10 ms·

How Japan saved Tokyo's rail network from collapse (part 1, 1945-1982)

194 points by jseliger 5y ago

dirtyid 5y ago
wdb 5y ago
Personally, I think, car use should be more heavily taxed and instead train, bus, metro usage should be more reasonable priced or maybe even free in some part.
tablespoon 5y ago
Wow, a Substack post that's not some political thing. Awesome!
- shusaku 5y ago
  Ironically, a massive government infrastructure program is what we used to describe as political
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > Ironically, a massive government infrastructure program is what we used to describe as political Politics for a polity with less dysfunction (or at least different dysfunction) than ours.
renewiltord 5y ago
Crazy good article. Very interesting indeed. I found it amusing that as I was reading about the JNR president who was forced to resign, the sentence went “he was forced to resign for hiding and diverting funds” and I was like “Oh, classic, embezzlement” and then it went “to the Shinkansen project”. Haha! His crime was secret allocation, not embezzlement. Okay that’s good.
xrd 5y ago
A fun read. The "Commuting Five Directions Operation" (通勤五方面作戦, tsukin-gohomen-sakusen). That last character "sen" means battle. That word means more like "wartime/military operation" which reflects the urgency.
- ojii 5y ago
  while 戦 does indeed mean "war/battle", 作戦 means "tactics/strategy" which can be used in a military context but doesn't have to be. Japanese has a lot of compound words, so looking at just a single character can be a bit misleading.
  - hsn915 5y ago
    Just like "Crusade" in modern usage has little (if at all) to do with physically fighting a religious war.
    - rob74 5y ago
      Actually, when you say that someone is on a crusade, you usually do mean that he is involved in some kind of holy war (be it for an actual religious topic, e.g. against abortion, or for something that can be considered a religion, such as an extreme adept of a programming language - see also "evangelist"). So it's not about physically fighting, but still "fighting for some strongly-held belief" in a more general sense. ...maybe you mean "cruise"?
      - hsn915 5y ago
        The GP comment was highlighting that 作戦 includes the character for "war". Now, in the case of "crusades", the word has very negative connotation in Arab/Muslims countries. So, when George Bush said the war on terror was a "crusade", the vast majority of political commentators in the Arab world took this literally as religious war between the Christian and Islamic civilizations.
      - justsomehnguy 5y ago
        Actually, when someone means the religious crusade when this is not implicitly understood from the context it is usually spelled as 'religious crusade'.
eloisius 5y ago
I worry the TRA (not high-speed) in Taiwan will collapse. It’s a separate system from the high-speed HSR system, and aside from Taipei, their stations are separate and only loosely connected by buses or metro in Kaohsiung. It’s a shame, because the HSR can get from north to south in about two hours, but the stations are all outside the city centers. TRA stations are far more convenient, and the network is far more extensive, but Taiwan has a strong car culture. Despite an excellent rail system, many people will opt to sit bumper to bumper traffic on weekends and holidays. TRA has also been poorly managed and doesn’t have a great safety record compared to other developed nations. I worry that as more and more people want to demonstrate their new wealth by driving, ridership on TRA will fall, and without integration with HSR it can’t even serve as a feeder network and we’ll be stuck with a high-speed rail too far outside the cities to be useful without driving and parking at the station.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  > TRA stations are far more convenient, and the network is far more extensive, but Taiwan has a strong car culture. Despite an excellent rail system, many people will opt to sit bumper to bumper traffic on weekends and holidays. I think "car culture" is usually a good explanation for big picture decisions for transportation -- where society invests, how the government develops transportation-related policies, what people will protest locally against -- but a poor explanation for why people make day to day transportation decisions. Pretty much anytime you see people hardly using public transit (or biking or walking) in an area, you can zoom in and discover that, shocker of shockers, it really sucks in one or more ways. People are mostly pretty rational when it comes to those day-to-day decisions, I think. Yes, it may seem silly that people will drive their huge truck to their office job a mere mile and a half away, but if you zoom in, you find that even their residential neighborhood has huge, wide streets that people speed around in, making biking feel uncomfortable and dangerous. And when everyone else has huge trucks going fast, being in a huge truck does make you feel quite a bit safer. Another example, my hometown of the South SF bay area has excellent weather for biking, and the more populated areas are largely flat*, but biking there is still uncommon, and if you try to do so yourself you quickly discover why. It's largely unpleasant and very dangerous-feeling, with fragmented, quarter-assed infrastructure that often seems designed to try and kill you. Who the hell feels comfortable biking on painted bike lanes on Lawrence Expressway next to 50+ mph traffic, I'll never know. And what little infrastructure there is often randomly disappears, like bike lanes that just sort of curve into the sidewalk (and not even a sloped edge, so I'm not sure what they expect you to do there). I personally got hit twice by cars the last year before I moved to Munich, including once when my son was on my bike (police came out, but they didn't even bother ticketing the driver who t-boned by rear wheel, of course). * Yes, obviously there are hills around the valley, but most of the people and stuff is in the flat parts
