There's a bunch of claims in the article that are misleading or just wrong.
> Core rail operations are profitable for every Japanese private railway company
Only the urban, legacy private railways that benefited from the "build a suburb and trains to it" system. Rural lines, private or not, all hemorrhage money, as do many of the newer private lines (often built by government and private only in name).
> Japanese cities have the lowest residential density in Asia
This is because Japanese "cities" (市) are administrative units, not actual cities. Particularly in the rapidly depopulating countryside, it's common for a bunch of dying villages that can't afford to duplicate their services anymore to get more or less forcibly merged into a "city" like Miyoshi in Shikoku that, in satellite view, looks like untouched forest:
> The urban area of Tokyo, the densest Japanese city, has a weighted population density less than that of many European cities,
This is only true for Tokyo Prefecture, which encompasses a vast slab of mountains. Actual Tokyo (23-ku) packs in over 15k people/km2, 50% more than inner London (10k) and nearly 2.5x Greater London (6k).
"The Japanese love cars, but they take trains because they have the best railway system in the world"
That's exactly it. It's not because of some cultural bias or whatever.
I'm in Japan. I use trains because it's so very easy and it's so very reliable. It's simply the best option for travelling. If I wish to go to Tokyo? I check a website quickly, I look up the best connection for my schedule (easy to find), I may pay in advance, or not. I take my bicycle and go ten minutes to the nearest station, park the bicycle in the bicycle parking there, and off I go. As it's a small station I change to a limited express train (where I've booked a seat) after ten minutes, then, after another forty minutes I reach a big station and I switch to the Shinkansen and I'm off to Tokyo. I'm relaxed all the time. I buy a coffee on the train, and/or I buy coffee and lunch at the station and bring on the train.
Every other way of getting there is way more complex, and would take way more time.
IMHO cultural bias (and practicality, geographic and economic (low car ownership post-WW2)) is there in Japan, which led to a particular development model, which lends itself to non-car-centric infrastructure.
Contrast: Okinawa, where the US (cultural?) influence is higher and that has highways everywhere and where public transit is apparently not that good.
> Also, is not the population density fairly high? There's not as much land to spread in low-density car centric suburbs like there is in (say) the US.
LOL no. Outside of the big neighborhoods of the big cities, Japan is endless urban sprawl. I know because I live in a small Japanese city of 40k people and it's just detached houses, small 2-story apartment buildings, a big box stores. Public transportation is almost non-existant and I need to drive my car everyday for everything.
How many folks live inside versus outside the Tokyo-Osaka-Fukuoka rail corridor (Tokaido/Sanyo Shinkansens)? Saoporo is probably the next-largest city outside of that stretch.
Yeah, I know that half the population lives in either the Greater Tokyo Area or the Keihanshin area. But you still have the other half scattered all around the country.
And even within those areas, when you move to the outskirts it is not so dense. Take the train from Narita to central Tokyo and tell me what you see.
>Are there not a lot of toll roads in Japan as well?
There are, but at least wherever I've been driving or been a passenger, there are alternative roads which are just fine. In general slower, but every so often the toll roads are congested for miles due to a combination of roadwork and a LOT of traffic, which makes them slower than the alternative roads during those times.
As for cars - the Japanese aren't against cars. Many of my neighbors have two cars, particularly dual-income households. And they take very good care of them, as a rule. More than I would - to me a car is just a utility. Not for the Japanese.
And people love driving too, at least outside the major cities.
Population density: Technically I live in a town with some 300,000 people. But it used to be nearly a dozen towns until 2006, when Japan decided to do some major restructuring and in many areas a bunch of smaller towns were thrown together to become a larger one. So we're really spread out..
Maybe some trains could be more redneck coded somehow? Steam trains with sweaty stokers and buffalo shooting from the windows of course had plenty of that, but how to bring something from that aesthetic to the present? Bar carriage with sports screens still sounds still a bit passive and cliche. Maybe a gym car? There are already kid and pet cars after all at least here. In German trains you get a real glass pint for your beer, I think that's a big plus.
Riding the the train daily is the norm in the eastern United States. The urban density and shorter distances between metros allows it to be affordable.
The US is massive... riding the train between most cities is dramatically more expensive than flying and takes most of a day if not multiple days between cities.
I used to commute weekly between two cities in Texas and it was a 2 hour flight. (Houston - Lubbock)
On the JR line in Tokyo, standing with a friend who motions to me with his glance to a salaryman standing next to us. "Hand-stitched suit", my friend whispers. Which is when I notices this guy's "threads" (literally).
Perhaps not Warren Buffett, but no doubt an executive of some stature riding with the rest of us plebes.
At my native home my bicycles are insured, now through my home insurance (part of the furniture, kind of), but at one point one of my electric bicycles was too expensive for that and required additional insurance. As soon as the price dropped a bit I could drop that extra insurance.
As the comment above said, in Japan a bicycle is registered to a person when you buy it. Even the second hand bikes from recycle shops. And there _is_ a theft problem.. but not everywhere. I sometimes don't bother with locking my bicycle outside the shopping mall, here (in my town in Japan). Nobody steals bicycles here. There was a time when a particular gang of teenagers would steal scooters though.. the 50cc ones. A friend's scooter was stolen. The police found the culprits and he got his scooter back.
But not much problems with bicycles. Unlike in my town back home. Now that I'm here I would not be surprised if, when I go back, I find that someone broke into my garage and stole the bicycles.
Though even if you're getting an hybrid assist bike, if you're paying much more than 1500$ for a commuter, probably overpaying [1200 from the manufacturer]
Convenience & simplicity aside, how expensive is it? Not necessarily compared to driving, but just in general. When I went to Japan a long time ago, I remember being kinda shocked at the cost compared to the JR Pass for tourists (which included the Shinkansen), but part of that was to give tourists a huge incentive to spend some money outside of Tokyo, I'm sure, but I remember some fares feeling expensive for people just to head into the city for a night out...
I don't think it's expensive, but then again I'm comparing it to train prices in Northern Europe, which is just painful. There, I'm used to pay for the ticket through gritted teeth. In Japan I can pay for a ticket + limited express (better train w/booked better seat) for a 45 minute ride for what I would pay for a pint of beer at home. Totally worth it. The Shinkansen for a 90 minute ride is not cheap, say ten beers.. Northern Europe beer prices, mind.
The subway system in Kyoto (Karasuma line) is operated by the local government. I visited during the busiest time of the year (Gion matsuri), and the trains were not overcrowded, were frequent and arrived on the dot. The subway system is nicely air conditioned which was pleasant as I visited during a heatwave.
I'm mostly in favor of privatization, but this is an example where the local government provide an exceptional service which is in no way inferior to the privately operated ones.
Japan's railroad system has a big geographic advantage - the country is long and narrow. The railroad system is primarily a long end to end line with short crosswise branches.[1]
That's an efficient structure. The branch lines don't have to be fast. Many are still narrow gauge, at 3 ft 6 in.
The US had to fill a huge area in the railroad era. That left a lot of underutilized track once the road network got good.
The northeast and west coast metropolitan corridors are similar, and combined have comparable populations, densities, and distances as Japan. Yet we can't even build a single high-speed line. And for all the excuses about the difficulty of building rail through developed regions, the existing rights of ways and infrastructure in both the NE and California are comparable to what everybody else has had to work with, at least in the past 50 years. The density of the NE is nothing like what you see elsewhere in the world, especially Asia, and Japan and China specifically.
It's lack of political will and ambition, period, by both the community and leadership. And excusing our inability by pointing at the hurdles, insinuating that others succeeded because they didn't face the same challenges, only perpetuates the paralysis.
> The density of the NE is nothing like what you see elsewhere in the world, especially Asia, and Japan and China specifically.
Yeah, I defy anyone who claims the US can't build trains "because of density" to fly to Tokyo, and actually take the Seibu Shinjuku line west from Shinjuku station. Look at those buildings built right next to the tracks, for many, many kilometers. People live in those -- if the windows opened, you could reach out and touch the laundry on the balconies that overlook the tracks [1].
Compared to that (and let's be clear: that's one average line in west Tokyo), even the Acela line in the east coast is a bad joke, density-speaking. The US doesn't build decent trains because the US is corrupt and sclerotic and run by incompetent people, not because of some mythical structural advantage in Magical Asia.
