Why Japan has such good railways | Hacker News Reader

Why Japan has such good railways

worksinprogress.co

568 pointsRickJWagner580 comments

> 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".

Makes you consider the cost of anything that is “free”

"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.

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.

Same with credit cards.

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)

Yes, the line between public and private policy is blurry but I think our society would’ve gone down a very different path if car drivers were expected to directly pay for what they use as much as transit riders are.

This is the whole point of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

> 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.

If the USA implemented that exact rule, it would change almost nothing. People already need nighttime parking for non-legal reasons.

You are dramatically misinformed. Where I live in Los Angeles, a very large number of people park their cars primarily or exclusively on the street.

Such a change would have a significant impact.

> Where I live in Los Angeles, a very large number of people park their cars primarily or exclusively on the street.

> Such a change would have a significant impact.

What would that impact be? Do you see, or experience, a lot of contention for nighttime parking?

There's plenty of contention for street parking in nonresidential areas. But a nighttime parking certificate doesn't do anything about that. Nighttime parking is done in residential areas.

Not the person you're replying to, but I see the same thing happen in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. Dense neighborhood with a lot of nightlife, but many of its residents exclusively use free street parking to park overnight. There is a lot of contention for spots after about 7pm.

It's not like you have to get waivers to park your cars in front of your house in Japan. Your car MUST have a designated lot, with proofs(more or less a set of simple declaration forms than anything detailed and concrete), to be registered under your name. Otherwise it cannot be registered. A full waiver for parking violations technically exist, but they are reserved for official and/or actually special vehicles only(like actual fire trucks). The vast majority of cars stay in an off-of-road parking lot of some sort, be it a fancy mechanical one or a crude gravel lot next to apartment complex.

I reckon that not many other country do that kind of legal setup. But Japan is among those very few.

But permission to park in front of your own house is trivial to obtain in the US (as the thread has noted, generally not even necessary to obtain, but in some cases it is necessary to get permission) and would satisfy the requirement.

You can imagine a regime where parking in front of your own house is banned as a policy choice, but that's completely different from a regime where you need to document that you have permission to park somewhere at night. The nighttime parking requirement doesn't make it any harder to own a car, because you're "gatekeeping" ownership with a gate that can't bar anyone.

> You can imagine a regime where parking in front of your own house is banned as a policy choice

Yes, I believe that's exactly what's being referred to. A blanket ban on street parking and requiring documentation of a dedicated off street parking space to register a vehicle.

Of course there would be little to no point to such an exercise in a nation where the majority of the streets have wide shoulders specifically intended for parking. What's happening here is that people with a vested interest in a given political outcome aren't making a rational comparison of the differences between the infrastructure in the two places.

My take is that the anti-car movement broadly engages in a disingenuous tactic where they actively attempt to make the experience of using cars worse in order to drive political change while misrepresenting the nature of their actions. It's an underhanded tactic employed by a vocal minority with the intent of fooling the silent majority.

> Yes, I believe that's exactly what's being referred to. A blanket ban on street parking and requiring documentation of a dedicated off street parking space to register a vehicle.

Not at all. I agree with you that that's what they're hoping to express. But it's not what they said. The proposal is just "a reserved nighttime space on private land".

Street parking in front of your house is not necessarily banned by that requirement. The edge of the street can easily be part of the house lot. It can also easily be owned by a private company that owns the whole edge of the street and leases that space to homeowners.

But note that that company wouldn't be worth much, because residential street parking is not in short supply. Which is what I've been pointing out above.

IANAL anywhere, but the actual law[1] is a blanket ban on roadside parking as means of storage. The blurbs around overnight and proofs are just implementation details. Both the spirit and the reality is no one shall leave cars on curbs. I believe this includes privately owned access roads due to technicality combos with building codes that require roads adjoining properties for fire safety reasons(but sort of inexplicably not driveways).

Anyways, the point is, it actually is a nationwide prohibition of curbside parking as a car ownership strategy, and vast majority do comply with it.

1: https://laws.e-gov.go.jp/law/337AC0000000145/

>Do you see, or experience, a lot of contention for nighttime parking?

In the Hudson Waterfront of New Jersey, yes.

If you tried that your politicians would get tossed out of office the next election.

Your argument totally ignores that all this infrastructure was built around using cars. Doing things like banning street parking doesn't magically reorganize the way everything was built out over the last 100 years. Took a 100 years to build this will take 100 or more years to undo it.

I'm also suspicious the people pushing stuff like that would in a different time and place would be wearing hair shirts and flagellating themselves. All nice but that's not most people.

Neither LA nor NYC are even vaguely similar to the rest of the nation, so invoking their names when talking about national effects is pretty useless. They're insanely, unbelievably dense locations. The extreme majority of Americans do not live in anything near that dense.

Over 1/20 Americans live in LA or NYC. Cities in LA county don't show up in a density ranking until 15th with Maywood. WEHO is 20th and its gets less dense from there. Like 80% of Americans live in metro areas.

Right, 19/20 people do not need the same solution as the highly specific ones you would need for some place as dense as Manhattan or LA. You can do things in Seattle that you cannot do in Manhattan - MUCH cheaper things.

Have you actually been to LA? It's not that dense. Miami, Boston, Detroit, Chicago are just as or more dense depending on the neighborhood.

I totally agree about LA county. I don't think many people comprehend its size. It is fuckin' enormous, like the size of a small nation (it is one third the size of Belgium)!

The idea that LA is an unbelievably dense location is puzzling. My Spanish hometown is significantly denser than Los Angeles. Even large parts of NYC are not in any way dense by global urban standards.

As for people parking in the street in the US, you will find them in many smaller cities. Look at random pictures of south St Louis: Plenty of neighborhoods built before every house had a 2 car garage, and therefore with a lot of on-street parking used every day. And that's with single family homes. Hell, you find this in deep suburbs too, where someone decides they want 4 cars, and have the garage full of crap. I could take pictures of at least ten cars parked on the curb, and at least 40 outdoors in driveways if I went for a one mile loop around my 4th ring suburb.

Now, not that this is the main reason Americans still use cars to go anywhere right now, as the rest of the infrastructure around me also makes car mandatory. Suburbs with houses 3 miles from the nearest business, shops inaccessible on foot, streets that, while supposedly crossable, are extremely unsafe to pedestrians... In a world where, say, we limit each household to one car, my entire suburb becomes abandoned, and most businesses collapse, kind of like a place like Madrid collapses if one didn't run any public transit for 4 months.

You changed the goalpost...

If LA or California wanted to enact these laws, they could. Passing at a federal level is a non starter.

Perhaps you’ve never lived in a large American city? In many cities you can’t even park on the street overnight in residential neighborhoods because the parking is permitted for people who live in that neighborhood. Without the right sticker (or a guest permit from a resident) your car is getting ticketed or towed, formalizing the usage of overnight street parking for residents.

In Chicago, for example, many neighborhoods are full of former single family homes that at some point (often long ago) were converted into 2 or 3 unit residences, but there is still likely only one garage that maybe fits two vehicles. If you’ve got units filled with 2-3 roommates each, there might be 9 cars for a building with only 2 spots.

Obviously I’m not arguing this is good, but that’s the way things are for now.

The main low-hanging fruit is just removing surface parking lots in American downtowns and stopping the development and expansion of highways through the same. If you did nothing else that would have a significant positive impact. For almost all communities those surface parking lots are economic extracts from the community. They're woefully underpriced for tax purposes too.

Maybe the parking lots, but if you know anything about the major Japanese cities with satisfyingly good train systems then you'll also know they have a lot of expressways running through them.

Yes, I do love the rail system in Japan. Went a few years ago, going back next year most likely. I've also driven in Japan (Osaka). I just meant, in general, a low-hanging fruit we could tackle is making surface parking lots a thing of the past in downtown or urban areas. With actual economically productive constructs there instead, such as business, retail, housing, parks, &c. we could pretty much get to the density where trams make sense, and in some cities we could work on intra-city rail too.

I think where I live (Columbus) is very well positioned for this model if only our civic leaders had courage and stopped thinking of transit as a "blue" thing (also our city council needs to stop suburban thinking). We don't need to build any more expressways or highways. We are maxed out. The only sane option is respecting appropriate density, and focusing on categorical changes in how we move people: walk/bike/rail instead of bus/car/roadways.

> we could pretty much get to the density where trams make sense

That's the key issue. We don't need to launch a war on surface parking to achieve the necessary density. Zoning and mass transit buildout go hand in hand and the problem getting in the way is fundamentally a political one. If the politics is solved and the density increases market forces will cause the surface parking to go away on their own.

Surface parking is a huge waste of space that becomes unusable for pedestrians. You can't apply market forces to it because unpaid roadside parking is effectively a tragedy of the commons.

You do though, because you need a higher level of density to make transit make sense, and you need more interesting places for people to live and walk to. When you have easy and convenient parking, particularly these surface lots in downtown areas, you kill the downtown because there's nobody there to support business outside of 9-5 office commutes.

The removed parking needs to be replaced by transit options people actually want to use.

I live just outside a fairly large city. Getting downtown sucks. Driving is the only real option, but parking is annoying and expensive. Even if it was free, it would still be annoying. I almost exclusively take an Uber because of it. Those can add up and be a mixed bag as well.

There is bus service, but it’s infrequent and quadruples the time. In some cases, the transit directions say 1h 20 minutes, where 47 minutes of that is walking. Meanwhile, a car is under 20 minutes.

I used to live outside of Chicago. The Metra could get me downtown faster than a car (during rush hour) for just a few bucks. The train became the pragmatic choice and dictated where I chose to live.

Removing parking doesn’t build a train, it just raises parking rates, keeping people from even bothering to go downtown.

I agree that surface lots are terrible, but they have to be replaced by something.

Buses are a simpler solution. A city should solve the anywhere to downtown is quick on bus or train thing. You need transit lanes and more buses. Ideal is public transit is faster and cheaper. Even someone who already has a car will not use it.

Then once solved, let people get across from one suburb to the next on transit quickly but that is harder to do economically.

Simpler solution but they’re a strictly worse version of your car and they still depend on highway widening projects. In other words, more of the same.

To change the culture in the US we will have to make category changes. Cars and busses are in one category, walking, biking, and rail options in another. We need the latter or we risk just wasting time, effort, and resources.

Busses make more sense and work better as an add-on to rail systems and walking/biking.

A typical commute bus would carry 30-80 people so that replaces probably 30-80 cars. I don't know how a bus is worse than a train in this regard. Both need land to be built. Unless you are talking underground but they are expensive.

If your city is a shit place to commute adding buses and bus lanes can help. Once you are on a bus zooming past all the traffic you can see.

Also important point: I'd do min 300m between stops maybe more.

I would be more pro train and anti bus for "last mile(s)" if the bus is petrol but if all electric I am for the bus! Where I live there are a plethora of places my kids can get to on a bus much quicker than even if we were near a station and they got a train.

It's more about changing cultural habits. We already have busses and bus rapid transit, for example, where I live. And while I generally support the effort, it doesn't and won't have the adoption that something like, say, a street car or tram would have going along other various routes. The issue is the bus is just a worse version of your car. Even today people buy cars, drive them, pay $15 to park, rather than hop on our park-and-ride service that are conveniently located in the suburbs. That should tell you something about how difficult it is to change cultural habits.

But rail is a category change. You walk up to it, it takes you somewhere on a fixed line, you hop off. You continue on your walking journey. You expect things to be a little closer, more dense (but not too dense). You're not thinking much about bus time tables, it's new, it's cool, Europe has it. Japan has it. And those are great places you've visited, right?

That's the main difference.

The bus is way more nice to get suburbs to city than my car though. It is actually quicker. And that is with a walk both ends and leaving at $random time. Make it a better car and people will switch. Part of it is making the car crapper. Bus lanes do that. Limited parking does it.

Of course if there were a train nearby I would probably get it. I'd pay an extra 10 mim commute time for that smooth ride (e.g. if train stops further away as they likely are). But if you are low on trains, buses can do a great job.

And if people won't shift make them free. Might be cheaper than building more roads anyway.

If you remove parking spaces it solves itself because traffic is reduced and transit options become more efficient AND more financially sound.

This is what the activists think but in reality it just slowly makes everyone's lives worse. There's typically some sort of political or social dysfunction preventing effective transit and reducing parking doesn't magically make that go away. It's analogous to the tired refrain about new technology not fixing social problems.

Not in this case. Traffic and the movement of people are a bit like water. Path of least resistance. Make parking more difficult and folks will take transit, or live closer to work. Both options are better for local economies and save everyone money.

> or live closer to work

Which means you also need to battle the housing problem, too, though, plus changes in settlement patterns take years to decades to manifest. In the meantime, you might have to weather quite some griping about it or even serious pushback.

Generally speaking, not my problem and not something I care all that much about in my city.

I don't think society needs to accommodate that lifestyle so someone can live 30 miles away from work and treat my city like a place you just commute to work to. Those days are increasingly over, as cities realize this is bad for the city and incredibly expensive to operate (surface parking lots are economic extractions and tax revenues low).

You are of course right there is pushback, and things take time to manifest, but we moved to the suburbs at one point there's no reason we can't fix that. I'm not entirely sure why my city council for example cares what suburban voters who don't vote in our elections really think outside of 2nd hand complaining from employers. But they're free to relocate their large downtown offices to the suburbs, we shouldn't cater to them anyway precisely because they can move at any time leaving quite the financial problem as building patterns revolve around this 8-5 white collar commuter scheme to surface parking lots, and if the anchor tenant leaves you're left with, basically, a dead city. It's incredibly fragile and stupid.

Or people just stop going there.

Exactly. I already don't go into the large relatively nearby city as much as I used to because of both general inclination and traffic/parking hassles. Which is fine.

But if people in the main stop going into the city you'd probably see a drop-off in the city amenities that make many people want to live there in the first place.

This is like that phrase “nobody goes there anymore it’s too popular”. The surface parking lots would be replaced with things people want to go downtown for in the first place, never mind additional residences which mean more customers for businesses.

Nowhere in the world, and I mean the entire world, has the scenario in which surface parking lots are replaced with other productive uses have resulted in a drop off in city amenities - it’s a non-sequitur. The businesses and residences that replace the lots are city amenities. Adding them has the opposite effect that you describe.

Think about it another way - what if we add surface parking lots? What would you drive to downtown to do? There wouldn’t be anything there because the amenities would have been replaced by mostly empty parking lots.

We can also just have multi-story garages. We can actually increase parking (on a social scale) while removing surface parking lots. That would create amenities and allow folks like yourself to easily come to town. Would it cost? Sure. So what?

Nothing against multi-story garages.

Just go (or don't go) to places based on how much of a hassle it is to do so. If enough people--local or otherwise--want to visit good for them. I definitely make choices based on how easy or hard it is to get to the destination.

I hear ya. I'm the same way. Funny enough we actually actively try to avoid going to the suburbs in our metro, especially some of the areas with Costco and such because the traffic and anger and road rage is just so god damn stupid and I think, frankly, things have gotten rather dangerous. Maybe I'm getting old. I find it much easier and less stressful to just walk over to somewhere and grab what we need when that is an option.

The person I was replying to said to remove the parking and “nothing else”. To me this means no investment in transit options to compensate. This just kills the city as the money from the suburbs can’t get to the city to spend.

> The removed parking needs to be replaced by transit options people actually want to use.

Removing surface lots doesn't immediately mean removing parking. You're still free to build parking - you just have to integrate it into the building it is serving. Which gives you a pretty big incentive to only build the parking you actually need, and share it with neighboring buildings to reduce costs.

> Removing parking doesn’t build a train, it just raises parking rates, keeping people from even bothering to go downtown.

Removing surface lots means increasing density, which means the same transit stop can serve more people, which lowers per-passenger costs and allows for higher-frequency running and denser transit networks.

It's a chicken-and-egg problem: you don't want surface lots removed because there is no good alternative, but a good alternative isn't economically viable due to the surface lots enforcing low density.

I agree with you. The person I replied to said, “if you did nothing else that would have a significant positive impact.”

Building parking structures is also something else. They would make parking better than the surface lots, but make traffic worse.

My objection was so the “nothing else” part. Surface lots are bad, but just removing them doesn’t solve the problem they are currently poorly solving. Larger parking structures would be better, and transit options that offer options that are faster, cheaper, and easier than driving/parking would be better still.