supernova87a 5y ago
I remember always being very impressed with the Japanese/Tokyo rail system being so punctual. But it was not until I saw this video [1] and read about it more that I understood that it was not out of some kind of "let's make this system really great" motivation (like voluntary desire for perfection) that you associate with Japan nowadays. It was that they could not satisfy the need without it operating really reliably and punctually -- it was simply necessary to have. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se1XtS8LAKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se1XtS8LAKs -- Japanology, a pretty entertaining series in general, if you're interested in the quirks and daily life aspects of Japanese society. And one thing I like about this series is that they usually end each episode with some touching personal story of how someone relates to the overall theme of the episode (oddly enough, because I generally never like the attempt to create a “people story” on the news or documentaries).
- asiseeit123 5y ago
  In other countries being punctual and reliable is not necessary to have
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > it was simply necessary to have. Of course, you can't transport dozens of millions of people everyday if you start being unreliable. The whole system would collapse if a train is 10 minutes late because it would block dozens of trains behind it.
  - tkgally 5y ago
    > The whole system would collapse if a train is 10 minutes late... Short-term collapses do happen fairly regularly. For fifteen years, until COVID, I commuted every day between Yokohama and Tokyo. In the morning, I went from Yokohama to Shibuya on the Toyoko Line (a non-JR private line); most evenings, I returned home through Shinagawa on JR. I remember many mornings when the trains to Shibuya were delayed by ten or twenty minutes or longer; like other lines into Tokyo, the trains ran at full capacity and at maximum closeness to each other during morning rush hour, and the slightest problem could cause a backup. (Evening rush hour is more spread out, and I experienced fewer delays then.) Anyone who rides Tokyo trains regularly has similar stories. But it is true that, overall, Japanese trains, including the trains in the Tokyo area, are reliable and even pleasant to ride. In the ongoing discussion of working at home vs. office [1], many people have named commuting as a negative aspect of working in an office. I actually didn’t mind my commute—the walk to and from the stations was good exercise, the bustle of stations like Shibuya and Shinagawa was stimulating, and the train rides gave me time to think, read, and listen to music. While I am now happy to be working at home, I hope the pandemic quiets down enough for me to start feeling confident about going places by train again, both in the Tokyo area and throughout Japan. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30239441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30239441
franciscop 5y ago
Living here, the Yamanote Line opened in 1885 and with its current form from 1956 has become "The One Ring (Line)" in that it makes a ring connecting ALL of the major stations in Tokyo, and from which basically all of the mentioned lines in the article depart or go through. For example, you want to go west you'd go to Shinjuku (station on the Yamanote line) and take the Chuo. North? Either Ikebukuro or Ueno, on the north-west/north-east of the Yamanote line. Shibuya (south-west), Shinagawa (south-east) and Tokyo (east) stations are also within this. And those are the biggest stations in Tokyo, all connected through a circle line (in both directions) with trains that are ~2 mins from each other and completely full on peak times. In certain combinations it might be faster to go through "smaller" lines crossing Tokyo Station, like from Shibuya to Tokyo I'd get the Ginza Line because it goes straight. But this circle + rays of lines that happens thanks of Yamanote IMHO would have collapsed if there was instead only a single central station in the middle managing these movements between the major lines from outside Tokyo.
- masklinn 5y ago
  Circle lines seem to be making a comeback (or finally be getting popular?) e.g. Moscow’s mcl and bcl, paris’ line 15) and it’s really heartening to see. Circle lines tend to have pretty low distance/trip ratios but high value and great occupancy.
  - lmm 5y ago
    Circle lines are unpopular nowadays because of poor resilience, just as lines with many branches are falling out of fashion (particularly as integrated ticketing reduces the advantages they once had) - indeed it's not so long ago that London deliberately "unwound" its circle line. Although the Yamanote line is a circle, it's very much an off-centre one that swings out through the suburbs on one side and not the other. And it's worth noting that Japan is pretty far behind in terms of integrated ticketing for occasional journeys (although commuter passes are integrated between different companies).
