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Why Japan has such good railways

• newyankee 6mo ago
  The good thing that happened seems to be that China has essentially 10xed the Japan railways template. I wonder how bad a car centric China would've had been.
  • Barrin92 6mo ago
    In urban areas China is just as car centric. A lot of cities look like Robert Moses wet dreams[1]. Beijing and Shanghai have so many expressways, ring roads and arterial streets they look like they were built by Americans. The rail network in the country to get from city to city is great but the urban planning is taken out of Metropolis [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing%E2%80%93Tongzhou_Expressway#/media/File:Jingtong_Expwy_east_of_Sihui_(20230828160357).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing%E2%80%93Tongzhou_Expre...
    • ehfeng 6mo ago
      Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong are simply in a class of their own. imo, Shanghai and Guangzhou have decent systems. Compare China's urban areas to Asia's other major developing nations: Jakarta, Bangkok, Manila. China can do much better, but there's also much, much worse urban planning out there.
• amazingamazing 6mo ago
  the railways are excellent, but it's funny. I was just in Kyoto and saw flyers seemingly at every single temple opposing the Hokuriku Shinkansen extension. apparently this type of opposition has always existed (I looked at the history of trains in Japan and originally most Japanese did NOT want it at all because they thought it looked really ugly), like nimbys in USA, but such decisions are apparently federalized according to some Japanese nationals I spoke to, so the nimbys have no power. USA should do the same (well, the current federal government is volatile to say, the least, but in general I think it'd be improvement).
  • dgellow 6mo ago
    I’m not American, so only have an outsider perspective, but I’m not convinced that’s possible in the US to do the same, because the country has a completely different perspective on individual rights. Land ownership seems to be seen as something sacred that cannot be infringed in any way, meaning a small group of people who own some parts of the land can block any development that would benefit the public at large
    • amazingamazing 6mo ago
      land rights aren't exactly a constitutional right, but the 5th amendment makes it hard to take it, so in practice would probably require a constitutional amendment.
      • ghaff 6mo ago
        The 5th amendment isn't exactly recent. But a lot of factors make it harder--for better or worse--to exercise eminent domain today than in the past. You could probably never reasonably build the equivalent of the interstate highway system today. (Though even at the time, there were compromises made because of strong community pushback in some cases and there was less developed space than today as well.)
    • thekyle 6mo ago
      [dead]
    • kiba 6mo ago
      The US is the country that originated Georgism.
    • yks 6mo ago
      You’d think so, but in fact it’s almost the opposite! You can own your land all you want but your neighbor has a final say on what’s allowed on your land.
    • titzer 6mo ago
      This is mostly true until it's time to build an interstate.
• zdw 6mo ago
  Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677481
  • codethief 6mo ago
    and of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762060 which is the same article under a different URL.
• andrewstuart 6mo ago
  Countries like Japan seem to make policy that serves the people. Other countries decisions serve politicians, corporates, the rich, and maybe possibly finally, the citizens. Here in Melbourne a city of 5 million people we don’t have a train from the airport to the city despite decades of political talk about it. But why not? Because the Airport Coporation makes vast unfathomable profit on car parking. What’s most important? Just look around.
  • thegreatpeter 6mo ago
    most of the japanese railway system is private. their 2 largest companies are some of the largest publicly traded companies in the world.
    • presentation 6mo ago
      Works in progress also had a great article recently (also discussed on hacker news) about how Japanese railways are private, profit earning real estate development corporations. [1] Unfortunately, people from western countries have very negative views toward the privatization of mass transit despite the wild success that Japan has experienced. The model makes so much sense: if trains are just a way to get people to the real estate that you developed, then you’re going to make sure that the trains AND the destinations are really nice, which also turns out to be very lucrative (at least in densely populated areas) as a cherry on top. And even worse, like this commenter above alludes to, it is trendy in the West to believe that real estate developers are evil, and that corporations that make money are sucking the life out of society. This kind of degrowth populism pretty much guarantees that the successful Japanese model is out of reach for most countries, because it is exactly the pursuit of profit that makes Japan’s system so nice - not some edicts from a benevolent and extremely capable government. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762060
      • bluefirebrand 6mo ago
        > Unfortunately, people from western countries have very negative views toward the privatization of mass transit despite the wild success that Japan has experienced Japanese culture would frown heavily on enshittifying the transit experience to earn more profit. Western culture mass transit is already often shitty, and I cannot imagine how shit it would become if a for profit corporation took it over and started to squeeze it to make more money
• ChrisMarshallNY 6mo ago
  I love the Japanese rail system. I am retired, now, so don't travel there, anymore, but I always used to cry, after coming back to the US, and getting on LIRR trains. The most amazing thing, is how on-time they are, and how precise their stops are. They have marks on the platform, showing exactly where the doors will open (Protip: Don't stand directly in front of the doors, when they open). I hear that this is the result of human drivers; not robots. Apparently, engineer training in Japan is pretty intense.
  • trvz 6mo ago
    The Densha de Go game series lets you experience a bit of what it’s like to drive a Japanese train. There’s also Hmmsim 2 on iOS, which may be easier to get/run.
  • retired 6mo ago
    As a European I can only dream of having such a rail system. When I have to buy six individual tickets for triple digit prices to get somewhere and the train ends up slower than going by car I wonder why I would even try.
