How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart
arun.is
arun.is
For one of my recent trips, I was actually more better served with a local pass (Kansai Wide Pass) than the JR Pass.
Too bad because it used to be a really good deal...
Considering the environmental woes & collapses coming down the pike, I'd like to see a trans-border effort to drive down the price of mass transit _everywhere_. Put it on the G7 agenda, the OECD agenda, the UN General Assembly agenda, ...
Still a bargain, you can go anywhere as mich forth and back as you want (just not the dedicated long distance trains, so going through all of germany takes a bit longer).
But the biggest problem for the german trains remains the management of DB (Deutsche Bahn). Who are in charge of the network.
Who paid themself heavy bonuses all the time, while failing on all the metrics that mattered (they succeeded on making a new useless info page go live, that was the official justification for the bonus).
And they could do this, because the job of the ministry of transport was to make it easy for the car industry. And the german train is in theory privatized, in reality not so much.
The current ministry might be better though, so maybe something is happening. But I believe it, when I see it.
Only 50% of the relative loss of transit agencies is subsidised by the federal government, the other 50% gets subsidised by the respective state. And since the compensation is calculated in relation to the prices of monthly subscription tickets on routes in the respective transit area, transit agencies are left with even less.
Additionally, a lawsuit determined that the train network price cap for public transport is illegal, further increasing costs for the states.
This already has caused service reductions in multiple states, e.g. just now in Berlin additional overground Metro services during commuter peaks got halfed. With the results of the lawsuit and now interest from the federal goverment to put more funding into public transport, a lot more services will get axed in the next 3 years.
Where society here and now should invest, what direction to go from from here, is totally up to us. What makes the most sense - preferably in the long run.
Cars are pretty shitty for long distances. Rubber tyres wear down the road and create unhealthy dust, way more friction and noise than metalwheel on rail. And they can be directly powered with electricity.
Not carry a heavy battery around and waste energy with charging and discharging.
Or well, have the noise and dirt of combustion engines.
Those are all pretty strong arguments to invest at least equally into a well functioning train network.
Every car that can be replaced with a train (in the simple often case of a person riding the train not moving his vehicel for himself) is a net profit for society. Cleaner air. Less or allmost no pollution.
(The electric trains here next to my home are really silent and still fast)
Personally I think this is having our priorities very wrong.
(I also think that rail as a primary mean of transport over roads is totally unrealistic and impractical, but that another issue)
If they plan a trip, the don't calculate the whole cost of ownershipt, they calculate the distance and how much fuel they need (a.k.a. flexible costs).
An extremely cheap ticket makes the car owners stop using their cars so much. This is not just a benefit for the abstact idea of "environment", but also a direct benefit for the population. Less cars means less noise pollution, less air pollution and more space on the roads. That way people, who actually need a car, van or truck to get around and do their work, benefit.
The D-Ticket is completely independent of any (rail) infrastructure financing, those have distinct budges on federal level, since any project has to be approved by the legislature individually. The D-Ticket is eating away the budget of the states and their transit authorities, causing a reduction of services..
Or... Russia's attack of Ukraine caused a spike of energy prices.
Now which one of us has the correct history, and which is wrong, and why? Is it revisionism?
<https://www.ns.nl/en/season-tickets/dal-vrij>
HN discussion 4 days ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48543872>
Given that many commuter-rail (and frankly, other) transport systems operate well below capacity during off-peak times and in counterflow directions, such pricing could well increase ridership and revenue.
From HN discussion and information elsewhere (including the NL rail site itself), so long as a trip begins off-peak, the off-peak rates apply:
Please note: the time you check in determines whether you will travel with a discount.
<https://www.ns.nl/en/season-tickets/dal-vrij> (see FAQs section)
Other systems may of course vary, but typically trip start / time of ticket purchase / time of ticket check determines the applicable rate.
The fastest service on the Tokyo-Osaka corridor, Nozomi, maxes out at 300 km/h but is indeed not included in the pass.
I also looked up Tohoku JR passes for an upcoming trip and it wasn't affordable at all. I'm better served using single tickets even when riding the Shinkansen.
[1]: https://www.westjr.co.jp/travel-information/en/tickets-passe...
Not true. It really depends on your use case and blanket statements like this aren't helpful. Yes, the pass has doubled in price since few years ago but it still does make sense in many cases, especially in multi-week multi-city Japan trips
This is not a blanket statement as my first sentence is recommending people to make calculations based on their planned trip.
These are all "long" but really not that time-long distances. Shinkansen and regional trains work pretty well for these. And yes, a lot of tourists move between the cities quite often, even some metros accept the JR pass.
I was there twice in last 3 years and for our calculation it took 5-6 return shinkansen trips to justify new jr pass price (2 weeks jr pass). And let me tell you shinkansen are experience on their own so there was no lack of will to find daytrips using them
Again that's my POV, but since the price hike I've never met someone who got a good deal with the JR Pass.
https://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/publications/me...