[1] I have no idea how people manage to live like that -- these trains are loud, and run basically from 4AM until 1AM every day -- but it's not lost on me that the fact that people can build houses right up next to the tracks might be the true advantage of Magical Japan.
The U.S. can build trains and has a good rail system—for freight not passengers. It’s not obvious how Japan moves freight, but the U.S.’s rail system evolved to move freight efficiently. That is a huge difference and not necessarily the result of corruption or incompetence.
My understanding the rail share of freight is relatively low in Japan compared to many other developed countries. Most freight moves by truck or coastal shipping. Looking at a map of Japan, most of the cities are by the coast, so I guess coastal shipping makes a lot of sense.
I live in a unique community which is sandwiched between a public-transit light rail line, and a freight line as well.
The light rail can run a frequency of 12-20 minutes in each direction. The freight's schedule: who really knows?
But the freight train is generally inhibited from sounding its horn or bells near residential neighborhoods. So, unless I am really paying attention while awake, I cannot detect it passing by, no matter the size.
The light rail is audible from where I sit, usually, but only just. It toots the horn mostly as it passes, but it's not disruptive or annoying to me, anyway. I sort of enjoy the white noise it all makes. There are cars that do a lot worse.
I think that the architecture here is helpful, too. The buildings are clustered around a central courtyard, and really insulated from the road noise. At any given time, there may be folks splashing in the pool, or running the jets on the hot tub, anyway.
The light rail stations are a major convenience to living here, and the train noise is absolutely the least of our worries!
I've heard people say that, but I find it hard to believe. I think I'd go nuts. And sure, they don't take 10 minutes to pass, but the busy lines (like the Seibu line I mentioned) are running at least 2-3 trains every 10 minutes, so they might as well be continuous.
The houses built next to the crossing points, in particular, have always boggled my mind. BING BING BING BING BING....
(I mean, maybe you’re right in some places, but it’s certainly not everywhere. Ironically, I happened to be standing next to a completely empty crossing, gates down, bonging away, while reading your comment.)
The nearest crossings where I live indeed stop the chimes when the barriers have been lowered. This doesn't actually make much of a difference really, because the train arrives only a few seconds after, and, because it's a local line, there are never more than three cars in the train so it passes very quickly.
Not that I'm bothered by the chimes at all. And grandson loves them.
I think a big part of it is also that (partly because of the necessity of building for earthquake resistance), Japanese construction is a lot more robust than American housing, and also tends to have extremely good soundproofing on windows and doors. Actually, it's most of the rest of the world, except the US.
> Japanese construction is a lot more robust than American housing, and also tends to have extremely good soundproofing on windows and doors.
Oh, you’re definitely engaging in Magical Japan, here.
While building standards have certainly improved in the past 20 years, the average Japanese house is built just strong enough not to fall over when someone farts. In particular, windows tend to be single pane, and you’re lucky if they block a strong wind, let alone noise.
> Japanese construction is a lot more robust than American housing, and also tends to have extremely good soundproofing on windows and doors.
This must be a different Japan than the one I'm familiar with, where exterior walls are often uninsulated and only a few inches thick and single-pane windows are still the norm in a lot of housing. I wouldn't be surprised if soundproofing were better for railroad-adjacent buildings, but compared to American homes the soundproofing here is surprisingly poor.
As the sister comment said - the houses are just strong enough not to fall over in a "normal", all-the-time earthquake. Our house sways a lot under typhoons and far-away earthquakes (far away = long wavelengths). It's only relatively recent that building codes have been updated to handle real earthquakes without falling over like a house of cards. Remember the Noto earthquake Januar 1, 2024? Large areas didn't have a single house still standing.
(Which is why we're now tearing down our old house and building a new, stronger one. Post-war Japan was more concerned with a) building a lot of houses, and b) keep lots of jobs, which meant, as far as houses were concerned, building use-and-throw-away houses. Then build another. And another. And don't talk to me about sound proofing.. it's non-existing. What with no insulation in walls.)
When I lived in Japan it was in a relatively recent (last 10 years) but not brand new apartment block - Maybe if you are talking about a rural area or an old postwar Showa era house, sure. But either way the sound proofing is worlds better than any new construction in the US.
I'm in a 20 year old two-storey apartment right now (while we're building a new house), and the sound-proofing isn't non-existing but not as bad as some other apartments I'm aware of (where you can't make a sound without the neighbors start knocking on the walls/floors, and you're privy to thing you don't actually want to hear..) - but we can hear every footstep when the neighbors walk the stairs to their upper floor. The rooms which are more distant are fine, we don't actually hear them talking. Most of the time.
The advatange they have is that all 4 of their major metropolitan areas are in a straight line across flat land. The enemy of high-speed is any diviations from flat and straigh. On he accela top speed can be maintained less then 40% of the trip.
All the major metro areas on the Acela corridor are also on a straight line, on significantly flatter land than Japan. Notice how the Acela never spends 10+ minute periods in long, deep tunnels under mountain ranges. The Acela primarily spends most of the trip going below 100 mph because it is operating on 100+ year old infrastructure that has only ever been upgraded piecemeal as it starts to fail.
It's always feels funny to me when taking the Acela between Boston and NYC that you go screaming along at 150mph... for a small portion of track in Rhode Island. The rest of the time you're going much slower. It's almost like, why even bother for that small section?
The Shinkansen was a very different experience when I took it.
That's got zero to do with anything. you do not need to add rail to the whole country.
As an example SF Bay Area and Switzerland are about the same size, SF has double the population density. It has a Bay, Switzerland has mountains. Switzerland has like 10x the trains. There's no reason SF Bay couldn't too.
It's similar for most metro areas. LA used to have a huge train system. Bad insentives and government policies killed it. They're adding new ones back but they're adding them in the worst possible way, making them unprofitable and designed only for people who can't afford cars means they'll only be a money sink at best, or they'll get underfunded and decrepit at worst
Even the lowest density US states have most of the population in corridors or areas with sufficient density.
E.g. Montana used to have passenger rail through the most densely populated Southern part of the state. That region has comparable density to regions of Norway that have regular rail service. (There are efforts to restart passenger service in Southern Montana)
And it's not like places like Norway have rail everywhere either - the lower threshold for density where rail is considered viable is just far lower.
The actual proportion of the US population that lives in areas with too low density to support rail is really tiny.
It has a big geographic disadvantage too: the entire country is a mountain range. Japan's railway network relies on countless tunnels and viaducts, adding greatly to the cost, especially for high speed lines which require larger clearance and therefore larger tunnel diameters, and larger turning radii.
Geography is no excuse for the US not having better passenger rail service, especially when geography was no obstacle to the US having fantastic rail service in the 1920s.
There is no excuse for the US’s failure. Many countries have large areas to cover. China is a similar size and has massive HSR coverage. The US could too if they didn’t waste all the money on corruption.
China also has nationalized rail systems. The major reason for the failure in the US is that the rail lines are not publicly owned. The reason the rail systems never got upgraded and Amtrak couldn't deploy high speed rail everywhere (despite it being a national priority in the 70s, 80s, and 90s) is that outside of the northeast corridor, Amtrak doesn't own the lines and couldn't get the owners to allow Amtrak to upgrade them for passenger high speed rail.
> China also has nationalized rail systems. The major reason for the failure in the US is that the rail lines are not publicly owned.
The article we're discussing explains that Japan has the best passenger rail system in the world, and which happens to be privatized, along with privately owned track. So which one is it? Go figure.
While I agree with you, their system did not start privatised, and the Shinkansens predate privatisation by some time. I don't have the evidence to justify this, but I suspect that you need national buy-in - both financially and politically - to start a HSR build-out, which could then potentially be privatised at a later stage.
I believe the Japanese private rail companies also own the lines where their traffic is. This would explain a lot. There are other countries (including my native one) where the trains are run by one company and the lines are owned by another. This does.not.work. For what seems like obvious reasons. There's no economic gain for the owner of the infrastructure to spend money, quite the opposite in fact.
Most EU countries have adopted the approach of putting the infrastructure company and the public train company under the same holding company, which is sort-of the minimum that EU regulations demand. In practice, in many countries the previous national rail company (under whatever conglomerate structure it may be operating under today) is fiercely protective of its own turf and tries to prevent new entrants, and digging their heels in implementing EU railway competition regulations. So complying with the letter of the law, but does everything in its powers to not comply with the spirit.
