Why Japan has such good railways

> Japan is one of the only countries to have privatized parking. In Europe and North America, vast quantities of parking space is socialized: municipalities own the streets and allow people to park on them at low or zero cost. Initially with the intention of encouraging the provision of more parking spaces, Japan made it illegal to park on public roads or pavements without special permission. Before someone buys a car, they must prove that they have a reserved night-time space on private land, either owned or leased.

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".

“Japan’s liberal land use regulation makes it straightforward to build new neighborhoods next to railway lines, giving commuters easy access to city centers. It also enables the densification of these centers, which means that commuters have more places they want to go.”

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."

I think this is it. The economic model incentivizes rail development. (Certainly, part of it is also cultural and legal frameworks that in the US make it very hard for this model to work)

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 made it to the HN front page 4 days ago, under its (terrible) previous name "The secrets of the Shinkansen":

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

The most core reason should be that they built a dense railway network embedded in cities very early on, and developed in a mutually dependent manner; just as the United States, after large-scale highway infrastructure and becoming a pioneer in civil aviation, was destined to become a nation on wheels. Just look at Tokyo: the total length of various lines exceeds 6,000 km, with seamless transfers between subways and mainline trains. The most fundamental reason lies in the topography. Japan is a long, narrow country, where two or three mainline railways are enough to connect the country's core regions. This significantly reduces the cost of the railway "network."

Japanese public transport is good, but no match for the Swiss system. Outside of big cities, the coverage is spotty, and even reasonably large towns are only connected by reserved-only trains every couple of hours that get booked out days in advance. The almost complete lack of digitization is also remarkable (reservations have to be made with machines in the stations). There are other annoyances such as the public transport in Tokyo shutting down completely at midnight. In contrast, the Swiss government-owned system delivers usable connectivity to almost any human settlement, even most mountain villages. The ticket prices are also not so different, which is surprising considering the large difference of salaries in the two countries.

It's generally regarded that Hong Kong has the best subway in the world. There are many reasons for this, but one cannot be overstated: Hong Kong's geography. A huge portion of the city consists of long thin urban corridors sandwiched between mountains and the sea. As a result, Hong Kong need concentrate its funding on only a few subway lines to support a huge portion of the population.

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.

This is a great article, but I think it’s hard to ignore that Japan’s culture of harmony is a big part of why they were able to choose sensible regulations that benefitted everyone. We struggle to pass even the most sensible land use reforms because entrenched interests want to remain entrenched even if it hurts the system overall.

the railways are excellent, but it's funny. I was just in Kyoto and saw flyers seemingly at every single temple opposing the Hokuriku Shinkansen extension. apparently this type of opposition has always existed (I looked at the history of trains in Japan and originally most Japanese did NOT want it at all because they thought it looked really ugly), like nimbys in USA, but such decisions are apparently federalized according to some Japanese nationals I spoke to, so the nimbys have no power.

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).

I love the Japanese rail system. I am retired, now, so don't travel there, anymore, but I always used to cry, after coming back to the US, and getting on LIRR trains.

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.

Alright whippersnappers, let's chat about the history of railroads in the US.

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.

Japan also has amazing car infrastructure too! Last time I was there visiting family in the mountains, I was quite impressed by the number and quality of tunnels and spiral ramps. The highways are similarly privatized, with tolls like train fares reducing the need for government subsidies.

I live in Tokyo. The rail network here is so dense that even locals like me still get confused figuring out transfers sometimes.

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.

The article is great and very informative. But I feel there's a general vibe of "privatizations are great". For example, they do mention that privatizations didn't work in Argentina (they were a total mess and the total railway went from something like 50k kilometers to two thirds of that - if) but they don't mention enough of it - or other cases - to understand which regulations and why worked the way they did. It feels too much like it's all about integrating corporations, and that's it.

This article is dishonest about the level of privatization in the JR's.

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.

In the West some private equity company would be buying these up, selling off the land and separate businesses, and screwing the rail passengers for all they can, until the whole thing sinks in a sea of debt. Then repeating the formula.

