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Comment by cafxx | Hacker News Reader

I live in Tokyo and I can assure you that living car-free is lovely.

I used to love driving, then moved here and stopped caring altogether when I realized that public transport here is significantly faster (and cheaper) than using your car to go from point A to point B.

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And probably safer

Quite so. And, I forgot, you can use the time commuting for something that requires your complete attention - like reading, studying, or even just deep thinking - that you simply can't do when you're driving.

So not only it's faster, it actually frees up time for other things.

Unless you’re a woman

Actually that's a very interesting question. Is the rate of sexual assault on Japanese Trains higher or lower than their average auto injury rate?

It's a lot higher. But I wouldn't be so sure whether chronic back pain from a car crash is better or worse than being groped in a train.

The underlying general point you are making is definitely valid, but there are now reserved cars on all trains during rush hours.

> I live in Tokyo and I can assure you that living car-free is lovely

So you really enjoy packed subways that make you feel like cattle pretty much every time of the day? Sorry but Tokyo is the best example of "best in class public transport" being completely over capacity for the amount of people they have to transport every day.

In my personal opinion, better that than trawling slowly through traffic jams. If their train system is over capacity, more people moving through cars would be even more of a nightmare.

The feeling of independence (or not feeling like “cattle“) is substantially reduced in big cities, where you are subjected to a lot of traffic rules, overcrowding of cars, jaywalkers, accidents, potholes, diversions, expensive parking space... I could go on.

> In my personal opinion, better that than trawling slowly through traffic jams.

I think the best way to describe it is that it sucks either way to commute in Tokyo no matter what means of transports you end up using, except if you can live very close to your office, which is not the experience of 99% of people.

It sucks less on a nice heated/cooled chair, with fresh air and nice music and no ------- one around - even in a 10 times less populated city

As mentioned in my previous comment, it really does sound like you don't know what you're talking about.

Commuting in Tokyo is not without problem, but consistently better than commuting anywhere else I've been.

Also, you seem to completely ignore the point that the alternative "everyone commutes by car" (or you have other alternatives?) would result in a constant gridlock given Tokyo's scale - so it would be orders of magnitude worse.

I've always wondered why they don't do 'assigned seating' in a metro train. It is feasible to know everyone's destination station at the time of boarding. And it is feasible to know current occupancy of each car in the train. So potentially, people can be assigned to a specific car (need not be a specific seat), such that crowding in each car can be capped and more cars per train can be added without having to increase the platform length. Also, even when platform length isn't a constraint, I have seen metros running with less cars and preferring to keep it crowded. Why is that?

> It is feasible to know everyone's destination station at the time of boarding.

I challenge you to find a mechanism that works for this and is quick enough to keep up at rush hour in the average Tokyo train station.

Additionally, people move at different speeds through the station due to factors like age, familiarity with the network, disability, bladder capacity etc.

It’s a non-trivial problem to solve, and likely only marginally improves user experience.

Put an electronic sign up on each station platform indicating where the cars with most space will be on the next train. Some people will rush to those cars, some will just stay where they were. By varying the amount of notice given or the threshold where you consider a car "less full", you can distribute the travellers more evenly.

I suspect the reason this isn't valuable is that the feedback loop is already pretty good at high occupancy rates: when one car is at capacity, every other car is too.

You can indicate your destination at the entry turnstile to the platform and it will tell you two things: (a) the car you should board, and (b) the car you should exit from at the destination station. Most times, (a) and (b) are same. Some times, (a) and (b) can be different – say when you have more cars than then length of the platform supports, then some cars will hang off the platform length and hence their doors won't open. If you were assigned to board such a car, you have to make way to another nearby assigned car whose door can open, which is assigned to you so that everyone won't crowd the same last car aligned to the platform.

Have you never been in a metro train before? There's not actually that much seating, if you only had people sitting down that'd be like a tenth of the train's capacity.

Not to mention the trains stop every minute or two, and people don't, like, book that stuff ahead of time.

I guess you took my "assigned seating" literally. I obviously didn't mean _seating_ but more of an assigned spot in a train car. The point of an assigned spot is that there can be different designated areas for different people – elderly, women, kids, disabled, those with cycles, those with luggage, general etc. and now with Covid19, these assigned spot density could be appropriately adjusted.

I still don't see how that would help. What does adjusted mean? The problem is there isn't enough capacity, yeah they could just reduce how many people can take the train, that means people being late to work or otherwise with an impacted schedule.

And they already know which train routes at which times are crowded, if they could just add more capacity they'd have already done it.