Then again, given the UK experience of going all-in on the "vertical separation" and privatization path, perhaps one shouldn't blame them.
The interesting thing is how the EU railway policy just keeps plowing ahead trying to impose the "vertical separation" approach in the EU, despite the disastrous results from the UK experience (and some EU countries to a somewhat lesser extent, so far the UK seems to be the only example of going all-in on that approach).
Russia is far larger and far less populated, it's an economic backwater and a cultural dead end. Yet despite that they have rail connecting their country together.
Once you get past the Urals, most of Russia's development is along an east west axis until you reach Baikal and the the far east. Also as a Marxist dictatorship for some years, there was little emphasis on independent travel (cars etc)
To call Russia a "cultural dead end" is a bit much, considering all the great artists of various kinds that country has produced. In fact, you'll find that famous Russian novels like Anna Karenina and Doctor Zhivago feature trains as motifs.
Great point about trains being featured in Russian novels. I imagine trains are well-represented in Japanese literature too, as well as film and maybe poetry. That's an angle I'd enjoy investigating further for other cultures. Surely the U.S. is more of a "car culture", but even offhand I can think of, for example, the novel On the Road with train-hopping having a significant role.
What is this corruption you are talking about? What specifically are you talking about? Things you don’t like aren’t necessarily the result of corruption.
"The US could too if they didn’t waste all the money on corruption."
China is also corrupt, but it is a dictatorship with massive central planning. Central planning leads to wastage and human costs in many areas but it is good at producing new infrastructure.
Japan is also mostly mountains and is prone to natural disasters like earthquakes and Typhoon induced floods.
Sonce our first trip in 2017 at least two railways we rode have been damaged enough to be partially inoperable and under lengthy restoration work - Hisatsu line (washed away bridges) and Kurobe Gorge railway (bridge destroyed by earthquake).
Then explain international train travel in Europe or China's national train network. Both fill large areas.
Conversely, the UK is long and narrow, and unlike Japan has neither earthquakes nor is it particularly mountainous and yet its train system is rubbish.
Here in Spain a huge chunk of the population lives along the coast, so obviously what we need is a radial network along the coast, with a few spokes connecting to Madrid in the center. But for whatever reason it's impossible to make any trains that go anywhere other than the capital.
The Netherlands is a similar shape to the continental contiguous United States yet we have an excellent public transport system. Very good trains and every population has awesome cycling infrastructure.
The US could have all of this and more in their populated areas. They're the richest country in the world. Why is the infrastructure so neglected? It's clearly a choice.
The question to ask is "who owns the rail lines?". That matters for having a good rail system. It's basically the same problem for why the US doesn't have fiber internet available everywhere, too.
For new rail at least, whoever wants to build them gets to own them, right?
I think what it comes down to is that if automobile companies had to build and maintain the roads, we certainly wouldn't have so many cars. But railway companies need to build the train lines, while competing with taxpayer funded automobile infrastructure. It's not impossible (see Japan) but also not easy.
Good parallel. An article recently explained how Switzerland has the fastest fibre optical network: all companies share the same cabling. Dig once. No need to hook the property or do anything when switching provider.
US army can deploy air force, tankers, soldiers and all the logistics together with Burger King anywhere in the world within days and somehow people that pay for it still think a simple rail in their home turf is impossible.
I dunno, centre right national governments in recent years have been pretty car friendly. Driving can be cheaper for family outings. For two adults and two teens to go from Utrecht to Amsterdam and back (26 minutes each way) is €48 (with discount if you buy a flex pass monthly) or €80 without a discount. Suddenly driving is pretty competitive
Japanese rail companies are allowed to buy land, then build infrastructure, then enjoy the increased value of said land. American rail is hobbled by the extraction of increased land values by those who already own land by the stations. Of course, freeways are similar, but people don’t mind roads losing money.
China is giant and sprawling and they are able to do it.
That said this reply doesn’t actually address much of what the article talks about, most interestingly how rail companies are private and are also real estate developers. That thought process ought to make sense to Texans or something.
The USA's westward expansion was indeed facilitated by the timely development of railroads, and so many of the cities were built around the ability to haul freight and service depots along the rail lines, much like ancient cities sprang up alongside rivers and bays because of boat shipping.
However, the United States is also a nation built upon the motor vehicle, and our much-vaunted freeway system here was built deliberately as a national defense measure that could easily move materiel and troops between cities and states, in the event of a domestic invasion or future wars on our own soil. The freeways enjoyed deep investments also due to commercial utility, and again, many cities and habitations sprang up at the nexus of various freeways, as truck-based shipping could service them as well.
I think one of the main obstacles to rail lines in the United States is our car-centrism, and many motorists of any socio-economic class really, really hate trains and public transit of any kind, and any other type of transport that may impinge on their freedom to drive wherever they want on as many highways as possible.
Therefore it is extraordinarily difficult for railways to get good rights-of-way. Amtrak is a redheaded stepchild. Commuter rail may be better respected in places where it was established, like the Eastern Seaboard, but if I asked any voter or motorist here, they would be voting against any sort of rail project whatsoever.
There are also other factors. Heavy bombing during the war had the effect of clearing a lot of previous infrastructure so they were in effect building from scratch in some areas.
This is a little counterintuitive but it does make a difference.
I recently moved from a coastal city (that is very linear) to a landlocked city spread evenly in all directions. I had naively assumed the new city would be easier to get around in, since on average places would be closer to you. But the first city has decent commuter rail, which meant I could get to the other end of the city in an hour, and use cabs for last mile connectivity.
I'm sure you can have good public transit in "round" cities too, but it is certainly more difficult to plan.
Round cities are even better for rail. You run a line in a circle, like the Yamanote line in Tokyo, and now it has the advantage of periodic boundary conditions. Everywhere is central!
It’s fascinating to read but I have a hard time imagining a public western railway provider could evolve into a train based mega corporation doing real estate and health services.
The Swiss SBB also has a real estate division, which makes them a lot of money actually (I think a lot of that comes from leases from shops in train stations).
They also have an energy company which runs some hydroelectric power stations.
Transport for London (TfL) have a fledgling property development arm called Places for London which aims to try and replicate some of the successes of Japanese railway companies. They propose the mooted Bakerloo line extension is partially subsidised by over-station developments.
TfL can barely build some flats in Zone 2 without the locals rioting like they're destroying a Cotswolds village. Actually, it can barely fix the literal busiest station in the country without a bunch of minor celebrity detractors riling up everyone about how much of a travesty it is that we're doing it.
Without the public or central government support, the efforts you're talking about amount to very little.
Deutsche Bahn does everything from real estate to infrastructure to truck companies (no longer in Europe, though, they had to sell that off) to car sharing to energy production to IT development to trading lumber, workforce rental and startup venture capital. The list changes every few days, so some they may no longer do, others they will now do. It's a megacorp.
Many of these have grown out of the original business model.
What is seldom mentioned in these conversations is that the United States has a very good rail system—-for freight. That’s what the U.S. system did well, not passengers. From the article it isn’t obvious how Japan moves freight, but they obviously aren’t moving a lot of freight on the Shinkansen.
They actually started doing that very recently, converting old Shinkansen into a freight trains. Obviously you can't fit large cargo, but it's a good option for fast transport of parcels etc.
It's a good article, but I think the "it's not culture, just good governance" idea is a little hand wavy. The two bleed into each other greatly. The fact that houses are more disposable and wealth is less intergenerational in Japan does a lot to tamp down the NIMBY issues that plague e.g. the UK.
The UK is so far gone that the transport authority in it's largest city can't revamp stations or do add-on development without literal years of hand wringing. And even then it's often rejected or reduced in the end.
London is probably the worst-governed, or worst-planned, city of its peers. NYC has famously bad governance but at least it actually has its own government.
The national government controls all London budgets, the Mayor has no power, there's no legislative body for the city (GLA is not one), and there are 33 different borough councils that don't owe the Mayor anything.
>The UK is so far gone that the transport authority in it's largest city can't revamp stations or do add-on development without literal years of hand wringing. And even then it's often rejected or reduced in the end.
They just finished a line that traverses the whole city. It's 73 miles from end to end and carries one seventh of the UK's rail journeys (600,000 trips per day).
The Elizabeth Line is basically at the bare minimum for a global Asian city. It's not even that good by comparison. It's really a joke that London only has one line of that caliber and it took them literally decades to build.
