This is got to be a huge factor. Making everyone pay for "free parking" through inefficient use of space is such a waste. I strongly recommend everyone to read Donald Shoup's "The High Price of Free Parking".
> This is got to be a huge factor.
If the USA implemented that exact rule, it would change almost nothing. People already need nighttime parking for non-legal reasons.
Such a change would have a significant impact.
> Such a change would have a significant impact.
What would that impact be? Do you see, or experience, a lot of contention for nighttime parking?
There's plenty of contention for street parking in nonresidential areas. But a nighttime parking certificate doesn't do anything about that. Nighttime parking is done in residential areas.
This is the most important paragraph in the article. It can’t be overstated how ingenious Japan’s system of zoning is and how much this has benefitted their society in ways we can only dream about here in the West.
Something that, for some reason, people in the states don't want to accept is that - when given the choice - the vast majority of people prefer living in dense urban environments.
Granted I’m approaching it from the perspective of a tourist or business traveler, but 6/6 of the European cities I’ve been in were fully navigable for my purposes via transit. I’d probably guess half or less in the US.
Even in NYC or SFO, the metro areas are so large it really makes the success rates low depending on the trip.
At the peak of the bubble era, just the land underneath the Imperial Palace had an estimated real estate value larger than the entire state of California.
I'm only barely familiar with it so I ask this in good faith: is it really ingenious or is it just more permissive? My bias/priors are that the simpler and truer statement is: it can't be overstated how beneficial more permissive zoning laws are to a society.
IMO in this whole conversation, whether discussing any jurisdiction not just japan, impacts of zoning is an over emphasized and tax policy under emphasized (ie. almost never discussed).
That means no car trips when you run out of bread or milk.
Smartest property of that zoning system IMO.
No idea what our local zoning laws are
Think more in terms of small convenience stores ("Spätis" with daily necessities) everywhere. Typical distance to a store is maybe 500-1000m in Germany. In dense areas of Japanese cities it's closer to one store every 100m-200m.
So in Germany it'd be a 10 minute walk, while in Japan most of your "walk" would be getting downstairs.
The flipside of that is that selection is going to be limited compared to what you'd find in Germany.
Example: Texas
Zoning has to both exist and be well-designed.
But it would not be legal to build japanese neighbourhoods in Texas.
That isn't ingenious, it's battery farming.
The problem is, the healthcare costs don't hit the parties responsible (i.e. governments and cheapskate landlords).
And guess what's often hotly contested. Noise barriers tend to draw complaints because they ruin the sightline, are either ugly from the start or end up being "decorated" not by good art but quick throw tags. And landlords are often too much penny-pinchers to install decent windows unless you legally require them to, which is often impossible for already constructed buildings. The landlords don't have to live with the noise after all, and in overheated housing markets people are forced to live in what they can get.
It'd suck less if it felt like E.G. noise and environmental pollution ordinances were ever enforced. (Break up those parties and stop people from doing trash burns / crappy fires during burn bans which are pretty much always...)
* Clear and concise approvals process
* No more NIMBY BS
* Impact based assessment (similar to Japans)
* Possibly goals to encourage desired types of use (but not hard LIMIT beyond disallowed!)
Mental health is atrocious across Asia.
What do you really mean? On that basis, we all would live on isolated farms on the prarie.
Humans are social animals that live in groups, just like other primates. Humans like living in dense cities so much that they pay far more for much smaller spaces in the most dense cities.
That doesn't make all density good but 'fight all densification' is not a real solution. When is it good and when bad? How much desnity in those situations? Those are some of the real questions.
> "I think that though we are a railway company, we consider ourselves a city-shaping company. In Europe for instance, railway companies simply connect cities through their terminals. That is a pretty normal way of operating in this industry, whereas what we do is completely different: we create cities and then, as a utility facility, we add the stations and the railways to connect them one with another."
Because the railway companies also participate in the economic activity at the destinations, they extract extended value from enabling mobility. Imagine if the rail operators owned a percentage of a stadium or convention center, for example. This then creates the economic incentive to build more connections to this "hub".
https://www.kyotostation.com/kyoto-station-building-faciliti...