If I may clarify, my intent was just to suggest that if we did nothing else with respect to better transit that removing the surface parking lots and replacing them with something else would have that positive impact. Of course, I didn't clearly state that, but I wanted to let you know what I intended. :)

Something that peeves me where I'm at is that the transportation system here (not Chicago) is not coordinated across the systems. Here there's a bus that could take me to where I work, but it stops once every hour and is often late by 20 minutes. Local businesses also sponser a "free trolley" that follows the same route. It's overfull at peak hours and as a form of transportation the seats and setup make it much less safe for passengers. (Park benches as seats, and when the driver breaks you're holding on for life) The worse part is that this "free option" now competes with an existing valid option that cost a dollar. But that means that based on fares it's likely they will reduce stops and reduce hours (they have) it would have been better had the business incentive had just sponsered the existing bus route instead. Additionally comparing to china's awesome bus system (depending on the city), there, there is always two buses that come every 20 minutes. So you're never really ever suffereing. (Major cities anyways) The trolly is poorly managed and often three of them will come at once as they don't sync them when they run late they just all go so often you have three trolleys following each other and a very late bus. So it just... I never understood with the advent of GPS why buses aren't syncing so that they could just be traffic bound instead of time bound That way a bus could always arrive every x minutes instead of well the bus is scheduleed to arrive at x time and it might not arrive due to traffic woes. This should be syncable. ... Like why is the system so... I can't avoid saying it... capitalistically bound instead of populas bound. I mean it would better for capalism if that was more human centric. /political rant blah blah

> The main low-hanging fruit is just removing surface parking lots

You're pre-supposing that transit is _better_ than cars. It's not. ESPECIALLY the Japanese transit.

I certainly don't want to suffer through this bullshit every day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9Xg7ui5mLA

That is wild, I wouldn't have nearly enough faith in the structural integrity of the doors for that. Not to mention that packing people in like that seems vaguely unsafe.

I'm a Tokyo local and yes, this is real. Even I find it uncomfortable. On the Yamanote Line during rush hour, trains come every 2-3 minutes and it can still look close to this.

That said, most people's daily commute isn't this extreme -- it depends heavily on the line and direction. The tradeoff most Tokyo residents accept is: 30 minutes of crowded train vs. hours stuck in traffic with nowhere to park.

There is ample parking everywhere in Japan, you just have to pay for it.

The OP is missing that you do the same thing you just do it in a car in a congested highway with your road rage, spend a lot of money, and all of that to avoid the impression of a subway ride that would never happen in an American city except maybe New York because these cities obviously lack population density at the scale of Tokyo. Oh and you get in car crashes and die.

This isn’t an anti-car rant. I’m actually trying to just get folks who don’t want to drive and shouldn’t be driving off the road so we can save money and do more with the infrastructure we already have while restoring economic bases and entrepreneurship to our non-coastal cities. It is quite literally a win for everyone except bloated highway departments and their downstream contractors.

That's because subways are a dead end. They need to be removed entirely, and the dense cities need to be de-densified. That's the long-term plan.

> I’m actually trying to just get folks who don’t want to drive and shouldn’t be driving off the road so we can save money and do more with the infrastructure

Can we PLEASE just stop with the "saving money" and "off the road" nonsense? Please.

Adding transit does NOT reduce congestion (see: .https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/7/does-buildi... ). And it is NOT cheaper than owning a car.

If you dream of rail going to every city block like in NYC, then you should think about its other side effects: toxic densification, unaffordable housing, depopulation.

> That's because subways are a dead end. They need to be removed entirely,

I certainly agree subways aren't the way of the future, at least in America. Too expensive and, frankly, unnecessary. We are already de-densified (which is why I find your below comment bizarre)

> and the dense cities need to be de-densified. That's the long-term plan.

Can you point to a single elected official in an American city that has a plan of reducing density in their city? I'm curious.

> Can we PLEASE just stop with the "saving money" and "off the road" nonsense? Please.

> Adding transit does NOT reduce congestion (see: .https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/7/does-buildi... ). And it is NOT cheaper than owning a car.

Well, no, I won't stop because it's true and arguments to the contrary are faulty for various reasons. For example, suggesting that transit doesn't reduce congestion misses the fact that you can't count future growth that didn't occur. Every single person riding transit would be driving, if there was no transit. It's just logically false. It's also ignoring the fact that growth and congestion and transit typically go hand-in-hand.

> And it is NOT cheaper than owning a car.

The only way for this to be true is to ignore all of the factors of car ownership. Even then it's probably still false.

> If you dream of rail going to every city block like in NYC, then you should think about its other side effects: toxic densification, unaffordable housing, depopulation.

No I don't. Also NYC is the most populous city in America so depopulation here as an argument yet again makes 0 sense. Housing is unaffordable precisely because of the density and demand, which go hand-in-hand.

> We are already de-densified (which is why I find your below comment bizarre)

The US is rapidly densifying, and this will get _worse_ as the population starts shrinking in earnest. Japan leads the way here, its population has been going down for a while. Yet Tokyo now is in a real estate bubble.

> Can you point to a single elected official in an American city that has a plan of reducing density in their city? I'm curious.

Plenty of cities are resisting the density increases, NIMBYs are holding the line.

> Well, no, I won't stop because it's true and arguments to the contrary are faulty for various reasons. For example, suggesting that transit doesn't reduce congestion misses the fact that you can't count future growth that didn't occur.

Again. Transit does NOT reduce the congestion. This is a simple observable verifiable fact.

You can say that transit enables more density (true), but it does NOT reduce congestion.

> Every single person riding transit would be driving, if there was no transit.

And there would be fewer of these people.

> The only way for this to be true is to ignore all of the factors of car ownership. Even then it's probably still false.

In Seattle, I'm going to end up paying $150k in taxes/fees for the failrail line that will go nowhere near me. This is literally more than a lifetime of owing a cheap car.

But even if we just look at operating costs of transit, a single trip on transit is about $20. This ends up being about equal to the IRS deduction for car depreciation for the average trips.

> No I don't. Also NYC is the most populous city in America so depopulation here as an argument yet again makes 0 sense.

Look at the fertility rate for people in dense city cores vs. suburbs.

> Housing is unaffordable precisely because of the density and demand, which go hand-in-hand.

Indeed. Now think about this: the total US population is shrinking. NYC is growing. What is happening?

Hint: look at Japan.

> The US is rapidly densifying, and this will get _worse_ as the population starts shrinking in earnest. Japan leads the way here, its population has been going down for a while. Yet Tokyo now is in a real estate bubble.

There are a lot of factors that go in to real estate prices, and I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to compare Tokyo to any city in America besides New York in just about any aspect.

> Plenty of cities are resisting the density increases, NIMBYs are holding the line.

Name one. That's not the same thing as NIMBY. No city is actively against growth.

> Again. Transit does NOT reduce the congestion. This is a simple observable verifiable fact. You can say that transit enables more density (true), but it does NOT reduce congestion.

It's the same thing, and it goes very well with your thesis that the US is rapidly densifying. As it densifies congestion gets worse, adding transit takes away additional cars that would otherwise be on the road.

In Seattle whatever transit exists is gone, now those people would drive cars, ergo congestion increases. This seems very obvious.

> In Seattle, I'm going to end up paying $150k in taxes/fees for the failrail line that will go nowhere near me. This is literally more than a lifetime of owing a cheap car.

Ok and do you not see what the problem is with this argument? I could just say, I'm paying $150k more in taxes for a new highway being built somewhere that won't go anywhere near me or I won't drive on.

Second, you're not including the costs for highway construction, maintenance, insurance, gas/oil (why do you think we're in Iran) &c. that goes into car ownership.

Third - Most Americans aren't buying cheap cars.

> But even if we just look at operating costs of transit, a single trip on transit is about $20. This ends up being about equal to the IRS deduction for car depreciation for the average trips.

Weird. I took a "single trip on transit" and it was less than $5 in New York. See I can just pull numbers out of my ass and apply them without any good reason too.

> Look at the fertility rate for people in dense city cores vs. suburbs.

What about them?

> Indeed. Now think about this: the total US population is shrinking.

The US population is not shrinking.

> NYC is growing. What is happening?

People want to live there - that's my best guess.

> There are a lot of factors that go in to real estate prices, and I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to compare Tokyo to any city in America besides New York in just about any aspect.

Yes, it absolutely makes sense. The trend is simple: you build rail transit, you get unaffordable housing. Go on, try to find a counter-example.

> Name one. That's not the same thing as NIMBY. No city is actively against growth.

Princeton, Texas.

> It's the same thing, and it goes very well with your thesis that the US is rapidly densifying. As it densifies congestion gets worse, adding transit takes away additional cars that would otherwise be on the road.

No, it does NOT take cars off. A car that is on the road, stays on the road. Cars are _vastly_ superior to any transit mode on average, so people almost never give them up.

You basically need to make your streets impassable before people start switching from cars to transit.

> In Seattle whatever transit exists is gone, now those people would drive cars, ergo congestion increases. This seems very obvious.

Then people would out-migrate, companies will close dense offices, and congestion will relax.

> Ok and do you not see what the problem is with this argument? I could just say, I'm paying $150k more in taxes for a new highway being built somewhere that won't go anywhere near me or I won't drive on.

Except that I'm _also_ paying for all the highway construciton and maintenance in direct user fees ( https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur... ). A transit user does NOT pay for my use of highways, I do.

And to give you some perspective, one mile of this failrail will cost about the same as construction of 1000 miles of modern 6-lane freeway. The entire project will cost about the same as the total highway spending for entire WA for 15 years.

> Third - Most Americans aren't buying cheap cars.

As I sa

> Weird. I took a "single trip on transit" and it was less than $5 in New York. See I can just pull numbers out of my ass and apply them without any good reason too.

That's because transit riders in the US (or Europe for that matter) never pay the full fare cost, it's always subsidized.

And the ~$20 number is easy to get. For example, MTA: 1.15 billion annual rides (2023), total _operating_ budget $19.2B. Divide one number by another. And this does not include all the new subway construction cost, which is harder to account for.

> The US population is not shrinking.

It will within 1-2 years: https://www.prb.org/news/u-s-population-growth-is-slowing-to...

And even before that, the rate of growth for large cities has been outpacing the population growth for the last 2 decades.

> People want to live there - that's my best guess.

They don't. Most people would prefer to live in suburbs, but they HAVE to live in dense cities.

> Yes, it absolutely makes sense.

It doesn't. Tokyo metro is like, 30+ million people. That has very little in common with, say, where I live which is Columbus, Ohio. You can argue this point but I am closed-minded to any difference of opinion here.

> The trend is simple: you build rail transit, you get unaffordable housing. Go on, try to find a counter-example.

That's because the demand for rail transit is so high that people will pay a premium to live next to it. When you say people really want to live in the suburbs, well, the market disagrees and that is reflected in housing prices.

> Princeton, Texas.

Ok so you've found a city of a little under 40k that is opposed to growth? How so? What article are you referring to? Who specifically from Princeton, Texas is speaking out? Why do you have to go to such a small town to find an example?

> No, it does NOT take cars off.

Ok but it does, because those people have to move around and if they're not using a train or something they'll use a car. I don't know why you're disputing this pretty trivial fact.

> Cars are _vastly_ superior to any transit mode on average, so people almost never give them up.

I don't think anyone needs to give up their car. I certainly don't want to. They're convenient and awesome. But I don't need or want to get in a car and drive 20 miles or something to buy a loaf of bread. That's a dumb and expensive transportation model.

> Except that I'm _also_ paying for all the highway construciton and maintenance in direct user fees ( https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur... ). A transit user does NOT pay for my use of highways, I do.

Not true in all states. Pretty much untrue generally. You're forgetting about the federal highway dollars that go into this stuff, which comes out of general federal taxes. Either way you pay for all sorts of things you don't use all the time. I don't use Social Security or Medicaid. Guess I should start arguing to get rid of those.

> And to give you some perspective, one mile of this failrail will cost about the same as construction of 1000 miles of modern 6-lane freeway. The entire project will cost about the same as the total highway spending for entire WA for 15 years.

Well to start we should just stop building freeways, we already built a lot and don't need them. Second please cite your source. Third, not applicable to all states.

> That's because transit riders in the US (or Europe for that matter) never pay the full fare cost, it's always subsidized.

Very few people pay the full cost for anything, including highways, or the police who have to ticket traffic offenders, or the fire trucks that have to go scrape dead kids off the pavement. Bad argument.

> And the ~$20 number is easy to get. For example, MTA: 1.15 billion annual rides (2023), total _operating_ budget $19.2B. Divide one number by another. And this does not include all the new subway construction cost, which is harder to account for.

You're just cherry-picking random things to argue about. First it's Seattle, then it's NYC, who knows what city you'll pick next to create an arbitrary data point.

> It will within 1-2 years: https://www.prb.org/news/u-s-population-growth-is-slowing-to...

We already have too many people anyway (earth should have closer to a billion). And we can increase the population if we so desire through immigration or benefits to promote procreation. What does this tie to anyway? Was your argument that because population levels are declining, Americans are moving to cities and driving up housing prices? Who cares?

> They don't.

Well they do, otherwise they wouldn't be moving there.

> Most people would prefer to live in suburbs, but they HAVE to live in dense cities.

If most people preferred to live in suburbs they wouldn't be moving to urban areas.

There is only one truly dense city in America and that's NYC and I guess you could argue Chicago. Other cities have some parts that are kind of dense, but even those are very car-centric (DC, Boston, for example).

Also, for whatever it is worth, I'm not in favor of NYC style development. I live in a single family house with a detached garage, with restaurants, parks, coffee shops, grocery, and more within a 15-20 minute walk and of course I can drive to those things too if I want. Initially what I was talking about was a city like where I live where we have these economically destructive surface parking lots and commuter culture which is bad for the city and bad for the economy. Adding transit to my city, particularly a north/south tram line will alleviate congestion, improve quality of life, and attract more people. Our surrounding neighborhoods can continue to have mixes of apartments, single-family homes, duplexes, and more.

> Tokyo metro is like, 30+ million people.

Yes, and this exactly is the problem. WHY is it a city of 30 million when the country's population is shrinking?

> That's because the demand for rail transit is so high that people will pay a premium to live next to it. When you say people really want to live in the suburbs, well, the market disagrees and that is reflected in housing prices.

No. There is NO demand for transit from people living in the city. None. The demand is from _companies_ that force people to work in/near dense city cores.

> Ok so you've found a city of a little under 40k that is opposed to growth? How so?

Moving goalposts?

> You're just cherry-picking random things to argue about. First it's Seattle, then it's NYC, who knows what city you'll pick next to create an arbitrary data point.

I'm sorry. I can't argue with you in good faith. You have zero understanding of the problem, and when confronted with facts or examples, you slink away from them. Because they are not to your liking.

For what city do you want me to give you the data? I can assure you that I'm not cherry-picking, and that NYC is actually one of the better-run transits.

> Well they do, otherwise they wouldn't be moving there. > If most people preferred to live in suburbs they wouldn't be moving to urban areas.

Spoken like a true privileged dude. Have you ever heard of doing what you hate because you _have_ to? That's exactly what is happening with cities.

> There is only one truly dense city in America and that's NYC and I guess you could argue Chicago. Other cities have some parts that are kind of dense, but even those are very car-centric (DC, Boston, for example).

The problem is that cities are getting _more_ dense. Not the absolute density.

> No. There is NO demand for transit from people living in the city. None. The demand is from _companies_ that force people to work in/near dense city cores.

Am I missing an obvious joke here? Because I've lived in multiple cities with great public transit, and this quote couldn't be further from the truth - the people love their public transit options, and they keep voting to build it out further.

The cost of housing further backs this claim. The market is usually right - and amenities like a tram or great public transit lead to higher prices particularly near the stops or in a certain proximity. With extra travelers you get shops and small business that spring up that corporations like Starbucks can't as readily compete against. That further drives interest and development and you create a positive economic feedback loop.

> Yes, and this exactly is the problem. WHY is it a city of 30 million when the country's population is shrinking?

Because there are better opportunities and amenities in the city? I don't know. Can you elaborate on what your larger point is here? I still don't understand why Tokyo is relevant to this conversation, but happy to chat about it if you can help me better understand the point you are trying to make.

> No. There is NO demand for transit from people living in the city. None. The demand is from _companies_ that force people to work in/near dense city cores.

Or maybe companies are locating to where people want to live? I.e. California or San Francisco specifically.

> Moving goalposts?

You just named a random city, the least you can do is grab an article where an elected official is talking about how they're against growth or urban infill or something.

Then we can talk about why this is a bad example.

> I'm sorry. I can't argue with you in good faith. You have zero understanding of the problem, and when confronted with facts or examples, you slink away from them. Because they are not to your liking.

Or maybe you aren't doing a good enough job explaining the problem. What does filling some crappy surface parking lots and putting a tram through Downtown Columbus, Ohio (for example) have to do with Tokyo or New York City?

> For what city do you want me to give you the data? I can assure you that I'm not cherry-picking, and that NYC is actually one of the better-run transits.

Columbus, Ohio. Let's talk about that since you have the data and I live here and can confirm your data.

> Spoken like a true privileged dude.

Damn right, and I'm not apologizing for it. :)

> Have you ever heard of doing what you hate because you _have_ to? That's exactly what is happening with cities.

I've heard of it. I would categorize commuting as "doing what you hate".

> The problem is that cities are getting _more_ dense. Not the absolute density.

Doesn't seem to be a problem. The increase in density increases tax revenue, allows folks to live closer to where they work, enables entrepreneurs to start new businesses because they have a larger serviceable population, and more. And that can all happen while I still have a 2.5 car garage, car, and single family home.

