Forum - View topicAnswerman - How Does The Train System Work In Japan?
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samuelp
Industry Insider
Posts: 2231 Location: San Antonio, USA |
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So many subway lines connect through to private rail lines at their end points that a single fare system would be insane. I can hop on a train in Tokorozawa and get off at Yokohama, that single train goes through 2 different private railways and 2 subway systems, and the slowest local takes more than 2 hours one way without any transfers. Basically the reason subways charge by zone is that they are pretty much all intricately interconnected to the other above ground lines. As for JR lines... you could go clear from Tokyo to Koyo on local trains in a day (would take 6-10 hours) without ever leaving the gates, so... yeah, they need to charge by distance. Even shinkansen prices are based on just distance + an extra super express fare which is also distance based. |
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DerekL1963
 Subscriber Posts: 1113 Location: Puget Sound |
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Though the East is in general more densely populated than the West, it's only really in relative terms. Huge swaths of the East are fairly low density, far too low to support much of a train network with the exception of a very few corridors. It's only in the Northeast Corridor/the BosWash megalopolis that it's an entirely different world and population densities even begin to approach that of Europe and Japan. (This is easily missed if you look at a population density map of the US because the area affected is long, narrow, and such a small proportion of the map.) Overall, the population of the US is fairly tightly clustered with broad open spaces in between. On the linked map, you could drop the entire nation of Japan, which has approximately the population of the US, into the gap between the Piedmont Atlantic and Florida/Gulf Coast regions. You could drop Europe (even the empty parts in the east) with twice the population of the US, easily into either of the gaps west of the Mississippi. But what high speed rail advocates also miss is that the the Japanese and European models work not only because of gross population density... But also because high speed/long range rail is only one level of a larger and more complex system of mass/public transit. The trains we see most often in anime (and which the questioner was asking about), aren't Shinkansen - they're local (metro) and regional systems. These systems, with the exception of a few megalopoli, are largely absent in the US. (And the ones that do exist are generally tightly focused on getting commuters from distant suburbs and exurbs to the downtown core and back again - not on general transit.) |
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kryten2x4p
Posts: 32 Location: United Kingdom |
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In one episode of the anime Boku no Imōto wa "Ōsaka Okan" anime#14906, the main characters talk about several of the pre-paid rail cards such as the Suica, Pasmo and the appropriately named Ikoca!
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leongsh
 Posts: 181 |
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ICOCA. The IC card issued by JR West. |
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peno
Posts: 349 |
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I remember a scene in Digimon Adventure where the kids are buying tickets for their trip from Hikarigaoka (renamed Highton View Tarrace in dub, for whatever reason) to Odaiba. But that is for Tokyo subway, not trains. Also there, they will use their money for next trip to buy hamburgers, so they had to use hitchhiking.
Also, in Super Lovers, there is scene where Ren assures Haru he'll be fine using train, only to be proven wrong, when he's unable to get through the turnstile. It was supposed to be funny scene, but I actually did not laugh, since I am pretty sure I would've found myself in the same predicament, should I ever visit Tokyo. Thank goodness there are not turnstiles in public transport where I live. BTW, Ren in anime is using contactless card shaped as blue and white cat. I guess that's fictional, but does something similar exist in real world? |
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TheAncientOne
 Posts: 1871 Location: USA (mid-south) |
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Japan's population was estimated at under 127 million in 2015, vs. over 322 million for the United States at the beginning of this year. A better comparison would have been to California, which has slightly more land area than Japan (163,696 vs. 145,936 square miles), but a population of less than 40 million (and is the state with the largest population). |
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5824 Location: Virginia, United States |
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When I was stationed there for three years, for a single person the train system is not bad. But when you have a family and travel short distances a lot it makes more sense to have a car.
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Well, I have been following news about the California High Speed Rail, which is currently the most earnest attempt at building such a thing in the United States. Costs have ballooned because the team in charge of building it keeps facing litigious NIMBIs at every place where someone lives. There's also constant rethinking of planned routes to comply with environmental guidelines and local laws. Fresno, in particular, has generated nonstop opposition, and some people there seem willing to pay everything they have so that the California High Speed Rail does not happen. (As a southern Californian who's sick of traffic congestion and has relatives in northern California, I would love the High Speed Rail.) It seems that in the western world, construction of rail transportation is a love-it-or-hate-it affair. On the one hand, I can understand why some people might be upset of having to live next to train tracks. On the other, rail designers know this and try to keep rails either in industrial areas, at the outskirts of cities, or underground.
Public transportation also has kind of a dim view in many Americans' minds. It is, after all, a country where cars are a status symbol. As a result, even road-based public transporation in major cities is highly inadequate, or in the case of most of Texas, nonexistent. Public works projects in the United States that involves building new street-level roads, bridges, and highways greatly outnumber projects to introduce new means of public transportation. (Not sure where stuff like taxis, Uber, and Lyft come in though.)
Yeah, that's incredibly cheap and affordable, and I'd take the train more often if the ones around here charged that little. The last time I checked prices for our local Metrolink rail service, a round-trip ticket from my nearest station to Glendale, CA cost US$17. I'd estimate that's around...18 kilometers one way, I think. I forget how much month passes run at, but it would've only been worth it if I took the round trip six days a week the whole month long. If I missed even two days, it would've been cheaper to pay the US$17 each day. |
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SWAnimefan
Posts: 634 |
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For the most part yes, there just isn't enough people to make it work. Mainly because American culture doesn't revolve around mass transit, like Japan does. So there wouldn't be enough money to sustain operations. Secondly, there is the issue of infrastructure. Upgrading older rails to handle high-speed rails. And adding more tracks, which means having to tear down homes (which isn't popular). This is somewhat the reason why California isn't gung-ho regarding Elon Musk's Hyperloop. Too expensive. |
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configspace
Posts: 3717 |
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It would make much more sense to take Germany's approach with unlimited speed Autobahns instead of rails. This would be cheaper, supplement existing infrastructure, and provide an economic boost to the various towns they go through as people will want to use it. Car culture is huge in America. The culture as represented by Initial D is comparatively niche and absolutely tiny in Japan.