How so? In the United States Congress granted land to railroad companies, and the companies can sell the land to finance building tracks. Many cities started as railroad stops and grew because of the railroad.
Zoning laws is another. It's a lot of fun visiting Japan and Taiwan because you can wander around and there's a huge variation of utilization in a given block. US approach to zoning means that I rarely see similar utilization in the US.
Separate from this is politics.
I'm in the NYC metro area and we've been trying to expand access into NYC for decades.
You would think that this would be a no-brainer because it enables so much economic activity in both directions (NY/NJ). Yet, Chris Christie canceled the ARC project (which itself was years in the making) for optics at the time of the Tea Party.
Maine set to become first state with data center ban: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/09/maine-data-center-ban.html
Also, it's a different kind of more insidious and visceral NIMBY rooted in racism and classism.
Americans love choice and they love stuff. They fill their cars with their stuff drive around on their own schedule without having to watch a clock or think about what’s near a train line and what isn’t. (Even with Tokyo’s amazing railway network, you have to think about that!) My wife drives to three different grocery stores 20 miles apart to get exactly the products she wants. The idea of just accepting whatever brand of hamburger buns they have at the store that’s conveniently on the train line between our house and work is completely alien.
To live within a Japanese system, Americans would have to change a bunch of other things about their culture. We’d have to give our kids independence to take the train themselves, instead of spending every saturday driving them around to 3 different far flung activities. We’d have to learn to appreciate what’s conveniently available, instead of the exact thing we want.
And not even Tokyo’s amazing train network makes it convenient to juggle two working spouses and school drop off and pickup for three kids. What line is convenient to your house, both parents work, and all three kids’ schools? The Japanese don’t even try to solve that problem.
> We’d have to give our kids independence to take the train themselves, instead of spending every saturday driving them around to 3 different far flung activities.
> The idea of just accepting whatever brand of hamburger buns they have at the store...
Rail <-> Road isn't an either or issue. It wasn't in 1850 and it isn't today. The only difference, at least in the US, is that poorly designed government intervention/policies forced low population densities.
Rail and other forms of public transport simply don't work with suburban sprawl. Large roadways also don't work - compare the state of US infrastructure against pretty much every other country out there - it's just that the financial bill from an unbelievable amount of deferred maintenance hasn't come due yet.
> How will US citizens help their friends move or do their large (in terms of volume) Costco grocery shopping without large trucks and only using rail?
Apparently, it works just fine.
The Midwest, as an example, has roughly the same size and population as France with a larger economy. In fact, if you overlay the French TGV network onto the Midwest with Chicago where Paris is, you get a pretty good approximation of where major Midwestern cities are located: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/NMr3J3gt8C
If anything, right now America is tilted heavily to car-only.
...
completely makes sense when you realise it is all just an elaborate system to avoid being around the small part of the population that commit insane amounts of violent crime in the US with no motive
---
Christopher Lane, a 22-year-old Australian baseball player, was fatally shot while jogging in Duncan, Oklahoma, on August 16, 2013. Three teenagers, including convicted gunman Chancey Luna, targeted him in a random "boredom" killing. Luna received life in prison without parole, while accomplices received lesser sentences
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.
Mumbai too has a very similar structure (the core city is basically a peninsula that goes north-south). Our railway lines run N-S as well, with (till the recent Metros) feeder roads connecting them.
Mumbai is also one of the most densely populated cities in the world (#2 by some metrics).
Our local railways have an annual ridership of 2.26 billion [1]. Pretty much everyone agrees they're vital to the city.
I think this could be a variable to contribute to a good coverage and infrastructure... but there are probably more factors involved.
New Zealand was a really young country when railway technology came along, and didn't really have enough time or money to invest in a good railway network before other technology came along.
Airplanes are the perfect technology for NZ's geography, because they just fly over everything. There are actually a few places in NZ that received passenger airline service in the 30s before they received a railway connection (namely Gisborne), and many other places that never received railway connections.