Not as nice as an office with a door, but really not bad. Especially the taller ones.
But it is also true that I do not work in tech, I work and am exposed mostly to industrial companies. I have very little experience with "tech" companies.
Diminishingly few.
It is a feedback loop.
At least in the past, companies like JR East were known for their worker exploitation and unfair policies, leading to decades of hostile labor disputes with Kokuro (the National Railway Workers' Union)[3].
In 2013, a family sued JR West after an overworked employee committed suicide. The family claimed he worked over 100 hours a month, and that during some months, he worked over 254 hours of overtime[4].
Japanese trains are renowned for being extremely punctual, but operators often punish employees for the smallest mistakes. They fine employees if the train is delayed by even a single minute, leading to one driver suing JR West in 2021[5].
I know the west likes to romanticise Japanese culture, but the reality of the working culture in Japan is far from romantic.
[1] https://izanau.com/article/view/black-companies-japan
[2] https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/karoshi-deep-look-japans-...
[3] https://www.jil.go.jp/english/archives/emm/2006/no.74/74_si....
[4] https://japantoday.com/category/national/family-files-lawsui...
[5] https://www.vice.com/en/article/japan-railways-lawsuit-late/
“Why Japan has such good railways”
https://culturecompiled.com/p/strong-state-capacity-is-a-pro...
On the other side, visitors who can’t read Japanese can’t do anything but try to interpret those letters in the language they know
I've lived in Japan for 4 years now and it was a bit of a culture shock travelling to Germany where I had to have a different pass/app for the various buses and trains. The U.S.'s public transit buildout is slow but happening, and I worry it's falling into the same trap. I'd like to see a federal bill requiring all private/public transit to use the same universal payment scheme accepted in Japan in order to get federal funding for their projects.
My first visit to Japan, there were still places that would only accept a subset of IC cards and not all.
I remember reading that interoperability between Suica, Pasmo, ICOCA and the others didn't happen overnight. A lot of agreements had to be worked out between companies that were technically competitors.
It's interesting how much invisible coordination goes into making a system feel simple
Each JR company also have their own website, and their own "network pass", making it quite cumbersome to book online tickets (e.g. needing to book each segment separately if they're on different companies' routes).
The Swiss system also has different companies, but everything can be booked on the SBB website/app.
Made something to listen to all the songs - https://sheets.works/data-viz/bells-of-tokyo
The chirping bird sounds to help blind users find their way to and from the platforms is also a pretty interesting design decision.
https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/aura-of-success-the-first-ye... (and note the links to the earlier pieces at the beginning)
A nice framework for all types of communications.
Truth is that nobody funds multiple competing transportation network. Japan chose rail, we chose highways.
I tihnk that helps explain the feasiability of train on each country more than inherent choices
A sparse railway system would leave parts of the country less populated by design as it’s simply harder to get to them. People would bunch up into cities and towns because they had to.
And while Germany is probably a bit worse than European average, I have seen plenty of other similarly car-pilled places in Europe. Though also some positive examples. Paris has done a lot to bring some parks to a horribly car-infested city. Amsterdam is great. Rome is pretty decent. Few places in Europe are as bad as the US when it comes to car-dependence. But there are also very few places comparable to Japan's approach to car ownership
Highways are great when everyone has a different path.
Japan has most (but not all) of its large destinations on the pacific coast, which works great for rail.
I'm sure passenger rail networks used to have more routing options than amtrak does now, but it's hard to get between a lot of places by rail without going through Chicago. In the western US, you can go north/south in the pacific states or near the missisipi. Sure mountains are hard to cross, but there's no north/south in the plains either... Or Atlanta to Florida, etc.
With small airports, there's probably plenty of flight time is worse than drive time and security and rental counter time add up too, so flying isn't always less time than any other mode, but often it is.
I still maintain it's an investment problem. Where rail investment was maintained (other parts of the world) it's still widely used.
Europe shifts people by train, not freight.
The US/Canada/Mexico is about 10% more than the EU, but it shifts 7 times as much freight by rail.
Road is much more difficult to destroy than rail
If you had to choose one or the other, especially in a time of war/aggression, road seems to be the clear choice
There are around 100 train companies in Japan. JR is 7 of those 100. The other 93 are NOT JR. Drawing any conclusions about Japanese trains from inspecting 7% of them is just wrong.
The title, "How Japan's railways stayed one" is just false. They were never one, they are still not one.
Take Tokyo, off the top of my head there is Toei, Tobu, Odakyu, Keio, Seibu, Tokyu, Keikyu, Tokyo Metro, ... and JR
If you're in Shibuya. You can take JR (4 lines: Yamanote, Saikyo, Shinjuku-Shonan, N-EX), Keio (1 line: Inokashira), Eiden (3 lines: Ginza, Hanzomon, Fukutoshin), Toyku (2 lines: Den-en-toshi, Toyoko)
Or Osaka, there's Hanshin, Hankyu, Kentetsu, Nankai, ... and JR
Those others, except maybe 1, are all private, and have always bene private. Even JR's 7 are now private and they were originally private, there was a middle period where the government took them over. It was the period where they nearly went bankrupt, had extremely bad performance.
