The secrets of the Shinkansen
worksinprogress.news
worksinprogress.news
> Core rail operations are profitable for every Japanese private railway company
Only the urban, legacy private railways that benefited from the "build a suburb and trains to it" system. Rural lines, private or not, all hemorrhage money, as do many of the newer private lines (often built by government and private only in name).
> Japanese cities have the lowest residential density in Asia
This is because Japanese "cities" (市) are administrative units, not actual cities. Particularly in the rapidly depopulating countryside, it's common for a bunch of dying villages that can't afford to duplicate their services anymore to get more or less forcibly merged into a "city" like Miyoshi in Shikoku that, in satellite view, looks like untouched forest:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/tRtdQisJCUMsqivv7
> The urban area of Tokyo, the densest Japanese city, has a weighted population density less than that of many European cities,
This is only true for Tokyo Prefecture, which encompasses a vast slab of mountains. Actual Tokyo (23-ku) packs in over 15k people/km2, 50% more than inner London (10k) and nearly 2.5x Greater London (6k).
That's exactly it. It's not because of some cultural bias or whatever.
I'm in Japan. I use trains because it's so very easy and it's so very reliable. It's simply the best option for travelling. If I wish to go to Tokyo? I check a website quickly, I look up the best connection for my schedule (easy to find), I may pay in advance, or not. I take my bicycle and go ten minutes to the nearest station, park the bicycle in the bicycle parking there, and off I go. As it's a small station I change to a limited express train (where I've booked a seat) after ten minutes, then, after another forty minutes I reach a big station and I switch to the Shinkansen and I'm off to Tokyo. I'm relaxed all the time. I buy a coffee on the train, and/or I buy coffee and lunch at the station and bring on the train.
Every other way of getting there is way more complex, and would take way more time.
Perhaps not Warren Buffett, but no doubt an executive of some stature riding with the rest of us plebes.
The US is massive... riding the train between most cities is dramatically more expensive than flying and takes most of a day if not multiple days between cities.
I used to commute weekly between two cities in Texas and it was a 2 hour flight. (Houston - Lubbock)
(I agree with the trains. I love the trains.)
https://www.aventon.com/products/soltera-2-5-ebike?variant=4...
As the comment above said, in Japan a bicycle is registered to a person when you buy it. Even the second hand bikes from recycle shops. And there _is_ a theft problem.. but not everywhere. I sometimes don't bother with locking my bicycle outside the shopping mall, here (in my town in Japan). Nobody steals bicycles here. There was a time when a particular gang of teenagers would steal scooters though.. the 50cc ones. A friend's scooter was stolen. The police found the culprits and he got his scooter back. But not much problems with bicycles. Unlike in my town back home. Now that I'm here I would not be surprised if, when I go back, I find that someone broke into my garage and stole the bicycles.
If you run into someone on your bike, you're on the hook for their medical costs (yes even in Japan's universal health care system, it's not single-payer), loss of income, etc.
Insurance will pay for that. It's now legally required to hold bicycle insurance in most cities in Japan when riding for this reason, similar to requiring basic car insurance.
This government page lists the 34 prefectures where insurance is mandatory https://www.mlit.go.jp/road/bicycleuse/promotion/index.html
> That's exactly it. It's not because of some cultural bias or whatever.
Are there not a lot of toll roads in Japan as well?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressways_of_Japan#Tolls
Also, is not the population density fairly high? There's not as much land to spread in low-density car centric suburbs like there is in (say) the US.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#Populati...
IMHO cultural bias (and practicality, geographic and economic (low car ownership post-WW2)) is there in Japan, which led to a particular development model, which lends itself to non-car-centric infrastructure.
Contrast: Okinawa, where the US (cultural?) influence is higher and that has highways everywhere and where public transit is apparently not that good.
The procedure for the permit in my city is maddening, you need to draw a map of your general area and your parking lot BY HAND, and then several days later a police guy will go there to confirm it visually. They have not invented GIS yet...
LOL no. Outside of the big neighborhoods of the big cities, Japan is endless urban sprawl. I know because I live in a small Japanese city of 40k people and it's just detached houses, small 2-story apartment buildings, a big box stores. Public transportation is almost non-existant and I need to drive my car everyday for everything.