So it's touted as some great success but to me it's a sign of failure. They'll say similar things if they ever finish HSR in California. Yeah I'm sure the end product will be fine but the whole process is disgraceful.
Never mind the fact that the Elizabeth Line is only so over-utilized because London completely fails at building density in and around its center. So it has to make its people live in zone 30 and sit on the train for two hours every day.
These mixed companies can be very confusing to tourists especially. I'm always answering questions from tourists who are confused why they can't buy a ticket to where they want to go.
If you intend to do a fair amount of travelling and your stay is <3 weeks, it may be worth getting a JR Pass[1]. It doesn't work for all lines, but does include the Shinkansen and several of the major inner-city lines. Buses too.
Probably not worth it if you're only visiting one city as the pass is quite expensive. There are regional tourist passes though.
Unfortunately the 70% price rise on the JR pass back in 2023 made it much less likely to be economic for most people compared to just buying tickets as you go, even for trips that visit more than one city. Last time I was there I did a loop up from Tokyo to Hokkaido and back by rail, and it was still cheaper to buy individual tickets. (There are obviously still some itineraries where it works out cheaper, but it's much less of an "obviously good idea for most people" than it was back before 2023.)
Having followed some tourists coming to Japan, a large amount of the people appreciate convenience, and the rail pass gives them that. The price is secondary.
Hell, there are even people paying the equivalent of 100 USD just to have someone pick them up from the Haneda airport and accompany them to the hotel. Not even a taxi service, just to be with them to buy them the train tickets, etc.
Almost everything works with Suica, no? Although to be fair I guess tourists are _more_ likely to use the heritage lines with slightly different rules.
Tourists are often buying paper tickets. There's no way for a foreign Android phone to use a digital Suica, so people with Android are stuck with a physical card or paper tickets, and there's a lot of outdated information online that the physical cards are in low supply (They were last year but this year they're not).
When we visited Tokyo last year, what stopped us from even trying was the online information we came across was unclear and suggested we could only get the physical cards at the airport and at some tourist office, and we forgot to look for it at the airport... I don't know if that is correct or not, but compare Oyster in London which is advertised at practically every corner store, so even if you get into town not knowing the system, it's hard not to find somewhere you can get a card (or you can just use contactless - I haven't had an oyster card in years).
The UK is completely chaotic ticket-wise on a national level, though.
We got IC cards (ICOCA) in Osaka for 500 Yen each, and used them for 2 weeks travelling across Japan this March. Worked like a charm, only thing that's annoying for us tourists is how it is a stored value card and needs to be topped up. I think we still had like 500 Yen on our cards when we departed, even though we bought a lot of stuff with it on the last few days.
While we got ours at the Osaka airport (KIX), I am sure I saw the "purchase a new SUICA/ICOCA" options at a few terminals while topping up. I suppose you mixed up the "Welcome to SUICA" tourist card (available at fewer locations) with the normal one? I was under the impression there was a lot of confusing information floating around online.
But I agree, public transport in London is - as a tourist - more straight forward. Just a matter of spotting the terminals at some stations IIRC. OTOH in Japan we found no station with an elevator smelling like someone used a hippie bus as an emergency toilet ;-)
> we could only get the physical cards at the airport and at some tourist office, and we forgot to look for it at the airport
Little over a decade ago I did exactly the same. I ended up buying a Suica card at Ueno station from a clerk, which was a bit of an adventure since she was eager to help but barely spoke any English and I barely spoke any Japanese. Together we skillfully massacred both languages with an ad-hoc pidgin and lots of gesturing. Due to an issue with my wireless hotspot I only had an old school phrasebook at my disposal, which was about as helpful as the infamous Monty Python sketch implies. The airport seemed much more convenient as a tourist since everyone there at the very least spoke basic English. At the time it was certainly possible to get a Suica card at a major train station, though admittedly not easy.
Apple doesn't make regional variants of the phone, so all models have the technology built-in, even if it's disabled by default. Android phones outside of Japan lack Suica support.
Like: you can actually change the lightbulbs for the headlights of the Series 0 train while it being underway - there is a service hatch that opens to a human-sized service area accessible from the driver's cabin which allows such repairs.
> the most striking institutional feature of Japanese rail is that it is privately owned by a throng of competing companies.
Knowing the author I knew it was going to be his main argument before even opening the blog post. And it's obviously wrong, these companies don't compete with one another, they all have a local monopoly. (The article itself acknowledges that and even acknowledges the organizational benefits of such monopolies, but the author could refrain himself from praising the virtue of competition nonetheless…)
The article correctly identifies positive externalities of railways:
> The railway can capture the value it creates for me by charging me a fare, but it cannot capture the value it creates for those at my destination. As transport infrastructure creates benefits that produce no revenue for providers, free markets rarely build enough of it.
…but then very confusingly argues that railways should be profitable, including on per-passenger basis. A profitable transport system with positive externalities is inevitably either too expensive or under-investing (or maybe both) with respect to maximising the total economic productivity. Ancillary monopolies in real estate and retail might offset that somewhat, but only to an extent.
Similarly, I don't understand why the article speaks positively of the closure of 83 "loss-making lines". The lines being loss-making for the rail company doesn't mean they aren't improving total productivity, as the very same article argues!
Further, they mention the over-crowding in Tokyo later on
> Tokyo’s infamously crammed trains are a symptom of underpriced rush hour traffic
…but somehow blame it on the price being too low, and not under-investment into more capacity by the commercial companies! People commuting less because they can't afford it would be bad for the businesses on the other side of their commute!
I suppose this is the centre-right ideological slant of Works in Progress showing, which is a bit of a shame when it leads to those self-contradictions in the usually quite rigorous publication.
> At its most extreme, three separate commuter lines compete for the traffic between Osaka and the port city of Kobe, running in parallel, sometimes fewer than 500 meters apart.
Sometimes fewer than 100 meters apart. Or connecting to each other's with a bridge.
There's a bunch of claims in the article that are misleading or just wrong.
> Core rail operations are profitable for every Japanese private railway company
Only the urban, legacy private railways that benefited from the "build a suburb and trains to it" system. Rural lines, private or not, all hemorrhage money, as do many of the newer private lines (often built by government and private only in name).
> Japanese cities have the lowest residential density in Asia
This is because Japanese "cities" (市) are administrative units, not actual cities. Particularly in the rapidly depopulating countryside, it's common for a bunch of dying villages that can't afford to duplicate their services anymore to get more or less forcibly merged into a "city" like Miyoshi in Shikoku that, in satellite view, looks like untouched forest:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/tRtdQisJCUMsqivv7
> The urban area of Tokyo, the densest Japanese city, has a weighted population density less than that of many European cities,
This is only true for Tokyo Prefecture, which encompasses a vast slab of mountains. Actual Tokyo (23-ku) packs in over 15k people/km2, 50% more than inner London (10k) and nearly 2.5x Greater London (6k).
"The Japanese love cars, but they take trains because they have the best railway system in the world"
That's exactly it. It's not because of some cultural bias or whatever.
I'm in Japan. I use trains because it's so very easy and it's so very reliable. It's simply the best option for travelling. If I wish to go to Tokyo? I check a website quickly, I look up the best connection for my schedule (easy to find), I may pay in advance, or not. I take my bicycle and go ten minutes to the nearest station, park the bicycle in the bicycle parking there, and off I go. As it's a small station I change to a limited express train (where I've booked a seat) after ten minutes, then, after another forty minutes I reach a big station and I switch to the Shinkansen and I'm off to Tokyo. I'm relaxed all the time. I buy a coffee on the train, and/or I buy coffee and lunch at the station and bring on the train.
Every other way of getting there is way more complex, and would take way more time.
>> "The Japanese love cars, but they take trains because they have the best railway system in the world"
> That's exactly it. It's not because of some cultural bias or whatever.
Are there not a lot of toll roads in Japan as well?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressways_of_Japan#Tolls
Also, is not the population density fairly high? There's not as much land to spread in low-density car centric suburbs like there is in (say) the US.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#Populati...
IMHO cultural bias (and practicality, geographic and economic (low car ownership post-WW2)) is there in Japan, which led to a particular development model, which lends itself to non-car-centric infrastructure.
Contrast: Okinawa, where the US (cultural?) influence is higher and that has highways everywhere and where public transit is apparently not that good.