Japan is a decent country but everyone who writes about it tends to overindex on the posh parts of Tokyo.
Would even go as far as to say many comments about the place being trapped in the 80s or 90s don't match reality. For instance, the only time I've ever been asked to use a fax machine was by a US company.
Every time you read a story about some Japanese town offering people, even foreigners, money to move there and occupy an abandoned house, keep in mind this is a gesture of desperation, not gratitude,
Most finance roles in Japan almost exclusively hire Japanese nationals
> Japanese mega venture/US tech companies
They don't tend to hire foreigners in most cases except for Chinese (Taiwanese and Mainland) and Koreans
The only reason it recently reversed in the US was due to COVID.
Second, many countries are modern in some ways and backwards in some other way. To label a country as modern or not is silly.
Here how it works: I build a porch today and my neighbor builds a pool. In 30 years, he builds a porch but I build a pool. If you cherry pick porches, I look outdated and he looks modern, but it’s reversed if you cherry pick pools!
If you want examples, unless something has changed, if you run a business (for example consulting) and you make a new contract, you must register the contract with the tax office in person. The Japanese government apparently made moves to fix this type of "must be done in person" stuff because of covid. I haven't registered a contract since 2019.
For example, when you visit the San Francisco Bay Area, the actual posh areas are Marin, the Tri-Valley, and the hill adjacent areas of South Bay suburbs (eg. Woodside, Atherton, Saratoga, Los Altos, Los Gatos, Foster City, San Mateo).
Your average Japanese or other foreign visitor isn't visiting or staying in those suburbs nor would they be able to afford the hotel fees for hotels in those areas.
This is a major reason why Japan and Euro-trips have become fairly common amongst younger Americans now - renting a decent 4 start hotel room or Airbnb in a posh area of Japan that is out of reach for most Japanese comes out roughly the same as a middle-of-the-pack experience in the US because an American median salary is double the Japanese or European one.
Not to mention the idea that JR is only 7% of Japanese railroad makes little sense in real life. JR carries a majority of rail passengers in Japan. The long tail of non JR railroad companies in Japan are small, regional operators owning maybe one or two lines with infrequent services. Many of them are also private only in the sense that they are incorporated in the same way as private companies. But if you dig a little around you will find out they are actually owned by local governments.
Further, in the big metro areas, the private trains do just fine.
JR East is #1, Tokyo Metro is #2, JR West is #3, Tokyu is #4, ... the next JR, JR Central is down at #9 with #5 #6 #7 #8 all private. Tokyo Metro is private, Toei (is the city run subway, it has 4 lines as is far down the list).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_through_trains_in_Japa...
Asakusa (one of "my" lines!) line, is definitely a subway inside central Tokyo, but you can stay on the same physical train going all the way from Narita to Haneda (think RER in Paris?) — I think it would be qualified as "light rail" anywhere else in the world.
JR is a whole lot more than 7% of trains (downthread you claim 38% of passengers, but even that understates things; over 60% of passenger-km are with JR).
> Eiden
Not what it's called lol.
> Those others, except maybe 1, are all private, and have always bene private.
Yes and no. Other operators are structured as private companies but often have significant public ownership, and even those that are notionally 100% privately owned often have strong ties with the political system via the keiretsu system, and always collaborate very closely with local and national governments in practice. E.g. fares are regulated, not simply set at "what the market will bear" levels; conversely the government provides a lot of legal support and subsidy for building new lines.
Just a deep fundamental misunderstanding of how things work.
Also Keihan. And most, if not all, of these companies have huge land and real estate development projects generating non-rail income all up and down their lines.
Also, Mt. Fuji Station and Fuji Station are 2h30m apart: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Mt.Fuji+Station,+2+Chome-5-1...
China a bit less so than Japan, but still much more than the US or Western Europe. Plus even the minorities are still phenotypically more or less similar looking to the majorities.
China also enjoys the benefits of being an autocratic nation.
Like you said, the fact that China is authoritarian is a big factor in all of this.
The "melting pot" West does have numerous phenotypically similar caucasian subcultures, but also many non-caucasian ones that do not look phenotypically alike at all.
>'Rail transport in Japan was originally run by Japanese National Railways (JNR). Like many state-owned corporations, it was starting to struggle in the 80s with mounting debt. JNR was losing its advantage over other transport, in both passenger and freight. In the ’80s, the Japanese government began pushing to privatize its state-run monopolies — to reduce the national deficit and improve efficiency across these sectors.'"
The article mentions 'improve efficiency,' and that's the part I was looking at. Then it goes on to explain the strength of the brand logo. So the overall point here is, 'How can something that has been broken apart still appear as one?' And I was simply saying that, despite the inefficiencies in that process, the fact that it still comes across as so stable shows that the branding strategy is good.