And how many people live in those areas?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#Urban_di...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_weighted_density
Half the population lives in Tokyo (40M), Osaka (19M), and Nagoya (10M); one-third in the Greater Tokyo Area.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg5XHN_25HQ&t=7m38s
How many folks live inside versus outside the Tokyo-Osaka-Fukuoka rail corridor (Tokaido/Sanyo Shinkansens)? Saoporo is probably the next-largest city outside of that stretch.
And even within those areas, when you move to the outskirts it is not so dense. Take the train from Narita to central Tokyo and tell me what you see.
When visiting you tend to visit some of the busiest areas and also spend a lot of time on the train. It's tiring and it seems so busy. But since almost every neighbourhood has all amenities and there is no single CBD, when you live there, you realise how much of Tokyo is an endless sea of small apartment buildings with small islands of restaurants and businesses around train stations, plus a handful of larger islands.
The article talks about the railways developing areas around Tokyo. This is actually very interesting and the way it sprawled[1] outwards towards places like Yokohama. Railways made commuter towns with amenities and commuter lines to those towns at the same time, and rented and sold real estate in those towns. Over time the areas in between the terminus of each of these lines (usually Shibuya or Shinjuku) and each town filled in until what you see today.
[1] I think the debate about whether or not Tokyo is/has urban sprawl depends on your definition. If you take it to mean expanding with lower density on the outskirts, it definitely "sprawled", although today it's more filled in. If you take it to mean unplanned low-density, car-centric expansion, it didn't "sprawl" that much. I've seen the terms car-centric sprawl and train-centric sprawl used to discuss the differences.
There are, but at least wherever I've been driving or been a passenger, there are alternative roads which are just fine. In general slower, but every so often the toll roads are congested for miles due to a combination of roadwork and a LOT of traffic, which makes them slower than the alternative roads during those times.
As for cars - the Japanese aren't against cars. Many of my neighbors have two cars, particularly dual-income households. And they take very good care of them, as a rule. More than I would - to me a car is just a utility. Not for the Japanese. And people love driving too, at least outside the major cities.
Population density: Technically I live in a town with some 300,000 people. But it used to be nearly a dozen towns until 2006, when Japan decided to do some major restructuring and in many areas a bunch of smaller towns were thrown together to become a larger one. So we're really spread out..
And there are alternatives to the Interstate highway system in the US, but the since the Interstates have no tolls everything is build around them.
I'm mostly in favor of privatization, but this is an example where the local government provide an exceptional service which is in no way inferior to the privately operated ones.
The US had to fill a huge area in the railroad era. That left a lot of underutilized track once the road network got good.
The article we're discussing explains that Japan has the best passenger rail system in the world, and which happens to be privatized, along with privately owned track. So which one is it? Go figure.
Then again, given the UK experience of going all-in on the "vertical separation" and privatization path, perhaps one shouldn't blame them.
Technically, yes, the JR's are private companies.
But track construction is generally done by a government construction company financed with Japanese sovereign debt. The completed tracks are then long-term leased to the JR's at favorable rates.
Is it really a private company if the key capital outlay is done by the government and given to you with a sweetheart deal? ehhhhhh.... you can call the operator company private, but you're being dishonest if you call the system privatized.
It's like saying certain rats solve the maze because the path is simpler. Except that the failing rats happen to have a different incentive.
You'll have to make yourself clearer, I have no idea what you're implying
The private sector unfortunately is too short sighted, and will optimize for profit. Doesn't seem to work well for nationwide infrastructure..that being railroads, but also the internet.
To call Russia a "cultural dead end" is a bit much, considering all the great artists of various kinds that country has produced. In fact, you'll find that famous Russian novels like Anna Karenina and Doctor Zhivago feature trains as motifs.
I think US trains did have their window though. At one time they would have been the main way to get into the interior or across the continent.
It's funny as I'm quite fan of quite a few Russians, yet they're all people who either died before the Russian system was created or are those lucky enough to escape.
China is also corrupt, but it is a dictatorship with massive central planning. Central planning leads to wastage and human costs in many areas but it is good at producing new infrastructure.
This is a little counterintuitive but it does make a difference.
I recently moved from a coastal city (that is very linear) to a landlocked city spread evenly in all directions. I had naively assumed the new city would be easier to get around in, since on average places would be closer to you. But the first city has decent commuter rail, which meant I could get to the other end of the city in an hour, and use cabs for last mile connectivity.
I'm sure you can have good public transit in "round" cities too, but it is certainly more difficult to plan.
You don't have to be "sure", take a look at London which is a "round" city with excellent public transit.