  • rsynnott 6mo ago
    > how precise their stops are I'm not sure how unique that is. Many rail systems, in most stations, have platforms only just long enough for the longest train. Most commuter stations in Ireland, say, can take the longest commuter train which calls at that station, and no more (typically because there were lengthened to that to accommodate that commuter train). It has to stop _fairly_ precisely, or some doors will be to nowhere. (I am sometimes on a train that stops short, and then has to slowly crawl forward to align fully with the platform. This, unfortunately, causes delays.)
    • ChrisMarshallNY 6mo ago
      > I am sometimes on a train that stops short, and then has to slowly crawl forward to align fully with the platform. In Japan, that would get the engineer fired.
• journal 6mo ago
  Because they have bad something else.
• signorovitch 6mo ago
  Japan also has amazing car infrastructure too! Last time I was there visiting family in the mountains, I was quite impressed by the number and quality of tunnels and spiral ramps. The highways are similarly privatized, with tolls like train fares reducing the need for government subsidies.
  • sieabahlpark 6mo ago
    [dead]
• cebert 6mo ago
  Japan has some of the best infrastructure anywhere. It will be interesting to see if they can keep it that way with their population changing and becoming more geriatric.
• epolanski 6mo ago
  I've been in Kyushu, in the south. Japanese railways are indeed amazing, but it should be pointed out that peripheral routes are being dismissed everywhere in the country side, often isolating people and killing places. Infrastructure is also dated in many places. It's not a criticism to Japan, I think they are just facing the fact that many people move to the cities and the country is on a population decline as well. They are facing this very masterfully.
• rwmj 6mo ago
  In the West some private equity company would be buying these up, selling off the land and separate businesses, and screwing the rail passengers for all they can, until the whole thing sinks in a sea of debt. Then repeating the formula.
  • rayiner 6mo ago
    The japanese railroads are owned by private companies.
    • rwmj 6mo ago
      Yes. How would private equity buy them unless they were private companies already?
      • hollerith 6mo ago
        The point is that Japan has a well-established private-equity industry [1] so the fact that PE firms haven't ruined Japanese railways suggests that PE firms aren't universal corrosive solvents like you seem to want us to believe they are. [1] https://flippa.com/blog/pe-funds/japan-private-equity-firms/ https://flippa.com/blog/pe-funds/japan-private-equity-firms/
        • rwmj 6mo ago
          Or it could be there are Japanese laws or customs preventing them from doing it. The article mentions maximum fare prices for example. Japanese antitrust law is strong and thoroughly enforced.
          • Ekaros 6mo ago
            Most likely more long term thinking in culture. Where as in West every single person just think of ways to profit in absolute shortest possible ways. Even if that were to kill untold trillions of human beings. After all what does a few hundred million dead matter if you can make extra cent from your company.
• jmull 6mo ago
  I’d think Japan being a long, skinny, population dense country has to help. There’s just more potential in every km of rail laid.
  • ladberg 6mo ago
    Is that not similar to both the west and east coasts of the US?
    • SeanLuke 6mo ago
      It's true to some degree now. But it wasn't very true -- or expected to be true -- back when train lines were being established. That was during westward expansion.
    • delecti 6mo ago
      WRT the west coast, mostly. It's about as long as Japan, but only about half the population. It's certainly populated enough that it's not justifiable that rail travel is so slow. Less so for the east coast though. From roughly DC to Boston is decently connected with rail, but is not nearly as direct of a corridor as Japan.
      • the__alchemist 6mo ago
        The east coast ("Amtrak") rail blows. Expensive, and slow.
        • ghaff 6mo ago
          Really? Take it all the time going to NYC even though it's not really very convenient for me to get to a northern station. Amtrak is priced to make it a good idea to book tickets in advance. Shinkansen isn't cheap either, especially if you don't have a pass--not sure of current details.
      • 9x39 6mo ago
        Cars were already popular in the US and good enough of a solution in conjunction with the highway system, maybe. If basic transportation is solved, it probably reduces the impetus to build passenger rail for rail's sake.
• floatrock 6mo ago
  This article is dishonest about the level of privatization in the JR's. Yes, they're private companies, and they do diversification like investing in real estate around their rail cooridors to grow towns and grab people looking to do some shopping in their adjacent department store as passengers are walking through the stations. This is transit-oriented development at its best. (Also, ask google why land property lines in the US western states often look like big checkerboards) But there's no mention of the Japan Railway Construction, Transport and Technology Agency (JRTT). That's the government entity that builds many new Shinkansen lines. It then leases them to the JR companies at a fixed rate for 30 years. This keeps massive construction costs off the private companies' balance sheets. Or when they do need large capital spends, there's no mention of the Fiscal Investment and Loan Program (FILP) which provides loans in the form of low-interest credit backed by government guarantees. Their creditors are effectively lending to the Japaneese government, not the JR company. Is that kind of system really privatized? It's hybridized at best, and it shows that you really need government support of some sort to push country-scale infrastructure like this forward. Sorry free-market absolutists.
  • SV_BubbleTime 6mo ago
    It is not at all dishonest to talk about their privatization. It’s dishonest to hand wave it away while pretending that because there are government controls for construction and financing that it would go even better if it was more government or “more hybridized”. With no source, just opinion. No one that has ever had to switch blue to red to green in toyko just cash, buying a new ticket at each stop only to go a couple miles, has ever forgotten how privatized Japans railways are. I expected to see comments about how good it is, how most people love it, how it’s highly privatized, and of course about how to make it better with more government.