In the US, rail just makes no sense. I've ridden Amtrak a couple times before. There are no sights, it was slower and less convenient than driving. For high speed rail/bullettrain, for so much extra cost (and all of its bonds will ultimately be paid for by raising taxes) the absolute best it can do is match the times of inter-city commuter planes, like Southwest. And it'll have a tough time competing. Forget about inter-state travel. The whole car culture is tied to suburban sprawl which some regard with disdain, but allows for cheap, convenient, high quality of life options for many and affordable business options (i.e. office spaces outside of expensive downtown metro areas) Last edited by configspace on Sat Sep 24, 2016 3:05 am; edited 1 time in total |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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The problem with putting up more highways and freeways (and bridges and other car paths) is that they are soon filled up by increased traffic. This was a phenomenon noticed in New York City when the government went on a bridge-building spree, under the idea that NYC's traffic problems were coming from people having to take long routes to get to bridges. What happened instead was that more drivers were present on the roads, and the new bridges became just as jammed as the old ones.
What actually works better is road dieting. This is a means of road construction that deliberately makes drivers go slower, which causes fewer traffic jams. There was a street that underwent a road dieting program, and now it's only jammed a few times of the day rather than all day and all night long. The Autobahn system was created at a time when there weren't nearly as many cars on the road as there are now. Now there are so many motorists in cities whose roads were never designed for the load they presently carry, and engineers work hard to keep up and keep traffic bearable. I would recommend the book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What it Says about Us) by Tom Vanderbilt. It's about the psychology of being behind the wheel and why they cause problems on the road, as well as programs to alleviate these problems both successful and unsuccessful and why. |
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configspace
Posts: 3717 |
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While I have not read his book, I have head of road dieting and I simply don't agree. It's a central planners dream but a nightmare for transportation freedom. It is not solving the problem of allowing people to go wherever they want, whenever they want, how they want, as a quickly as possible. Second increased traffic by use of bridges are not comparable to general traffic during routine travel because of increased bottlenecking. Road dieting may alleviate traffic in certain areas only because it simply shifts the problem but it doesn't increase traffic bandwidth. In CA, the problems have greatly reduced through opposite measure of increasing bandwidth: widening the freeways and using smarter onramp lights. The Autobahn system DOES work. Brilliantly in fact. And may be the best solution for costs spent to actually address the problem of quick, cheap, easy and convenient transportation
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Maybe we've been seeing totally different places, but whenever I see widening of freeways and the building of more roads, jams are alleviated. But then a few months pass, and the wider freeway becomes just as jammed, and the new roads become jammed too. One example I can think of was the widening of the Interstate 5 south going into Anaheim. It is 7 lanes on both sides (used to be 5) and gets jammed in the morning until around noon. Further down south into Santa Ana, the carpool lane, of all things becomes jammed, though that's more of a case of poor planning, as it's because of a series of carpool-only entrances that all merge into the same lane you can't escape from. Widened roads become jammed because the locals react to this new space by driving more often, or traffic gets diverted to the widened road under the idea that they can handle a bigger load. That is, building new roads and widening others is a Sisyphean task, because as you create more driving space, more cars will appear to fill up that space.
A major cause of traffic congestion, especially ones that seem to have no reason for it (that is, traffic suddenly clears up in some random part of the road), is that there were a series of drivers (or sometimes just one) who were moving significantly faster than the rest of the traffic. These hotshots do a lot of lane weaving and force drivers around them to slow down, which creates a chain reaction and induces congestion. That's what road dieting is for: It prevents this sort of traffic jam from ever happening. (The street I'm talking about in the previous post is Maclay Avenue in the city of San Fernando, by the way. Used to cause lots of problems. As the major north-south road in the city, lots of people took it. They reduced it by one lane in each direction and gave the sidewalks around it an irregular shape. Now I can travel down Maclay in half the time I used to.) Road dieting also discourages people from driving around unless they must. A lot of heavy traffic you see when it isn't the morning or evening rush are leisure drivers who are either out on trivial errands or just driving for fun. |
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Paiprince
 Posts: 593 |
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As someone who absolutely abhors cars (they are unnecessarily finicky moneysinks), I'm all for a faster and more timely railway system in the US. Also, convince these employees to make more of an effort to call out their destinations. I've missed my stop several times because the conductor can't even be bothered to say a full sentence. Not gonna fly in Japan.
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P€|\||§_|\/|ast@
 Posts: 3498 Location: IN your nightmares |
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I don't think I've ever ridden a train or subway in Japan without a PA of some sort announcing the upcoming station. Plus near or above every exit is a computer monitor very clearly and prominently telling you the upcoming station and the direction to exit to get to station exit.
The only complaint I have with the Tokyo metro system is, if you are not using a transit card and instead buying by the trip, you have to know or look up how much it costs. I like it better in Seoul and most large cities in China, where you just need to tap the name of your destination on the machine and it instantly spits out a ticket. |
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