Sonce our first trip in 2017 at least two railways we rode have been damaged enough to be partially inoperable and under lengthy restoration work - Hisatsu line (washed away bridges) and Kurobe Gorge railway (bridge destroyed by earthquake).
The northeast and west coast metropolitan corridors are similar, and combined have comparable populations, densities, and distances as Japan. Yet we can't even build a single high-speed line. And for all the excuses about the difficulty of building rail through developed regions, the existing rights of ways and infrastructure in both the NE and California are comparable to what everybody else has had to work with, at least in the past 50 years. The density of the NE is nothing like what you see elsewhere in the world, especially Asia, and Japan and China specifically.
It's lack of political will and ambition, period, by both the community and leadership. And excusing our inability by pointing at the hurdles, insinuating that others succeeded because they didn't face the same challenges, only perpetuates the paralysis.
Yeah, I defy anyone who claims the US can't build trains "because of density" to fly to Tokyo, and actually take the Seibu Shinjuku line west from Shinjuku station. Look at those buildings built right next to the tracks, for many, many kilometers. People live in those -- if the windows opened, you could reach out and touch the laundry on the balconies that overlook the tracks [1].
Compared to that (and let's be clear: that's one average line in west Tokyo), even the Acela line in the east coast is a bad joke, density-speaking. The US doesn't build decent trains because the US is corrupt and sclerotic and run by incompetent people, not because of some mythical structural advantage in Magical Asia.
[1] I have no idea how people manage to live like that -- these trains are loud, and run basically from 4AM until 1AM every day -- but it's not lost on me that the fact that people can build houses right up next to the tracks might be the true advantage of Magical Japan.
Not that bad actually. You get used to it and even if trains are frequent they don't need 10 minutes to pass by your home.
The houses built next to the crossing points, in particular, have always boggled my mind. BING BING BING BING BING....
Just another example of Japanese attention to detail and human oriented design.
(I mean, maybe you’re right in some places, but it’s certainly not everywhere. Ironically, I happened to be standing next to a completely empty crossing, gates down, bonging away, while reading your comment.)
Not that I'm bothered by the chimes at all. And grandson loves them.
The light rail can run a frequency of 12-20 minutes in each direction. The freight's schedule: who really knows?
But the freight train is generally inhibited from sounding its horn or bells near residential neighborhoods. So, unless I am really paying attention while awake, I cannot detect it passing by, no matter the size.
The light rail is audible from where I sit, usually, but only just. It toots the horn mostly as it passes, but it's not disruptive or annoying to me, anyway. I sort of enjoy the white noise it all makes. There are cars that do a lot worse.
I think that the architecture here is helpful, too. The buildings are clustered around a central courtyard, and really insulated from the road noise. At any given time, there may be folks splashing in the pool, or running the jets on the hot tub, anyway.
The light rail stations are a major convenience to living here, and the train noise is absolutely the least of our worries!
Oh, you’re definitely engaging in Magical Japan, here.
While building standards have certainly improved in the past 20 years, the average Japanese house is built just strong enough not to fall over when someone farts. In particular, windows tend to be single pane, and you’re lucky if they block a strong wind, let alone noise.
I’m exaggerating a little, but not by much.
(Which is why we're now tearing down our old house and building a new, stronger one. Post-war Japan was more concerned with a) building a lot of houses, and b) keep lots of jobs, which meant, as far as houses were concerned, building use-and-throw-away houses. Then build another. And another. And don't talk to me about sound proofing.. it's non-existing. What with no insulation in walls.)
This must be a different Japan than the one I'm familiar with, where exterior walls are often uninsulated and only a few inches thick and single-pane windows are still the norm in a lot of housing. I wouldn't be surprised if soundproofing were better for railroad-adjacent buildings, but compared to American homes the soundproofing here is surprisingly poor.
More generally, any argument of the form "the US is special for reason ____ and therefore rail is especially difficult here" is highly likely to be utter nonsense.
The Shinkansen was a very different experience when I took it.
As an example SF Bay Area and Switzerland are about the same size, SF has double the population density. It has a Bay, Switzerland has mountains. Switzerland has like 10x the trains. There's no reason SF Bay couldn't too.
It's similar for most metro areas. LA used to have a huge train system. Bad insentives and government policies killed it. They're adding new ones back but they're adding them in the worst possible way, making them unprofitable and designed only for people who can't afford cars means they'll only be a money sink at best, or they'll get underfunded and decrepit at worst
E.g. Montana used to have passenger rail through the most densely populated Southern part of the state. That region has comparable density to regions of Norway that have regular rail service. (There are efforts to restart passenger service in Southern Montana)
And it's not like places like Norway have rail everywhere either - the lower threshold for density where rail is considered viable is just far lower.