> Also, is not the population density fairly high? There's not as much land to spread in low-density car centric suburbs like there is in (say) the US.
LOL no. Outside of the big neighborhoods of the big cities, Japan is endless urban sprawl. I know because I live in a small Japanese city of 40k people and it's just detached houses, small 2-story apartment buildings, a big box stores. Public transportation is almost non-existant and I need to drive my car everyday for everything.
> LOL no. Outside of the big neighborhoods of the big cities, Japan is endless urban sprawl.
And how many people live in those areas?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#Urban_di...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_weighted_density
Half the population lives in Tokyo (40M), Osaka (19M), and Nagoya (10M); one-third in the Greater Tokyo Area.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg5XHN_25HQ&t=7m38s
How many folks live inside versus outside the Tokyo-Osaka-Fukuoka rail corridor (Tokaido/Sanyo Shinkansens)? Saoporo is probably the next-largest city outside of that stretch.
Yeah, I know that half the population lives in either the Greater Tokyo Area or the Keihanshin area. But you still have the other half scattered all around the country.
And even within those areas, when you move to the outskirts it is not so dense. Take the train from Narita to central Tokyo and tell me what you see.
>Are there not a lot of toll roads in Japan as well?
There are, but at least wherever I've been driving or been a passenger, there are alternative roads which are just fine. In general slower, but every so often the toll roads are congested for miles due to a combination of roadwork and a LOT of traffic, which makes them slower than the alternative roads during those times.
As for cars - the Japanese aren't against cars. Many of my neighbors have two cars, particularly dual-income households. And they take very good care of them, as a rule. More than I would - to me a car is just a utility. Not for the Japanese. And people love driving too, at least outside the major cities.
Population density: Technically I live in a town with some 300,000 people. But it used to be nearly a dozen towns until 2006, when Japan decided to do some major restructuring and in many areas a bunch of smaller towns were thrown together to become a larger one. So we're really spread out..
> There are, but at least wherever I've been driving or been a passenger, there are alternative roads which are just fine.
And there are alternatives to the Interstate highway system in the US, but the since the Interstates have no tolls everything is build around them.
I have read you also need to prove you have a place to park a car in order to own one. (And as you point out, space is limited.)
Maybe some trains could be more redneck coded somehow? Steam trains with sweaty stokers and buffalo shooting from the windows of course had plenty of that, but how to bring something from that aesthetic to the present? Bar carriage with sports screens still sounds still a bit passive and cliche. Maybe a gym car? There are already kid and pet cars after all at least here. In German trains you get a real glass pint for your beer, I think that's a big plus.
I suspect that culturally for Americans to embrace trains, you probably need segregation; a free class and a ticketed class with a bouncer.
Riding the the train daily is the norm in the eastern United States. The urban density and shorter distances between metros allows it to be affordable.
The US is massive... riding the train between most cities is dramatically more expensive than flying and takes most of a day if not multiple days between cities.
I used to commute weekly between two cities in Texas and it was a 2 hour flight. (Houston - Lubbock)
i mean the Shinkansen has two classes as well :)
three, now!
> “An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport.”
On the JR line in Tokyo, standing with a friend who motions to me with his glance to a salaryman standing next to us. "Hand-stitched suit", my friend whispers. Which is when I notices this guy's "threads" (literally).
Perhaps not Warren Buffett, but no doubt an executive of some stature riding with the rest of us plebes.
Ah! But is your bicycle registered and do you have insurance.
(I agree with the trains. I love the trains.)
Registered, very likely—it's required and IIRC done at time of purchase.
People insure bikes?
At my native home my bicycles are insured, now through my home insurance (part of the furniture, kind of), but at one point one of my electric bicycles was too expensive for that and required additional insurance. As soon as the price dropped a bit I could drop that extra insurance.
As the comment above said, in Japan a bicycle is registered to a person when you buy it. Even the second hand bikes from recycle shops. And there _is_ a theft problem.. but not everywhere. I sometimes don't bother with locking my bicycle outside the shopping mall, here (in my town in Japan). Nobody steals bicycles here. There was a time when a particular gang of teenagers would steal scooters though.. the 50cc ones. A friend's scooter was stolen. The police found the culprits and he got his scooter back. But not much problems with bicycles. Unlike in my town back home. Now that I'm here I would not be surprised if, when I go back, I find that someone broke into my garage and stole the bicycles.
They are easy to steal and can cost multiple thousands of dollars.
Though even if you're getting an hybrid assist bike, if you're paying much more than 1500$ for a commuter, probably overpaying [1200 from the manufacturer]
https://www.aventon.com/products/soltera-2-5-ebike?variant=4...
Convenience & simplicity aside, how expensive is it? Not necessarily compared to driving, but just in general. When I went to Japan a long time ago, I remember being kinda shocked at the cost compared to the JR Pass for tourists (which included the Shinkansen), but part of that was to give tourists a huge incentive to spend some money outside of Tokyo, I'm sure, but I remember some fares feeling expensive for people just to head into the city for a night out...
I don't think it's expensive, but then again I'm comparing it to train prices in Northern Europe, which is just painful. There, I'm used to pay for the ticket through gritted teeth. In Japan I can pay for a ticket + limited express (better train w/booked better seat) for a 45 minute ride for what I would pay for a pint of beer at home. Totally worth it. The Shinkansen for a 90 minute ride is not cheap, say ten beers.. Northern Europe beer prices, mind.
The subway system in Kyoto (Karasuma line) is operated by the local government. I visited during the busiest time of the year (Gion matsuri), and the trains were not overcrowded, were frequent and arrived on the dot. The subway system is nicely air conditioned which was pleasant as I visited during a heatwave.
I'm mostly in favor of privatization, but this is an example where the local government provide an exceptional service which is in no way inferior to the privately operated ones.
Japan's railroad system has a big geographic advantage - the country is long and narrow. The railroad system is primarily a long end to end line with short crosswise branches.[1] That's an efficient structure. The branch lines don't have to be fast. Many are still narrow gauge, at 3 ft 6 in.
The US had to fill a huge area in the railroad era. That left a lot of underutilized track once the road network got good.
[1] https://www.jrailpass.com/pdf/maps/JRP_japan.pdf
> the country is long and narrow
The northeast and west coast metropolitan corridors are similar, and combined have comparable populations, densities, and distances as Japan. Yet we can't even build a single high-speed line. And for all the excuses about the difficulty of building rail through developed regions, the existing rights of ways and infrastructure in both the NE and California are comparable to what everybody else has had to work with, at least in the past 50 years. The density of the NE is nothing like what you see elsewhere in the world, especially Asia, and Japan and China specifically.
It's lack of political will and ambition, period, by both the community and leadership. And excusing our inability by pointing at the hurdles, insinuating that others succeeded because they didn't face the same challenges, only perpetuates the paralysis.
> The density of the NE is nothing like what you see elsewhere in the world, especially Asia, and Japan and China specifically.
Yeah, I defy anyone who claims the US can't build trains "because of density" to fly to Tokyo, and actually take the Seibu Shinjuku line west from Shinjuku station. Look at those buildings built right next to the tracks, for many, many kilometers. People live in those -- if the windows opened, you could reach out and touch the laundry on the balconies that overlook the tracks [1].
Compared to that (and let's be clear: that's one average line in west Tokyo), even the Acela line in the east coast is a bad joke, density-speaking. The US doesn't build decent trains because the US is corrupt and sclerotic and run by incompetent people, not because of some mythical structural advantage in Magical Asia.
[1] I have no idea how people manage to live like that -- these trains are loud, and run basically from 4AM until 1AM every day -- but it's not lost on me that the fact that people can build houses right up next to the tracks might be the true advantage of Magical Japan.
The U.S. can build trains and has a good rail system—for freight not passengers. It’s not obvious how Japan moves freight, but the U.S.’s rail system evolved to move freight efficiently. That is a huge difference and not necessarily the result of corruption or incompetence.
Maybe. Japan has plenty of freight by rail, but you can’t look at (say) the California high-speed rail debacle and blame that on cargo.
My understanding the rail share of freight is relatively low in Japan compared to many other developed countries. Most freight moves by truck or coastal shipping. Looking at a map of Japan, most of the cities are by the coast, so I guess coastal shipping makes a lot of sense.
It can be a factor of many things, can it not? Seriously, if Japan was a map option in Transport Tycoon, it would be labeled "easy".
