also more trains are needed(and more investment and replacement of the Bahn management) in general, but as far as I know there is no income taken away, as it is subsidized and compensated on the federal level.
Problem with this approach though is it makes the system very vulnerable to political changes. How much of a problem this is in Germany I'm not sure.
Re: How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
"which they destroyed with there ideology and hate in there own country" Arguably the ideology and hate are prerequisites for a country to have a monoculture. With ideology and hate comes xenophobia and racism == monoculture.
[flagged]
This comment clearly does not meet HN benchmarks for civility and good faith.
Re: How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well yes, the idea is to have more people use the trains, so yes also more trains are needed(and more investment and replacement of the Bahn management) in general, but as far as I know there is no income taken away, as it is subsidized and compensated on the federal level.
Problem with this approach though is it makes the system very vulnerable to political changes. How much of a problem this is in Germany I'm not sure.
That is a problem as since the introduction of the ticket there are constant talk from the car lobby politicians to remove it again. So bad for planning for the smaller rail companies.
But the biggest problem for the german trains remains the management of DB (Deutsche Bahn). Who are in charge of the network.
Who paid themself heavy bonuses all the time, while failing on all the metrics that mattered (they succeeded on making a new useless info page go live, that was the official justification for the bonus).
And they could do this, because the job of the ministry of transport was to make it easy for the car industry. And the german train is in theory privatized, in reality not so much.
The current ministry might be better though, so maybe something is happening. But I believe it, when I see it.
Re: How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart
#98It's always frustrating to read anything by most foreigners about Japanese trains. There are around 100 train companies in Japan. JR is 7 of those 100. The other 93 are NOT JR. Drawing any conclusions about Japanese trains from inspecting 7% of them is just wrong. The title, "How Japan's railways stayed one" is just false. They were never one, they are still not one. Take Tokyo, off the top of my head there is Toei,…
Why are you frustrated when you didn’t even read the article?
Re: How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
"which they destroyed with there ideology and hate in there own country" Arguably the ideology and hate are prerequisites for a country to have a monoculture. With ideology and hate comes xenophobia and racism == monoculture.
[flagged]
USA is a melting pot and is not viewed as a monocultural country.
Re: How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart
#100Every platform at Shinjuku plays a different song when a train pulls in. There are sixteen platforms. The system started in 1989 with twelve.
Made something to listen to all the songs - https://sheets.works/data-viz/bells-of-tokyo