The actual proportion of the US population that lives in areas with too low density to support rail is really tiny.
> SF has double the population density.
These two statements seem hard to reconcile considering that Switzerland’s population is higher.
Both the SF Bay Area (not SF, the whole Bay), and Switzerland have ~8 million people.
SF Bay Area is 7K sq miles, Switzerland is ~15k sq miles
The point is still correct. Switzerland has half the density but it has amazing transporation. There's no excuse for SF Bay Area not to as well.
The US could have all of this and more in their populated areas. They're the richest country in the world. Why is the infrastructure so neglected? It's clearly a choice.
I think what it comes down to is that if automobile companies had to build and maintain the roads, we certainly wouldn't have so many cars. But railway companies need to build the train lines, while competing with taxpayer funded automobile infrastructure. It's not impossible (see Japan) but also not easy.
The interstate automobile road system got built through judicious use of eminent domain. That avoided all of these issues. Amtrak doesn't have the ability to do that.
>The US could have all of this and more in their populated areas.
Probably people in US have other priorities and that means there are other public policies.
Even so, the sticker shock of some trips on Dutch trains is unsettling. Utrecht to Rotterdam is €27.60 round trip (if using undiscounted fare). It's ~112 km (again, round trip). So for the same family you're looking at over €100 to go on a pretty minor journey.
I just want the Dutch government to fund trains more and roads less. It's kinda bizarre how there's no motorway tolls here, at least that I've encountered.
(we have two cars and five bikes, not counting the kids, and rarely use public transport, but I'd be behind that - as maybe then my town would get a tram system)
However, the United States is also a nation built upon the motor vehicle, and our much-vaunted freeway system here was built deliberately as a national defense measure that could easily move materiel and troops between cities and states, in the event of a domestic invasion or future wars on our own soil. The freeways enjoyed deep investments also due to commercial utility, and again, many cities and habitations sprang up at the nexus of various freeways, as truck-based shipping could service them as well.
I think one of the main obstacles to rail lines in the United States is our car-centrism, and many motorists of any socio-economic class really, really hate trains and public transit of any kind, and any other type of transport that may impinge on their freedom to drive wherever they want on as many highways as possible.
Therefore it is extraordinarily difficult for railways to get good rights-of-way. Amtrak is a redheaded stepchild. Commuter rail may be better respected in places where it was established, like the Eastern Seaboard, but if I asked any voter or motorist here, they would be voting against any sort of rail project whatsoever.
That said this reply doesn’t actually address much of what the article talks about, most interestingly how rail companies are private and are also real estate developers. That thought process ought to make sense to Texans or something.
Then explain international train travel in Europe or China's national train network. Both fill large areas.
Conversely, the UK is long and narrow, and unlike Japan has neither earthquakes nor is it particularly mountainous and yet its train system is rubbish.
Geography is no excuse for the US not having better passenger rail service, especially when geography was no obstacle to the US having fantastic rail service in the 1920s.
This type of development is called TOD (Transit Oriented Development)
Like: you can actually change the lightbulbs for the headlights of the Series 0 train while it being underway - there is a service hatch that opens to a human-sized service area accessible from the driver's cabin which allows such repairs.
Without the public or central government support, the efforts you're talking about amount to very little.
Liverpool Street isn't managed by TfL, it's managed by Network Rail.
They also have an energy company which runs some hydroelectric power stations.
Deutsche Bahn does everything from real estate to infrastructure to truck companies (no longer in Europe, though, they had to sell that off) to car sharing to energy production to IT development to trading lumber, workforce rental and startup venture capital. The list changes every few days, so some they may no longer do, others they will now do. It's a megacorp.
Many of these have grown out of the original business model.
It's brilliant if you think about it. By building super convenient rail transport you essentially lock people into your territory and businesses. They go by foot so they can't get far. If they want to go somewhere else, they probably have to take your rail network and only end up at your other properties. With some aggressive horizontal integration, you can essentially built a small kingdom.
Sometimes fewer than 100 meters apart. Or connecting to each other's with a bridge.
Maybe it's a carry on though "This is the third article we have released from Issue 23".
[1] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-japan-has-such-good-rai...
