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 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.

    > "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".

This is a very interesting point, especially in light of another article discussed here a couple days ago[0] about why Switzerland has 25 Gbit/s internet and why the US and Germany don't. One of the main points of the article was that the fiber optics infrastructure is (or should be treated as) a natural monopoly:

> The rational solution is to build the infrastructure once, as a shared, neutral asset, and let different companies compete to provide the service over that infrastructure. That’s how water works. That’s how electricity works in most places. And in Switzerland, that’s how fiber optic internet works.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652400

EDIT: Turns out the Japanese railway infrastructure is not truly owned by the railway companies but instead leased from a government-owned institution, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47773556 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47766873

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762060

And the top comment was mine, pointing out a bunch of factual mistakes and misleading claims:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47765032

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.

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).

That's why they have cisterns under Tokyo which can handle a 400 year flood, and more germane to this discussion, railways which make no sense. There are railways built in the '90s which wend their way through a dozen of mountain passes to provide rail service to tiny towns with just a few thousand residents. There's no way you can justify paying the maintenance on something like that, and indeed in recent years they've been shutting these kinds of lines down.

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.

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.

One thing I don't see discussed enough: the cost of car ownership in Tokyo is a huge factor. Monthly parking alone can cost as much as renting a studio apartment. In central Tokyo, parking for a single day can run close to $200.

When your country is this small and land is this expensive, trains just make more sense for most people. I think the rail network developed as much out of necessity as anything else.

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 wouldn't work in the US because of X". X is usually land area. Ok, but what about China?

- "We should fix some [corner case]" like the cost of parking;

- "It's too expensive here". Why is it expensive?

The key theme from all of this is central planning. You might be tempted to say that Japanese railways are private. Yes and no. And they certainly didn't start that way.

Back to the article, I find it weird to write an article in 2026 about the effectiveness of railways without talking about China. China is only mentioned once and that was in terms of passenger numbers.

Also, China's railroad network largely didn't even exist in 2005, certainly not the high speed rail. Look at the top metro systems by rail length [1] and 11 of the top 12 are in China (Moscow is the outlier). All of those systems are pretty new too. Chengdu at #4 was started in 2010.

According to this [2], Chengdu's population in 2010 was ~7.5 million. So you can't really argue the city was designed for it or it built early.

Most arguments against regional and metro rail systems can be debunked with "But China".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems

[2]: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20480/chen...

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.

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.

Suddenly all the businesses will be very pro-rail, as they benefit both directly and indirectly from its competent management, capacity growth and reach, even far from their own business. Especially far from their business.

Not claiming to know this works, but there are often many ways to solve a problem once the problem is well characterized. This insight that rail creates a great deal of indirect value is really helpful.

Indirect value is a battery. Voltage. Ready to power economic growth along whatever path the created-value to investment-return circuit gets closed.

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.)

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.

Workers can afford to live off low wages because the cost of goods is low. A meal in Japan, a very, very good and delicious meal of pork curry is about $8 USD. That's it.

In the US it's the opposite. Wages are high. Cost of food and rent is very high. That means that they have to charge high prices. But then it's so high people look for alternatives and then traffic drops. Then they cut jobs so it's dirty, unkept and dangerous. It's a vicious cycle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dKiEY0UOtA

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.

South Koreans then took over. In between were the Taiwanese.

The next wave will be mainland China.

For the past 2 years I moved somewhere where I did not need to have a car or to drive for pretty much any reason. I understand I am fortunate here but it seems like such a huge oversight to have designed literally all of our society around cars and vehicles instead of efficient public transport and better designed cities.

Imagine, for example, that you stumble upon an island of amazing acrobats, they can do fantastic feats. And they are also cannibals. Now the temptation is just too great to say "cannibalism aids in acrobatic skills. Learn from the secrets of the best acrobats". In other words, when looking at a different society, there are just too many differences for you to identify what makes a specific industry work, and what is just cannibalism, unless you do some very, very serious investigative analysis, which this article is not, and even though what you are doing will have high error rates. What you need is the opposite -- a society very close to the US, but with amazing rail. Then emphasizing differences is much more likely to hit on something important for rail.

I could argue the reason Japan has amazing rail was the deflationary period in which the government went on a massive infrastructure spree to stimulate the economy via deficit spending, and this was because of the high Japanese propensity to save in the aftermath of the Plaza accords, and profound risk aversion, as well as their extremely peaceful and law abiding social norms. Good luck on having any of those approaches work well in the US. But hey, once again people focus on their own concerns. I'm sure for someone obsessed with, say, land use rights, they will point out that the what is preventing us from having amazing rail is lack of a Japanese style land management system. And for someone else focused on toll roads, they will say if we had more toll roads, then we would have great public transportation. Of course, India is filled with toll roads, and they are not known for great public transportation. And I could also give examples of nations that did huge infrastructure deficit spending, and they didn't get great infrastructure. Etc. Everyone sees the world through the lens of their own concerns. Articles like this, that don't even try to rebut the counter arguments or account for concern-bias, are not impressive.

If you can drive somewhere in an hour - you would never take a commercial plane, etc etc

Trains peak around the 2-5 hour driving range. Which is perfect for Japan’s geographies

So the reason trains are good in Japan is that they’re best suited for the distances present in Japan

That's not a cause but a consequence.

They just "vanished"! Man, I hate it when that happens. You leave a railroad outside with out a lid on it for too long and it just, you know, evaporates! What a drag...

What an amazing evasion of reality/truth, another classic use of the passive voice...