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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.
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.
That means no car trips when you run out of bread or milk.
Smartest property of that zoning system IMO.
Example: Texas
Zoning has to both exist and be well-designed.
But it would not be legal to build japanese neighbourhoods in Texas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlwQ2Y4By0U
> ingenious Japan’s system of zoning
These two sentences don't fit together. Living next to major sources of pollution - and yes, noise is pollution as well - has been shown numerous times to be bad for the health of the people [1], leading to increased costs for healthcare systems [2], and to make it worse living near noisy traffic infrastructure (both rail and road) is closely correlated to poverty [3], which means poorer people are (as usual) being punished for being poor.
And on top of that, densification leads to worse mental health for the inhabitants [4] - particularly in Japan it's undeniable given phenomena such as "hikikomori".
Fight densification wherever someone tries to push it. People aren't poultry, and even in poultry or pig herds we know it's bad for their mental and physical health, why should humans be different?
[1] https://www.vrso.de/de/verband/veroeffentlichungen/veroeffen...
[2] https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/17/026/1702638.pdf
[3] https://www.rnd.de/mobilitaet/teure-mobilitaet-wie-armut-die...
[4] https://www.aerzteblatt.de/archiv/risiko-fuer-psychische-erk...
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.
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.
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.
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.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai_Suburban_Railway
I think this could be a variable to contribute to a good coverage and infrastructure... but there are probably more factors involved.
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.
Seems to me that the priorities are correct
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
It’s really hard to get a solid regional transit plan going when every town has its own local ordinances and zoning laws, the state has different priorities than the city, and funding for large projects tends to come from the federal government.
Land ownership doesn’t even seem to frequently be the problem in most US projects. It definitely can be like with California high speed rail where land purchases are a massive expense, but I think most issues with regional transit planning come from different root causes.
For example, until this year after legislative reform, the suburban and city transit authorities in Chicago didn’t work together and operated as independent entities. I imagine that this type of lack of cooperation within the same metro area might seem a little crazy in some places.
I’ve even read an articles about how the US bus manufacturing industry is highly consolidated because US metropolitan transit agencies over-customize their orders rather than agreeing on standardized designs across the country to make a more competitive vendor environment possible. US agencies overpay for buses compared to European and Asian transit authorities.
I also think that the US has lacked a lot of creativity when it comes to transit fiscal sustainability. The existing 90%+ of people who primarily use cars to get around can barely imagine a comprehensive public transit system existing, and they don’t want to fund it, and certainly can’t imagine a system where it’s sustainable and even profitable. Since the majority of people live this way in a car-dependent world, those are also the majority of people who make up our legislative bodies.
I’ve heard all the excuses before: “we can’t be like Europe or Asia living on top of each other, giving up cars would be going backwards, I live in a small town [1] we can’t have public transit here, there are homeless people on the bus, it’s not safe…”
[1] population: 30,000
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
South Koreans then took over. In between were the Taiwanese.
The next wave will be mainland China.
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762060
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