If you want to talk about density in American cities, I'd suggest not talking about Tokyo or New York City, because those are extreme outliers and no American city is going to look like that anytime soon.

I have a hard enough time dealing gracefully with moderately congested trains in a place like DC. How do you coordinate your positioning so you can get off at the correct stop if the train gets packed this tightly?

From another city where things can get quite packed on some lines at rush hour:

People in front of the door know that people will get out so they step outside to let the flow out and are the first ones to get back in, giving them the opportunity to go further inside so that they don't have to do it at every stop. Might even get a seat at some point (the longer the travel, the most likely to get a seat)

I have been stuck in commute traffic for hours, 30 minutes of that is infinitely preferable.

Also if it's really too packed, just wait 2 minutes for the next one

Thanks for the explanation. Someone else thought my question was impertinent, I'm happy you spent the time to educate me. I've never had to deal with public transit as congested as Tokyo, not even close. Hell, even on Portland light rail I find it stressful to try and navigate my way to the right place on the train to get off at my stop if I started my journey while the train was fairly empty.

> I have been stuck in commute traffic for hours, 30 minutes of that is infinitely preferable.

Can't argue with that. I won't ever have another commuting job again. I go into the office once a month, and after driving 45 minutes each way just because my company felt like our office needed to be in the most congested area of Portland, at the end of that day I thank my lucky stars that it's only once a month.

> Also if it's really too packed, just wait 2 minutes for the next one

Except that the next one will be just as crowded.

No probably a better. Never had to let more than 2 trains go but mostly just one, but even in rush hour the most common though is there is just enough space so I don't have miss any train.

Small quibble: visits downtown are an uncommon occurrence for many (most?) Americans. The vast majority of their transit is intra/inter-suburb. Where I live, it's relatively simple and easy to hop on a commuter train or bus to get downtown. It's impossible to use public transit to get from one place along the ring road to another, or from one side of a particular suburb to another. Therefore, everyone still needs a car.

That won’t fix the cost of rail in America, which is the main reason America doesn’t have better rail. Look at California high speed rail or light rail in Seattle. They have insane costs per mile, are still very over budget, falling behind schedule, and basically are forever grifts. The availability of parking is unrelated to these issues. It comes back to mismanagement and corruption.

Can you explain how Seattle is an example? They’re opening new lines, Link is packed often, seems like a well used reliable service, but I only visit once or twice a year.

It’s been a while since I read about their system but as I recall, across the entire system something like 100 billion is the total cost. But that’s only for like 75 ish miles. So it’s very expensive. I recently saw a news article saying they’re 30 billion short per their projections and are now cutting lines out of the plan that voters expected when they supported levies, and some surrounding cities where residents have each paid hundreds or more a year for the rail to come to them, now may not get them at all. Even though they’ve been paying into it for a decade or two. Which to me is a form of theft.

The central sections of link were expensive because they're built through the center of the earth with really huge stations, some of this is to avoid impacting cars but much is just to get elevation changes. The connection over lake Washington required a lot of money and work too, as it's a floating bridge.

The less complex sections were mostly on-par with other us cities.

The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail.

If you try building a single megaproject, nobody knows what they are doing, everything is inefficient, and mistakes will be made. But you learn by doing. If the individual projects are small enough that there are always multiple projects in various stages, you develop and maintain expertise. Then you can build things cost-effectively and finish the projects in time.

> The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail.

The cost of passenger rail is high in America because America has 11% of the population (read: customer) density of Japan.

(For cities, NYC has 25% lower population density than Tokyo.)

Dividing population by total land area is a horribly misleading way to understand density. There are alternatives, like population-weighted density, that give you a better picture: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3119965 Here's a blog post where somebody re-invented the concept and analyzed density in Europe: https://theconversation.com/think-your-country-is-crowded-th...

The population-weighted density of the US is roughly similar to continental Europe.

There's this one neat trick where you only build the rail where the people go!

I think it's not feasible in America because of the culture. If you have a good chunk of people that are hell-bent against sharing space with others for one reason or another (some are legitimate reasons!), you're already discarding a significant chunk of passengers.

Another hot take is... if you want any of the infrastructure to be mass-used, you have to make it better than the alternatives, so people with the means would use it as well. Like your subway should be faster than the cars, so even affluent people would take it. Your trains should be faster than door-to-door flight time, so people would take that as well. Unfortunately that makes a lot of things more complicated in communities with high income disparity.

Yes, but with caveats.

Culturally, though, it’s because that over half of the population doesn’t know that they would benefit from trains? In the same way outside (just as inside) the US there’s an age-old divide between farmers and city folk (see Denmark or France for the most recent protests).

In China, >66% of the population lives in urban areas. In the US, <30% live in proper urban areas (a vast majority, 60%, live in historically car-centric suburban areas mostly developed post WWII).

The issue is not that those areas that would benefit the most don’t support it, it’s that the areas that would benefit the most from it are surrounded by areas that currently have no viable alternatives (and thus knowledge that something else is possible) other than a car. They’re already driving >1hr to get to work or an airport. Therefore, of course they think anything that takes away resources from wider roads is a waste of their own time and tax money, as it does not benefit them.

The reason the California HSR, if ever finished, will actually mark a cultural shift is that it’s the only megaproject attempted since the 21st century that actually puts modern alternatives to the car in rural areas: vast amounts of money could’ve been saved by connecting LA to SF and SD by electrifying and tunneling on the current Amtrak route, but that would’ve left out about half the state.

Was it too ambitious? Maybe. But in 50 years, maybe everyone will be talking about how it changed California, and the US’s, entire attitude toward rail.

> Culturally, though, it’s because that over half of the population doesn’t know that they would benefit from trains

No it’s not. Everyone in America goes to Disney World, which was made by a train nerd and you can’t even drive into the parks. Everyone goes there, rides around the trains and walkable areas, and then goes home to Ohio and drives around in their giant SUV.

It’s not because people don’t know about trains. It’s because they don’t value the things you do, and they value things you don’t, like having distance from strangers and being able to buy a lot of stuff and cart it around with them everywhere.

All my family is immigrants from Bangladesh. They’re not steeped in generations of American car culture. But, for some reason, car culture is the thing they assimilate into most easily. My cousin was living in Queens (where all the recent Bangladeshi immigrants are) and moved to Dallas. She’s thrilled about having all the space for her kids to run around, the apartment with a pool, etc. She doesn’t miss having to schlep her kids on the subway around aggressive homeless people, people singing to themselves, panhandlers, etc.

That’s fun, because I’m from a third generation Dallas family :) I hope they enjoy Dallas and all Texas has to offer.

Dallas, TX has continually voted in expanding its DART Rail funding the past 40 years. It has the most miles of intercity rail in the entirety of the South. It has the most light rail, by mileage, built in the entirety of the US. It just opened up an entirely new rail line through the suburbs (and only the suburbs) in March, and is its third(!) line which connects directly to DFW airport, which makes it the most rail-connected airport in the United States, and tied with Shanghai, Tokyo and London for the world.

I also personally currently live on a farm in California, and am an advocate of HSR. I believe many of those in similar areas are afraid of rail because they have never experienced its benefits, and change without knowledge is scary.

So please forgive me if I say that you are incorrect in both your assessment of how the majority of Dallas, Texas supports rail and your assumption of what I value.

And regarding your point about Disney World, I believe you are actually agreeing with me. Disney is one of the only places in the US it makes more sense to use the train or shuttle than a car. It does not in most of the US. Many people go to Disney World and experience for the first time how well trains can work for day-to-day transit, if designed well and intentionally. People will use what is most convenient, immigrant or not — most people (including me) do not take trains out of some principled stance, they do so when it’s more convenient. And my argument is we should make it more convenient, safety and all.

> So please forgive me if I say that you are incorrect in both your assessment of how the majority of Dallas, Texas supports rail and your assumption of what I value.

I'm correct in my assumption about what you value. But you're correct in your assumption about what other people value.

> People will use what is most convenient, immigrant or not — most people (including me) do not take trains out of some principled stance, they do so when it’s more convenient.

Right, and virtually nobody in the Dallas, Texas area actually takes transit themselves. The proof of what they value is right there in their revealed preferences.

100% This is true.

The only people I hear clamoring for trains in non urban areas are younger online folks (mostly living in urban areas).

I rarely hear anyone ask for it in suburbia.

Frankly, if you've never lived in a place with clean, reliable, fast trains, you probably would be disillusioned and would never go to the train life. Or if your public infrastructure is deemed "for poor people".

Back to my original point, it's a cultural problem.

I go to Tokyo sometimes multiple times a year. It’s not like I don’t know about reliable trains.

> It’s not because people don’t know about trains. It’s because they don’t value the things you do, and they value things you don’t, like having distance from strangers and being able to buy a lot of stuff and cart it around with them everywhere.

But isn't this pretty fungible? Like it can't be that all the people genetically predisposed to like high density neighborhoods and biking to the grocery store happen to be in the Netherlands.

> Another hot take is... if you want any of the infrastructure to be mass-used, you have to make it better than the alternatives, so people with the means would use it as well. Like your subway should be faster than the cars, so even affluent people would take it.

These days cities often achieve this by purposely hurting the alternatives like driving. And that just isn’t the solution. Mass transit has to be fast period. Not just faster than a bad alternative. And it needs to be safe, and 24x7.

I support all kinds of transportation. I think everyone should have access to trains, cars, bikes and etc. But I also think each has its own merits. Like the car ownership over here is huge, but most commute to work on trains because things aren’t really invisibly subsidized.

> These days cities often achieve this by purposely hurting the alternatives like driving.

The point is not hurting the alternative of driving, it's to ensure that drivers don't actively hurt the more space-efficient alternatives of biking and walking on foot. The people who still have a real need for driving actually have a far better experience as a result due to the reduced traffic.

> I think it's not feasible in America because of the culture. If you have a good chunk of people that are hell-bent against sharing space with others for one reason or another (some are legitimate reasons!), you're already discarding a significant chunk of passengers.

That's why America never layed any railroads in the 19th century, and everyone just rode by horse instead. Oh wait, that's not what happened at all.

You are ignoring major cultural shifts - people also lived tightly packed into tenements then too. The tolerance for such space sharing without common purpose has declined.

Which means that culture could easily shift again. It's not like Europe wasn't just as car-obsessed immediately after WWII (and East Asia a few decades after that), they just realized that it was a bad idea and that cars were fundamentally incompatible with dense settlements.

Funny enough, Americans are usually happy to use public transportation when the travel in Europe or in Japan. Also most New Yorkers use the subway every day.

It's just their own public transit infrastructure they don't like, and I understand them.

I’ve heard a better idea.

“What you should in fact do is employ all the world's top male and female supermodels, pay them to walk the length of the train handing out free Chateau Petrus for the entire duration of the journey. You'll still have about 3 billion pounds left in change and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down.” ~Rory Sutherland

>The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail.

This seems backwards to me tbh. Is this a feeling or backed by hard data?

As much as anti-american sentiment is right now, there are still great engineering feats pulled off all the time.

Construction is expensive because we value public insight into projects and health factors for workers and everyone [and the environment] else impacted. Other countries not so much.

    > Construction is expensive because we value public insight into projects and health factors for workers and everyone [and the environment] else impacted. Other countries not so much.

Railway construction in Spain and France is at least half the cost of the United States. Both "value public insight into projects and health factors for workers and everyone [and the environment] else impacted".

Infrastructure construction is more about administration than engineering. If the people in charge have not administered similar projects before, they will make mistakes.

Public insight, health, worker welfare, and environment are pretty universal values in developed countries. What may set the US apart is their particular version of the common law system. A lot of people have the standing to sue someone, causing unpredictable delays and cost overruns for an infrastructure project. In many other countries, most cases related to infrastructure projects are handled by administrative courts. They will determine narrowly whether all the relevant laws were followed, and do so cost-effectively and in a predictable time.

Experience with the decisions of the relevant courts in similar cases is a major component of basic competence in infrastructure projects. If you can predict what the courts are willing to approve, you can plan the project accordingly. If you can predict how much time and money the court process will take, you can include that in the plans. But if you don't have the experience or the courts are unpredictable, you are bound to make mistakes.

At the same time, the same government, mysteriously, has no problem building a vast network of roads reaching everywhere and spanning the whole country.

If the US government neglects a section of highway until a city becomes unreachable by roads, there will be riots. The same city losing a train service? Totally expected, trains are supposed to suck.

The sorry state of American public transport is a self-fulfilling prophecy: everybody knows that public transportation sucks, and therefore nothing is done to improve it, because it's a waste of resource.

>the same government, mysteriously, has no problem building a vast network of roads reaching everywhere and spanning the whole country.

Our road-building has slowed dramatically since the 1980s. The Interstate Highway network would be much more expensive and slow to build today.

>If the US government neglects a section of highway until a city becomes unreachable by roads, there will be riots.

Consider John's Island, South Carolina. The highway that was supposed to go there has been delayed for 33 years. Access to the island/town is through two two-lane roads that get backed up to a standstill every night. There's a running "joke" about how everyone is going to die if there's a major hurricane.

    > Consider John's Island, South Carolina. The highway that was supposed to go there has been delayed for 33 years.

I Googled about this issue. It looks like it is multi-factor: legal battles, lack of funding, and significant conflict over growth management vs. environmental concerns.

In summary: Money and NIMBYism.

That’s maybe the reason today to not build more but not the reason it is bad. America ignored rail for decades in favor of highway systems and now the cost is almost always considered infeasible. We will redo our roads every 5-10 years though.

If it was invested in 50 years ago or more we would be in a different place for sure.

The per mile costs are definitely high in America, for a lot of reasons, often related to laws and policies, but that's not really the issue. At the end of 2025, nearly 20 years since California voters passed Prop 1A, we have spent under $15 Billion on California High Speed Rail. As a point of contrast, the cost of 2025's tax cut extensions is estimated to be $4 Trillion. The fact is that we don't have quality intercity passenger rail in this country because politicians aren't willing to support it and fund it as reasonable levels. Seattle light rail is an interesting example because politicians there are willing to support it and so ... we are building it, despite the relatively high per mile costs. LA Metro is interesting right because the voters passed sales taxes that funded various light rail projects. So LA is building better rail. But the political process means that every district supervisor gets their own rail project and so we have light rail to Pomona but are struggling to get a subway down Wilshire where it's obviously more needed. Anyways, all this is to say, politics is a big part of the reason why we don't have better rail in America. And blaming "grift" is a right-wing political talking point that probably doesn't help.

> political process means that every district supervisor gets their own rail project

This is part of what people mean by “grift.” Anyway, I’m not right wing. I just want cheap rail done competently. That’s not “not the issue.” As a voter, that is very much an issue for me.

California is about the size of Japan with the same GDP. They could pass their own funded project for public transportation.

It's a problem with the entire US needs to support it, that is politics 101.

    > California is about the size of Japan with the same GDP.

On the surface, this is true, but it ignores taxation structure when comparing a federal state to a sovereign nation. It would be very hard to get state-level income tax rates above 15% in the US. That cannot compete against federal/national tax rates that normally approach 40% in US and Japan. In any nation, the vast majority of large mass transit project construction costs are paid for by the central/national gov't. I would characterise your comparison is disingenuous.

    > They could pass their own funded project for public transportation.

They could not reasonably 100% self-fund large mass transit projects. They need federal dollars, a lot of them, and it is very competitive to get them. As an example, look at how long it has taken to raise necessary funds to build the Silicon Valley BART extension. There is tremendous support from the public for this project, but it takes a long time to raise necessary local funds. In parallel, they need to "win" federal support for the lion's share of construction costs.

You raise some very good points about the expansion of rail in Los Angeles basin. However, this part: "struggling to get a subway down Wilshire where it's obviously more needed". As I understand, it is incredibly complex to build subways in that part of LA basin due to natural gas deposits that make tunnelling dangerous and expensive.

The tunneling in that area is done now so we can see what happened. It was slightly more expensive and slower to tunnel in that area due to the tar sands and methane. But what was really expensive and time consuming was the NIMBY lawsuits and actual laws passed that used the methane as an excuse to try to stop the project.

Thank you for the follow-up. What laws were passed that slowed/delayed the project?

Here's a bill that repealed a previous bill that slowed/delayed the project: https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/4653

I can't find the laws it's repealing immediately, but they must exist.

Street parking makes suburbs worse, too. Almost everybody in my neighborhood has their garages piled to the ceiling with junk and parks in the street, which makes it a pain to weave through even for someone driving a compact crossover… I can’t imagine what kind of hell it is for trash and delivery drivers having to squeeze huge trucks and vans through without swiping peoples’ cars.

And that's without mentioning what's like for the lowest of the low (in the USA): pedestrians.

my absolute biggest pet peeve about living in "modern" suburbs and a large contributing factor behind why i wanted to (and eventually did) leave them.

imagine having the only well-maintained sidewalk for a good ways out be blocked by cars whose owners have 2+ car garages!

