The UK is so far gone that the transport authority in it's largest city can't revamp stations or do add-on development without literal years of hand wringing. And even then it's often rejected or reduced in the end.
The national government controls all London budgets, the Mayor has no power, there's no legislative body for the city (GLA is not one), and there are 33 different borough councils that don't owe the Mayor anything.
They just finished a line that traverses the whole city. It's 73 miles from end to end and carries one seventh of the UK's rail journeys (600,000 trips per day).
Without the public or central government support, the efforts you're talking about amount to very little.
Liverpool Street isn't managed by TfL, it's managed by Network Rail.
They also have an energy company which runs some hydroelectric power stations.
Deutsche Bahn does everything from real estate to infrastructure to truck companies (no longer in Europe, though, they had to sell that off) to car sharing to energy production to IT development to trading lumber, workforce rental and startup venture capital. The list changes every few days, so some they may no longer do, others they will now do. It's a megacorp.
Many of these have grown out of the original business model.
The UK is completely chaotic ticket-wise on a national level, though.
You can get a normal Suica just about anywhere.
Little over a decade ago I did exactly the same. I ended up buying a Suica card at Ueno station from a clerk, which was a bit of an adventure since she was eager to help but barely spoke any English and I barely spoke any Japanese. Together we skillfully massacred both languages with an ad-hoc pidgin and lots of gesturing. Due to an issue with my wireless hotspot I only had an old school phrasebook at my disposal, which was about as helpful as the infamous Monty Python sketch implies. The airport seemed much more convenient as a tourist since everyone there at the very least spoke basic English. At the time it was certainly possible to get a Suica card at a major train station, though admittedly not easy.
Probably not worth it if you're only visiting one city as the pass is quite expensive. There are regional tourist passes though.
The US had to fill a huge area in the railroad era. That left a lot of underutilized track once the road network got good.
The article we're discussing explains that Japan has the best passenger rail system in the world, and which happens to be privatized, along with privately owned track. So which one is it? Go figure.
It's like saying certain rats solve the maze because the path is simpler. Except that the failing rats happen to have a different incentive.
You'll have to make yourself clearer, I have no idea what you're implying
To call Russia a "cultural dead end" is a bit much, considering all the great artists of various kinds that country has produced. In fact, you'll find that famous Russian novels like Anna Karenina and Doctor Zhivago feature trains as motifs.
China is also corrupt, but it is a dictatorship with massive central planning. Central planning leads to wastage and human costs in many areas but it is good at producing new infrastructure.
This is a little counterintuitive but it does make a difference.
I recently moved from a coastal city (that is very linear) to a landlocked city spread evenly in all directions. I had naively assumed the new city would be easier to get around in, since on average places would be closer to you. But the first city has decent commuter rail, which meant I could get to the other end of the city in an hour, and use cabs for last mile connectivity.
I'm sure you can have good public transit in "round" cities too, but it is certainly more difficult to plan.
You don't have to be "sure", take a look at London which is a "round" city with excellent public transit.
Sonce our first trip in 2017 at least two railways we rode have been damaged enough to be partially inoperable and under lengthy restoration work - Hisatsu line (washed away bridges) and Kurobe Gorge railway (bridge destroyed by earthquake).
The northeast and west coast metropolitan corridors are similar, and combined have comparable populations, densities, and distances as Japan. Yet we can't even build a single high-speed line. And for all the excuses about the difficulty of building rail through developed regions, the existing rights of ways and infrastructure in both the NE and California are comparable to what everybody else has had to work with, at least in the past 50 years. The density of the NE is nothing like what you see elsewhere in the world, especially Asia, and Japan and China specifically.
It's lack of political will and ambition, period, by both the community and leadership. And excusing our inability by pointing at the hurdles, insinuating that others succeeded because they didn't face the same challenges, only perpetuates the paralysis.
Yeah, I defy anyone who claims the US can't build trains "because of density" to fly to Tokyo, and actually take the Seibu Shinjuku line west from Shinjuku station. Look at those buildings built right next to the tracks, for many, many kilometers. People live in those -- if the windows opened, you could reach out and touch the laundry on the balconies that overlook the tracks [1].
Compared to that (and let's be clear: that's one average line in west Tokyo), even the Acela line in the east coast is a bad joke, density-speaking. The US doesn't build decent trains because the US is corrupt and sclerotic and run by incompetent people, not because of some mythical structural advantage in Magical Asia.
[1] I have no idea how people manage to live like that -- these trains are loud, and run basically from 4AM until 1AM every day -- but it's not lost on me that the fact that people can build houses right up next to the tracks might be the true advantage of Magical Japan.
Not that bad actually. You get used to it and even if trains are frequent they don't need 10 minutes to pass by your home.
The houses built next to the crossing points, in particular, have always boggled my mind. BING BING BING BING BING....
Just another example of Japanese attention to detail and human oriented design.
(I mean, maybe you’re right in some places, but it’s certainly not everywhere. Ironically, I happened to be standing next to a completely empty crossing, gates down, bonging away, while reading your comment.)
Not that I'm bothered by the chimes at all. And grandson loves them.
The light rail can run a frequency of 12-20 minutes in each direction. The freight's schedule: who really knows?