> these trains are loud, and run basically from 4AM until 1AM every day
Not that bad actually. You get used to it and even if trains are frequent they don't need 10 minutes to pass by your home.
I live in a unique community which is sandwiched between a public-transit light rail line, and a freight line as well.
The light rail can run a frequency of 12-20 minutes in each direction. The freight's schedule: who really knows?
But the freight train is generally inhibited from sounding its horn or bells near residential neighborhoods. So, unless I am really paying attention while awake, I cannot detect it passing by, no matter the size.
The light rail is audible from where I sit, usually, but only just. It toots the horn mostly as it passes, but it's not disruptive or annoying to me, anyway. I sort of enjoy the white noise it all makes. There are cars that do a lot worse.
I think that the architecture here is helpful, too. The buildings are clustered around a central courtyard, and really insulated from the road noise. At any given time, there may be folks splashing in the pool, or running the jets on the hot tub, anyway.
The light rail stations are a major convenience to living here, and the train noise is absolutely the least of our worries!
I've heard people say that, but I find it hard to believe. I think I'd go nuts. And sure, they don't take 10 minutes to pass, but the busy lines (like the Seibu line I mentioned) are running at least 2-3 trains every 10 minutes, so they might as well be continuous.
The houses built next to the crossing points, in particular, have always boggled my mind. BING BING BING BING BING....
I noticed when I visited Japan that the crossing chimes quieten once the barriers have fully lowered.
Just another example of Japanese attention to detail and human oriented design.
Not where I am standing right now!
(I mean, maybe you’re right in some places, but it’s certainly not everywhere. Ironically, I happened to be standing next to a completely empty crossing, gates down, bonging away, while reading your comment.)
The nearest crossings where I live indeed stop the chimes when the barriers have been lowered. This doesn't actually make much of a difference really, because the train arrives only a few seconds after, and, because it's a local line, there are never more than three cars in the train so it passes very quickly.
Not that I'm bothered by the chimes at all. And grandson loves them.
I think a big part of it is also that (partly because of the necessity of building for earthquake resistance), Japanese construction is a lot more robust than American housing, and also tends to have extremely good soundproofing on windows and doors. Actually, it's most of the rest of the world, except the US.
> Japanese construction is a lot more robust than American housing, and also tends to have extremely good soundproofing on windows and doors.
Oh, you’re definitely engaging in Magical Japan, here.
While building standards have certainly improved in the past 20 years, the average Japanese house is built just strong enough not to fall over when someone farts. In particular, windows tend to be single pane, and you’re lucky if they block a strong wind, let alone noise.
I’m exaggerating a little, but not by much.
> Japanese construction is a lot more robust than American housing, and also tends to have extremely good soundproofing on windows and doors.
This must be a different Japan than the one I'm familiar with, where exterior walls are often uninsulated and only a few inches thick and single-pane windows are still the norm in a lot of housing. I wouldn't be surprised if soundproofing were better for railroad-adjacent buildings, but compared to American homes the soundproofing here is surprisingly poor.
As the sister comment said - the houses are just strong enough not to fall over in a "normal", all-the-time earthquake. Our house sways a lot under typhoons and far-away earthquakes (far away = long wavelengths). It's only relatively recent that building codes have been updated to handle real earthquakes without falling over like a house of cards. Remember the Noto earthquake Januar 1, 2024? Large areas didn't have a single house still standing.
(Which is why we're now tearing down our old house and building a new, stronger one. Post-war Japan was more concerned with a) building a lot of houses, and b) keep lots of jobs, which meant, as far as houses were concerned, building use-and-throw-away houses. Then build another. And another. And don't talk to me about sound proofing.. it's non-existing. What with no insulation in walls.)
When I lived in Japan it was in a relatively recent (last 10 years) but not brand new apartment block - Maybe if you are talking about a rural area or an old postwar Showa era house, sure. But either way the sound proofing is worlds better than any new construction in the US.
I'm in a 20 year old two-storey apartment right now (while we're building a new house), and the sound-proofing isn't non-existing but not as bad as some other apartments I'm aware of (where you can't make a sound without the neighbors start knocking on the walls/floors, and you're privy to thing you don't actually want to hear..) - but we can hear every footstep when the neighbors walk the stairs to their upper floor. The rooms which are more distant are fine, we don't actually hear them talking. Most of the time.
The advatange they have is that all 4 of their major metropolitan areas are in a straight line across flat land. The enemy of high-speed is any diviations from flat and straigh. On he accela top speed can be maintained less then 40% of the trip.
All the major metro areas on the Acela corridor are also on a straight line, on significantly flatter land than Japan. Notice how the Acela never spends 10+ minute periods in long, deep tunnels under mountain ranges. The Acela primarily spends most of the trip going below 100 mph because it is operating on 100+ year old infrastructure that has only ever been upgraded piecemeal as it starts to fail.
It's always feels funny to me when taking the Acela between Boston and NYC that you go screaming along at 150mph... for a small portion of track in Rhode Island. The rest of the time you're going much slower. It's almost like, why even bother for that small section?
The Shinkansen was a very different experience when I took it.
That's got zero to do with anything. you do not need to add rail to the whole country.
As an example SF Bay Area and Switzerland are about the same size, SF has double the population density. It has a Bay, Switzerland has mountains. Switzerland has like 10x the trains. There's no reason SF Bay couldn't too.
It's similar for most metro areas. LA used to have a huge train system. Bad insentives and government policies killed it. They're adding new ones back but they're adding them in the worst possible way, making them unprofitable and designed only for people who can't afford cars means they'll only be a money sink at best, or they'll get underfunded and decrepit at worst
Even the lowest density US states have most of the population in corridors or areas with sufficient density.
E.g. Montana used to have passenger rail through the most densely populated Southern part of the state. That region has comparable density to regions of Norway that have regular rail service. (There are efforts to restart passenger service in Southern Montana)
And it's not like places like Norway have rail everywhere either - the lower threshold for density where rail is considered viable is just far lower.
The actual proportion of the US population that lives in areas with too low density to support rail is really tiny.
> As an example SF Bay Area and Switzerland are about the same size,
> SF has double the population density.
These two statements seem hard to reconcile considering that Switzerland’s population is higher.
It has a big geographic disadvantage too: the entire country is a mountain range. Japan's railway network relies on countless tunnels and viaducts, adding greatly to the cost, especially for high speed lines which require larger clearance and therefore larger tunnel diameters, and larger turning radii.
Geography is no excuse for the US not having better passenger rail service, especially when geography was no obstacle to the US having fantastic rail service in the 1920s.
There is no excuse for the US’s failure. Many countries have large areas to cover. China is a similar size and has massive HSR coverage. The US could too if they didn’t waste all the money on corruption.
China also has nationalized rail systems. The major reason for the failure in the US is that the rail lines are not publicly owned. The reason the rail systems never got upgraded and Amtrak couldn't deploy high speed rail everywhere (despite it being a national priority in the 70s, 80s, and 90s) is that outside of the northeast corridor, Amtrak doesn't own the lines and couldn't get the owners to allow Amtrak to upgrade them for passenger high speed rail.
> China also has nationalized rail systems. The major reason for the failure in the US is that the rail lines are not publicly owned.
The article we're discussing explains that Japan has the best passenger rail system in the world, and which happens to be privatized, along with privately owned track. So which one is it? Go figure.
While I agree with you, their system did not start privatised, and the Shinkansens predate privatisation by some time. I don't have the evidence to justify this, but I suspect that you need national buy-in - both financially and politically - to start a HSR build-out, which could then potentially be privatised at a later stage.
I believe the Japanese private rail companies also own the lines where their traffic is. This would explain a lot. There are other countries (including my native one) where the trains are run by one company and the lines are owned by another. This does.not.work. For what seems like obvious reasons. There's no economic gain for the owner of the infrastructure to spend money, quite the opposite in fact.
In every EU country the infrastructure company (companies) is separate from companies that operate trains, with some usually small exceptions.
Most EU countries have adopted the approach of putting the infrastructure company and the public train company under the same holding company, which is sort-of the minimum that EU regulations demand. In practice, in many countries the previous national rail company (under whatever conglomerate structure it may be operating under today) is fiercely protective of its own turf and tries to prevent new entrants, and digging their heels in implementing EU railway competition regulations. So complying with the letter of the law, but does everything in its powers to not comply with the spirit.
