alt Hacker NewsThe secrets of the Shinkansen
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"The Japanese love cars, but they take trains because they have the best railway system in the world"
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, I look up the best connection for my schedule (easy to find), I may pay in advance, or not. I take my bicycle and go ten minutes to the nearest station, park the bicycle 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.
The subway system in Kyoto (Karasuma line) is operated by the local government. I visited during the busiest time of the year (Gion matsuri), and the trains were not overcrowded, were frequent and arrived on the dot. The subway system is nicely air conditioned which was pleasant as I visited during a heatwave.
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.
Japan's railroad system has a big geographic advantage - the country is long and narrow. The railroad system is primarily a long end to end line with short crosswise branches.[1] That's an efficient structure. The branch lines don't have to be fast. Many are still narrow gauge, at 3 ft 6 in.
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.
What is seldom mentioned in these conversations is that the United States has a very good rail system—-for freight. That’s what the U.S. system did well, not passengers. From the article it isn’t obvious how Japan moves freight, but they obviously aren’t moving a lot of freight on the Shinkansen.
It’s fascinating to read but I have a hard time imagining a public western railway provider could evolve into a train based mega corporation doing real estate and health services.
It's a good article, but I think the "it's not culture, just good governance" idea is a little hand wavy. The two bleed into each other greatly. The fact that houses are more disposable and wealth is less intergenerational in Japan does a lot to tamp down the NIMBY issues that plague e.g. the UK.
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.
These mixed companies can be very confusing to tourists especially. I'm always answering questions from tourists who are confused why they can't buy a ticket to where they want to go.
The article correctly identifies positive externalities of railways:
> The railway can capture the value it creates for me by charging me a fare, but it cannot capture the value it creates for those at my destination. As transport infrastructure creates benefits that produce no revenue for providers, free markets rarely build enough of it.
…but then very confusingly argues that railways should be profitable, including on per-passenger basis. A profitable transport system with positive externalities is inevitably either too expensive or under-investing (or maybe both) with respect to maximising the total economic productivity. Ancillary monopolies in real estate and retail might offset that somewhat, but only to an extent.
Similarly, I don't understand why the article speaks positively of the closure of 83 "loss-making lines". The lines being loss-making for the rail company doesn't mean they aren't improving total productivity, as the very same article argues!
Further, they mention the over-crowding in Tokyo later on
> Tokyo’s infamously crammed trains are a symptom of underpriced rush hour traffic
…but somehow blame it on the price being too low, and not under-investment into more capacity by the commercial companies! People commuting less because they can't afford it would be bad for the businesses on the other side of their commute!
I suppose this is the centre-right ideological slant of Works in Progress showing, which is a bit of a shame when it leads to those self-contradictions in the usually quite rigorous publication.
I was hoping for some 'technical' secrets.
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.
> the most striking institutional feature of Japanese rail is that it is privately owned by a throng of competing companies.
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…)
I'm drawn by the style and aesthetics of the charts in combination with the fonts used in them.
> At its most extreme, three separate commuter lines compete for the traffic between Osaka and the port city of Kobe, running in parallel, sometimes fewer than 500 meters apart.
Sometimes fewer than 100 meters apart. Or connecting to each other's with a bridge.
Title should be "The secrets of the Shinkansen" which is odd for a (very well written) piece about Japanese commuter trains (non-shinkansen versions).
Maybe it's a carry on though "This is the third article we have released from Issue 23".
There's a bunch of claims in the article that are misleading or just wrong.
> Core rail operations are profitable for every Japanese private railway company
Only the urban, legacy private railways that benefited from the "build a suburb and trains to it" system. Rural lines, private or not, all hemorrhage money, as do many of the newer private lines (often built by government and private only in name).
> Japanese cities have the lowest residential density in Asia
This is because Japanese "cities" (市) are administrative units, not actual cities. Particularly in the rapidly depopulating countryside, it's common for a bunch of dying villages that can't afford to duplicate their services anymore to get more or less forcibly merged into a "city" like Miyoshi in Shikoku that, in satellite view, looks like untouched forest:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/tRtdQisJCUMsqivv7
> The urban area of Tokyo, the densest Japanese city, has a weighted population density less than that of many European cities,
This is only true for Tokyo Prefecture, which encompasses a vast slab of mountains. Actual Tokyo (23-ku) packs in over 15k people/km2, 50% more than inner London (10k) and nearly 2.5x Greater London (6k).