Truth is that nobody funds multiple competing transportation network. Japan chose rail, we chose highways.
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.
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
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.
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).
<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.
The fastest service on the Tokyo-Osaka corridor, Nozomi, maxes out at 300 km/h but is indeed not included in the pass.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Japan is a decent country but everyone who writes about it tends to overindex on the posh parts of Tokyo.
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/
https://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/publications/me...
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.
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.
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.
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
>'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.
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.
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.
“Why Japan has such good railways”
https://culturecompiled.com/p/strong-state-capacity-is-a-pro...
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.
