A real-time 3D digital map of Tokyo's public transport system
minitokyo3d.com
minitokyo3d.com
*It's not unique to Tokyo, but I've spent extended periods of time in cities with trains and this is what we often did. Tokyo just has lots of train lines.
The cleanliness was a big part of it, but also just how non-abused everything was. I was there for a week and didn't once see a tag carved into the seats or walls of a train car or smell urine on a platform. I don't think I even saw a single piece of litter on a train. The respect with which people treat public property was genuinely eye-opening.
I wish there were some kind of transferable lesson that we could apply here where dingy and defaced public infrastructure is just accepted as "the way things are in a big city," when it's demonstrably not inevitable.
You become blind to it when you live there but when you suddenly realise places _dont_ have to be tagged when they shutter for the night. (If they even shutter at all)
When you go hiking in the countryside, it is common to see people carrying a small plastic bag to pickup any garbage along the trails. Again, compared to other hiking destinations, the trails here are freakishly clean all the time.
General stores, restaurant, and public transport work really well however.
I will not touch on societal issues or politics, as everyone has their own view on these matters.
On iOS the integration with Apple wallet means you can top it up and provision it without even needing to install the app.
Still incredible that I can now have a Suica ready to go before I even arrive in Tokyo, all using the Wallet app
Never heard about a shortage. Possibly the person did not know where to buy them.
There are Fare adjustment machines in the stations for the cases you mentioned. You don't have to handle cash or talk to attendants.
Station names can definitely be confusing though, even for natives.
When I was a tourist here several years ago, I had no trouble at all. I just used Google Maps. It tells you exactly where to go, which platform to stand on, when the train will arrive, which car to sit in for most efficient transfer, etc.
>First, you have to pay your tickets in cash every time (the "IC cards" are not sold anywhere due to a chip shortage)
No one uses cash, except some tourists. The chip shortage thing is a very, very recent problem. All the locals don't have this problem; they have IC cards they've had for years, or they use their phone. According to some other comments here, they do sell special IC cards for tourists at the airports now.
>and the machines do not accept foreign credit cards.
There's a good reason for this. 1) fees, and 2) credit cards are incredibly slow. Japan developed the Felica chips used in IC cards specifically because they needed to be extremely fast to handle the incredible foot traffic going through the fare gates. Using credit cards (even if the processors lifted all the fees) would slow everything down and cause a massive backup.
>you have to go to a ticket counter and pay whatever you owe (again, in cash only)
Well yeah, that's what you get for using old-fashioned paper tickets.
>Lastly, the similarity in station names, such as Nippori Station and Nishi-Nippori Station,
You think it's confusing to have "X Station", and "West X Station"? The US has the exact same thing: in the DC metro system, there's Falls Church East and Falls Church West stations, for instance, or Farragut West vs. Farragut North in downtown DC.
You were relating it as if it's normal. It's not.
It's like going as a tourist to NYC in 2012, getting hit by Hurricane Sandy, and then complaining that NYC is plagued by hurricanes and flooding and a terrible city to visit as a result. (Sandy was an event that NYC hadn't experienced in, I don't even know, generations?)
Buying paper tickets for local trains/subways simply hasn't been normal in Japan for quite a long time. And according to other posters here, you could have bought an IC card at the airport anyway, but for some reason you didn't do that or ask about it. When I came here as a tourist, buying an IC card was the second thing I did after I got off the plane and got out of immigration/customs, right after visiting an ATM and getting some cash. It's one of the most basic things about visiting Japan, and should have been one of the first things mentioned on any website that you'd find when googling about traveling in Japan.
It's not even much different than the US: if you want to visit DC or NYC, you have to have a stored-value fare card (or phone app these days), and unlike Japan, those cards are only good on those cities' metro systems, whereas Japan's IC cards can generally be used everywhere in the country (with some weird exceptions, but Suica and Pasmo generally work almost everywhere). And unlike the city-specific cards in the US, you can return the IC cards when you leave Japan and get your whole deposit (plus remaining stored value) back.
>Another problem which I forgot to mention is that sometimes the colors in Google Maps didn't match those in the metro.
I've never noticed that. The colors for the Tokyo Metro lines are all correct in my daily experience; I'm not so sure about the other lines, but Tokyo Metro makes more use of color-coding for different lines AFAICT.