Then again, given the UK experience of going all-in on the "vertical separation" and privatization path, perhaps one shouldn't blame them.
Well, to be honest, the results in Japan and China, where that isn’t the case, have turned out to be much better.
The interesting thing is how the EU railway policy just keeps plowing ahead trying to impose the "vertical separation" approach in the EU, despite the disastrous results from the UK experience (and some EU countries to a somewhat lesser extent, so far the UK seems to be the only example of going all-in on that approach).
Russia is far larger and far less populated, it's an economic backwater and a cultural dead end. Yet despite that they have rail connecting their country together.
So did France. There is a common factor at play with Russia. Has little to do with the country's shape.
It's like saying certain rats solve the maze because the path is simpler. Except that the failing rats happen to have a different incentive.
> So did France. There is a common factor at play with Russia. Has little to do with the country's shape.
You'll have to make yourself clearer, I have no idea what you're implying
Once you get past the Urals, most of Russia's development is along an east west axis until you reach Baikal and the the far east. Also as a Marxist dictatorship for some years, there was little emphasis on independent travel (cars etc)
To call Russia a "cultural dead end" is a bit much, considering all the great artists of various kinds that country has produced. In fact, you'll find that famous Russian novels like Anna Karenina and Doctor Zhivago feature trains as motifs.
Great point about trains being featured in Russian novels. I imagine trains are well-represented in Japanese literature too, as well as film and maybe poetry. That's an angle I'd enjoy investigating further for other cultures. Surely the U.S. is more of a "car culture", but even offhand I can think of, for example, the novel On the Road with train-hopping having a significant role.
What is this corruption you are talking about? What specifically are you talking about? Things you don’t like aren’t necessarily the result of corruption.
"The US could too if they didn’t waste all the money on corruption."
China is also corrupt, but it is a dictatorship with massive central planning. Central planning leads to wastage and human costs in many areas but it is good at producing new infrastructure.
Japan is also mostly mountains and is prone to natural disasters like earthquakes and Typhoon induced floods.
Sonce our first trip in 2017 at least two railways we rode have been damaged enough to be partially inoperable and under lengthy restoration work - Hisatsu line (washed away bridges) and Kurobe Gorge railway (bridge destroyed by earthquake).
Oh this again.
Then explain international train travel in Europe or China's national train network. Both fill large areas.
Conversely, the UK is long and narrow, and unlike Japan has neither earthquakes nor is it particularly mountainous and yet its train system is rubbish.
Here in Spain a huge chunk of the population lives along the coast, so obviously what we need is a radial network along the coast, with a few spokes connecting to Madrid in the center. But for whatever reason it's impossible to make any trains that go anywhere other than the capital.
The Netherlands is a similar shape to the continental contiguous United States yet we have an excellent public transport system. Very good trains and every population has awesome cycling infrastructure.
The US could have all of this and more in their populated areas. They're the richest country in the world. Why is the infrastructure so neglected? It's clearly a choice.
The question to ask is "who owns the rail lines?". That matters for having a good rail system. It's basically the same problem for why the US doesn't have fiber internet available everywhere, too.
For new rail at least, whoever wants to build them gets to own them, right?
I think what it comes down to is that if automobile companies had to build and maintain the roads, we certainly wouldn't have so many cars. But railway companies need to build the train lines, while competing with taxpayer funded automobile infrastructure. It's not impossible (see Japan) but also not easy.
Good parallel. An article recently explained how Switzerland has the fastest fibre optical network: all companies share the same cabling. Dig once. No need to hook the property or do anything when switching provider.
US army can deploy air force, tankers, soldiers and all the logistics together with Burger King anywhere in the world within days and somehow people that pay for it still think a simple rail in their home turf is impossible.
Isn't Netherlands trying to deter from car use by laws and taxes and at the same time funneling public money into railroads and bike infrastructure?
>The US could have all of this and more in their populated areas.
Probably people in US have other priorities and that means there are other public policies.
I dunno, centre right national governments in recent years have been pretty car friendly. Driving can be cheaper for family outings. For two adults and two teens to go from Utrecht to Amsterdam and back (26 minutes each way) is €48 (with discount if you buy a flex pass monthly) or €80 without a discount. Suddenly driving is pretty competitive
Japanese rail companies are allowed to buy land, then build infrastructure, then enjoy the increased value of said land. American rail is hobbled by the extraction of increased land values by those who already own land by the stations. Of course, freeways are similar, but people don’t mind roads losing money.
China is giant and sprawling and they are able to do it.
That said this reply doesn’t actually address much of what the article talks about, most interestingly how rail companies are private and are also real estate developers. That thought process ought to make sense to Texans or something.
The USA's westward expansion was indeed facilitated by the timely development of railroads, and so many of the cities were built around the ability to haul freight and service depots along the rail lines, much like ancient cities sprang up alongside rivers and bays because of boat shipping.
However, the United States is also a nation built upon the motor vehicle, and our much-vaunted freeway system here was built deliberately as a national defense measure that could easily move materiel and troops between cities and states, in the event of a domestic invasion or future wars on our own soil. The freeways enjoyed deep investments also due to commercial utility, and again, many cities and habitations sprang up at the nexus of various freeways, as truck-based shipping could service them as well.
I think one of the main obstacles to rail lines in the United States is our car-centrism, and many motorists of any socio-economic class really, really hate trains and public transit of any kind, and any other type of transport that may impinge on their freedom to drive wherever they want on as many highways as possible.
Therefore it is extraordinarily difficult for railways to get good rights-of-way. Amtrak is a redheaded stepchild. Commuter rail may be better respected in places where it was established, like the Eastern Seaboard, but if I asked any voter or motorist here, they would be voting against any sort of rail project whatsoever.
There are also other factors. Heavy bombing during the war had the effect of clearing a lot of previous infrastructure so they were in effect building from scratch in some areas.
>the country is long and narrow
This is a little counterintuitive but it does make a difference.
I recently moved from a coastal city (that is very linear) to a landlocked city spread evenly in all directions. I had naively assumed the new city would be easier to get around in, since on average places would be closer to you. But the first city has decent commuter rail, which meant I could get to the other end of the city in an hour, and use cabs for last mile connectivity.
I'm sure you can have good public transit in "round" cities too, but it is certainly more difficult to plan.
Round cities are even better for rail. You run a line in a circle, like the Yamanote line in Tokyo, and now it has the advantage of periodic boundary conditions. Everywhere is central!
>I'm sure you can have good public transit in "round" cities too, but it is certainly more difficult to plan.
You don't have to be "sure", take a look at London which is a "round" city with excellent public transit.
It’s fascinating to read but I have a hard time imagining a public western railway provider could evolve into a train based mega corporation doing real estate and health services.
The Swiss SBB also has a real estate division, which makes them a lot of money actually (I think a lot of that comes from leases from shops in train stations).
They also have an energy company which runs some hydroelectric power stations.
Transport for London (TfL) have a fledgling property development arm called Places for London which aims to try and replicate some of the successes of Japanese railway companies. They propose the mooted Bakerloo line extension is partially subsidised by over-station developments.
TfL can barely build some flats in Zone 2 without the locals rioting like they're destroying a Cotswolds village. Actually, it can barely fix the literal busiest station in the country without a bunch of minor celebrity detractors riling up everyone about how much of a travesty it is that we're doing it.
Without the public or central government support, the efforts you're talking about amount to very little.
> Actually, it can barely fix the literal busiest station in the country
Liverpool Street isn't managed by TfL, it's managed by Network Rail.
Ah yes, was too into the screed. Same problem though.
We had just that in the UK relatively recently! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-landhttps://en.wikipedia...
That's actually pretty common.
Deutsche Bahn does everything from real estate to infrastructure to truck companies (no longer in Europe, though, they had to sell that off) to car sharing to energy production to IT development to trading lumber, workforce rental and startup venture capital. The list changes every few days, so some they may no longer do, others they will now do. It's a megacorp.
Many of these have grown out of the original business model.
Because most western train companies are nationalized or co owned by the state. They don't even have to turn a profit.
What is seldom mentioned in these conversations is that the United States has a very good rail system—-for freight. That’s what the U.S. system did well, not passengers. From the article it isn’t obvious how Japan moves freight, but they obviously aren’t moving a lot of freight on the Shinkansen.