Blocking the sidewalk should be fineable?

Such rules are often not enforced.

In my experience, it's often up to the people in the neighborhood to decide. One of my neighbors down the street a number of years ago was militant about it. Code Enforcement does not routinely drive our streets looking for violations, but if someone blocked a sidewalk, parked facing the wrong way on the street, etc, Code Enforcement would magically appear to give them a ticket. Pretty sure this neighbor had them on speed dial.

I am sure social networks (the non tech kind) help here. Maybe they both play golf or coach each other's kids.

In an ideal world where scrolling and driving would _actually_ be a punishable offense, sure!

In reality: moving away solved the problem.

Note: I grew up in an older (1940s) suburb with a town square that was actually walkable. This problem didn’t exist there. Mostly because the garage was detached and further back from houses, so you had your own proper driveway to park your car onto.

This is where legislation can come in - when I bought my house, one provision was that I can't change the front to a garden, it has to remain usable as a parking space for a car. Even if I don't have a car. There's limited extra / visitor parking available. Of course, a lot of people have two cars so it's kinda moot but still.

This is crazy car-centric legislation.

Now, instead of letting car owners pay for the public space they use (street parking), you are forcing anyone without a car to waste their own private space, in case somebody wants to park there.

I can't imagine that you have to let someone park on your private property anywhere.

No, that is not the point.

The subtle difference is between American parking minimums imposed on property owners - “you must reserve space on your private property for this many cars whether you own them or not” vs Japanese parking requirements imposed on car owners - “you must reserve space on some private property for your car if you want to own it”

Don't take this the wrong way but to anyone who has read the book "The High Price of Free Parking" this contribution to this thread reads like someone who came late to a meeting and missed half of the discussion and keeps asking questions that would have been answered had they joined earlier.

I can see why you might ask this, but the book very much focused on the idea that a piece of land much preserve space for a parking space. It might sound innocuous but it is the source of many issues within cities, a contributor to housing inaffordability, why so many buildings in the US are surrounded by miles of parking, why some of the lots in your city are derelict, etc.

The book very much addresses why mandated parking minimums even in suburban residential lots are also bad (specially the mandated minimum less so the carpark itself), I highly recommend the book mentioned above.

Here's the preface of the book http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/PrefaceHighCostFreeParking.pdf

There's also a good audiobook.

In England, so many people are living at home due to the housing issues that some houses have 3-4 cars and no driveway. Streets are nowhere near as wide as Norther America so two cars cannot pass easily and drivers have to find gaps between cars to pass each other.

There is an absolute mind-boggling number of garages full of crap in Japan too.

I think it's a corollary of Parkinson's Law: Crap expands to fill the space available for it. It's one reason I've never gotten a shed rather than just depending on my garage to store stuff in the winter when I need to get any cars off the driveway for plowing. Too much temptation to just fill spaces up.

Garages are the easiest way to get cheap storage space attached to or close to your home. Apart from garden sheds.

The issue is really the perverse incentive: if there is free onstreet parking, its usually more useful to put your car on the street and use the garage for something else. For many people that might even hold true if they have to walk a bit to the next parling spot

That's really hard to escape unless you remove free on-street parking from large areas at once

It doesn't help that under-main-roof garages seem to be designed to only just fit small to medium sized cars despite the significant, rampant inflation of car sizes over the past few years.

My family tend to opt for smaller cars, because we're practical and don't have the faulty 'keeping up with the Joneses' gene, which means we can fit two cars in a two car garage.

We may still be in the majority, but it feels like it won't be for long.

UMR garage sizes should be inflating with the average car size. The Ford Ranger, essentially a fucking truck, and completely impractical, is the highest selling car in Australia because of backwards-thinking tax incentives from a few years ago, and then the ensuing Joneses effect.

Sigh... humans.

/rant

I don't suppose you have Ford F350s in your area? You could put that Ranger in the glove box.

Don't see them very often, thankfully. We're not the US yet - there is still hope!

UMR?

Under main roof

Apologies, I meant to add the acronym where first said under main roof.

Thanks!

This is true. Back when I was EV shopping, the number of models that were both proper modern EVs and could fit reasonably in my garage was shockingly small.

Or maybe big vehicles which are inefficient from the point of view of physics (bigger = more energy to move around), take more space and damage the road more (more heavy, more bad for road) should be banned or taxed accordingly instead of having the law change the size of garages ?

I'd be happy with all of the above.

In my area street parking is banned on collection day until 5pm. This is also when they do street cleaning. Somehow everyone finds room for all their cars on this day. Otherwise its similar to how you describe.

Guilty of garage as a storage shed, but its also crazy to me people don't store their second most expensive asset inside their garage.

I have space in garage for car at times of year when plowing may be needed. But plenty of space outside on driveway at times of year when it's not. Live in a very safe area and it's easier to just pull up in front of the garage door. Not sure what's crazy about that.

Also makes roads unsafe for cycling

In which part of Europe is cheap to park?

Romania. Even its capital and the largest city - Bucharest - is still pretty cheap, sometimes even free like in this example on Google Street View https://maps.app.goo.gl/r6TFFtHbj2SELTqY9 If you're willing to take the risk which is pretty low, you can even park it on the sidewalk like here https://maps.app.goo.gl/y6DNVBdR2KvJsA917

But times are changing. Lanes and sidewalks, sometimes even green spaces, are being converted to parking spaces, so there's less spaces for freeloading. They're also becoming more and more expensive. The residential ones have also been hard to get and it will probably become even harder to get as more drivers will need them as the risk of getting a fine increases.

That's probably an exception. Most cities I know in Europe have crazy expensive parking and usually forbid cars from entering the city center. I would say EU cities are really hostile to cars

You should distinguish between residents and visitors. In Belgium, and I believe in many other European cities, street parking for residents is extremely cheap or free.

In Italy parking is free for residents. And street parking in the city centre is usually cheap (2 or 3 euros per hour).

Car culture in Italy is still too strong; but luckily many municipalities are working to decrease parking spots and build more cycle lanes.

Not Paris and especially not if you have an SUV: 225€ for six hours (sic). But unlike Tokyo the average narrow street in Paris is still lined with parked cars from end to end, so apparently the fees are still too low.

I suspect if you live there you can get a parking permit to park relatively cheaply. Where I used to live they introduced paid parking on my street, because people were going out the city center to park in residential areas instead of pay for a parking garage. A permit cost me €75 a year.

I don't park on the street anymore when I go to Paris by car. The private underground garages are cheaper (4-5 euro/hour).

One way of reducing the need for parking somewhat is to introduce a 20 miles per hour (32 kph) speed limit. A number of British cities and the entire country of Wales have done this. One guy has been fined repeatedly for doing 22mph. One more transgression and he loses his license. "Keeping your eye on the speedometer while watching the road is tricky". Presumably his car doesn't have a cruise control. Seems this speed limit is quite stressful and may encourage some to use public transport if they can.

https://www.gov.wales/introducing-default-20mph-speed-limits

Most of it? Parking is only expensive in dense downtown areas. Go out into the suburbs and on-street parking is almost always free.

True in England for sure. People in towns and suburbs, which is most of the country, think they have a god-given right to park on the street outside their house.

Even in urban London areas there is usually onstreet parking, it isn't free but it is quite cheap, you buy a permit from the council for ~£400 a year. On a square footage basis that is extremely cheap land rent!

Wow weird. I've lived there and never knew but now that you've pointed that out I'm realizing we never parked on the street. It's always at the house or the parking lot of the place we're going.

Of course 95% of the time we take the train. Only use a car to go to Costco or possibly go out to the country (even then a lot of remote areas are super accessible in public transit)

I think it is. You have to prove that you have a space to park your car and if you have space at your house, they come to measure and verify that you do. I don't mind parking for places that you are visiting, but you need to have your own parking and not depend on the street for it.

Their streets tend to be super narrow, with pedestrians and bicycles sharing the shoulder. And back streets are basically alleys with pedestrians sharing the street with cars. Obviously parked cars there would be a disaster.

Also it tends to cost more via tolls to drive any significant distance than to take the train or bus (or plane for that matter), unless you have multiple people in the car. The car situation in Japan strikes me as more a case of regulatory capture than wise use of land. Because even small towns with vast empty spaces operate this way.

It's significantly more efficient to provide services to compact towns than sprawled towns, so I'm not sure this registers to me as a downside.

It's pretty common for small sprawled towns to struggle to keep up with maintenance of roads/water/power, which is less of an issue with compact towns.

The same applies at the city level, of course.

The lack of sprawl is also a consequence of how mountainous the country is. While not as bad as a lot of western sprawl, the areas of Japan that are a bit wider and less populated do have an element of car dependent sprawl to them. Then of course the villages that aren't covered by the train network and aren't boxed in by mountains have a pretty similar relationship to cars as a small western town.

Where I think the US and Australia both struggle is trying to make the car work in dense cities as populations grow. We do actually have pretty dense cities in Aus, yet cannot give up the car.

“Regulatory capture”? This term means something very specific and doesn’t apply in this case at all.

So in other words… they internalized a number of heavily subsidized externalities of individual transportation by car?

A fellow Shoupista!

I like trains but the logic is flawed. If we banned hats, or made it so they were very expensive, less people would wear hats. And sure, probably more places would worry about shade because hats are not an option... But it doesn't really prove that's the right thing to do or that hats are inefficient use of cloth.

Hats are pretty objectively an ineffecient use of cloth, here. Roads are incredibly expensive to maintain societally because cars cause so much wear-and-tear; cars, maintenance, and insurance are expensive on the individual; lack of foot-traffic is expensive for business-owners; individual car-use is much more expensive on the planet and power grid; travel is more difficult & and dangerous for children and old-folks… it goes on and on.

Having sprawling towns that require cars to get around is pretty obviously a bad idea from so many fronts. Trains, trolleys, and bikes are better on all these points.

> Roads are incredibly expensive to maintain societally because cars cause so much wear-and-tear;

Actually the wear and tear due to cars is minimal compared to that of trucks. The relationship of wear to mass is nonlinear. Which isn't to say that buttering half the earth with asphalt isn't a seemingly absurd use of resources.

It's not about artificially increasing car ownership price, it's about making people pay for what they use (parking space) instead of having it paid for by the whole society like a socialized good.

But it is. Otherwise we'd just be talking about raising meter prices and not trains.

When all public parking will be metered we'll talk! For now, in US most parking is free.

For example supermarket parking: they are forced by law to build huge parking lot. You pay not those not with your taxes but with your groceries, even if you take the bus or walk to go to the supermarket.

It would make a difference in dense cities like San Francisco where many people park on the street. A lot of people would have to give up their cars.

Meanwhile, in rural areas and many suburbs, it would be pointless paperwork, because everyone has a big enough driveway for their cars and nobody parks on the street at night.

So it seems like it would be difficult to get enough people in favor to do it state-wide in California? Wherever it would actually force people to do something, it would be unpopular.

there is middleground: tax / fines, whatever you name them. It will be free if you filled the paperwork, and it start out cheap, while gradually increase yearly. Can be different depending on the density or how heavy traffic an area is. However you should improve the public transport at the same time too.

Your city/rural distinction is insightful. I think it can be taken into account relatively easily. Name explicitly the cities/locations were the requirement would apply. Possibly based on some objective criteria like population density.

Can such policies be implemented individually by cities?

Not sure about the legal frameworks in the US but that’s exactly how it works in most places in the UK. Cities have restrictions for on-street parking (metered, permitted, illegal) whereas the towns and villages don’t (unless they also bring in bylaws to help with congestion).

Also restrictions such as residents only parking in both cities and towns.

In the US it varies a lot based on what state you're in. Some states give the cities a wide latitude for such policies, but some states (notably 'red' ones where the state government is likely to be conservative and the cities are likely to be liberal) do not grant cities the flexibility to make ordinances like this.

> A lot of people would have to give up their cars.

You don't have to give up the car, you just park it farther away from the dense and crowded downtown and use some other personal transportation (scooter, bike) for the last mile trip.

In a city with a properly-designed transit system you wouldn't need a car at all.

I think it is quite telling how car ownership is viewed here: it it something you "have to" "give up". Car use has been normalized to such a point that it is viewed as a necessity, almost a God-given right, rather than just another mode of transport to get you from A to B.

Even in bike-heavy and transit-heavy cities you'll be hard-pressed to find trips which are impossible to do by car. Sure, it might not be the cheapest or most convenient option, but (outside of small pedestrian zones) completely banning cars is practically unheard of. On the other hand, there are plenty of suburbs where public transit basically doesn't exist, and any kind of bike infrastructure is met with hostility. For all intents and purposes, you can't live there without a car. That doesn't exactly sound like freedom to me.

> In a city with a properly-designed transit system you wouldn't need a car at all.

That's the wrong argument. People stay in traffic for hours, being frustrated about the waste of time. Yet, when asked why they wouldn't take public transport, you hear a bunch of dumb arguments why public transport is shit.

I experience this all of the time in my city. Public transport is awesome and you get around just as fast as with a car (given there is no traffic, which rarely happens). Yet, people complain about how bad public transport is and how unreliable. But if you point out that car traffic is just as unreliable and slower, then they take their freedom-card. That's some cognitive dissonance, if nothing else.

I wouldn't give a shit about these people. It's just so damn funny to see that - unless public transport is immediate teleportation - it never is good enough for them -- even if it's objectively faster a lot of times. Public transport will never good enough for these negative Nellie's.

I take the subway all the time in SF but usually won’t take buses because they rattle, feel like the cheapest afterthought, are cramped, and make me feel poor. The quality of the experience matters too.

The San Francisco neighborhoods I'm thinking of aren't downtown. they usually require residence permits to park.

> Meanwhile, in rural areas and many suburbs, it would be pointless paperwork, because everyone has a big enough driveway for their cars and nobody parks on the street at night.

... which is exactly why it can have a huge impact! The default American suburban street is insanely wide due to the assumption that people will need on-street parking. Get rid of the unused on-street parking spaces and you immediately increase a suburb's density by something like 5%-10%.

Just think how much the municipality would save in road maintenance by basically halving the amount of road surface! And it's also a 10% reduction in water/sewer line length, a 10% reduction in area which needs to be covered by emergency services, a 10% reduction in commute distance, and so on.

As an added bonus: the smaller streets will disincentivize speeding, so it'll directly make the neighborhood safer as well.

Of course this won't immediately fix existing neighborhoods, but it'd at least open up the possibility of building right-sized ones in the future.

> Get rid of the unused on-street parking spaces and you immediately increase a suburb's density by something like 5%-10%.

As you say, only for new construction. The lack of new construction is itself the problem.

A problem is that most municipalities require excessively wide streets with on street parking for any new developments.

Japan-width streets, despite their increased safety & land-use efficiency, are prohibited most places.

In dense cities parking garages (both underground, free standing and on top of commercial properties) works great to give high-density parking space

The difficulty would be in transitioning. Building spots only open up so often

Seems like a poor use of space when you can just work at making things easier for people to travel without a car.

It's worth noting that for a kei car (the small 660cc cars that make up most of japan's car sales) you do not actually need to prove you have parking space in some regions of japan (like you do with non kei cars)

If Japan was a US State, it would be fifth in size.

So you maybe right, who knows, but there is nothing stopping a state adopting these laws and seeing how it works out. California could do it, why not?

This only applies to night time, and trains stop early compared to many other places. Also, there are plenty of paid parking spaces for use during the day, and you’ll often find cars parked in the street, even narrow ones, with the hazard lights on like they’re a magic spell, which they are, because enforcement is close to zero. You will even see cars parked on the road next to a car park.

All in all, I don’t think there’s any relationship between Japan’s car culture, parking rules or availability, and its train system.

The availability of parking is inversely proportional to its cost. High cost = lots of availability.

> Before someone buys a car, they must prove that they have a reserved night-time space on private land

Ahhhh yes

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to purchase a car without also showing proof of a reserved night-time space on private land.

“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.

>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.

Sometimes permissive zoning laws don’t actually encourage positive urban development outcomes.

Example: Texas

Zoning has to both exist and be well-designed.

I bet you'd see natural market driven concentration around rail stations in Texas too, if they had a useful rail network.

You might be surprised, look at Dallas. They have a pretty extensive rail network.

Dallas does not have permissive zoning, even in comparison to a city like Seattle.

Dallas-Area Rapid Transit (DART) member cities all had to develop 25-year plans for denser development around station sites as a condition of their membership, if that’s what you mean by “natural”.

Texas zoning isn't nearly as permissive as Japan's. Setbacks are a big added requirement. Minimum parking requirements too though that is changing.

But it would not be legal to build japanese neighbourhoods in Texas.

Texas zoning is only “permissive” relative to other states. Relative to Japan it’s quite restrictive.

That's a big part of it. They also do zoning mostly at the federal level, meaning local opposition isn't relevant.

From what I remember, Japanese zoning allows small shops (there's a size limit) in any residential zone.