    - mlindner 5y ago
      > And it's worth noting that Japan is pretty far behind in terms of integrated ticketing for occasional journeys (although commuter passes are integrated between different companies). Firstly, Japan actually has very good integrated ticketing, namely you don't buy tickets at all. You wave your phone/card over the stall on entry and wave it again at whatever station you exit from, and the system calculates the fare at exit. (And it's discounted from the price of actually buying tickets.) Japanese train station gates allow more people to move in and out of the station than any other model of station I have seen in any country. Secondly, the over-focus on integrated ticketing misses that the important thing is integrated payment. It wasn't the case until some number of years ago, but nowadays everything but the most rural of rural lines has a single shared national system for IC card payment that is easy to use. The IC cards can even be used at most grocery stores and restaurants. They even work for foreigners and are a great alternative to cash to avoid having to calculate payments.
Synaesthesia 5y ago
Wow these 250%+ capacities are pretty crazy.
rtpg 5y ago
It's very impressive to see these decades-longs projects pay off, in one way or another. Every single line extension, station change, is an entire political battle and story. A fractal of stories waiting to be discovered. One extremely important detail for me when I hear about JNR (Now JR East/West etc) and privatization: during privatization, all the Shinkansen debt in particular was held onto by the public. Extremely expensive infrastructure (now a money printer, at least the Tokyo <-> Osaka segment), just handed to private investors. Of course JR works well as a whole now and it's not like society is worse off, but it's always left a bit of a poor taste in my mouth. (For people wanting some more interesting transportation content: here[0] is an excellent overview of IC cards and integration of all the systems in the 2000s) [0]: https://www.ejrcf.or.jp/jrtr/jrtr62/pdf/6-15_web.pdf https://www.ejrcf.or.jp/jrtr/jrtr62/pdf/6-15_web.pdf
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mlindner 5y ago
  > Of course JR works well as a whole now and it's not like society is worse off, but it's always left a bit of a poor taste in my mouth. Wouldn't it be the case that society is now better off because of it? The "poor taste in your mouth" is a mental block from extensive propaganda in the last few years especially against private ownership.
  - rtpg 5y ago
    The counterfactual isn't "JNR collapses entirely without privatisation". Hell, it's not "JNR collapses after privatization due to existing debts". There are so many possible universes involved here. It should be pointed out that privatization of JNR involved a lot of stuff! Regional breakups, the debt load, there's so much stuff going on there that assuming that privatization happened in an orthodox way is much more succumbing to propoganda than my statement. The coupling of so many things to a single event titled "privatization" means it is extremely hard to untangle everything. In any case I think "infrastructure-based train company suddenly doesn't have to pay its 65 billion dollar debts, and is able to function better after that" is not surprising, and I do not believe you need a bunch of bankers to figure out a business plan for that. There is an alternate universe where the debt is still taken on by the public, but JNR can continue to be a public good.
ggm 5y ago
My joy when the gong sounds from the announcer in akihabera sound like supermario power up stars...
rob74 5y ago
Great article! But I don't think that planners in other countries are unaware of how to make their rail systems better - they simply lack the political support and funding to be able to do it. Of course it make sense to add additional tracks to overloaded lines, improve the signaling, the maintenance etc. - but such projects are delayed for decades by political bickering, NIMBYism, funding difficulties etc. Plus it's much sexier for politicians to show off new high-speed train lines (never mind new freeways or airports) rather than such mundane rail improvements (which have a much higher "value for money" however).
- sanxiyn 5y ago
  I mean, the article's point is that Japan is no different. Basically, Commuting Five Directions Operation bankrupted JNR. JNR built many lines, but Tokyo land is expensive. I think Japan's mistake was funding it by debt. Yes it paid for itself, but it was too much debt for too long time. It should have been funded by direct investment from national budget.
  - rob74 5y ago
    Never mind the financing, my point is that Japan/Tokyo had the political will to significantly improve their railways in 1965, at a time where most administrations in the western world had a 100% car-centric strategy. For example, if you look at what became of the equally ambitious expansion plans of the New York subway from the 1960s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_for_Action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_for_Action), it's a sad story indeed...
myrandomcomment 5y ago
Impressive article, well done, especially given the writer not speaking Japanese. Google translate of older documents is not very good. If you live anywhere in the Tokyo metro area owning a car is silly. I had a friend they paid near $800 a month to park because he liked to drive outside of Tokyo once a month. I looked at him and said "you can rent cars in Japan, correct?"