They actually started doing that very recently, converting old Shinkansen into a freight trains. Obviously you can't fit large cargo, but it's a good option for fast transport of parcels etc.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2026/03/24/companies/f...
It's a good article, but I think the "it's not culture, just good governance" idea is a little hand wavy. The two bleed into each other greatly. The fact that houses are more disposable and wealth is less intergenerational in Japan does a lot to tamp down the NIMBY issues that plague e.g. the UK.
The UK is so far gone that the transport authority in it's largest city can't revamp stations or do add-on development without literal years of hand wringing. And even then it's often rejected or reduced in the end.
London is probably the worst-governed, or worst-planned, city of its peers. NYC has famously bad governance but at least it actually has its own government.
The national government controls all London budgets, the Mayor has no power, there's no legislative body for the city (GLA is not one), and there are 33 different borough councils that don't owe the Mayor anything.
The idea that culture can be divorced from other aspects of society seems like one of the biggest misconceptions of the 20th century.
>The UK is so far gone that the transport authority in it's largest city can't revamp stations or do add-on development without literal years of hand wringing. And even then it's often rejected or reduced in the end.
They just finished a line that traverses the whole city. It's 73 miles from end to end and carries one seventh of the UK's rail journeys (600,000 trips per day).
The Elizabeth Line is basically at the bare minimum for a global Asian city. It's not even that good by comparison. It's really a joke that London only has one line of that caliber and it took them literally decades to build.
So it's touted as some great success but to me it's a sign of failure. They'll say similar things if they ever finish HSR in California. Yeah I'm sure the end product will be fine but the whole process is disgraceful.
Never mind the fact that the Elizabeth Line is only so over-utilized because London completely fails at building density in and around its center. So it has to make its people live in zone 30 and sit on the train for two hours every day.
I guess your glass is half empty.
No, it's entirely factual, not a matter of outlook.
Otherwise please explain why one new line at this standard per 20-40 years is acceptable for a city that sees itself as world-leading.
These mixed companies can be very confusing to tourists especially. I'm always answering questions from tourists who are confused why they can't buy a ticket to where they want to go.
If you intend to do a fair amount of travelling and your stay is <3 weeks, it may be worth getting a JR Pass[1]. It doesn't work for all lines, but does include the Shinkansen and several of the major inner-city lines. Buses too.
Probably not worth it if you're only visiting one city as the pass is quite expensive. There are regional tourist passes though.
[1]:https://japanrailpass.net/en/
Unfortunately the 70% price rise on the JR pass back in 2023 made it much less likely to be economic for most people compared to just buying tickets as you go, even for trips that visit more than one city. Last time I was there I did a loop up from Tokyo to Hokkaido and back by rail, and it was still cheaper to buy individual tickets. (There are obviously still some itineraries where it works out cheaper, but it's much less of an "obviously good idea for most people" than it was back before 2023.)
Having followed some tourists coming to Japan, a large amount of the people appreciate convenience, and the rail pass gives them that. The price is secondary.
Hell, there are even people paying the equivalent of 100 USD just to have someone pick them up from the Haneda airport and accompany them to the hotel. Not even a taxi service, just to be with them to buy them the train tickets, etc.
Almost everything works with Suica, no? Although to be fair I guess tourists are _more_ likely to use the heritage lines with slightly different rules.
Tourists are often buying paper tickets. There's no way for a foreign Android phone to use a digital Suica, so people with Android are stuck with a physical card or paper tickets, and there's a lot of outdated information online that the physical cards are in low supply (They were last year but this year they're not).
When we visited Tokyo last year, what stopped us from even trying was the online information we came across was unclear and suggested we could only get the physical cards at the airport and at some tourist office, and we forgot to look for it at the airport... I don't know if that is correct or not, but compare Oyster in London which is advertised at practically every corner store, so even if you get into town not knowing the system, it's hard not to find somewhere you can get a card (or you can just use contactless - I haven't had an oyster card in years).
The UK is completely chaotic ticket-wise on a national level, though.
We got IC cards (ICOCA) in Osaka for 500 Yen each, and used them for 2 weeks travelling across Japan this March. Worked like a charm, only thing that's annoying for us tourists is how it is a stored value card and needs to be topped up. I think we still had like 500 Yen on our cards when we departed, even though we bought a lot of stuff with it on the last few days.
While we got ours at the Osaka airport (KIX), I am sure I saw the "purchase a new SUICA/ICOCA" options at a few terminals while topping up. I suppose you mixed up the "Welcome to SUICA" tourist card (available at fewer locations) with the normal one? I was under the impression there was a lot of confusing information floating around online.
But I agree, public transport in London is - as a tourist - more straight forward. Just a matter of spotting the terminals at some stations IIRC. OTOH in Japan we found no station with an elevator smelling like someone used a hippie bus as an emergency toilet ;-)
The card mentioned in the guides you read is the "Welcome Suica" that's only for tourists.
You can get a normal Suica just about anywhere.
> we could only get the physical cards at the airport and at some tourist office, and we forgot to look for it at the airport
Little over a decade ago I did exactly the same. I ended up buying a Suica card at Ueno station from a clerk, which was a bit of an adventure since she was eager to help but barely spoke any English and I barely spoke any Japanese. Together we skillfully massacred both languages with an ad-hoc pidgin and lots of gesturing. Due to an issue with my wireless hotspot I only had an old school phrasebook at my disposal, which was about as helpful as the infamous Monty Python sketch implies. The airport seemed much more convenient as a tourist since everyone there at the very least spoke basic English. At the time it was certainly possible to get a Suica card at a major train station, though admittedly not easy.
Is this an Android thing? My US iOS works fine with digital Suica.
Apple doesn't make regional variants of the phone, so all models have the technology built-in, even if it's disabled by default. Android phones outside of Japan lack Suica support.
And Pixel phones have the tech, but you need to flash a Japanese ROM to be able to use it.
It's basically one card for everything, independent of company, in Japan. Only certain trips require tickets from specific companies.
I was hoping for some 'technical' secrets.
Like: you can actually change the lightbulbs for the headlights of the Series 0 train while it being underway - there is a service hatch that opens to a human-sized service area accessible from the driver's cabin which allows such repairs.
> the most striking institutional feature of Japanese rail is that it is privately owned by a throng of competing companies.
Knowing the author I knew it was going to be his main argument before even opening the blog post. And it's obviously wrong, these companies don't compete with one another, they all have a local monopoly. (The article itself acknowledges that and even acknowledges the organizational benefits of such monopolies, but the author could refrain himself from praising the virtue of competition nonetheless…)
There are many places in Japan where multiple companies compete over the same area
I'm drawn by the style and aesthetics of the charts in combination with the fonts used in them.
The article correctly identifies positive externalities of railways:
> The railway can capture the value it creates for me by charging me a fare, but it cannot capture the value it creates for those at my destination. As transport infrastructure creates benefits that produce no revenue for providers, free markets rarely build enough of it.
…but then very confusingly argues that railways should be profitable, including on per-passenger basis. A profitable transport system with positive externalities is inevitably either too expensive or under-investing (or maybe both) with respect to maximising the total economic productivity. Ancillary monopolies in real estate and retail might offset that somewhat, but only to an extent.
Similarly, I don't understand why the article speaks positively of the closure of 83 "loss-making lines". The lines being loss-making for the rail company doesn't mean they aren't improving total productivity, as the very same article argues!
Further, they mention the over-crowding in Tokyo later on
> Tokyo’s infamously crammed trains are a symptom of underpriced rush hour traffic
…but somehow blame it on the price being too low, and not under-investment into more capacity by the commercial companies! People commuting less because they can't afford it would be bad for the businesses on the other side of their commute!
I suppose this is the centre-right ideological slant of Works in Progress showing, which is a bit of a shame when it leads to those self-contradictions in the usually quite rigorous publication.
> At its most extreme, three separate commuter lines compete for the traffic between Osaka and the port city of Kobe, running in parallel, sometimes fewer than 500 meters apart.
Sometimes fewer than 100 meters apart. Or connecting to each other's with a bridge.
Title should be "The secrets of the Shinkansen" which is odd for a (very well written) piece about Japanese commuter trains (non-shinkansen versions).
Maybe it's a carry on though "This is the third article we have released from Issue 23".
On the magazine itself, it seems to be labeled "Why Japan has such good railways"[1] instead
[1] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-japan-has-such-good-rai...
That makes so much more sense
.
Read the article.