That means no car trips when you run out of bread or milk.

Smartest property of that zoning system IMO.

I also wonder how much the pressure filled culture of not standing out has something to do with this. My impression is Japanese are under a lot more pressure to not abuse the permissiveness of the zoning laws.

What do you mean by “abuse”?

I'm not meaning to take a dig at you, but the fact that you (and presumably many others) can genuinely ask that question serves to illustrate the parent's point quite nicely.

To spell it out, "abuse" here means to engage in behavior that is socially undesirable or disruptive or would generally be expected to upset otherwise reasonable neighbors or whatever while nonetheless falling within the bounds of the law. An alarmingly large amount of what goes on in the US falls into that category IMO.

The parent comment is specifically talking about abusing zoning laws. It’s also a very generic term and I’m interested in what would be an abuse of zoning laws specifically.

There are many kinds of zoning laws going as far as to say how tall and how open fences have to be depending on the type of yard the fence encloses. Eg a backyard can have a 7ft high 100% closed fence while a front yard is limited to 4ft and must be 50% open.

How someone can “abuse” sections of the law that can get so wildly specific as to restrict paint color is lost on me.

I don’t buy into the Japanese exceptionalism in such generic terms. Show your work.

The other responder called it out well but to add. Abuse would be anything that disturbs others and out of the norm. Smells, pollution, noise etc. Japanese culture is much more considerate than a lot of western culture because of the social pressure to not standout.

I would imagine this plays a large role in this.

Does this truly play out? I’m sorry but I don’t buy that this is true based on a stereotypical Japanese exceptionalism trope.

If a law allows a store up to a certain size, and someone builds a store of that size, has the law been abused?

While size does matter in practical terms when we think of zoning it’s really about noise, smells, pollution etc. So when I say abuse I thinking because of cultural norms and pressure of not standing out there is greater incentive to not disturb others. The argument and question on my end is does this zoning work because folks are pressured to also not stand out. They try to not disturb others.

You will see countless threads on Reddit about bad neighbors in the US. Folks playing loud music, causing disturbances at all hours and will not stop. This applies to zoning as well. If the law allows it, people will do it so there is much more consideration in the US. I don’t know if it’s the right solution but certainly different cultures play a huge role in this.

Fwiw that’s what we have in Germany, unless you live in remote places. You always have a Lidl, Aldi, or REWE you can walk or bike to.

No idea what our local zoning laws are

Not really the same thing. They're much larger already than most stores you'd see in urban Japan.

Think more in terms of small convenience stores ("Spätis" with daily necessities) everywhere. Typical distance to a store is maybe 500-1000m in Germany. In dense areas of Japanese cities it's closer to one store every 100m-200m.

So in Germany it'd be a 10 minute walk, while in Japan most of your "walk" would be getting downstairs.

The flipside of that is that selection is going to be limited compared to what you'd find in Germany.

I see. What you describe does seem to match what I experienced in NYC, Portugal, and Spain? Small supermarkets everywhere with a bit of a random selection of items

The Żabkas in Poland too, I suppose, at least the smaller ones.

Even the smallest Lidl, Aldi, or REWE are not small shops in the sense meant here.

You haven’t lived until you have experienced the Japanese Kombini (convenience store).

There's a lot of places to get decent fried chicken, onigiri, and snacks. It's just 7 and I holdings still let's the US 711 suck

A huge amount of residential homes are actually in light industry zoned areas. I learned this surprising fact here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfm2xCKOCNk

There are other aspects beyond simply being more permissive. I recall reading for example that property transfer tax is remarkably less on bare land, enough so that when travelling in Japan you will regularly notice bare lots for sale, as it is beneficial for the seller to tear down a lot before they sell it. This sort of thing encourages churn of housing, and coupled with liberal zoning, enables an accelerated increase in denser building. Tbh it probably encourages lower construction costs since more people are doing construction.

IMO in this whole conversation, whether discussing any jurisdiction not just japan, impacts of zoning is an over emphasized and tax policy under emphasized (ie. almost never discussed).

I have a hard time believing that a tax code that incentives destruction in any capacity is a good thing.

If the land is more valuable without a structure the current owner has natural incentive to do that, or someone else has incentive to buy, demolish and re-list.

Property taxes on land zoned for residential use are 6x more expensive if left bare. That’s why Japan has an akiya plague, because even a dilapidated building will keep taxes down.

I couldn’t find a more general article so here’s an example from a generic small town council.

https://www.city.inagi.tokyo.jp/en/faq/kurashi/1001633/10016...

You're right. I'm not sure how I got mislead or misremembered the dynamic here. I thought there was a specific clear tax benefit but doesn't seem so.

There are tax benefits for new buildings for a limited time so maybe that's what I was thinking about and became confused.

Leaving aside your mistake, you raise a great point. Why are there so many empty lots in central Tokyo for sale? It makes no sense financially! Maybe they assume they can tear-down the existing structure and sell it faster than the tax penalty will hit?

> I'm only barely familiar with it so I ask this in good faith: is it really ingenious or is it just more permissive?

Let's start from the glaring problem: The purpose of the US zoning system was institutionalized racism to keep the "undesirables" out rather than anything having to do with development management. Once you realize that, all of the misfeatures (NIMBY, excessive permitting, sclerotic bureaucracy, public participation) make obvious sense.

Practically every zoning system would be better than that.

This is a fair question. In short: Permissive. If you want to learn more, talk with any LLM about it. There are a bazillion YouTube videos and blog posts discussing the matter to no end.

Here is a good YouTube video to you started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5pPcV54kiQ

One thing that is critical is that the country hasn't turned home ownership into an ever growing financial asset that is meant to carry the majority of one's wealth into perpetuity

Well, it did at one point, it’s just that the crash that resulted was so nasty it disabused anybody of that notion.

At the peak of the bubble era, just the land underneath the Imperial Palace had an estimated real estate value larger than the entire state of California.

What major investments do they make instead? Or do they just not have much of a financial ladder?

Postal savings at 2% interest. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2005/08/how-did-japan-s-...

Rough.

Is it rough when a house costs 10-20x less than in countries where the best you can reasonable hope for is a whopping 10% return on your money?

10% is the bog-standard minimum, so you're more hoping for 12-15%, and the houses in Japan are knocked down and rebuilt between essentially every occupant, so they're pieces of garbage meant to last a decade or so, and about as environmentally unfriendly as one can get.

So yeah, it's extremely rough when there's nothing valuable to invest your money in.

I live in Japan by the way. It’s no where as dire as you make it sound. The houses are mostly knocked down because of the cultural attitude towards them and people’s lack of DIY knowledge when it comes to renovations. Many young people in the country side a slowly changing attitudes but the bones of many of their houses are no less garbage than anywhere else in the world. If your house costs $6k USD, then it leaves you a lot of left over money for renovations.

I’ll agree it sucks you can’t have a really cheap house an 15% return on your money (which seems like an exaggeration). But with some ingenuity I think people could make the lower property and house prices work for them a lot more than they do.

Where on earth are you getting 15% on real estate and over what time period?

My internal Brandolini's Law alarm is sounding loud and clear from this post.

If you think real investors should make 12-15%, you are essentially bankrupting the next generation. (Even 10% annualised would do it.) That is enormous intergenerational wealth transfer, ensuring the next generation cannot own a home before they are 50 years old or they rent forever.

Outside of central Tokyo (the most central ku's surrounded by Yamanote train loop line), there is almost no capital appreciation for homes (and apartments) because NIMBYism does not exist (quite literally through the national building code). As a result, they build enough for the demand, and home prices are relatively stable, roughly rising at the rate of inflation. France is pretty similar outside of central Paris. Before post-COVID inflation got out of control, Germany was also similar.

The center of Tokyo and Osaka are a bit special because they are the largest job centers in the whole country, and there is very (insanely?) high demand and not enough land to maintain low capital appreciation for homes. That said, there is still constant tear-down/rebuild projects in Tokyo to build denser housing. It is hard to walk 10 mins in central Tokyo and not see a tear-down/rebuild project. Fortunately, they have incredibly strict noise controls at construction sites, so you rarely hear it, but you see it.

    > the houses in Japan are knocked down and rebuilt between essentially every occupant

This is absolutely untrue. This is a near-perfect Internet Brain/Terminally Online type of comment. Houses are normally only knocked down in Japan when they are 50+ years old. (The "30 year rule" from the 1980s just won't die on the non-Japanese Internet.) The stuff that I see knocked down looks like it is from the 1950s -- pure wood, rotted to the core, and paper-thin windows. It makes no sense to restore these homes when there is no legal restriction for tear-down/rebuild. There are lots and lots of second hand single family homes that change hands between owners. All of the people that I know who own single family homes bought them second hand. There is a whole segment of the real estate construction market that does home restoration. It is pretty common to buy a second-hand single family home, then do X currency amount of restoration. Sometimes, these companies buy the used homes themselves, do restoration, then sell at a price for profit. Apartments are similar in wider Tokyo area.

    > they're pieces of garbage meant to last a decade or so

Again: Internet Brain/Terminally Online type of comment.

    > So yeah, it's extremely rough when there's nothing valuable to invest your money in.

Have you seen the Nikkei 225 stock index in the last 10 years? (How does the total return compare to your country of residence?) Also, Japan does not enforce capital controls, so regular people are welcome to invest their money in foreign stock markets, such as the S&P 500 stock index. They can do so using numerous domestically-listed mutual funds and ETFs.

Agree, most homes have been built to strict codes since the 80s, due to earthquakes and typhoons, which means by default, they're not "rubbish". There are many places with a crap finish, poorly insulated etc, but as I said in another comment, they're not by default trash.

I mean this in a context where deflation was rampant for three decades

Unfortunately that does not seem to have helped them keep housing affordable. Looks just as bad as anywhere else.

Source? I've always thought of Tokyo as a rare example of abundant and affordable housing among major world cities. Their rent to income ratio is like 0.3 while most major global cities are 0.35-0.4

tokyo is cheaper than most cities relatively to the average income but you have to consider the fact that many apartments are like 20 - 30 m^2

"West" when we talk about urban spaces, walk-accessible cities and public transportation is, IMHO, the wrong category. Europe and USA are very far apart.

they might mean west of japan ;)

Go far enough and Japan is west of Japan, several times over. You can always keep heading west.

Great point.

Granted I’m approaching it from the perspective of a tourist or business traveler, but 6/6 of the European cities I’ve been in were fully navigable for my purposes via transit. I’d probably guess half or less in the US.

Even in NYC or SFO, the metro areas are so large it really makes the success rates low depending on the trip.

Europe and USA are both huge places so it depends what you mean. If you compare major east coast cities - Boston, DC, and NYC to European metros like Paris/ Madrid/ Lisbon the biggest tax on the citizens is the same in that it’s impossible to build anything so a huge % of income needs to go to housing.

Well, Japan isn't much different in terms of the share of income that goes to housing: https://housingpolicytoolkit.oecd.org/2.H_conso.html

Japan and the US are huge - we’re taking about metros here. The situation in NYC is much worse.

East coast cities were built before modern building codes.

Something that, for some reason, people in the states don't want to accept is that - when given the choice - the vast majority of people prefer living in dense urban environments.

OP addresses that. Japan is not particularly dense, especially outside of core downtowns.

You see the same dynamics in London and Paris.

People do not "prefer to live in dense urban environments" by urbanist standards.

They prefer to live in dense urban environments by North American standards, which can still be far less dense than urbanists really want.

> which can still be far less dense than urbanists really want.

And this was my comparison?

May be an assumption on my part, but the language "people prefer to live in dense urban environment" is typical of urbanism-boosters - who definitely push a lot online that leads one to believe that anything less than inner Tokyo is unacceptable.

> People do not "prefer to live in dense urban environments" by urbanist standards.

Nobody wants to live there, it's too crowded and there's too much demand for housing! Oh wait, that makes no sense.

YES it does, JOBS!

You are required to live there, its not a choice.

It's a very US-centric perspective to assume that density = cities.

Almost every town in the US, at one point, was dense enough to support a vibrant main street. Many (most?) of them even had tram lines and other forms of public transportation.

It's not an either or proposition. You can have cost-effective infrastructure through relative density without having to deal with all of the trappings - good and bad - that come from a city.

Do you have a source for this? What threshold is needed for it to be 'dense'?

My source -> https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/003/033/089/164...

>the vast majority of people prefer living in dense urban environments.

The vast majority of people REQUIRE to live NEAR their employment which happens to be in cities.

Look what happened to NYC real estate rent when you gave people the choice of NOT doing that. Look what happens when you force them back to the office, they come back, but not by choice.

It takes under a minute to find reputable sources which say that something on the order of 3 out 4 people prefer a suburban city environment. The remainder splits between preferring rural or dense urban.

A great video on the zoning laws in Japan if anyone wants to nerd out on them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlwQ2Y4By0U

Ingenious? It's a system that endorses hyper-capitalism through sub-9m² kyosho jutaku.

That isn't ingenious, it's battery farming.

I don't think you can have Japanese zoning rules without Japanese culture. They have a lot of respect for other people and their property. Not always, but I just I can't think of many other places in the world where it would work.

    > "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".

> 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.

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.

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.

NIMBY seems to have a hard time stopping data centers. Why do they have more success stopping renewables and rail?

If we put the same amount of economic pressure on rail that data centers have...the US would have probably have almost as nice infrastructure as China and be significantly better off.

NIMBY is stopping data centers.

Maine set to become first state with data center ban: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/09/maine-data-center-ban.html

Also, it's a different kind of more insidious and visceral NIMBY rooted in racism and classism.

Yes, see the famous essay, Nimby Good When My Neighborhood by I Hyppocrit.

Not sure it's a bad thing. So, they would employ maybe 30 people after they're built. Consume a lot of power and water. I'd have to see the details of a specific proposal but I'd probably vote against personally.

Sure, it’s stopping some, but not most/all even with strong public opposition.

See: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/small-missouri-to...

It's facetious to pretend NIMBYs are as such because they're racist and classist, rather than because they just want to protect the single most valuable and future-determining investment they'll make in their entire lives.

Those factors are tied together and aren’t easily separable. The racism and classism comes in because they believe that people of a different race or class will diminish the value of their investment.

If enough people believe this then it is true. That's just how markets work.

It is how (unregulated) markets work, but is this the right outcome? What do you think would happen if this were allowed to play out to its logical extent?

Desirable things become expensive and undesirable things become inexpensive.

The public rail industry has no bribing mechanism unlike the data center industry and the fossil fuel industry. Did I write bribe? Sorry, “campaign contribution.” But sometimes also literally bribes like Tony Soprano cash in the bag.

There's an existing disused commuter rail line in NJ near the Hudson that was shut down in the 60s. It still has many of its stations and density to support rail service today but can't be reopened because of the NIMBYs. If they can't make that work, the rest of the country is mostly hopeless.

Kyoto station is a great example of this. It's enormous inside, with a hotel on the top, event facilities, and a ton of retail all over.

https://www.kyotostation.com/kyoto-station-building-faciliti...

In my travels through Japan and Taiwan, rail stops are almost always hubs of economic activity of all sorts. It's a selling point when searching for accommodations while planning trips. Easy access to food and shopping. Taiwan night markets in cities, for example, are almost always near major rail station of some kind (light, metro, train). No need to go very far to get from one point of interest to another.

It's actually a bad example - there is barely anything around Kyoto station except a few hotels and some shopping malls. The main shopping/entertainment area and almost all tourist attractions are north of it, requiring connection by bus or subway.

The areas around major stations in basically any other city are far more developed. Look at Osaka-Umeda for example. I don't know if that's due to the historical buildings or the relative lack of good railway within the city itself (Kyoto is mostly a hub to get between other lines)

> there is barely anything around Kyoto station

This is simply not true. Kyoto station is probably the most densely packed shopping / entertainment area in the city.

Source: I live in Kyoto.

I don't live there now but I did for a long time.

The original comment was "I think that though we are a railway company, we consider ourselves a city-shaping company." Kyoto is absolutely not built around its station. Walk a few blocks away and there's nothing but regular apartments! The true centre is Shijo Kawaramachi.

Eh.

The station itself is a pretty active hub. We arrived there 9:30 AM to visit teamLabs Kyoto (which is just walking distance away from the station) and it was already pretty packed in the station.

But I think your observation/comment maybe misses the mark: the rail operators may still end up owning some of the commercial real estate nearby whether it's office buildings, hotels, etc. It doesn't all have to be shopping or dining, just that the rail operating owning the real estate near the transit hubs provides an incentive to provide service to that hub to create more value from those holdings.

I sometimes see the US referred to as a "post-rail" society, meaning that it has outgrown the need for rail for the more intimate, personal transportation methods we see today. I submit that, like other HN commenters say, the US doesn't need rail due to this society. How will US citizens help their friends move or do their large (in terms of volume) Costco grocery shopping without large trucks and only using rail?

The same way people in every other country do it (rental vans)

Rail <-> Road isn't an either or issue. It wasn't in 1850 and it isn't today. The only difference, at least in the US, is that poorly designed government intervention/policies forced low population densities.