    • floatrock 6mo ago
      You misunderstand me... I'm not saying the privatization is a bad thing, handwaving it away, or saying lets throw government at it. I'm merely pointing out that in a 4,000 word essay trying to explain all the factors that let Japan have such a good railway system, there's a huge amount of emphasis on the privatization part, and zero mention of all the public sector subsidies that enable the entire system. It's fine to talk about the efficiency of the private operators. No problem there. The dishonesty is in omitting any discussion of how the tracks that the whole system depends are built with heavy government support. Without that, one could be forgiven for reading that article and thinking "oh, just privatize it and you'll be as successful as Japan." I think the take-away here should be more along the lines of what a working public-private partnership can look like and what roles each can play. I'd love to see a 4,000-word article that compares this model to the regional transit authority models we have in the US.
• SeanLuke 6mo ago
  It's generally regarded that Hong Kong has the best subway in the world. There are many reasons for this, but one cannot be overstated: Hong Kong's geography. A huge portion of the city consists of long thin urban corridors sandwiched between mountains and the sea. As a result, Hong Kong need concentrate its funding on only a few subway lines to support a huge portion of the population. This good article aside, I wonder if the same thing is true about Japan when we're talking about long-distance trains. Compared to France or Germany, Japan is basically a stick. A very large chunk of the populace lies on a single train line running from Kagoshima up to Hakodate, running through Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Osaka, Kyoto, Yokohama, Tokyo, Sendai, etc. So you can slap a single bullet train line there and service all of them.
  • deleted 6mo ago
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  • kinow 6mo ago
    That is a good point but I think it doesn't apply everywhere.that has a similar shape. New Zealand has a similar shape but without railways interconnecting cities. You cannot cross the country, the islands, or even regions by train. I think this could be a variable to contribute to a good coverage and infrastructure... but there are probably more factors involved.
    • andrewl 6mo ago
      The population density is probably one factor. New Zealand has 5.34 million people in 103,000 square miles. At the other extreme you have Hong Kong with 7.5 million people in 430 square miles. Each mile of track gives service to a much larger percentage of the population in Hong Kong than New Zealand. The same goes for a lot of the United States. The coastal corridors in the United States are population dense, but the interior less so.
      • phire 6mo ago
        Population density is one thing. Another issue is timing. New Zealand was a really young country when railway technology came along, and didn't really have enough time or money to invest in a good railway network before other technology came along. Airplanes are the perfect technology for NZ's geography, because they just fly over everything. There are actually a few places in NZ that received passenger airline service in the 30s before they received a railway connection (namely Gisborne), and many other places that never received railway connections. At the same time, NZ was one of the fastest adopters of the automobiles, second only to America. I think viable cars and airplanes had taken another 25 years to arrive, NZ might have had a much more complete railway network, with a much better chance of surviving intact into the modern era.
• tjpnz 6mo ago
  In Japan there's a cross party political consensus that public transport projects are a net positive for society. That's important when you have work which could take a decade or more to complete - the Chuo maglev project for instance will be complete when my kids are approaching adulthood and they're still not in primary school. I often wonder what we might be able to do in New Zealand (where I'm from) if we had the money and population to support it. But then I remember that one of the two major political parties always cancels or scales back anything ongoing which is public transport related, every single time they're elected, so nothing ever gets done.
• mvvl 6mo ago
  one thing worth pointing out is that the legacy private railways work because they were never nationalized and had decades to quietly buy up land around stations before it was worth anything. That's really hard to replicate from scratch. This model is great in dense cities but even Japan is still struggling with rural lines
  • linguae 6mo ago
    Exactly. Tokyu's model of building a train line from the city center to rural areas and then building suburban developments in the rural areas the line traverses doesn't work in already built-up areas. Hence, there are still publicly-owned lines in areas where that model doesn't work. A great example is the Yokohama Municipal Subway. It is publicly owned and serves areas that were generally already built before the subway line was built.
  • deleted 6mo ago
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  • strado 6mo ago
    Exactly this. And the European case is the opposite starting point. Paris already had 2+ million people when the Metro opened in 1900. You're not building rail to create land value, you're building it because the existing density already demands it. Which is why European systems basically all require public subsidy while the Japanese private lines could turn a profit. The preconditions are just so different that copying either model somewhere else rarely works. IME the people pushing "just do what Tokyo does" tend to skip over this part.
• skl3977 6mo ago
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• ttul 6mo ago
  “Japan’s liberal land use regulation makes it straightforward to build new neighborhoods next to railway lines, giving commuters easy access to city centers. It also enables the densification of these centers, which means that commuters have more places they want to go.” This is the most important paragraph in the article. It can’t be overstated how ingenious Japan’s system of zoning is and how much this has benefitted their society in ways we can only dream about here in the West.
  • savanaly 6mo ago
    >how ingenious Japan’s system of zoning is I'm only barely familiar with it so I ask this in good faith: is it really ingenious or is it just more permissive? My bias/priors are that the simpler and truer statement is: it can't be overstated how beneficial more permissive zoning laws are to a society.
    • dangus 6mo ago
      Sometimes permissive zoning laws don’t actually encourage positive urban development outcomes. Example: Texas Zoning has to both exist and be well-designed.
      • zbrozek 6mo ago
        I bet you'd see natural market driven concentration around rail stations in Texas too, if they had a useful rail network.
        • XenophileJKO 6mo ago
          You might be surprised, look at Dallas. They have a pretty extensive rail network.
          • Schiendelman 6mo ago
            Dallas does not have permissive zoning, even in comparison to a city like Seattle.