The UK is so far gone that the transport authority in it's largest city can't revamp stations or do add-on development without literal years of hand wringing. And even then it's often rejected or reduced in the end.
The national government controls all London budgets, the Mayor has no power, there's no legislative body for the city (GLA is not one), and there are 33 different borough councils that don't owe the Mayor anything.
They just finished a line that traverses the whole city. It's 73 miles from end to end and carries one seventh of the UK's rail journeys (600,000 trips per day).
So it's touted as some great success but to me it's a sign of failure. They'll say similar things if they ever finish HSR in California. Yeah I'm sure the end product will be fine but the whole process is disgraceful.
Never mind the fact that the Elizabeth Line is only so over-utilized because London completely fails at building density in and around its center. So it has to make its people live in zone 30 and sit on the train for two hours every day.
Otherwise please explain why one new line at this standard per 20-40 years is acceptable for a city that sees itself as world-leading.
Apple has the margins to just pay the license fee for every iPhone, Android makers try to keep their costs down more.
The UK is completely chaotic ticket-wise on a national level, though.
You can get a normal Suica just about anywhere.
Little over a decade ago I did exactly the same. I ended up buying a Suica card at Ueno station from a clerk, which was a bit of an adventure since she was eager to help but barely spoke any English and I barely spoke any Japanese. Together we skillfully massacred both languages with an ad-hoc pidgin and lots of gesturing. Due to an issue with my wireless hotspot I only had an old school phrasebook at my disposal, which was about as helpful as the infamous Monty Python sketch implies. The airport seemed much more convenient as a tourist since everyone there at the very least spoke basic English. At the time it was certainly possible to get a Suica card at a major train station, though admittedly not easy.
While we got ours at the Osaka airport (KIX), I am sure I saw the "purchase a new SUICA/ICOCA" options at a few terminals while topping up. I suppose you mixed up the "Welcome to SUICA" tourist card (available at fewer locations) with the normal one? I was under the impression there was a lot of confusing information floating around online.
But I agree, public transport in London is - as a tourist - more straight forward. Just a matter of spotting the terminals at some stations IIRC. OTOH in Japan we found no station with an elevator smelling like someone used a hippie bus as an emergency toilet ;-)
Quite likely.
Probably not worth it if you're only visiting one city as the pass is quite expensive. There are regional tourist passes though.
Hell, there are even people paying the equivalent of 100 USD just to have someone pick them up from the Haneda airport and accompany them to the hotel. Not even a taxi service, just to be with them to buy them the train tickets, etc.
> The railway can capture the value it creates for me by charging me a fare, but it cannot capture the value it creates for those at my destination. As transport infrastructure creates benefits that produce no revenue for providers, free markets rarely build enough of it.
…but then very confusingly argues that railways should be profitable, including on per-passenger basis. A profitable transport system with positive externalities is inevitably either too expensive or under-investing (or maybe both) with respect to maximising the total economic productivity. Ancillary monopolies in real estate and retail might offset that somewhat, but only to an extent.
Similarly, I don't understand why the article speaks positively of the closure of 83 "loss-making lines". The lines being loss-making for the rail company doesn't mean they aren't improving total productivity, as the very same article argues!
Further, they mention the over-crowding in Tokyo later on
> Tokyo’s infamously crammed trains are a symptom of underpriced rush hour traffic
…but somehow blame it on the price being too low, and not under-investment into more capacity by the commercial companies! People commuting less because they can't afford it would be bad for the businesses on the other side of their commute!
I suppose this is the centre-right ideological slant of Works in Progress showing, which is a bit of a shame when it leads to those self-contradictions in the usually quite rigorous publication.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2026/03/24/companies/f...
Knowing the author I knew it was going to be his main argument before even opening the blog post. And it's obviously wrong, these companies don't compete with one another, they all have a local monopoly. (The article itself acknowledges that and even acknowledges the organizational benefits of such monopolies, but the author could refrain himself from praising the virtue of competition nonetheless…)
> 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. Changing the timetable at station A can affect the timetable at station Z; buying new trains that can travel faster might require changes to the infrastructure so they can reach their top speed, which in turn requires rewriting the timetables. This becomes especially complicated if different services share tracks. To prevent delays from propagating from one service to another, the timetable needs to be carefully designed to make best use of the available infrastructure.
> […]
> By maintaining and restoring the institutions that built the first railway systems in the nineteenth century, the Japanese have created the mightiest railway system of the twenty-first.