But the freight train is generally inhibited from sounding its horn or bells near residential neighborhoods. So, unless I am really paying attention while awake, I cannot detect it passing by, no matter the size.
The light rail is audible from where I sit, usually, but only just. It toots the horn mostly as it passes, but it's not disruptive or annoying to me, anyway. I sort of enjoy the white noise it all makes. There are cars that do a lot worse.
I think that the architecture here is helpful, too. The buildings are clustered around a central courtyard, and really insulated from the road noise. At any given time, there may be folks splashing in the pool, or running the jets on the hot tub, anyway.
The light rail stations are a major convenience to living here, and the train noise is absolutely the least of our worries!
Oh, you’re definitely engaging in Magical Japan, here.
While building standards have certainly improved in the past 20 years, the average Japanese house is built just strong enough not to fall over when someone farts. In particular, windows tend to be single pane, and you’re lucky if they block a strong wind, let alone noise.
I’m exaggerating a little, but not by much.
(Which is why we're now tearing down our old house and building a new, stronger one. Post-war Japan was more concerned with a) building a lot of houses, and b) keep lots of jobs, which meant, as far as houses were concerned, building use-and-throw-away houses. Then build another. And another. And don't talk to me about sound proofing.. it's non-existing. What with no insulation in walls.)
This must be a different Japan than the one I'm familiar with, where exterior walls are often uninsulated and only a few inches thick and single-pane windows are still the norm in a lot of housing. I wouldn't be surprised if soundproofing were better for railroad-adjacent buildings, but compared to American homes the soundproofing here is surprisingly poor.
The Shinkansen was a very different experience when I took it.
As an example SF Bay Area and Switzerland are about the same size, SF has double the population density. It has a Bay, Switzerland has mountains. Switzerland has like 10x the trains. There's no reason SF Bay couldn't too.
It's similar for most metro areas. LA used to have a huge train system. Bad insentives and government policies killed it. They're adding new ones back but they're adding them in the worst possible way, making them unprofitable and designed only for people who can't afford cars means they'll only be a money sink at best, or they'll get underfunded and decrepit at worst
E.g. Montana used to have passenger rail through the most densely populated Southern part of the state. That region has comparable density to regions of Norway that have regular rail service. (There are efforts to restart passenger service in Southern Montana)
And it's not like places like Norway have rail everywhere either - the lower threshold for density where rail is considered viable is just far lower.
The actual proportion of the US population that lives in areas with too low density to support rail is really tiny.
The US could have all of this and more in their populated areas. They're the richest country in the world. Why is the infrastructure so neglected? It's clearly a choice.
>The US could have all of this and more in their populated areas.
Probably people in US have other priorities and that means there are other public policies.
However, the United States is also a nation built upon the motor vehicle, and our much-vaunted freeway system here was built deliberately as a national defense measure that could easily move materiel and troops between cities and states, in the event of a domestic invasion or future wars on our own soil. The freeways enjoyed deep investments also due to commercial utility, and again, many cities and habitations sprang up at the nexus of various freeways, as truck-based shipping could service them as well.
I think one of the main obstacles to rail lines in the United States is our car-centrism, and many motorists of any socio-economic class really, really hate trains and public transit of any kind, and any other type of transport that may impinge on their freedom to drive wherever they want on as many highways as possible.
Therefore it is extraordinarily difficult for railways to get good rights-of-way. Amtrak is a redheaded stepchild. Commuter rail may be better respected in places where it was established, like the Eastern Seaboard, but if I asked any voter or motorist here, they would be voting against any sort of rail project whatsoever.
Sometimes fewer than 100 meters apart. Or connecting to each other's with a bridge.
I'm mostly in favor of privatization, but this is an example where the local government provide an exceptional service which is in no way inferior to the privately operated ones.
Knowing the author I knew it was going to be his main argument before even opening the blog post. And it's obviously wrong, these companies don't compete with one another, they all have a local monopoly. (The article itself acknowledges that and even acknowledges the organizational benefits of such monopolies, but the author could refrain himself from praising the virtue of competition nonetheless…)
That's exactly it. It's not because of some cultural bias or whatever.
I'm in Japan. I use trains because it's so very easy and it's so very reliable. It's simply the best option for travelling. If I wish to go to Tokyo? I check a website quickly, finds the best connection for my schedule (easy to find), I may pay in advance already, or not. I take my bicycle and go ten minutes to the nearest station, park it in the bicycle parking there, and off I go. As it's a small station I change to a limited express train (where I've booked a seat) after ten minutes, then, after another forty minutes I reach a big station and I switch to the Shinkansen and I'm off to Tokyo. I'm relaxed all the time. I buy a coffee on the train, and / or I buy coffee and lunch at the station and bring on the train.
Every other way of getting there is way more complex, and would take way more time.
Like: you can actually change the lightbulbs for the headlights of the Series 0 train while it being underway - there is a service hatch that opens to a human-sized service area accessible from the driver's cabin which allows such repairs.
marak830•3h ago
Maybe it's a carry on though "This is the third article we have released from Issue 23".
limitedfrom•3h ago
[1] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-japan-has-such-good-rai...
marak830•3h ago