• kemiller 6mo ago
  This is a great article, but I think it’s hard to ignore that Japan’s culture of harmony is a big part of why they were able to choose sensible regulations that benefitted everyone. We struggle to pass even the most sensible land use reforms because entrenched interests want to remain entrenched even if it hurts the system overall.
  • mitthrowaway2 6mo ago
    So America's culture of individual liberty is why people don't have the freedom to build whatever they want on the land that they own?
    • Someone1234 6mo ago
      American's culture of me, me, me, now, now, now is why. If it doesn't benefit the individual almost immediately they're strongly opposed. They want the benefits of strong infrastructure but let someone else build it without inconveniencing ME or costing ME a dime. It is a culture that teaches greed is good and society should be built around all gain no cost.
      • socalgal2 6mo ago
        > They want the benefits of strong infrastructure but let someone else build it without inconveniencing ME or costing ME a dime. Which is what the Japanese have. private railways
      • antonymoose 6mo ago
        As an American, I always hear all these weird stories about New York and its subway system. All the random busker type nonsense, the petty crime and the “mugger wallet” type jokes. Not to mention the major crimes that make the news. I’d rather not deal with it? Yes I know roads are dangerous. I’d still rather not deal with the expected culturally imposed insanity that the Japanese curiously seem to lack.
        • mmooss 6mo ago
• shevy-java 6mo ago
  Japanese are the original micro-optimisers. Kaizen. South Koreans then took over. In between were the Taiwanese. The next wave will be mainland China.
  • thenthenthen 6mo ago
    China is not about optimising, its about maximising
• fsh 6mo ago
  Japanese public transport is good, but no match for the Swiss system. Outside of big cities, the coverage is spotty, and even reasonably large towns are only connected by reserved-only trains every couple of hours that get booked out days in advance. The almost complete lack of digitization is also remarkable (reservations have to be made with machines in the stations). There are other annoyances such as the public transport in Tokyo shutting down completely at midnight. In contrast, the Swiss government-owned system delivers usable connectivity to almost any human settlement, even most mountain villages. The ticket prices are also not so different, which is surprising considering the large difference of salaries in the two countries.
  • kohsuke 6mo ago
    You can make reservations online: https://www.eki-net.com/en/jreast-train-reservation/Top/Index https://www.eki-net.com/en/jreast-train-reservation/Top/Inde...
    • deleted 6mo ago
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    • darekkay 6mo ago
      But you still have to pick up the tickets at the machine. Additionally, my mobile phone internet is not recognized as "being in Japan", so I can't access the QR code needed for the ticket without wifi. You can work around it (save the QR code when you have wifi), but it all just seems so inefficient compared to all the countries where you can _book_ your tickets using a mobile app.
      • SapporoChris 6mo ago
        Actually, ticketless services are being rolled out. Example: https://www.jreast.co.jp/en/multi/ticket/eticket.html https://www.jreast.co.jp/en/multi/ticket/eticket.html
        • darekkay 6mo ago
• myui 6mo ago
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• talkingtab 6mo ago
  The introduction lost me. To quote: "Japan’s vast railway network", but it does not address the mouse in the room. Japan is approximately the size of California with a population density that is three times that of California. I would argue that a comparison of rail systems without addressing those critical issues may be interesting but isn't really informative. The issues are complex.
  • rsynnott 6mo ago
    California has a similar population density to France, which has a generally decent railway network. It's not really an excuse.
    • gnabgib 6mo ago
      France has a density (pop/km²) of 122, similar density countries include Poland, Azerbaijan, Sierra Leone, Egypt (how are consistent are the rail systems across those countries?). US has a density of 37. California specifically has a density of 94 (29% lower), which puts it near Spain, Timor-Leste, Moldova and Cuba.. California is doing OK for it's position. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
      • Mawr 6mo ago
        People aren't uniformly distributed over entire areas, making such comparisons completely wrong and pointless. > US has a density of 37. Just LOL. No, the US does not consist of 300 million people evenly spread over that large of an area. Not even close.
• cbdevidal 6mo ago
  I honestly had no idea they’re so libertarian-capitalist. I figured it was government-led, government-run.
• DmitryO 6mo ago
  Russian or Chinese one way better.
  • grishka 6mo ago
    When was the last time you had to travel between Moscow and St Petersburg? Sapsan trains are always sold out from my experience. And those night trains don't always fit your needs, although they are plentiful and dirt cheap. They are supposedly building a dedicated high-speed rail line, but I don't have much faith in that, especially in the current situation.
• CharlieDigital 6mo ago
  > "I think that though we are a railway company, we consider ourselves a city-shaping company. In Europe for instance, railway companies simply connect cities through their terminals. That is a pretty normal way of operating in this industry, whereas what we do is completely different: we create cities and then, as a utility facility, we add the stations and the railways to connect them one with another." I think this is it. The economic model incentivizes rail development. (Certainly, part of it is also cultural and legal frameworks that in the US make it very hard for this model to work) Because the railway companies also participate in the economic activity at the destinations, they extract extended value from enabling mobility. Imagine if the rail operators owned a percentage of a stadium or convention center, for example. This then creates the economic incentive to build more connections to this "hub".
  • kccqzy 6mo ago
    > Certainly, part of it is also cultural and legal frameworks that in the US make it very hard for this model to work How so? In the United States Congress granted land to railroad companies, and the companies can sell the land to finance building tracks. Many cities started as railroad stops and grew because of the railroad.