At the same time, NZ was one of the fastest adopters of the automobiles, second only to America.
I think viable cars and airplanes had taken another 25 years to arrive, NZ might have had a much more complete railway network, with a much better chance of surviving intact into the modern era.
But because cars are major German export driver and car manufacuring is major employment in Germany, anything competing with cars has not much political support.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-merz-pledges-to-resist-2035-eu...
That would be if kilometers of rail tracks scaled linearly with population density per unit area. My guess (based on no research at all) is it’s more that there’s a population density tipping point, and after reaching it rail development dramatically increases. I do also think you’re right about the influence of the German car industry.
Side note, there actually isn't one shinkansen from Kagoshima to Hakodate, that route would take you on 5 different shinkansen lines: Kyushu, Sanyo, Tokaido, Tohoku, and Hokkaido. But I get your point.
Switzerland has 8m people. Bay Area has 8m people. Switzerland is 1/4th as densely populated as the Bay Area (4x the size) yet they have 10x better transportation
That said, I'm willing to bet that San Fransisco and the surrounding communities had comparable public transportation in the 19th and early 20th century. While I can't speak for the bay area, you can still find exposed tram tracks in many US cities - Philadelphia, for instance.
The US's move from having the best to arguably the worst public transportation system in the world among developed countries is a lesson in disastrous government policy.
If it doesn't benefit the individual almost immediately they're strongly opposed.
They want the benefits of strong infrastructure but let someone else build it without inconveniencing ME or costing ME a dime.
It is a culture that teaches greed is good and society should be built around all gain no cost.
Which is what the Japanese have. private railways
I’d rather not deal with it? Yes I know roads are dangerous. I’d still rather not deal with the expected culturally imposed insanity that the Japanese curiously seem to lack.
Most of this is stories. Yeah there are buskers but tbh I like buskers. Music in the public square is a plus not a minus even if it's not my personal preference of music.
Subway crime rates are around 2-4 incidents per million rides. There was a spike during covid and it started to rapidly trend down afterwards. That corresponds with economic desperation during that period pretty cleanly.
But that 2-4 incidents per million rides is roughly comparable to the crime rates at gas stations, etc. The difference is that density is lower so you just see it less often. It happens just about as frequently but you are less likely to witness it because you are less likely to be present when it happens to somebody else at a gas station.
> I’d still rather not deal with the expected culturally imposed insanity that the Japanese curiously seem to lack.
Trust me Japan has just as much of an issue with crime on rail. Arguably they have higher rates but the Japanese police often just don't consider sexual harassment or sexual assault a serious crime and would rather brush it under the rug or otherwise deal with it outside the criminal system to avoid harming the abuser. (ex: an incident that I'm familiar with: "oh we gave the guy who assaulted you on the train your address so they could mail you a hand written apology note instead of charging them with assault")
And the "wacky in your face" crime (intoxicated, mental illness, etc) is still very much an issue in Japan but it's cracked down on by police in places that tourists frequently visit during the day and otherwise everyone just expects it so people who live there don't really mention it to tourists.
I mean hell look at Shibuya Meltdown for some of the more mild "funny" examples.
The only real difference between the NYC metro and the Japanese metro is that it's louder because there's not a social norm to limit talking on the train (until people are drunk ofc). Otherwise it's all the same shit and you see it all when you start commuting.
The weird stories, about anything, are nonsense; sensationalized to either be emotoinally compelling or even active disinformation to serve some political end (especially about American cities, especially about NYC.)
It's just induced fear. Just go to NY and ride the subway. Millions do all the time without any problems, without a second thought. It's really no problem and amazingly convenient. (Busking is people playing music.)
Of course some crime occurs among millions of people but so do lottery grand prizes and heart attacks. I've been on many subway rides without experiencing one crime or even seeing one, and much other public transit.
And when you do, you'll know what to think of the stories and people who tell them.
You might say it's because we live in a "low trust society," but not for the reasons the people who usually invoke that term claim.