Rail and other forms of public transport simply don't work with suburban sprawl. Large roadways also don't work - compare the state of US infrastructure against pretty much every other country out there - it's just that the financial bill from an unbelievable amount of deferred maintenance hasn't come due yet.

I’m probably a top 5% train nerd for the U.S. I took trains to work primarily from 2012-2020, in NYC, Philly, Baltimore, and DC. I used to ride Amtrak from Baltimore to DC every morning. I love Tokyo’s train system. I go there every year and I always take the train. But when I went there with my wife and three kids, I took a lot of Ubers! You can’t fit our double stroller with big America bags of toys and snacks on a business hours subway in Tokyo.

Americans love choice and they love stuff. They fill their cars with their stuff drive around on their own schedule without having to watch a clock or think about what’s near a train line and what isn’t. (Even with Tokyo’s amazing railway network, you have to think about that!) My wife drives to three different grocery stores 20 miles apart to get exactly the products she wants. The idea of just accepting whatever brand of hamburger buns they have at the store that’s conveniently on the train line between our house and work is completely alien.

To live within a Japanese system, Americans would have to change a bunch of other things about their culture. We’d have to give our kids independence to take the train themselves, instead of spending every saturday driving them around to 3 different far flung activities. We’d have to learn to appreciate what’s conveniently available, instead of the exact thing we want.

And not even Tokyo’s amazing train network makes it convenient to juggle two working spouses and school drop off and pickup for three kids. What line is convenient to your house, both parents work, and all three kids’ schools? The Japanese don’t even try to solve that problem.

    > We’d have to give our kids independence to take the train themselves, instead of spending every saturday driving them around to 3 different far flung activities.

The shock! The horror!

    > The idea of just accepting whatever brand of hamburger buns they have at the store...

How could a family possibly survive! Imagine having to eat a different brand of hamburger buns! Truly, America is a shining beacon of modernity and convenience where I can get the exact, precise, industrially mass produced hamburger bun.

You’re preaching to the choir. I loved working at a company with a company cafeteria because I hated going out into midtown manhattan every day to choose lunch. But convincing americans that all their “choice” is illusory isn’t a matter of transit policy, it’s something much harder.

Maybe you misinterpreted the post you replied to? I don't think they were saying this stuff is a crazy proposal, just that it will be a different way of life for most Americans. No need to be so abrasive.

They were reacting to what was presented and saying that it was foolish. It doesn’t matter if the author presented it as “I am saying this” or “Americans think this”.

Damn, we get it, USA is a dystopia. No need to keep scaring us with those stories.

It just occurred to me that some of the car-hating comments on HN might be motivated by a yearning for a more communal way of life (the expression of which has been suppressed by the US's ethic of freedom for the individual).

I lived for many years next to a train station in NJ. I could readily take the train in to Manhattan, but for the hours I'd be there in evenings and on weekends, it was much more convenient and faster to drive in. My town was far enough out that the cost was slightly cheaper to drive (before the congestion fee). I then had the freedom to leave at any time without concern for the schedule.

> My town was far enough out that the cost was slightly cheaper to drive (before the congestion fee)

Aside from culture, this is another aspect which they touch on in the article. Japan doesn't have public parking. You're only allowed to buy a car if you have access to a parking spot. Tokyo is full of lots but they're all paid lots that charge in 30-60 min increments. There's also a lot of congestion zones in Tokyo which make driving in the city very expensive. Companies that do deliveries in the city often have a company car (or fleet of such) which lets them drive to destinations.

Overnight workers who do spend significant times at work before/after the trains stop do drive in. Most Japanese families in Tokyo live in suburbs surrounding the city and will walk, bike, or drive to a nearest train station to commute in.

I'm fairly far out from Boston/Cambridge but I'm pretty much the same situation. Going in for a commute (or 9-5 event), the commuter rail is pretty good; I'm a 7 minute drive to the station. But it's basically unworkable for an evening event (or a day into evening event). Trains are maybe every 90 minutes outside of commuting hours and they're largely empty. I end up suffering the drive in, paying for parking as needed (which isn't an issue if I'm going in for my usual theater), and then a pretty easy drive home. Wouldn't even think about taking rail in for the weekend.

If Tokyo was in America, your situation would be like this: imagine going outside of your home and walk for 10 minutes to a small hamburger shop. It only has 10 seats and it’s run a by hamburger nerd who makes elite hamburgers. This guy grinds his own beef, bakes his own buns and pickles his own pickles and everything is perfect. The burgers are only 8 dollars and you can’t even imagine of making hamburgers yourself.

I know, I’m familiar with Tokyo. But my family would take up half the restaurant, only one of the three kids would like the burger, and the other two would throw a shit fit because the burger guy only sells burgers. Two different societies optimizing for different things.

There are family restaurants in Japan as well. You would not bring your family to the place described above, you would go with your spouse, friends or colleges or other adults.

This happens in New Orleans but the burger is like 28 dollars.

> school drop off and pickup for three kids

When we were in Japan my son walked to school when he was 6. Parts of the walk close to the school were supervised. It wasn't just allowed, it was expected.

    > How will US citizens help their friends move or do their large (in terms of volume) Costco grocery shopping without large trucks and only using rail?

Japan happens to be the 4th largest market (by stores) for Costco (US, Canada, Mexico, Japan)

Apparently, it works just fine.

People in Japan also move and go shopping.

Rail for the US has always been more about moving goods than people. For overland long-haul freight it is significantly cheaper than trucking. Rail allows us to ship goods to places where we don’t have ports or river access. A place like Japan can make such good use of rail simply because it is so densely populated.

The US is also densely populated; when people are talking about high speed rail they are talking about connecting the major, close by metropolitan areas that most people live in.

The Midwest, as an example, has roughly the same size and population as France with a larger economy. In fact, if you overlay the French TGV network onto the Midwest with Chicago where Paris is, you get a pretty good approximation of where major Midwestern cities are located: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/NMr3J3gt8C

Even if it would serve the same population, I don’t think a system like this would have the same level of demand as France’s high speed rail.

Frankly, these don’t look like locations that that many people want to travel between.

Most travel happens between cities that are close together, and Chicago has always been the larger gateway to the rest of the nation and the world.

The French urban areas on the TGV aren’t very big; Montpelier, for example, has a total of 600,000 people in its metro area, which is roughly the same size as Toledo, OH or Wichita, KS.

Montpellier probably gets more tourism than Toledo though. And most people taking the train to Paris are probably not doing it so they can fly somewhere else.

You actually can book an Air France/TGV combo ticket: https://wwws.airfrance.fr/en/information/prepare/voyages-com...

And yeah, there would be a fair amount of demand just to Chicago the same way there is a fair amount of demand to Paris, in that they’re both the regional powerhouses with finance, HQs, etc.

Everything you’re saying is true but I don’t think any of it contradicts what I’m saying.

Who says anything about “only?” Japan is home to a thriving car industry.

If anything, right now America is tilted heavily to car-only.

Trucks can be rented. When then-wife and I were remodelling the tired old house we lived in, we didn't own a truck. We talked about it (and in this instance, had space for one), and we mathed it a bit. The numbers quickly showed that it would be very expensive to own a truck, for only a little bit of added, occasional convenience.

When we needed a truck to move cabinets or drywall or whatever, we rented one for that. It didn't cost much.

When we moved houses, we rented a truck for that. It was easier and cheaper to move with one rented huge box truck, than to own something that would be useful for that.

Otherwise: Deliveries. We just had big stuff delivered. No problem. Things like appliances and TVs were simply delivered, and this never added any expense to the purchase.

These days, even Costco delivers stuff just fine. It does tend to cost more than in-store.

Rentals and deliveries can easily cost hundreds of dollars per year. It's not free; it might even be rationalized as being rather expensive.

But owning/insuring/maintaining/fuelling/parking a car (or a truck, just the same) can easily cost thousands. It's a different magnitude.

And you also realise that for most things a van is more practical than a pickup truck.

It is.

The work I do requires me to have things like tools and ladders with me. A sedan doesn't quite cut it (I've tried), and SUVs are awful for every practical road-going purpose.

So these tools and ladders are out in the van (a top-trim Honda Odyssey) right now. It does OK on gas, it's very comfortable, it keeps everything nice and dry with 3 zones of HVAC, and it's passively theft-deterrant: Nothing about it says "steal these tools" to a would-be thief at all.

It's really good.

If I did work that didn't require a vehicle like that then I'd just have a small sedan. (I live in a very car-centric area of Ohio, as do the people I'm fond of being near. I either need a car or I need to change my views about what I find important in life; that's the way the cookie crumbles.)

And if I lived in an area with actually-good public transportation and the kinds of neighborhood shops that this promotes, then I probably wouldn't even want a small sedan. I like walking and riding a bike. And I'd rather buy a transit pass and spend more time reading, than pay for all the things that having a car requires me to pay for.

Adding the occasional train ticket (that never needs new tires, or an oil change, or a timing belt) for longer trips would be cheaper than owning a car, too.

I ride my cargo bike to Costco. I can fit a full shopping cart on it, getting enough for a family of three regularly and easily. With a small hatchback car I could easily fit way more. If I had a convenient train I'd shop more frequently with a rolling 2 wheel cart.

It's really not difficult to shop large volume thongs without a giant car.

I believe America has built railway towns. I am surprised why America that’s very fond of capitalism never developed this concept further? With some aggressive horizontal integration you can built your own kingdom. It is brilliant!

> 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

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 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47766873

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.

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.

This isn't a magic bullet. It normally works for electricity because it's relatively cheap to transport electricity so consumer have a choice and can provide strong selective pressure. Fibre internet is similar to that (at least in the UK).

It doesn't make as much sense for water or rail because consumers have no choice. The "competition" is companies making impossible bids to the government and then getting bailed out. It definitely hasn't worked in the UK.

There is currently a major scandal about underinvestment by water companies leading them to releasing raw sewage into waterways, and trains are notoriously expensive and unreliable here (though I would still say apart from the price the UK train experience is pretty good compared to most countries).

Another crucial difference is that energy supply (as in selling energy to end users – physically providing electric energy to the grid on the other hand does require sufficient physical transport capacity in some ways) and internet access are much more virtual things – the mere existence of an additional company offering those services doesn't directly congest the infrastructure as such.

Trains on the other hand are decidedly physical things that take up a significant amount of space on the infrastructure, and they do so as soon you start offering the service, no matter whether people actually use it or not. This means that railway networks can only support a very limited amount of competing companies before you start running out of capacity to run additional trains, and it's especially easy to run out of capacity when you're talking about mixed-traffic railways where fast long-distance services intermingle with slower regional and/or freight services.

And as soon as you run out of capacity, train operating companies have to start battling each other for train paths instead of passengers, a situation that can have completely different incentives which aren't necessarily best aligned with passengers' actual interests.

Another difference is that competing trains obviously cannot run at exactly the same time, which again makes competition less efficient because trains running at differing times cannot be perfect substitutes for each other, which becomes relevant once you add passengers' external schedule-constraints (having to arrive in time for work or whatever appointment they might have and maybe cannot really influence) into the mix. (Long-distance leisure travel is probably less affected by that, because people are regularly willing to flex their schedules for that, but other kinds of traffic aren't as flexible.)

This effect then only gets magnified further once connections come into play, because with different trains along the same route always having to be separated by at least a few minutes, it's impossible to offer equally attractive connections between e.g. a branch line (which might run only hourly or half-hourly at best) and all the various hypothetical competing services on the main line.

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

And the top comment was mine, pointing out a bunch of factual mistakes and misleading claims:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47765032

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.

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.

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.

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.

You can make reservations online: https://www.eki-net.com/en/jreast-train-reservation/Top/Inde...

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.

Actually, ticketless services are being rolled out. Example: https://www.jreast.co.jp/en/multi/ticket/eticket.html

This sounds great, especially as it's linked to the IC card. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything similar for JR West or JR Kyushu, which I will be using in the next few weeks. Hopefully they will implement the same system in the future.

How could a route busy enough to completely fill a train every few hours not justify some kind of regularly scheduled service?

Most cities at least have night busses. Tokyo has 0 options after midnight.

There are taxis and they are pretty cheap (compared to western Europe and the US). It is not a replacement but you CAN get home if you are out late.

It's worth mentioning that swiss is a nation of 9 million, whereas Japan has 128 million people. I'm not sure how comparable it is. You probably don't need to pass through a lot of settlements for any public projects in swiss, for example.

I think it's more politics and economics. Switzerland is quite a lot richer than Japan and is extremely decentralized politically. That creates strong incentives to provide good public services even to mountain villages. It also helps that Switzerland isn't experiencing population decline. The Swiss population as a whole is growing quite rapidly and from what limited data I could find even rural regions are growing. I think land acquisition doesn't really play a huge role. They are both mountainous countries where rail projects have to squeeze in valleys or bear the expense of tunnelling.

Quite alot richer than the 4th richest Economy in the world?

In a per capita sense of course. But it does pose an interesting question. To what degree does the quality of rail scale with absolute investments vs per capita investments. On the face of it rail is almost entirely fixed cost. The capital investment for tracks, trains and the operating cost for staff and energy are fixed to matter how many or few people the trains are serving. The crux is that for a given cost the quality scales inversely with the population and covered area. Transplant the Swiss rail expenses to Japan and it would make for a pitiful experience. Stretching over an area 9x larger and having to serve 12x more people, simply requires a lot more rolling stock, track and personell to offer a similar level of experience. In particular when talking about rural rail service it's most apt to compare areas of similar size and population and in this local sense Switzerland is not just richer per capita but absolutely.

Doesn't that make it more impressive? That such a small country can deliver an outstanding public transit network.

I was thinking that Japan and Switzerland likely have good rail networks because the buildable land is severely constrained by geography. In those cases mountains, and connected only by thin linear corridors (valleys and near coastlines). Look at this map of Japan: The green areas aren't just natural areas, they are too mountainous to build cities.

https://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/ALOS/en/dataset/lulc_e.htm

In other places with large, flat expanses, human civilization spreads out to an extent that expensive railroads just can't serve the needs/desires of people. You could artificiallly constrain it, but you know what? People in general just don't like being told what to do.

"Japanese public transport is good, but no match for the Swiss system." I did some internet searches and Tokyo seems to always come in first when comparing rail systems. Switzerland comes in 3rd sometimes. Reasons for Tokyo being ranked first seem to be utilization, safety and punctuality.

Public transportation shutting down at midnight might be an annoyance to some, but it is a blessing to those that reside very close to the metro lines.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Didn't know about these historical facts, looks like timing really contributed to the current situation in New Zealand. When I was in Auckland some years ago, I remember NZ trying to bring some railway services back, before the pandemic.

I never got to travel on these, but I'm hoping to do that when I'm there again, probably next year. I see the website is still the same, so if anyone is going to NZ: https://www.greatjourneysnz.com/.

And to be fair, looks like you can more or less cross the country, as long as you don't plan to get all the way to Invercargill.

The railway services NZ are trying to bring back are regional commuter services. Auckland to Hamilton (now in operation); Auckland to Tauranga; Wellington to Palmerston North (Capital Connection, has been in operation for 35 years, about to be upgraded to battery-electric trains, since only half the route is electrified).

And also the vague idea of local rail service around Christchurch (interestingly, a private company bought the old DMUs from Auckland's local fleet after electrification and are just starting to run special trains for Rugby games).

Part of the problem is that there is only really only three metro areas in New Zealand. Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. Everything else isn't really large enough to provide enough demand for a proper intercity route. And Christchurch isn't even on the same island, so you can't have a proper intercity train with the ferry getting in the way.

So the only potentially viable intercity route is Auckland to Wellington.

And apart from Hamilton and Palmerston North, (which already have commuter trains) there is absolutely nothing in the middle. The same distance in Europe or the US's eastern corridor would service 4-6 decently sized metro areas, and provide plenty of extra demand.

There just isn't enough potential demand to put a high-speed rail line through there. And without the high-speed rail, it's a 10 hour train trip that has zero chance of competing with a 1 hour plane ride.

Christchurch to Wellington is even worse. 6 hour train ride, at least an hour waiting for the ferry, 3.5 hour ferry ride. The plane does it in at little as 25 min in the air, there isn't enough time to reach cruising altitude. There is a reason why the route used to be serviced by an overnight ferry.

> And to be fair, looks like you can more or less cross the country, as long as you don't plan to get all the way to Invercargill

Yeah... but those aren't "intercity trains". They are scenic tourist trains that just so happen to be running along old intercity routes. Not bad as a tourism experience, but overpriced and not optimised for transportation needs.

The fact that you can't book both the Interislander ferry and costal pacific on the same website is very telling. They are literally run by the same company.

----------------------

If you are serious about the Christchurch to Invercargill, there is now a private company offering the occasional weekend trip: https://www.mainlander.co.nz/train-trips/the-mainlander-rail...