194 points by jseliger 5y ago

wdb 5y ago

Personally, I think, car use should be more heavily taxed and instead train, bus, metro usage should be more reasonable priced or maybe even free in some part.

tablespoon 5y ago

Wow, a Substack post that's not some political thing. Awesome!

shusaku 5y ago
Ironically, a massive government infrastructure program is what we used to describe as political
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > Ironically, a massive government infrastructure program is what we used to describe as political Politics for a polity with less dysfunction (or at least different dysfunction) than ours.

renewiltord 5y ago

Crazy good article. Very interesting indeed. I found it amusing that as I was reading about the JNR president who was forced to resign, the sentence went “he was forced to resign for hiding and diverting funds” and I was like “Oh, classic, embezzlement” and then it went “to the Shinkansen project”. Haha! His crime was secret allocation, not embezzlement. Okay that’s good.

xrd 5y ago

A fun read. The "Commuting Five Directions Operation" (通勤五方面作戦, tsukin-gohomen-sakusen). That last character "sen" means battle. That word means more like "wartime/military operation" which reflects the urgency.

ojii 5y ago
while 戦 does indeed mean "war/battle", 作戦 means "tactics/strategy" which can be used in a military context but doesn't have to be. Japanese has a lot of compound words, so looking at just a single character can be a bit misleading.
- hsn915 5y ago
  Just like "Crusade" in modern usage has little (if at all) to do with physically fighting a religious war.
  - rob74 5y ago
    Actually, when you say that someone is on a crusade, you usually do mean that he is involved in some kind of holy war (be it for an actual religious topic, e.g. against abortion, or for something that can be considered a religion, such as an extreme adept of a programming language - see also "evangelist"). So it's not about physically fighting, but still "fighting for some strongly-held belief" in a more general sense. ...maybe you mean "cruise"?
    - hsn915 5y ago
      The GP comment was highlighting that 作戦 includes the character for "war". Now, in the case of "crusades", the word has very negative connotation in Arab/Muslims countries. So, when George Bush said the war on terror was a "crusade", the vast majority of political commentators in the Arab world took this literally as religious war between the Christian and Islamic civilizations.
    - justsomehnguy 5y ago
      Actually, when someone means the religious crusade when this is not implicitly understood from the context it is usually spelled as 'religious crusade'.

eloisius 5y ago

I worry the TRA (not high-speed) in Taiwan will collapse. It’s a separate system from the high-speed HSR system, and aside from Taipei, their stations are separate and only loosely connected by buses or metro in Kaohsiung. It’s a shame, because the HSR can get from north to south in about two hours, but the stations are all outside the city centers. TRA stations are far more convenient, and the network is far more extensive, but Taiwan has a strong car culture. Despite an excellent rail system, many people will opt to sit bumper to bumper traffic on weekends and holidays. TRA has also been poorly managed and doesn’t have a great safety record compared to other developed nations. I worry that as more and more people want to demonstrate their new wealth by driving, ridership on TRA will fall, and without integration with HSR it can’t even serve as a feeder network and we’ll be stuck with a high-speed rail too far outside the cities to be useful without driving and parking at the station.

TulliusCicero 5y ago
> TRA stations are far more convenient, and the network is far more extensive, but Taiwan has a strong car culture. Despite an excellent rail system, many people will opt to sit bumper to bumper traffic on weekends and holidays. I think "car culture" is usually a good explanation for big picture decisions for transportation -- where society invests, how the government develops transportation-related policies, what people will protest locally against -- but a poor explanation for why people make day to day transportation decisions. Pretty much anytime you see people hardly using public transit (or biking or walking) in an area, you can zoom in and discover that, shocker of shockers, it really sucks in one or more ways. People are mostly pretty rational when it comes to those day-to-day decisions, I think. Yes, it may seem silly that people will drive their huge truck to their office job a mere mile and a half away, but if you zoom in, you find that even their residential neighborhood has huge, wide streets that people speed around in, making biking feel uncomfortable and dangerous. And when everyone else has huge trucks going fast, being in a huge truck does make you feel quite a bit safer. Another example, my hometown of the South SF bay area has excellent weather for biking, and the more populated areas are largely flat*, but biking there is still uncommon, and if you try to do so yourself you quickly discover why. It's largely unpleasant and very dangerous-feeling, with fragmented, quarter-assed infrastructure that often seems designed to try and kill you. Who the hell feels comfortable biking on painted bike lanes on Lawrence Expressway next to 50+ mph traffic, I'll never know. And what little infrastructure there is often randomly disappears, like bike lanes that just sort of curve into the sidewalk (and not even a sloped edge, so I'm not sure what they expect you to do there). I personally got hit twice by cars the last year before I moved to Munich, including once when my son was on my bike (police came out, but they didn't even bother ticketing the driver who t-boned by rear wheel, of course). * Yes, obviously there are hills around the valley, but most of the people and stuff is in the flat parts