Is there evidence of that? It sounds like a broad stereotype of a complex, large country by an ignorant outsider.
> entrenched interests want to remain entrenched even if it hurts the system overall
Another way to look at that is prioritzing the individual over the system, a hallmark of liberty and human rights.
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.
Looking at the schedule towards Tokyo for Monday, April 27th: Tokuyama has: 4 16 car Nozomi trains to Tokyo 19 8 car Kodoma/Sakura trains to Shin-Osaka 9 8 car Kodoma/Sakura to Okayama
Hamamatsu has: 31 16 car Kodoma to Tokyo 19 16 car Hikari to Tokyo
Keep in mind the fastest Kodoma seems to only take around 1 hr 40 mins to Tokyo, and the fastest Hikaru is only 1 hr 20 mins.
I'm sure it's nice getting a 1 seat ride to Tokyo from Tokuyama if you can get on one of the 4 Nozomis, and unfortunate you can't get a one seat ride past Shin-Osaka from Hanamatsu, but the service levels seem pretty proportionate to me.
The total number of trains with a direct connection from Hamamatsu to Fukuoka is, at least based on all the info I can find, zero.
Or even a much closer city that people in Hamamatsu would frequently go to: Hiroshima. Also zero direct connections without a transfer.
People in Tokuyama can go direct to Fukuoka and Tokyo. They can do a transfer at Osaka in the case of non-direct trains. They're very much better set up than Hamamatsu.
Seems to me that the priorities are correct
So the argument that 'new train X will destroy the water supply' really needs to be based on a whole stack of good evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Big_Pollution_Diseases_of...
And I don't even get the clean bathrooms connection. Sounds like a random TikTok meme with zero relevance. Half the bathrooms don't even have soap.
> Japan had great civil engineering for 100 years, they have made lots and lots and lots of tunnels. Japan overall has fantastic water quality ...
Does it? And if so, maybe that's because they make sure projects like this one don't contaminate the water supply.
> ... globally known for clean and safe bathrooms
What does this have to do with water supply? One suspects that you know very little if that's the best evidence you have.
This is specially true when these tunnel goes along many different areas and seemingly the only that complains and believes is unsafe is also the one that is trying to get a transit station in the district.
I'm sure they have plenty of evidence on why it is safe, like historical examples and such. But how do you 'prove' this to a point a politician can't just say, sure its 99.9999% safe but we can't risk it.
> What does this have to do with water supply? One suspects that you know very little if that's the best evidence you have.
The point is that Japan tends to take safety and cleanness very seriously. And they have built many train-lines and tunnels.
At one point to you personally consider the source of a claim?
You like to throw around assertions like "99.9% of times there really isn't an issue" with absolutely zero proof, but have a big problem with someone saying "I don't agree". I don't think you understand what sources, claims and truth actually mean.
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.
Almost all NIMBY opposition to development comes from people who do not own the land in question.
I don’t think the federal government could de facto change this, though in practice they have levers available.
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.
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.
I don't think so either, but because of the climate and geography, I also don't think there'd be 10x more cities, similar populations, I think you might end up with 2-3x more, really, at most.
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.
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...
One obvious axis is that in 1995 (I came to the US right around then) the country had a high church attendance rate, racial homogeneity, % of people who are parents, and % of people who were born here.
In the 30 years that passed all of these numbers had become significantly lower and obviously each factor on its own contributed to a decline in societal trust.
In the early 20th century, US rail companies were beholding a very favorable situation: high demand to run loads of heavy freight all over the country, high demand to ferry passengers all over the country, and basically no serious competitors to either revenue source.
Now freight revenue was never going to be transformative to the industry, but it had the benefits of being reliable, un-fussy, and fairly easy to build a financial business around. Passengers, on the other hand, offered huge revenue potential, but had the downsides of being very fussy about things like safety and comfort and timeliness, along with wanting stations in convenient places and an ever-expanding rail network.