Same company that's providing the Rugby special trains, but this is using the old Capital Connection rolling stock. The train usually runs day trips up to Arthur's pass for cruise ships, but when there is a gap in that schedule they are running these Christchurch to Dunedin and Christchurch to Invercargill excursions.

Even more touristy than great journeys.

I remember the announcement some years ago of the Auckland-Hamilton train. I think initially it had limited schedule, but from what I recall the usage was quite good after the launch (I think it was before or just after the pandemic). Good to know it's in operation now.

> And also the vague idea of local rail service around Christchurch (interestingly, a private company bought the old DMUs from Auckland's local fleet after electrification and are just starting to run special trains for Rugby games).

Hadn't heard about this! Interesting, and good idea to have a service for the games.

> So the only potentially viable intercity route is Auckland to Wellington.

This one would probably be quite busy. I had to fly Auckland-Wellington quite a bit as an engineer, and our managers & executives travel quite more (NIWA, a CRI that now I believe has merged with another one and changed its name).

Eventually I had to go to the capital to vote or for the embassy, or for a tech event. All these trips were always via airplane, but I'd be happy to get a fast train or a night train as in Europe.

> If you are serious about the Christchurch to Invercargill, there is now a private company offering the occasional weekend trip: https://www.mainlander.co.nz/train-trips/the-mainlander-rail...

Learned another new thing, thank you! I plan to go to Invercargill when I visit again to see if I can see the Aurora Australis or maybe check out where they have the MetService radiosonde launch. From what I recall MetService used to launch one from Invercargill near the airport (or I could be confused with a weather station or another climate monitoring station they had there).

What about options for those living up north? When I was still in Auckland some of my co-workers were looking into moving further West/North (there were too many people moving to South Auckland/Raglan/Hamilton at that time). But I remember the transport options involved one or more buses, and a ferry in the case of a co-worker that bought a house in... Hobsonville I believe. But the ferry didn't run all days, and had a limited schedule compared to the one for Waiheke or Devenport. Has that improved?

I always thought it'd be nice if there was a short train line connecting Devenport to Cape Reinga, as all the times I went to Cape Reinga or to take someone to Russel I'd have to drive or find a private shuttle.

Thanks!

I agree that if you put a high-speed line between Auckland and Wellington, and get the travel time down to 3-4 hours, people would use it. It would actually be faster than going to the airport for central Auckland, or anything further north.

But high speed lines are expensive, and NZ just doesn't have anywhere near the population density to justify it.

As for night trains, I'm pretty sure they can only exist where they are bridging multiple viable day train routes. Which is why that huge gap between Hamilton and Palmerston North is an issue.

And the route might actually be a bit short for a night train. If they electrified the entire distance (instead of using a diesel the whole way despite the fact 80% of the route is electrified) and did some improvements, they could probably get it down to an 8 hour trip.

> What about options for those living up north?

TBH, I'm not a fan of Auckland and don't really know what's going on with local public transport.

Population density is not accidental. HK has towers and greenery vs Anglophone culture which is to build homes sprawled into the greenery.

The US urban sprawl in 50s, 60s was not cultural and not by accident but planed part of civil defense.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47815910

That is definitely a factor, especially comparing Japan & HK with NZ.

didn't NZ have a decent inter-city train service in the past but no longer does bc cars won out in the end?

Geography like that does help a lot, it’s part of the reason it’s so easy to do really good high-speed rail in Italy over somewhere like Germany that is way more spread out. But it’s only half the picture, you also need the political will to get it built!

The population density of Italy 201/km2 is lower then population density of Germany 241/km2, so from point of view of density, Germany should have more high-speed rail than Italy.

But because cars are major German export driver and car manufacuring is major employment in Germany, anything competing with cars has not much political support.

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-merz-pledges-to-resist-2035-eu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschlandticket

The population density of Italy 201/km2 is lower then population density of Germany 241/km2, so from point of view of density, Germany should have more high-speed rail than Italy.

That would be if kilometers of rail tracks scaled linearly with population density per unit area. My guess (based on no research at all) is it’s more that there’s a population density tipping point, and after reaching it rail development dramatically increases. I do also think you’re right about the influence of the German car industry.

Density is not that important. It's the distribution. Japan for example has most of the population concentrated close to coast.

Italy has a few major population centers south of dome but sparsely populated otherwise.

And so on...

Yes. You get a lot of bang for your buck as far as the number of people served. Hong Kong is less than half the area of Rhode Island, but the populations are 7.5 million for Hong Kong and 1.1 million for Rhode Island. Small area plus high population density is the situation where trains are most valuable.

I think you're broadly correct and that's definitely a reason, and I have another example to support it.

Mumbai too has a very similar structure (the core city is basically a peninsula that goes north-south). Our railway lines run N-S as well, with (till the recent Metros) feeder roads connecting them.

Mumbai is also one of the most densely populated cities in the world (#2 by some metrics).

Our local railways have an annual ridership of 2.26 billion [1]. Pretty much everyone agrees they're vital to the city.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai_Suburban_Railway

I'm sure geography helps, but it's certainly not the driver for good train service design. Cities in Japan are definitely not laid out in thin lines, and there's not just a few routes in any given city. I was living in Nagoya back in high school, and its train lines are sprawling.

Side note, there actually isn't one shinkansen from Kagoshima to Hakodate, that route would take you on 5 different shinkansen lines: Kyushu, Sanyo, Tokaido, Tohoku, and Hokkaido. But I get your point.

California is also like this for the most part. Bay Area has 8 m, Los Angeles area has 17 m, and San Diego area has 3 m. 28 out of 39 live in those three. Straight line.

With relatively little between the Bay Area and LA to serve as a viable customer base. Hence, a lot of the problems getting California HSR going. Imagine you had the Boston area and the Washington DC area and took out NYC and Philadelphia in the middle. You'd have the same issue. The Acela isn't the fastest rail service (in part because NYC is in the middle but Boston to NYC and NYC to DC are a lot more practical than the whole route. I did it once when I wasn't in a hurry but it was because I could afford the time.

Isn't this Japanese Railway Thesis that with the railway you build something in that "very little between"? Have the railway company buy up up all that cheap land, develop it into commute hubs with their own walkable retail and use that to fund the railway.

To an extent, a good train service can _create_ stuff. A while back, Irish Rail increased frequency on the Dublin-Belfast intercity train service. This had the side-effect (apparently unexpected) of kind of turning Newry (which is across the border in Northern Ireland) into a commuter town for Dublin. The Cork line also has a bunch of commuter towns which are on the face of it weirdly distant from Dublin, because the train compresses the distance.

You can see the effect of this here: https://www.chronotrains.com/en/station/2964574-Dublin?maxTi...

I'd assume that similar will happen with California HSR (which would be a far better service than either of the Dublin intercities above); it would make living in intermediate stops and working in LA or SF far more practical.

The Hong Kong Metro is also very well planned, architected, and generally well run operationally. So much that the MTR corporation actually offers international consulting services. And for two decades, they have consulted with many mainland Chinese metro systems, hence it's no coincidence that the Shanghai and Shenzhen metros both look and feel very similar to HK's.

That’s arguably irrelevant to anything except the Shinkansen.

Switzerland has 8m people. Bay Area has 8m people. Switzerland is 1/4th as densely populated as the Bay Area (4x the size) yet they have 10x better transportation

The Swiss public transport system is a century-plus old at this point. Compare pictures of the Zurich tram system in the early 20th century with today - squint your eyes and you won't notice any difference.

That said, I'm willing to bet that San Fransisco and the surrounding communities had comparable public transportation in the 19th and early 20th century. While I can't speak for the bay area, you can still find exposed tram tracks in many US cities - Philadelphia, for instance.

The US's move from having the best to arguably the worst public transportation system in the world among developed countries is a lesson in disastrous government policy.

Even if the geography isn't thin it seems like there are major US cities you could draw a route through that would have similar population distributions. Or at least good enough for the economics to work.

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.

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?

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.

> 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

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.

> I always hear all these weird stories

The weird stories, about anything, are nonsense; sensationalized to either be emotoinally compelling or even active disinformation to serve some political end (especially about American cities, especially about NYC.)

It's just induced fear. Just go to NY and ride the subway. Millions do all the time without any problems, without a second thought. It's really no problem and amazingly convenient. (Busking is people playing music.)

Of course some crime occurs among millions of people but so do lottery grand prizes and heart attacks. I've been on many subway rides without experiencing one crime or even seeing one, and much other public transit.

And when you do, you'll know what to think of the stories and people who tell them.

It's extremely common for there to be human shit in the train cars, and lunatics going nuts. It's absolutely nothing like Japan.

> It's extremely common for there to be human shit in the train cars, and lunatics going nuts

Where does that come from? Not from your experience. You've never been on NY subways, clearly.

I've never seen feces - and anyway, how could you tell if it's from a dog? Did you examine it? Take it home and test it? It's one of the stories that maybe is slightly plausible, and which yields such strong disgust that rationality is overwhelmed and it makes a sensation - perfectly constructed misinformation or urban myth. Like waking up in a bathtub with a kidney missing.

'Lunatics' is such a loaded (and hateful) word you'll have to specify what you mean, but the occasional person talking to themself is harmless and completely uninterested in you (thus the conversation with themself) - I have never had any problem with such people on public transit or elsewhere. They are the most vulnerable people and compassion is the appropriate response.

As I wrote above, the stories are nonsense and it's induced fear.

I actually am speaking from experience, I saw both of those things my first week in New York. It's really not uncommon, I find it hard to believe that you've never run into shit/barf, usually when a car pulls up that has nobody in it, that's what's in there.

And this is all to say nothing about the decrepit state of the stations and cars themselves.

I've also been to Japan and experienced their trains. It's in such a different league that it's almost comedy.

> It's really not uncommon, I find it hard to believe that you've never run into shit/barf, usually when a car pulls up that has nobody in it, that's what's in there.

NGL this isn't surprising on Japanese trains either. Especially around last train. It's not super common but you see it from time to time and you just use a different car and report it to the staff next time you see someone.

Barf and shit are two very different things.

I lived in NYC for many years. Bodily fluids and liquid left on seats, litter, gag-inducing smelly people, people having episodes and screaming, all common enough to see on a weekly or monthly basis as a daily commuter. I have not been to Japan but I can't imagine they have the same level of antisocial behavior

> weekly or monthly basis

So not "extremely common" as the commenter upthread said.

> liquid left on seats

As in, something spilled?

> litter

Lol. Only on a weekly or monthly basis?

> gag-inducing smelly people

I think some people are looking to be judgmental.

> antisocial behavior

That's taking it pretty far; it's easy to ignore these things which are almost always harmless - none have ever affected my life. Maybe being judgmental and (for some) hateful is the real and dangerous antisocial behavior - the consequences have had real and awful consequences for many.

You can plug your ears and accept riding run-down trains full of shit, litter, puke, and threatening mentally ill people, in the name of not being "hateful," or as a society you can choose to have dignity and not put up with that.

Now the personal attacks; I'd rather ride with the person who talks to themself than the person telling me what I must think (or else I lack dignity!) - which of course is what they think.

> not put up with that

That's a bit controlling, insisting the world and other people must be your way. Freedom means something very different. No wonder you don't like NY.

Those stories would be accurate on BART in San Francisco. I used to ride that every day to/from work and at other times. The non-rush-hour times were the worst actually.

I've never lived in NYC, but from visiting, their subways seem safer (and also work much better).

> All the random busker type nonsense, the petty crime and the “mugger wallet” type jokes.

Most of this is stories. Yeah there are buskers but tbh I like buskers. Music in the public square is a plus not a minus even if it's not my personal preference of music.

Subway crime rates are around 2-4 incidents per million rides. There was a spike during covid and it started to rapidly trend down afterwards. That corresponds with economic desperation during that period pretty cleanly.

But that 2-4 incidents per million rides is roughly comparable to the crime rates at gas stations, etc. The difference is that density is lower so you just see it less often. It happens just about as frequently but you are less likely to witness it because you are less likely to be present when it happens to somebody else at a gas station.

> I’d still rather not deal with the expected culturally imposed insanity that the Japanese curiously seem to lack.

Trust me Japan has just as much of an issue with crime on rail. Arguably they have higher rates but the Japanese police often just don't consider sexual harassment or sexual assault a serious crime and would rather brush it under the rug or otherwise deal with it outside the criminal system to avoid harming the abuser. (ex: an incident that I'm familiar with: "oh we gave the guy who assaulted you on the train your address so they could mail you a hand written apology note instead of charging them with assault")

And the "wacky in your face" crime (intoxicated, mental illness, etc) is still very much an issue in Japan but it's cracked down on by police in places that tourists frequently visit during the day and otherwise everyone just expects it so people who live there don't really mention it to tourists.

I mean hell look at Shibuya Meltdown for some of the more mild "funny" examples.

The only real difference between the NYC metro and the Japanese metro is that it's louder because there's not a social norm to limit talking on the train (until people are drunk ofc). Otherwise it's all the same shit and you see it all when you start commuting.

Yes, that’s exactly right. Maximal ‘individual liberty’ is my right to maximize my land’s value. My neighbors either agree to maximize theirs in a way that increases, or doesn’t hinder, mine, or they are my enemy to be litigated to death by my lawyers for damages.

America's culture of individual liberty moved into the national mythos in the last century, replaced by a culture of consumption and commerce over all. People don't have the freedom to build whatever they want because pockets need to be greased, permits need to be reviewed, HOAs need to have their fees, etc.

> because entrenched interests want to remain entrenched even if it hurts the system overall.

You might say it's because we live in a "low trust society," but not for the reasons the people who usually invoke that term claim.

What are the reasons people usually invoke? And what are the "true reasons"?

Most people using the term "low trust society" are implying that certain subsets of the population are the cause of it, often with racial (non-white) and/or economic (lower class) components, whereas somebody like me views those groups and their behaviors, to the extent that it's true, as a symptom of the low trust society rather than the root cause. For me, the root cause is systemic corruption all the way to the top, for decade after decade.

And they are obviously correct as the per capita statistics prove out over and over and over and over and over again.

Please show the statistics and explain how they prove the direction of causality you're so confidently claiming.

> Japan’s culture of harmony is a big part of why they were able to choose sensible regulations that benefitted everyone.

Is there evidence of that? It sounds like a broad stereotype of a complex, large country by an ignorant outsider.

> entrenched interests want to remain entrenched even if it hurts the system overall

Another way to look at that is prioritzing the individual over the system, a hallmark of liberty and human rights.

It's also hard to ignore that Japan was bombed to smithereens in the 1940s and undertook a nationwide rebuilding effort that might have contributed to a more uniform approach to land use.

Not to mention that every few years either a typhoon or a 9.0 earthquake defeats any effort to build exceptional value in your property.

It seems the only thing that is permanent in Japan is impermanence.

> Not to mention that every few years either a typhoon or a 9.0 earthquake defeats any effort to build exceptional value in your property.

Isn't that the same in certain regions of the US?

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).

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

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.

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.)

The US is the country that originated Georgism.

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.

This is mostly true until it's time to build an interstate.

Good luck building a bunch of new interstates today. Opposition was already coming in at the end of the interstate system buildout. Drill down and you'll find various odd connections (or lack thereof) throughout the system that resulted from community opposition.

a small group of people who own some parts of the land can block any development

Almost all NIMBY opposition to development comes from people who do not own the land in question.

Eminent domain is designed for this. People are compelled to sell.

And you'd better be prepared to fight for it through the courts. Might take a decade or more if someone is really opposed to selling.

People say that but I’m not sure, it seems state of california manages to pull it off pretty well, thinking in terms of recent history it was used a couple years ago for highway expansion in bakersfield for example, using it on 900 homes. Pretty sure they must have used it recently in the owens valley when they widened 395 as well.

They still have influence in Japan. The maglev train has been delayed for years because a small portion passes through Shizuoka, and the local government wouldn't approve construction due to it making no stops in the prefecture and potentially affecting water supplies there.

This delayed the opening of it from 2027 to 2035 at the earliest.

Shizuoka as a whole is unusually screwed by the Shinkansen system. Large cities like Hamamatsu, with 800k people, are passed over by a lot of the Hikari (mid-speed Shinkansen), and the Nozomi (high speed Shinkansen) passes through the prefecture with zero stops whatsoever. However, it stops it cities like Tokuyama, with a whopping population of 100k.

is this because of the federal government capitulating or is it because the small group inherently has influence structurally?

The federal government has no influence. Prefectures approve their own construction. Japan's railways are built and operated by corporations, not the government, so the federal government has zero say in the matter.

ah interesting. I wonder why that person mentioned the federal government then. couldn't a single person just refuse to sell their land and block the entire thing then?

Funny how people always endlessly worry about water supply, its one of those things that is very easy to claim but very hard to prove an in 99.9% of times there really isn't an issue.

People can live without a high speed train. They cannot live without a clean water supply

Seems to me that the priorities are correct

Hard to imagine how a train that has no emissions itself as its catenary powered causes your water supply to be unclean.

Trains bring people who drink water.