    • d_sem 6mo ago
      I suspect the commenter above is reflecting on 2026 USA and not 1850 USA. The past tense nature of your comment if part of the concern highlights a common recognition that there is limited evidence the country is currently capable of building.
    • CharlieDigital 6mo ago
      A lot of NIMBY/racism/classism and modern reality of legal delays means that it can be costly. Zoning laws is another. It's a lot of fun visiting Japan and Taiwan because you can wander around and there's a huge variation of utilization in a given block. US approach to zoning means that I rarely see similar utilization in the US. Separate from this is politics. I'm in the NYC metro area and we've been trying to expand access into NYC for decades. You would think that this would be a no-brainer because it enables so much economic activity in both directions (NY/NJ). Yet, Chris Christie canceled the ARC project (which itself was years in the making) for optics at the time of the Tea Party.
• amacbride 6mo ago
  > This liberal zoning system is reinforced by private access to city planning powers. Thirty percent of Japan’s urban land has been subject to land readjustment, where agreement among two thirds of residents and landowners in an area is enough to allow its replanning, including compulsorily taking and demolishing land for amenities and infrastructure. I think this is the key paragraph because (like it or not) a lot of Americans would be philosophically opposed to this sort of process (the Kelo decision on eminent domain notwithstanding.)
  • loglog 6mo ago
    Americans are very comfortable with eminent domain, as long as it is applied to brown people.
• rayiner 6mo ago
  I’m glad the article confronts the “culture versus policy” argument. But I think it overlooks the degree to which policy reflects culture. Japanese rail policy reflects a combination of Big Government regulation and privatization that has no significant constituency in the U.S. In the U.S., the folks who like public transit would never go for having rail stations be owned by conglomerates that get nearly half their profit from retail and real estate activities adjacent to the stations: https://www.patiencerealty.com/post/the-story-of-how-privatization-and-real-estate-transformed-the-japanese-railway-industry https://www.patiencerealty.com/post/the-story-of-how-privati.... It makes perfect economic sense. Transit creates a positive value for the land around each station. Having the rail operators own the station gives them a stake in the value created and incentivizes them to prioritize good rail service that brings people to the hotels and retail the companies own near the stations. But Americans are ideological, not pragmatic, and an idea like that is DOA here.
• willmadden 6mo ago
  I know why Japan has such good railways, and I can also tell you that this blog article doesn't mention any them.
  • black6 6mo ago
    The tragedy of the commons doesn't seem to exist in Japan to the same extent it does in Western nations, especially the US. As you said: that's largely due to reasons not mentioned in the article.
    • willmadden 6mo ago
      Hear, hear! Fun fact: Germany was once famous for its on-time trains. You are now lucky if they show up at all.
      • thenthenthen 6mo ago
        This happened in, what like 15 years? The trains are truly a disaster. In 2022 i missed like 3 days of various conferences and workshops because trains would just not come :/
  • unselect5917 6mo ago
    [flagged]
• seu 6mo ago
  The article is great and very informative. But I feel there's a general vibe of "privatizations are great". For example, they do mention that privatizations didn't work in Argentina (they were a total mess and the total railway went from something like 50k kilometers to two thirds of that - if) but they don't mention enough of it - or other cases - to understand which regulations and why worked the way they did. It feels too much like it's all about integrating corporations, and that's it.
  • deleted 6mo ago
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  • ColonelBlimp 6mo ago
    I'm not surprised that the article has that vibe and that you noticed it. Works in Progress, the magazine that published the article, is notorious for having a preference for market-oriented solutions, "laissez faire" policies and neoliberalism. They are open about it. Nothing wrong with that, of course.
  • landedgentry 6mo ago
    S.Y. Lee wrote an excellent series on the privatization of Japan National Railways (JNR). This is part 4 of 4: https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-japans-national https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-japans-... If I remember correctly, the privatization of JNR was mostly political, and has little relation to the subsequent successes or failures of the railways. In other words, keeping it public would not necessarily have changed the outcome for passengers.
• vantassell 6mo ago
  > Japan is one of the only countries to have privatized parking. In Europe and North America, vast quantities of parking space is socialized: municipalities own the streets and allow people to park on them at low or zero cost. Initially with the intention of encouraging the provision of more parking spaces, Japan made it illegal to park on public roads or pavements without special permission. Before someone buys a car, they must prove that they have a reserved night-time space on private land, either owned or leased. This is got to be a huge factor. Making everyone pay for "free parking" through inefficient use of space is such a waste. I strongly recommend everyone to read Donald Shoup's "The High Price of Free Parking".
  • newsclues 6mo ago
    Makes you consider the cost of anything that is “free”
    • kulahan 6mo ago
      "free" just means "publicly subsidized" in these cases. Not that this is a bad thing, but that's really all it is. See also: literally anything any nation pays for using tax money.
      • acdha 6mo ago
        Sometimes it’s privately subsidized, too, such as when you go out to eat and your meal costs more because the restaurant provides free parking. People who don’t drive often pay higher prices subsidizing the people who do, which is something we should talk about more directly.
        • cm11 6mo ago
          Same with credit cards.