Most stations already have posters telling you:

- which cars are normally less crowded

- which cars are recommended for getting off at a certain station, based on proximity of the exits at that station to each car

Google Maps (as well as other apps) also show similar information when asking for transit directions (for the former it only gives you the average on the whole train, not by car)

Tokyo can get pretty crammed, but I always feel more like cattle on a crowded highway than I do on a crowded train.

Not sure how you can compare the comfort of sitting in a car with your own space versus standing for an hour or more stuck in between everyone's armpits with no space to move beyond an inch.

The alternative in Tokyo (and most other big cities), if everyone felt like cattle on public transport and decided to move to their own personal vehicle, would be an eternal gridlock of the city. You would have your own space, but you would also be stuck in your own space for hours on end barley moving forward.

Hmm, yeah, I can see what you mean about a car giving a little more independent space. I guess it's the fact that I could get off whenever I wanted? I could look on my phone or listen to something without having to worry about driving the car as well. Or, I guess managing a car has always felt more responsibility than privilege to me.

I guess also "an hour or more stuck in between everyone's armpits" is also like a worst-case scenario, and it happened to me infrequently enough that I didn't mind overall. Or, Tokyo rush hour might have been like commuting on the LA interstate? Neither are very fun, but driving along the Pacific Coast Highway is a more ideal kind of thing. I think I've had a lot of commuter rail situations like that too which have made up for it.

Visit Vienna then. World class public transportation, not crowded at all.

Living in Tokyo as well and yeah, the subway is a nightmare. It's GOOD, gets you everywhere pretty fast but for daily morning commuting - nah. Taking an overcrowded train every day squeezed into heaps of people that all don't want to be there gets very depressing with enough repetition cycles. A good reminder of how insignificant everything is. I am glad I have flex time and can avoid peak-time trains.

But Tokyo is also very bicycle-friendly with not many aggressive drivers (ignoring taxis), so that's my pick to get around.

Even before this corona-virus, Tokyo Metro had been providing small incentives to get people to commute before or after the crush hours. I imagine such attempts will be magnified in future.

I use this system every day and for me, it's not just good, it's fantastic. The number of routes, frequency and reliability of service is unsurpassed in any city. Notorious crushing may stick in the mind, but moving around the entire city at any time of day...

That visceral image of over-crowding is real but not really representative. From now we'll all need to do more efficient sharding of work schedules and locations.

Tokyo is the opposite of what i would call bicycle friendly. People there are probably much more careful than in other cities, but i was amazed at the lack of infrastructure for bikes when i visited the city a few months ago.

Bikes are either merged with car traffic, or simply go on the sidewalk, but i haven’t seen a single bicycle lane..

It's more bike friendly than virtually every US city by virtue of being dense and (probably?) careful drivers. And that it's acceptable to bike on the sidewalk.

The alternative would be that almost everybody can't get to their jobs. A subway line running at full capacity can't be matched by cars in throughput. Tokyo as it exists today would be literally impossible without public transport.

Last time I visited, only one train trip felt like that, an express out of the city around 9pm.

I expected the train to work to be packed around 8:30am, but instead there was tons of space.

Most of the time the trains in Tokyo aren't super packed (though I'm sure this is accurate for some commuter routes).

> you feel like cattle pretty much every time of the day

First of all this is not true, so I would start questioning whether you know what you're talking about at all, or whether you're not trying to have an informed conversation based on facts.

Outside of peak rush hours, roughly between 8-9 in the morning and 6-7 in the evening, and mostly on a few well-known lines, it is extremely unlikely for trains to be anywhere close to "packed". Let alone making you feel "like cattle". This kinda already undermines your point.

It is true though that during those peak times, on those lines, the system is over capacity. And this is where working for a company that has flexible working hours and that allows work from home helps tremendously. While this is still not widespread, there are active policy campaigns to push more businesses to enact the same measures - exactly to ease congestion in those peak times. So the problem is not structural, and there is a clear direction that can improve things.

Furthermore, even today with some planning and knowledge you can avoid the worst of the congestion (see my point about reach in my first comment).

Anyway, to answer your question: no, I don't enjoy packed subways, as I don't enjoy being stuck in traffic, or being robbed at gunpoint. But to me (your question asked whether "_I_ enjoy packed subways") it really does not matter, because both are things that I normally do not experience.

Please note that European cities are moving away from traditional public transportation (buses, underground, etc.) in favour of personal transportation such as bikes and scooters.

Not moving away from public transit, but adding more viable alternatives to cars.

Milan, for instance, will dramatically reduce the number of people that can access public transportation.

... for covid-19. The reason isn't because PT sucks but to maintain distance between occupants, the article says.

I don’t see that happening enough to more than complement the traditional public transport. I do see a lot of people sick of battery powered scooters littering the sidewalks though.

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