If the train doesn't make stops in your prefecture, it sure doesn't bring people.

pretty sure it's the tunneling not the train itself

Ok but here is the thing, Japan had great civil engineering for 100 years, they have made lots and lots and lots of tunnels. Japan overall has fantastic water quality and is globally known for clean and safe bathrooms.

So the argument that 'new train X will destroy the water supply' really needs to be based on a whole stack of good evidence.

The burden of proof should be on not contaminating the water supply. That is too dangerous to risk.

> Japan had great civil engineering for 100 years, they have made lots and lots and lots of tunnels. Japan overall has fantastic water quality ...

Does it? And if so, maybe that's because they make sure projects like this one don't contaminate the water supply.

> ... globally known for clean and safe bathrooms

What does this have to do with water supply? One suspects that you know very little if that's the best evidence you have.

Maybe if the only person that thinks that the water supply is being destroyed is a local politician with a massive axe to grind who is trying to extort a local stop, then maybe we should question that over the engineers who have built tunnels their whole lives.

This is specially true when these tunnel goes along many different areas and seemingly the only that complains and believes is unsafe is also the one that is trying to get a transit station in the district.

I'm sure they have plenty of evidence on why it is safe, like historical examples and such. But how do you 'prove' this to a point a politician can't just say, sure its 99.9999% safe but we can't risk it.

> What does this have to do with water supply? One suspects that you know very little if that's the best evidence you have.

The point is that Japan tends to take safety and cleanness very seriously. And they have built many train-lines and tunnels.

At one point to you personally consider the source of a claim?

At one point to you personally consider the source of a claim?

You like to throw around assertions like "99.9% of times there really isn't an issue" with absolutely zero proof, but have a big problem with someone saying "I don't agree". I don't think you understand what sources, claims and truth actually mean.

Japan has some of the most horrific pollution disasters of the 20th century and had tremendously polluted water. The clean Japan thing is only true because Japan got very serious about safety after companies were ignoring issues and polluting water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Big_Pollution_Diseases_of...

And I don't even get the clean bathrooms connection. Sounds like a random TikTok meme with zero relevance. Half the bathrooms don't even have soap.

> And I don't even get the clean bathrooms connection

It's simple. If it is Japan, someone will glaze it.

It's a bit ridiculous to imply Tokuyama gets better shinkansen service than Hamamatsu, because it has Nozomi service.

Looking at the schedule towards Tokyo for Monday, April 27th: Tokuyama has: 4 16 car Nozomi trains to Tokyo 19 8 car Kodoma/Sakura trains to Shin-Osaka 9 8 car Kodoma/Sakura to Okayama

Hamamatsu has: 31 16 car Kodoma to Tokyo 19 16 car Hikari to Tokyo

Keep in mind the fastest Kodoma seems to only take around 1 hr 40 mins to Tokyo, and the fastest Hikaru is only 1 hr 20 mins.

I'm sure it's nice getting a 1 seat ride to Tokyo from Tokuyama if you can get on one of the 4 Nozomis, and unfortunate you can't get a one seat ride past Shin-Osaka from Hanamatsu, but the service levels seem pretty proportionate to me.

Looking only at connections to Tokyo is a bit reductionist (difficult to believe, but yes, there are cities outside of Tokyo that people go to!). As a mere matter of geography, there are unavoidably fewer trains to Tokyo (it's on the opposite side of the island). Using that same methodology, it would be good to see how many trains from Hamamatsu have a direct connection to the biggest metropolis near Tokuyama: Fukuoka. That way we can measure which city is the best for getting to the opposite side.

The total number of trains with a direct connection from Hamamatsu to Fukuoka is, at least based on all the info I can find, zero.

Or even a much closer city that people in Hamamatsu would frequently go to: Hiroshima. Also zero direct connections without a transfer.

People in Tokuyama can go direct to Fukuoka and Tokyo. They can do a transfer at Osaka in the case of non-direct trains. They're very much better set up than Hamamatsu.

It can’t work in the US, because it’s not a society that works together for the collective good, or to raise everyone’s quality of life.

It’s a bunch of individuals in a dog eat dog situation who happen to live nearby.

I was just thinking about this, this morning.

In the US, we have had a pretty wide-open nation, for much of our history. Population density was low, and many folks were forced to be extremely self-sufficient.

This has resulted in a fiercely independent national zeitgeist.

Asian nations, on the other hand, have been very crowded, for a very long time.

This has resulted in a much more interdependent mindset.

Each has its advantages and disadvantages. There's really no nation on Earth that is as good at "ganging up" on a problem, as Japan. Korea and China are catching up quick, though. The US is very good at manufacturing footguns. We don't tend to play well with others.

It really is hard for exceptional people to make their way, in Japanese society, though. They have a saying "The nail that sticks up, gets hammered down."

>In the US, we have had a pretty wide-open nation, for much of our history. Population density was low, and many folks were forced to be extremely self-sufficient. This has resulted in a fiercely independent national zeitgeist.

Australia is much less dense and more remote that the US (I drove 1,050 miles in Australia through the desert without seeing a vehicle or person, in the US you can’t get more than 100 miles from McDonald’s) but Australian’s work together and don’t have this “ fiercely independent “ nonsense that keeps everyone at each others throats.

I don’t know.

Most Aussies I’ve known are quite independent.

I really like them; maybe because we share so many traits.

Also, the US was where the British sent their convicts, until we had a big prison riot.

Yes, but Aussies work together for the collective good of society. High taxes. Universal Healthcare. Higher education, etc etc.

Aussies are friendly and kind, not locked in a dog eat dog world.

The USA was founded in rebellion against high taxes and heavy-handed central government. That is still an essential component of our philosophy.

Agree. Which is why I

, at the top of this comment chain, that it can’t work in the US because people don’t work together.

Australia also has many issues the US had. Car dependence. They also don't have high speed rail despite their cities being near perfect for it.

Also in Australia the waste majority of the population arrived much later and most were always attached to coastal cities. These cities were dominated by British aristocrat early on and later the British labor movement and reflects the culture of London. Australia politically was a part of Britain in many ways for 100s of years after the US had gone its own way.

The same is true to a lesser degree for the North East Coast in the US, arguably it works more like Britain/Australia but the South and everything West is quite different.

Australia has higher taxes, universal healthcare, higher education, etc etc.

Aussies work together, not against each other

I have no strong opinion on the original thesis but your fact doesn't make the point you think it does; you're right that no one lives in most of Australia, nearly everyone is concentrated together on the coast. Australia is a bit more urban than the USA overall from a population perspective, despite being vastly less dense overall due to the areas that no one lives in. So there would be fewer people to carry the cultural individualism.

https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/1nbrov9/australi...

About 9 out of 10 Americans live in cities (incl burbs) and the same holds for Australians. Sure, there's fewer notable population centers in Australia (Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane and you got nearly everyone), but there's also just 10x fewer people than in the US so that kind of matches too. I think the picture you link to distorts this, it does not account for the fact that there's simply way fewer Australians.

I'm not convinced that if there were 300m Australians, that they'd still all live in those 5 cities (with every city being 10x bigger). I think there'd be more of them.

> I'm not convinced that if there were 300m Australians, that they'd still all live in those 5 cities (with every city being 10x bigger). I think there'd be more of them.

I don't think so either, but because of the climate and geography, I also don't think there'd be 10x more cities, similar populations, I think you might end up with 2-3x more, really, at most.

Fair. It'd turn into a Japan and a half (big one on the right, small one the left)

That's a rather expansive view of cities based on what the US Census categorizes as urban vs. rural. Between myself and a couple neighbors, we're on close to 100 acres, but that's urban according to the census because we're not that far from a major city and fairly close to some smaller ones.

Grain culture vs rice culture.

Rice cultivation requires collective water management, so you get more collectivist cultures. Growing grain mostly depends on rain, so your harvest depends on your own work.

That's an interesting theory. Makes just as much sense as mine.

It’s really hard to be empirical, in these types of things.

There was an experiment in China [1].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-44770-w

I think this is not a smart read of the situation. The US has built a tremendous amount of rail and other transit (eg NYC subway) back when it was an even more individualistic society than today.

In fact they country was clearly able to come together for the public good many times throughout their history.

You could consider other causes.

Francis Fukuyama is now arguing that the US in now a substantiantively lower trust society than it was in 1995 when he published his second book "Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity."

>In it I argued that trust is among the most precious of social qualities, because it is the basis for human cooperation. In the economy, trust is like a lubricant that facilitates the workings of firms, transactions, and markets. In politics it is the basis for what is called “social capital”—the ability of citizens to cohere in groups and organizations to seek common ends and participate actively in democratic politics.

>Societies differ greatly in overall levels of trust. In the 1990s, Harvard’s Robert Putnam wrote a classic study of Italy which contrasted the country’s high-trust north with its distrustful south. Northern Italy was full of civic associations, sports clubs, newspapers, and other organizations that gave texture to public life. The south, by contrast, was characterized by what an earlier social scientist, Edward Banfield, labeled “amoral familism”: a society in which you trust primarily members of your immediate family and have a wary attitude towards outsiders who are, for the most part, out to get you.

https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-world-simply-does-not...

I didn't realize the link but I agree with the decline in trust.

One obvious axis is that in 1995 (I came to the US right around then) the country had a high church attendance rate, racial homogeneity, % of people who are parents, and % of people who were born here.

In the 30 years that passed all of these numbers had become significantly lower and obviously each factor on its own contributed to a decline in societal trust.

Most all of that old rail was done by private companies seeking to make a profit. Just like Japan. Look at nyc subway building rates after it was publicly owned. Almost zero expansion. Contractions even.

I agree w that and disagree what the person's I replied to dumb premise.

Same in The Netherlands. There are companies that buy plots of lands near existing rail just to massively screw over the government if they ever want to expend rail. Double digit million euro deals over small patches of land.

Objections to large projects exist everywhere all over the world.

The reason the US has such an issue with this is because of state autonomy (and corruption). Most other places in the world don’t allow subregions of the country to do whatever they want and make up laws etc

Switzerland is even more regional than the US. Yet they seem to have built an excellent rail system.

The US interstate system is incredible extensive, uniform, and well-maintained (relatively speaking). States love federal dollars, and if there were federal dollars for train lines, they'd fall over themselves to get them. That doesn't seem to happen for a lot of reasons. It seems like there are a lot of corruption problems that seem to eat up train projects, but for some reason the interstate system, though replete with plenty of boondoggles, is an unstoppable road-spreading machine.

The interstate system only succeeded because the federal government took the very rare step of steamrolling all the states and individual landowners. It was done in service of putting people to work and stimulating the economy. But it was not a well-liked project.

Today, it is well-regarded, but when it was being done? No way.

My impression is it's more to do with being able to sue for everything under the sun and block things almost indefinitely under different forms of review, usually environmental.

We need to stop pretending it isn't corruption and conflict of interest

I am a big infrastructure nerd but I believe they are right, it does change the way idyllic landscapes and towns can look.

But I'm not sure it's a valid reason to block such practical projects. It's the same for cities with building height restrictions (or really very many types of restrictions). It will make an old city look a bit less romantic for sure, but also people have to live and work here. Cities aren't for looking at.

Japan isn’t a federal government, so the decision can happen at the national level because prefectural and local governments zoning ability came from the national government.

I don’t think the federal government could de facto change this, though in practice they have levers available.

There's a 'build the Japanese train system' board game "1889" -- https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/23540/shikoku-1889 -- https://www.amazon.com/Shikoku-1889-Railways-Players-Minute/...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.)

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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-...

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.

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.

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.

The japanese railroads are owned by private companies.

Yes. How would private equity buy them unless they were private companies already?

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/

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.

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.

Your first sentence might in fact be true, but you've presented no evidence or argument that it is, so all you've done so far is make a cheap dig at America's private-equity industry with nothing to back it up.

I fail to see how the topic of this comment thread (namely "why Japan has such good railways") sheds any light on the US PE industry or vice versa. Maybe you can explain the link. (If you can't then your cheap dig is also off-topic.)

(And I fail to see how antitrust law in particular might constrain a PE firm in any way.)

By privatizing them. Look at European rail in the past 50 years.

I thought the rails were owned by the government, leased to the companies?

Some of them are, like the Shinkansen lines. Others are both owned and operated by private companies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dkaid%C5%8D_Main_Line.

Additionally, the stations are generally owned by private companies—including the the development rights at the station. This means that the Japanese private rail companies capture a portion of the value created by the rail service, which otherwise would be an externality. So the companies have an incentive, as landowners, for rail ridership to stay high.

Japan railways are mostly (all?) privately owned.

But by companies that care about running railways, not by vultures that want to rip the companies apart and load them up with debt for their own short-term profits.

So western MBAs are the problem. I’ve long held this view.

Yes.

From the article:

"Today, the most striking institutional feature of Japanese rail is that it is privately owned by a throng of competing companies." ...

"Core rail operations are profitable for every Japanese private railway company, but they usually only account for a plurality or a small majority of revenue. The rest is contributed by their portfolio of side businesses."

It's like a textbook good application of capitalism that unsurprisingly the US can't seem to get right.

JR was only privatized in 1987 after the previous state owned railway company borrowed too much to fund its infrastructure projects like high speed rails.

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.

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.

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.

Did you miss this paragraph? They do talk about the subsidies from the national and prefectural governments.

> Carefully designed public subsidies also play a useful role. Although Japanese railways do not receive subsidies for day-to-day operations, they do receive government loans and grants for capital investments. These are typically tied to public priorities, such as disability access or earthquake-proofing, or to projects that have large spillovers that the railway company would be unable to internalize, like removing level crossings, or elevating at-grade railways or trams in order to reduce road congestion and accident risk. Generally, the local prefectural government will match the contribution of the national government. Larger new build projects are subject to lease back or debt-payment conditions that fare revenue is expected to pay back.

Unless this was added after the fact, I think this is mostly an issue of careful reading. To me, the article absolutely says that it's a hybridized system like you mention.

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.

This makes sense, because parking a car does take a similar amount of space as a studio apartment.

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677481

and of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762060 which is the same article under a different URL.

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

[2]: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20480/chen...

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!

... 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).

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.

most of the japanese railway system is private. their 2 largest companies are some of the largest publicly traded companies in the world.

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

> 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

Did you read what I said? The whole Japanese system is for profit and the one of the biggest reasons for Japan’s system being so pleasant is that it is done for commercial purposes.

If the incentives are right American companies can make good things, but usually they are not so because of poor policy.

> If the incentives are right American companies can make good things, but usually they are not so because of poor policy

I disagree. The incentives are never right for American companies because the only incentive they care about is making money at all costs. They don't even care about their reputations anymore if they can sell their rep for money

That's the point, you need to make making money = improving society. If you think that's impossible in the USA, then the USA is doomed and maybe you should look for the door. I am not that pessimistic.

I believe most of it was sold off after it was built, am I wrong?

like many other places, there is a airport bus in Melbourne as I recall. there is (or was) a train from Melbourne to Canberra too (with a short bus transfer on the Canberra side). it was very difficult to figure out how to buy a ticket for it!

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.

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.

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.

Is that not similar to both the west and east coasts of the US?

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.

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 east coast ("Amtrak") rail blows. Expensive, and slow.

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.

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.

The Northeast Corridor in the USA has great rail service. Its the best way to travel between DC and NYC.

I'm very aware! I live in NYC and have taken many trains up/down the corridor. But it still pales in comparison to the experience I get in Japan (which is cheaper, nicer, faster, more frequent, often more direct, connects up better to local transit within cities, etc.)

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

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.

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.

> 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.)

Americans are very comfortable with eminent domain, as long as it is applied to brown people.

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.

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_Expre...

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.

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-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.

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.

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

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)

I have a hard time believing China doesn't make the list with how much rail they have.

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.

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?"

I know why Japan has such good railways, and I can also tell you that this blog article doesn't mention any them.

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.

Hear, hear! Fun fact: Germany was once famous for its on-time trains. You are now lucky if they show up at all.

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 :/

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.

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).

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.

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

Tokyo trains are the best:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dKiEY0UOtA

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.

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.

The answer is simple: high population density. The more densely people live, the more effective public transport is.

Japanese are the original micro-optimisers. Kaizen.

South Koreans then took over. In between were the Taiwanese.

The next wave will be mainland China.

China is not about optimising, its about maximising

I love how the bar graph didn’t include China because China is such a small place, basically a rounding error.

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.

California has a similar population density to France, which has a generally decent railway network. It's not really an excuse.

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_dependen...

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.

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.

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.

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

>Rail travel is much more common in Japan

That's not a cause but a consequence.

It's both; more usage improves the economics and makes it easier to justify improvements and expansion.

Tru tru.

Russian or Chinese one way better.

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.

the article didn't even compare with China railways, that's weird.

It would make writing about the Shinkansen insignificant :p

> 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...

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.

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_consp...>

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...

I honestly had no idea they’re so libertarian-capitalist. I figured it was government-led, government-run.

Because they have bad something else.

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