        • doikor 6mo ago
          A lot of the time the businesses don’t have an option to not have parking as it is enforced by zoning laws/regulations. Though they can make that mandatory parking paid but often the social norm is for it to be free (at least for the first hour or two)
• m104 6mo ago
  Alright whippersnappers, let's chat about the history of railroads in the US. In the early 20th century, US rail companies were beholding a very favorable situation: high demand to run loads of heavy freight all over the country, high demand to ferry passengers all over the country, and basically no serious competitors to either revenue source. Now freight revenue was never going to be transformative to the industry, but it had the benefits of being reliable, un-fussy, and fairly easy to build a financial business around. Passengers, on the other hand, offered huge revenue potential, but had the downsides of being very fussy about things like safety and comfort and timeliness, along with wanting stations in convenient places and an ever-expanding rail network. Students of US business management history should be unsurprised, then, that while evaluating the market that offered reliable revenue, versus the market that wanted large capital investments, the railroads overwhelmingly chose the freight market. In other words, US the railroad companies spoke and said we do not want passengers loudly and clearly. The thinking was: passengers can do take the wagons and busses and cars and these newfangled airplane thingies, but freight is a guaranteed market for us! So the passengers slowly migrated to other form of transportation. But the kicker was, freight also wanted things like timeliness and access to an expanding transport network and, shockingly for the railroad execs, were willing to pay for it. Add about 80 years, declining rail traffic, and tons of corporate mergers, and we have the sad state of US railways today: many residents have never seen a railway expansion or shiny new rail equipment, much less a real functioning passenger train. It's easy and comfortable to say that zoning or regulations or market forces allowed US rail to languish, but that would be ignoring the part where the industry did not want the customers in the first place.
• lordmoma 6mo ago
  the article didn't even compare with China railways, that's weird.
  • thenthenthen 6mo ago
    It would make writing about the Shinkansen insignificant :p
• soruly 6mo ago
  successful train lines in Japan are all built between CBD and some spots / attractions. Odakyu: odawara / hakone, Seibu: chichibu, keiou: Takao, toukyuu: Nikko / kinugawa, nankai: Takao. Tourists spots are usually in the mountains and the CBD is near the sea. And residential area is developed between them along the lines so the trains carry bidirectional passengers to work or relax on the same line, higher utilization keeps ticket fare low.
• threethirtytwo 6mo ago
  I love how the bar graph didn’t include China because China is such a small place, basically a rounding error.
• arikrahman 6mo ago
  I have a hard time believing China doesn't make the list with how much rail they have.
• Nevermark 6mo ago
  A decentralized alternative would be making proportional ownership of railway stock, relative to distance from a rail station, a condition of business permits. Suddenly all the businesses will be very pro-rail, as they benefit both directly and indirectly from its competent management, capacity growth and reach, even far from their own business. Especially far from their business. Not claiming to know this works, but there are often many ways to solve a problem once the problem is well characterized. This insight that rail creates a great deal of indirect value is really helpful. Indirect value is a battery. Voltage. Ready to power economic growth along whatever path the created-value to investment-return circuit gets closed.
• johnea 6mo ago
  > The Midwest was once criss-crossed by a network of ‘interurbans’, essentially intercity trams. In the United States, these lines have vanished They just "vanished"! Man, I hate it when that happens. You leave a railroad outside with out a lid on it for too long and it just, you know, evaporates! What a drag... What an amazing evasion of reality/truth, another classic use of the passive voice...
  • rsynnott 6mo ago
    The actual lines would be essentially useless today; they kind of _do_ evaporate if not maintained. The important thing is whether the right of way had been preserved. Irish Rail is currently reopening an old line. The first step is ripping up the whole thing and laying a new one; the existing one, closed 25 years ago, is unusable. (For that matter, at time of closing, it was virtually unusable; I think it had a speed limit of 20kph or something for safety reasons.) They degrade badly if not maintained.
  • dredmorbius 6mo ago
    It would be more illuminating to reference the General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy directly, in which GM and other defendants (Firestone, tyre company, Standard Oil of California, Philips Petroleum, and Mac Trucks) were convicted of violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act in both monopolising the market for buses and the demolition of extant streetcar lines in numerous US cities: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...>
    • johnea 6mo ago
      Thank you for the link! Here in San Diego we're still suffering from those removals. New trolley lines aren't installed in a way to serve daily resident commutes, as the original trolley lines did, instead they're primarily organized to serve as tourist disneyland rides...
• moralestapia 6mo ago
  >Rail travel is much more common in Japan That's not a cause but a consequence.
  • rsynnott 6mo ago
    It's both; more usage improves the economics and makes it easier to justify improvements and expansion.
    • moralestapia 6mo ago
      Tru tru.
• decimalenough 6mo ago
  This made it to the HN front page 4 days ago, under its (terrible) previous name "The secrets of the Shinkansen": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762060 And the top comment was mine, pointing out a bunch of factual mistakes and misleading claims: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47765032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47765032
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  • nunez 6mo ago
    the "city merging" thing also happens in the US! particularly with school districts. this is why many gigantor middle/high schools exist; they serve HUGE coverage areas with many cities that are too small/rural to have their own school districts.
    • bombcar 6mo ago
      The bus from Cars 3 says “You about to feel the wrath of the Lower Belleville County Unified School District!” - and it works because almost all school districts people are familiar with in the USA have names similar to that, with the combinations and crossings of county and city.
  • connorboyle 6mo ago
    You seem to be using vanilla (or one might say "area-weighted" population density numbers. The article specifically says that they are using population-weighted population density numbers for comparison: > Population weighted density refers to the density multiplied by the actual number of people living in each area, and more closely reflects the density that people experience. One indication of this is that they give a different value for London's population density (9.2k / km^2) than you do.