supernova87a 5y ago

I remember always being very impressed with the Japanese/Tokyo rail system being so punctual. But it was not until I saw this video [1] and read about it more that I understood that it was not out of some kind of "let's make this system really great" motivation (like voluntary desire for perfection) that you associate with Japan nowadays. It was that they could not satisfy the need without it operating really reliably and punctually -- it was simply necessary to have. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se1XtS8LAKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se1XtS8LAKs -- Japanology, a pretty entertaining series in general, if you're interested in the quirks and daily life aspects of Japanese society. And one thing I like about this series is that they usually end each episode with some touching personal story of how someone relates to the overall theme of the episode (oddly enough, because I generally never like the attempt to create a “people story” on the news or documentaries).

asiseeit123 5y ago
In other countries being punctual and reliable is not necessary to have
ekianjo 5y ago
> it was simply necessary to have. Of course, you can't transport dozens of millions of people everyday if you start being unreliable. The whole system would collapse if a train is 10 minutes late because it would block dozens of trains behind it.
- tkgally 5y ago
  > The whole system would collapse if a train is 10 minutes late... Short-term collapses do happen fairly regularly. For fifteen years, until COVID, I commuted every day between Yokohama and Tokyo. In the morning, I went from Yokohama to Shibuya on the Toyoko Line (a non-JR private line); most evenings, I returned home through Shinagawa on JR. I remember many mornings when the trains to Shibuya were delayed by ten or twenty minutes or longer; like other lines into Tokyo, the trains ran at full capacity and at maximum closeness to each other during morning rush hour, and the slightest problem could cause a backup. (Evening rush hour is more spread out, and I experienced fewer delays then.) Anyone who rides Tokyo trains regularly has similar stories. But it is true that, overall, Japanese trains, including the trains in the Tokyo area, are reliable and even pleasant to ride. In the ongoing discussion of working at home vs. office [1], many people have named commuting as a negative aspect of working in an office. I actually didn’t mind my commute—the walk to and from the stations was good exercise, the bustle of stations like Shibuya and Shinagawa was stimulating, and the train rides gave me time to think, read, and listen to music. While I am now happy to be working at home, I hope the pandemic quiets down enough for me to start feeling confident about going places by train again, both in the Tokyo area and throughout Japan. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30239441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30239441

franciscop 5y ago

Living here, the Yamanote Line opened in 1885 and with its current form from 1956 has become "The One Ring (Line)" in that it makes a ring connecting ALL of the major stations in Tokyo, and from which basically all of the mentioned lines in the article depart or go through. For example, you want to go west you'd go to Shinjuku (station on the Yamanote line) and take the Chuo. North? Either Ikebukuro or Ueno, on the north-west/north-east of the Yamanote line. Shibuya (south-west), Shinagawa (south-east) and Tokyo (east) stations are also within this. And those are the biggest stations in Tokyo, all connected through a circle line (in both directions) with trains that are ~2 mins from each other and completely full on peak times. In certain combinations it might be faster to go through "smaller" lines crossing Tokyo Station, like from Shibuya to Tokyo I'd get the Ginza Line because it goes straight. But this circle + rays of lines that happens thanks of Yamanote IMHO would have collapsed if there was instead only a single central station in the middle managing these movements between the major lines from outside Tokyo.

