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).
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.
Seems to me that the priorities are correct
It’s a bunch of individuals in a dog eat dog situation who happen to live nearby.
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."
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.
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.
Aussies are friendly and kind, not locked in a dog eat dog world.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/1nbrov9/australi...
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.
In fact they country was clearly able to come together for the public good many times throughout their history.
You could consider other causes.
>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...
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
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.
I don’t think the federal government could de facto change this, though in practice they have levers available.
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.
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.
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
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.
There’s also Hmmsim 2 on iOS, which may be easier to get/run.
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.
[1] https://flippa.com/blog/pe-funds/japan-private-equity-firms/
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think this could be a variable to contribute to a good coverage and infrastructure... but there are probably more factors involved.
newyankee•1h ago