• linzhangrun 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  • frollogaston 6mo ago
    The thing I still don't get is, US cities were populated long before autos were ubiquitous. How did this not cement public transport? The most famous case is how Los Angeles's Pacific Electric rail company ("Red Car") died off. It's often thrown around that the automobile industry made that happen through lobbying, but when I dug into it, their decline started in the 1920s, well before autos were common and LA had its big freeways like the 405. I'm guessing it's just a population density thing. Cause supposedly the Red Car was a loss-leader for real estate development from the start.
• reenorap 6mo ago
  Japan's railways are amazing. They are amazing because the workers have low wages, so the companies can afford to over-employ, so they have workers that are doing things like wiping the handrails every hour, and ensuring that the bathrooms are meticulous. The trains are very clean and very safe, which encourages use more to the point where everyone uses them and alternatives are starved for money. Workers can afford to live off low wages because the cost of goods is low. A meal in Japan, a very, very good and delicious meal of pork curry is about $8 USD. That's it. In the US it's the opposite. Wages are high. Cost of food and rent is very high. That means that they have to charge high prices. But then it's so high people look for alternatives and then traffic drops. Then they cut jobs so it's dirty, unkept and dangerous. It's a vicious cycle.
  • landedgentry 6mo ago
    This tweet finds that US systems like BART and MTA have more employees, when adjusted by number of riders or miles of track, than JR East, which seems to contradict your comment. https://xcancel.com/shinobu_books/status/2043991756291879024 https://xcancel.com/shinobu_books/status/2043991756291879024
• sghiassy 6mo ago
  Every mode of transportation has a sweet spot in terms of range If you can drive somewhere in an hour - you would never take a commercial plane, etc etc Trains peak around the 2-5 hour driving range. Which is perfect for Japan’s geographies So the reason trains are good in Japan is that they’re best suited for the distances present in Japan
• Shailendra_S 6mo ago
  One word dedication of Japanese people. They care very dedicated to their country. I respect this thing the most in them. They are very hardworking also.
• WAKUTA 6mo ago
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• jmyeet 6mo ago
  So every time a post about successful public transit comes up, we get the full gamut of responses: - "This wouldn't work in the US because of X". X is usually land area. Ok, but what about China? - "We should fix some [corner case]" like the cost of parking; - "It's too expensive here". Why is it expensive? The key theme from all of this is central planning. You might be tempted to say that Japanese railways are private. Yes and no. And they certainly didn't start that way. Back to the article, I find it weird to write an article in 2026 about the effectiveness of railways without talking about China. China is only mentioned once and that was in terms of passenger numbers. Also, China's railroad network largely didn't even exist in 2005, certainly not the high speed rail. Look at the top metro systems by rail length [1] and 11 of the top 12 are in China (Moscow is the outlier). All of those systems are pretty new too. Chengdu at #4 was started in 2010. According to this [2], Chengdu's population in 2010 was ~7.5 million. So you can't really argue the city was designed for it or it built early. Most arguments against regional and metro rail systems can be debunked with "But China". [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems [2]: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20480/chengdu/population https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20480/chen...
  • thenthenthen 6mo ago
    The Chinese high speed rail network is completely utterly insane. Funny, the overhead line equipment (power lines) looks identical to the high speed lines in Europe!
    • rsynnott 6mo ago
      ... I mean, wait, what would you _expect_ it to look like? Overhead lines look much the same everywhere (except overhead lines for trams, which sometimes get weird).
• the_arun 6mo ago
  Japan's geography also a biggest factor in using trains over roads. Next comes population density. Resource constraints make them use rails over roads for efficiency. We cannot compare US & Japan.
• carefree-bob 6mo ago
  I am skeptical of these "learn the secret of how other culture does X" because it almost always reflects the concerns of the person writing the article rather than shedding light on how a nation does X well. That's because we view the world through the prism of our own concerns, but when we encounter a society that is substantially different from ours -- such as any East Asian society -- then they will have a broad basket of different concerns. Imagine, for example, that you stumble upon an island of amazing acrobats, they can do fantastic feats. And they are also cannibals. Now the temptation is just too great to say "cannibalism aids in acrobatic skills. Learn from the secrets of the best acrobats". In other words, when looking at a different society, there are just too many differences for you to identify what makes a specific industry work, and what is just cannibalism, unless you do some very, very serious investigative analysis, which this article is not, and even though what you are doing will have high error rates. What you need is the opposite -- a society very close to the US, but with amazing rail. Then emphasizing differences is much more likely to hit on something important for rail. I could argue the reason Japan has amazing rail was the deflationary period in which the government went on a massive infrastructure spree to stimulate the economy via deficit spending, and this was because of the high Japanese propensity to save in the aftermath of the Plaza accords, and profound risk aversion, as well as their extremely peaceful and law abiding social norms. Good luck on having any of those approaches work well in the US. But hey, once again people focus on their own concerns. I'm sure for someone obsessed with, say, land use rights, they will point out that the what is preventing us from having amazing rail is lack of a Japanese style land management system. And for someone else focused on toll roads, they will say if we had more toll roads, then we would have great public transportation. Of course, India is filled with toll roads, and they are not known for great public transportation. And I could also give examples of nations that did huge infrastructure deficit spending, and they didn't get great infrastructure. Etc. Everyone sees the world through the lens of their own concerns. Articles like this, that don't even try to rebut the counter arguments or account for concern-bias, are not impressive.