Students of US business management history should be unsurprised, then, that while evaluating the market that offered reliable revenue, versus the market that wanted large capital investments, the railroads overwhelmingly chose the freight market. In other words, US the railroad companies spoke and said we do not want passengers loudly and clearly.
The thinking was: passengers can do take the wagons and busses and cars and these newfangled airplane thingies, but freight is a guaranteed market for us! So the passengers slowly migrated to other form of transportation. But the kicker was, freight also wanted things like timeliness and access to an expanding transport network and, shockingly for the railroad execs, were willing to pay for it.
Add about 80 years, declining rail traffic, and tons of corporate mergers, and we have the sad state of US railways today: many residents have never seen a railway expansion or shiny new rail equipment, much less a real functioning passenger train. It's easy and comfortable to say that zoning or regulations or market forces allowed US rail to languish, but that would be ignoring the part where the industry did not want the customers in the first place.
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.
When I have to buy six individual tickets for triple digit prices to get somewhere and the train ends up slower than going by car I wonder why I would even try.
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.
It’s dishonest to hand wave it away while pretending that because there are government controls for construction and financing that it would go even better if it was more government or “more hybridized”. With no source, just opinion.
No one that has ever had to switch blue to red to green in toyko just cash, buying a new ticket at each stop only to go a couple miles, has ever forgotten how privatized Japans railways are.
I expected to see comments about how good it is, how most people love it, how it’s highly privatized, and of course about how to make it better with more government.
It's fine to talk about the efficiency of the private operators. No problem there. The dishonesty is in omitting any discussion of how the tracks that the whole system depends are built with heavy government support. Without that, one could be forgiven for reading that article and thinking "oh, just privatize it and you'll be as successful as Japan."
I think the take-away here should be more along the lines of what a working public-private partnership can look like and what roles each can play. I'd love to see a 4,000-word article that compares this model to the regional transit authority models we have in the US.
> Carefully designed public subsidies also play a useful role. Although Japanese railways do not receive subsidies for day-to-day operations, they do receive government loans and grants for capital investments. These are typically tied to public priorities, such as disability access or earthquake-proofing, or to projects that have large spillovers that the railway company would be unable to internalize, like removing level crossings, or elevating at-grade railways or trams in order to reduce road congestion and accident risk. Generally, the local prefectural government will match the contribution of the national government. Larger new build projects are subject to lease back or debt-payment conditions that fare revenue is expected to pay back.
Unless this was added after the fact, I think this is mostly an issue of careful reading. To me, the article does say that it's a hybridized system like you mention.
I think this is the key paragraph because (like it or not) a lot of Americans would be philosophically opposed to this sort of process (the Kelo decision on eminent domain notwithstanding.)
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.
[1] https://flippa.com/blog/pe-funds/japan-private-equity-firms/
I fail to see how the topic of this comment thread (namely "why Japan has such good railways") sheds any light on the US PE industry or vice versa. Maybe you can explain the link. (If you can't then your cheap dig is also off-topic.)
(And I fail to see how antitrust law in particular might constrain a PE firm in any way.)
Additionally, the stations are generally owned by private companies—including the the development rights at the station. This means that the Japanese private rail companies capture a portion of the value created by the rail service, which otherwise would be an externality. So the companies have an incentive, as landowners, for rail ridership to stay high.
In the U.S., the folks who like public transit would never go for having rail stations be owned by conglomerates that get nearly half their profit from retail and real estate activities adjacent to the stations: https://www.patiencerealty.com/post/the-story-of-how-privati.... It makes perfect economic sense. Transit creates a positive value for the land around each station. Having the rail operators own the station gives them a stake in the value created and incentivizes them to prioritize good rail service that brings people to the hotels and retail the companies own near the stations. But Americans are ideological, not pragmatic, and an idea like that is DOA here.
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.
Tourists spots are usually in the mountains and the CBD is near the sea. And residential area is developed between them along the lines so the trains carry bidirectional passengers to work or relax on the same line, higher utilization keeps ticket fare low.
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.
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
South Koreans then took over. In between were the Taiwanese.
The next wave will be mainland China.