I ignored the names and worked purely off the station numbers, knowing that my hotel was on the chiyoda line, and google maps.
iPhone and Apple Watch work OOTB since iPhone 8/X and Series 4.
I just lived in Tokyo for a year, and if good public transit was a main criteria for a place to live, Tokyo would be number 1 for me without a question.
In the US a car affords some freedom but driving feels like a chore, not to mention all of the associated costs and pains.
meanwhile I lived in Melbourne (Preston) for a bit and the trams were great. walk out, hop on the tram, into the city before too long, and then do whatchu gotta do. getting from suburb to suburb might be hard without having to go to Central and then back out, but they have busses for that.
Doesn’t the tube get very hot in the summer? The UK has very high taxes on airfares so even award tickets purchased with miles will have high costs which is why most frequent flyers will fly to France instead and take the train.
Chinese cities have good politics but the internet situation is a non-starter. (edit: Chinese cities have good subways! I made a freudian slip when writing).
Bangkok’s system is nice but not enough lines/coverage so you often need a Grab to supplement it. And the sidewalks are too dirty (I’ve been there 6 times so it’s not that I’m allergic to dirty sidewalks, but if I move somewhere I want to have clean sidewals)
Singapore has a very nice system but Singapore is so expensive (especially alcohol!).
Any muslim countries are a non-starter because they heavily tax alcohol to discourage consumption.
Alcohol is not too pricy in Japan, the 300 yen bar in Osaka is pretty great and it’s easy to meet friends any night. The subway system is good but the JR is too expensive compared to Jetstar or one of many many low cost carriers.
Seoul is also clean with good subway coverage, but Itaewon is too hilly if you like cycling and it takes forever to commute if you live on the other side of the city but still want the food in Itaewon.
Taipei is clean but too poor in all honesty. I expected better because of Taiwan’s dominance in tech but yeah. It does have a decent train system.
I love Malaysia but the KL train system doesn’t even go to Mont Kiara!
Sydney is a no go because AU TZ for video games is empty and many games don’t even put servers for Oceania.
To be fair
- There's electric bikes instantly rentable all over the city that are perfect for dealing with hills
- Itaewon is only a tiny part of the city and the huge majority of the remainder isn't nearly as hilly
- Except for Middle-Eastern (and maybe traditional "US") food, all other kinds of cuisine have at least as good if not better options outside of Itaewon
I remember when I grew up in Bangkok in the 90's and saw the pillars go up for the Skytrain, it still seemed like a pipe dream at the time.
It's not 3d, but it shows similar data.
(and the same applies to Boston except the subway system is too tiny, you can’t even take the subway into Brookline, which is disappointing because there is good pizza there).
I've recently been playing with shademap.app and it's pretty incredible for planning a solar panel install. Google Earth has always been able to show you shadows for any given time of day, but only for natural features (mountains, hills, generally the shape of the earth), but doesn't take into account buildings. Shademap is using OSM building data to calculate buildings as well.
I’ve enjoyed seeing the buses move around on Google maps too. And all the bus times are so accurate at the stops. I wish every city made all this data available.
The US cannot reproduce it. And no, the reason has nothing to do with cars which people here so love to blame.
Even if a US city were to successfully reproduce all the hardware parts of the Tokyo train system, it would quickly devolve into something like the NYC subway with all its problems.
Of course Japan has its own set of issues — no country is a utopia after all — but livability in the major metro areas is not among them.
Now I'm back to Dublin where I'm permanently based and I feel a type of homesickness that seems to be related to missing that level of "liveability" that Japan has. A lot of things sound like coming straight out of a nightmare for some westerners, such as small houses, small rooms, narrow streets, no sidewalks, small cars and vans. But I enjoy that environment way more.
Related thread with more of these kind of projects: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32647227
I don't have too many opportunities to take the trains nowadays, and when I had to take the trains I always forget to check this.
My question: Do you fetch the routes somewhere or you simulate the trip start-end times?
Of course, the sync dilemma will not be solveable (at least not at japanese standard levels) for quite some time :)
This is super cool, though.
I was unsure about the 3D aspect (especially since the map surface itself seems flat), but it was quite impressive clicking on live feeds and seeing them match the display (some trains seem to be missing from the live map, and some live cameras are delayed a bit compared to the activity shown on the map -- timestamps sometimes lag by 40s or so).
An implementation like that would be a potential security risk to public infrastructure.