• triage8004 6mo ago
  Been trying to implement the Japanese point-and-call systems they use for railway safety in LLm work with some success. Think it should theoretically be a good verbose way
• tnk0 6mo ago
  I live in Tokyo. The rail network here is so dense that even locals like me still get confused figuring out transfers sometimes. One thing I don't see discussed enough: the cost of car ownership in Tokyo is a huge factor. Monthly parking alone can cost as much as renting a studio apartment. In central Tokyo, parking for a single day can run close to $200. When your country is this small and land is this expensive, trains just make more sense for most people. I think the rail network developed as much out of necessity as anything else.
  • loglog 6mo ago
    This makes sense, because parking a car does take a similar amount of space as a studio apartment.
• laughing_man 6mo ago
  The real reason Japan has such good railways has to do with politics. Japanese politicians were unable to create jobs (and collect bribes) with military spending due to post war constitutional restrictions, so instead of a military industrial complex they created what some have dubbed the "construction state". That's why they have cisterns under Tokyo which can handle a 400 year flood, and more germane to this discussion, railways which make no sense. There are railways built in the '90s which wend their way through a dozen of mountain passes to provide rail service to tiny towns with just a few thousand residents. There's no way you can justify paying the maintenance on something like that, and indeed in recent years they've been shutting these kinds of lines down.
  • ArchieScrivener 6mo ago
    [dead]
  • ricardobeat 6mo ago
    This is completely ignoring the entire piece. Zoning, rail companies having large real estate interest and revenue, profitability, vertical integration, public policy. If having train service to remote areas and 400-year flood prevention systems are signs of dysfunction, things are going pretty great. Not all public utilities have to be profitable on their own.
    • laughing_man 6mo ago
      I'm not ignoring the piece at all. What I'm saying is the underlying reason Japan built so much rail has nothing to do with what the author is claiming. And yes, overbuilding infrastructure is a sign of dysfunction. The money to build all that stuff came from people who would have stimulated the economy in other ways, and it isn't free to maintain what you've built. It's really inefficient to build a rail line and then shut it down because you can't afford to maintain it.
• pcblues 6mo ago
  The idea that travel to work is necessary, most work is in the middle of a city, and people need affordable places to live that are far from the city led to both the road and rail catastrophes we have in nearly every modernish city. A better question is "Why can't the employer be close to home?" or "Why can't the employer pay for my commute?"
• codethief 6mo ago
  > In 1982, Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone started to privatize the railways. Unlike other countries, Japan simply returned to the traditional private railway model of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: tracks, trains, stations, and yards were owned by vertically integrated regional conglomerates. There are substantial advantages to vertical integration. Railways are a closed system that has to be planned as a single unit. […] This is a very interesting point, especially in light of another article discussed here a couple days ago[0] about why Switzerland has 25 Gbit/s internet and why the US and Germany don't. One of the main points of the article was that the fiber optics infrastructure is (or should be treated as) a natural monopoly: > The rational solution is to build the infrastructure once, as a shared, neutral asset, and let different companies compete to provide the service over that infrastructure. That’s how water works. That’s how electricity works in most places. And in Switzerland, that’s how fiber optic internet works. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652400 EDIT: Turns out the Japanese railway infrastructure is not truly owned by the railway companies but instead leased from a government-owned institution, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47773556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47773556 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47766873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47766873
  • SenHeng 6mo ago
    A problem with privatising the railways is that unprofitable routes, ie rural villages, are deprioritised or simply shut down. My village gets 1 train every 1.5 hours, and none between 3pm and 7pm. For several years now, there has been discussion of shutting down the upper half of the route. So every household has 2 or more cars.
    • alephnerd 6mo ago
      That's the same in most of Japan. Most people who over-idealize rail transit in Japan only visited or stayed short term within the Yamanote Line. It's a great country, but using Central Tokyo as a frame of reference as most people on HN do is the equivalent of using Manhattan or Central London as your frame of reference for the US or UK. Major urban areas like Osaka, Nagoya, and even most of Greater Tokyo are extremely car dependent with plentiful parking as well - let alone smaller towns.
• numitus 6mo ago
  The answer is simple: high population density. The more densely people live, the more effective public transport is.
• ItsClo688 6mo ago
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• silexia 6mo ago
  The problem in the United States is how difficult it is to get permits, unnecessary environmental regulations and massive waste and corruption (see Gavin Newsom and California's failed high speed rail).
• balderdash 6mo ago
  The problem with rail in many places like the US just comes down to door to door times. NE corridor train times are ok as long as your not going Boston <> Washington (even though it’s slower than it should be) and your going you can go downtown to downtown pretty easily - other than that there’s really not much intercity travel that makes sense by train. I’d super happily take the train if it was faster than driving or flying in the US. As an aside even for intercity travel it’s crazy the us doesn’t have more specialized trains like the Heathrow express even to make airport travel easier)
• claaams 6mo ago
  When your legislators fall (take bri...I mean are lobbied) for obvious grifts like "the hyperloop" our society won't progress. For the past 2 years I moved somewhere where I did not need to have a car or to drive for pretty much any reason. I understand I am fortunate here but it seems like such a huge oversight to have designed literally all of our society around cars and vehicles instead of efficient public transport and better designed cities.
• zawakin 6mo ago
  Japanese trains run on time not because of the tracks or the signaling. It's that any delay makes the total apology burden on station staff, conductors, and drivers grow exponentially. JR's timetabling is, in practice, an apology inflation containment policy.
• CHB0403085482 6mo ago
  Tokyo trains are the best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dKiEY0UOtA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dKiEY0UOtA