masklinn 5y ago
Circle lines seem to be making a comeback (or finally be getting popular?) e.g. Moscow’s mcl and bcl, paris’ line 15) and it’s really heartening to see. Circle lines tend to have pretty low distance/trip ratios but high value and great occupancy.
- lmm 5y ago
  Circle lines are unpopular nowadays because of poor resilience, just as lines with many branches are falling out of fashion (particularly as integrated ticketing reduces the advantages they once had) - indeed it's not so long ago that London deliberately "unwound" its circle line. Although the Yamanote line is a circle, it's very much an off-centre one that swings out through the suburbs on one side and not the other. And it's worth noting that Japan is pretty far behind in terms of integrated ticketing for occasional journeys (although commuter passes are integrated between different companies).
  - mlindner 5y ago
    > And it's worth noting that Japan is pretty far behind in terms of integrated ticketing for occasional journeys (although commuter passes are integrated between different companies). Firstly, Japan actually has very good integrated ticketing, namely you don't buy tickets at all. You wave your phone/card over the stall on entry and wave it again at whatever station you exit from, and the system calculates the fare at exit. (And it's discounted from the price of actually buying tickets.) Japanese train station gates allow more people to move in and out of the station than any other model of station I have seen in any country. Secondly, the over-focus on integrated ticketing misses that the important thing is integrated payment. It wasn't the case until some number of years ago, but nowadays everything but the most rural of rural lines has a single shared national system for IC card payment that is easy to use. The IC cards can even be used at most grocery stores and restaurants. They even work for foreigners and are a great alternative to cash to avoid having to calculate payments.

Synaesthesia 5y ago

Wow these 250%+ capacities are pretty crazy.

rtpg 5y ago

It's very impressive to see these decades-longs projects pay off, in one way or another. Every single line extension, station change, is an entire political battle and story. A fractal of stories waiting to be discovered. One extremely important detail for me when I hear about JNR (Now JR East/West etc) and privatization: during privatization, all the Shinkansen debt in particular was held onto by the public. Extremely expensive infrastructure (now a money printer, at least the Tokyo <-> Osaka segment), just handed to private investors. Of course JR works well as a whole now and it's not like society is worse off, but it's always left a bit of a poor taste in my mouth. (For people wanting some more interesting transportation content: here[0] is an excellent overview of IC cards and integration of all the systems in the 2000s) [0]: https://www.ejrcf.or.jp/jrtr/jrtr62/pdf/6-15_web.pdf https://www.ejrcf.or.jp/jrtr/jrtr62/pdf/6-15_web.pdf

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mlindner 5y ago
> Of course JR works well as a whole now and it's not like society is worse off, but it's always left a bit of a poor taste in my mouth. Wouldn't it be the case that society is now better off because of it? The "poor taste in your mouth" is a mental block from extensive propaganda in the last few years especially against private ownership.
- rtpg 5y ago
  The counterfactual isn't "JNR collapses entirely without privatisation". Hell, it's not "JNR collapses after privatization due to existing debts". There are so many possible universes involved here. It should be pointed out that privatization of JNR involved a lot of stuff! Regional breakups, the debt load, there's so much stuff going on there that assuming that privatization happened in an orthodox way is much more succumbing to propoganda than my statement. The coupling of so many things to a single event titled "privatization" means it is extremely hard to untangle everything. In any case I think "infrastructure-based train company suddenly doesn't have to pay its 65 billion dollar debts, and is able to function better after that" is not surprising, and I do not believe you need a bunch of bankers to figure out a business plan for that. There is an alternate universe where the debt is still taken on by the public, but JNR can continue to be a public good.

ggm 5y ago

My joy when the gong sounds from the announcer in akihabera sound like supermario power up stars...

rob74 5y ago

Great article! But I don't think that planners in other countries are unaware of how to make their rail systems better - they simply lack the political support and funding to be able to do it. Of course it make sense to add additional tracks to overloaded lines, improve the signaling, the maintenance etc. - but such projects are delayed for decades by political bickering, NIMBYism, funding difficulties etc. Plus it's much sexier for politicians to show off new high-speed train lines (never mind new freeways or airports) rather than such mundane rail improvements (which have a much higher "value for money" however).

sanxiyn 5y ago
I mean, the article's point is that Japan is no different. Basically, Commuting Five Directions Operation bankrupted JNR. JNR built many lines, but Tokyo land is expensive. I think Japan's mistake was funding it by debt. Yes it paid for itself, but it was too much debt for too long time. It should have been funded by direct investment from national budget.
- rob74 5y ago
  Never mind the financing, my point is that Japan/Tokyo had the political will to significantly improve their railways in 1965, at a time where most administrations in the western world had a 100% car-centric strategy. For example, if you look at what became of the equally ambitious expansion plans of the New York subway from the 1960s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_for_Action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_for_Action), it's a sad story indeed...

myrandomcomment 5y ago

Impressive article, well done, especially given the writer not speaking Japanese. Google translate of older documents is not very good. If you live anywhere in the Tokyo metro area owning a car is silly. I had a friend they paid near $800 a month to park because he liked to drive outside of Tokyo once a month. I looked at him and said "you can rent cars in Japan, correct?"