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677481

Japan's railways are amazing. They are amazing because the workers have low wages, so the companies can afford to over-employ, so they have workers that are doing things like wiping the handrails every hour, and ensuring that the bathrooms are meticulous. The trains are very clean and very safe, which encourages use more to the point where everyone uses them and alternatives are starved for money.

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.

Been trying to implement the Japanese point-and-call systems they use for railway safety in LLm work with some success. Think it should theoretically be a good verbose way

I’d think Japan being a long, skinny, population dense country has to help. There’s just more potential in every km of rail laid.

> This liberal zoning system is reinforced by private access to city planning powers. Thirty percent of Japan’s urban land has been subject to land readjustment, where agreement among two thirds of residents and landowners in an area is enough to allow its replanning, including compulsorily taking and demolishing land for amenities and infrastructure.

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.)

I’m glad the article confronts the “culture versus policy” argument. But I think it overlooks the degree to which policy reflects culture. Japanese rail policy reflects a combination of Big Government regulation and privatization that has no significant constituency in the U.S.

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.

Japan's geography also a biggest factor in using trains over roads. Next comes population density. Resource constraints make them use rails over roads for efficiency. We cannot compare US & Japan.

The good thing that happened seems to be that China has essentially 10xed the Japan railways template. I wonder how bad a car centric China would've had been.

A decentralized alternative would be making proportional ownership of railway stock, relative to distance from a rail station, a condition of business permits.

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 have a hard time believing China doesn't make the list with how much rail they have.

Every mode of transportation has a sweet spot in terms of range

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

one thing worth pointing out is that the legacy private railways work because they were never nationalized and had decades to quietly buy up land around stations before it was worth anything. That's really hard to replicate from scratch. This model is great in dense cities but even Japan is still struggling with rural lines

I am skeptical of these "learn the secret of how other culture does X" because it almost always reflects the concerns of the person writing the article rather than shedding light on how a nation does X well. That's because we view the world through the prism of our own concerns, but when we encounter a society that is substantially different from ours -- such as any East Asian society -- then they will have a broad basket of different concerns.

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.

Japan has some of the best infrastructure anywhere. It will be interesting to see if they can keep it that way with their population changing and becoming more geriatric.

successful train lines in Japan are all built between CBD and some spots / attractions. Odakyu: odawara / hakone, Seibu: chichibu, keiou: Takao, toukyuu: Nikko / kinugawa, nankai: Takao.

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.

In Japan there's a cross party political consensus that public transport projects are a net positive for society. That's important when you have work which could take a decade or more to complete - the Chuo maglev project for instance will be complete when my kids are approaching adulthood and they're still not in primary school. I often wonder what we might be able to do in New Zealand (where I'm from) if we had the money and population to support it. But then I remember that one of the two major political parties always cancels or scales back anything ongoing which is public transport related, every single time they're elected, so nothing ever gets done.

One word dedication of Japanese people. They care very dedicated to their country. I respect this thing the most in them. They are very hardworking also.

I've been in Kyushu, in the south.

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.

Russian or Chinese one way better.

the article didn't even compare with China railways, that's weird.

So every time a post about successful public transit comes up, we get the full gamut of responses:

- "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...

Countries like Japan seem to make policy that serves the people.

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.

>Rail travel is much more common in Japan

That's not a cause but a consequence.

I love how the bar graph didn’t include China because China is such a small place, basically a rounding error.

Japanese are the original micro-optimisers. Kaizen.

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

The next wave will be mainland China.

I honestly had no idea they’re so libertarian-capitalist. I figured it was government-led, government-run.

> The Midwest was once criss-crossed by a network of ‘interurbans’, essentially intercity trams. In the United States, these lines have vanished

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...

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I know why Japan has such good railways, and I can also tell you that this blog article doesn't mention any them.

Because they have bad something else.

The introduction lost me. To quote: "Japan’s vast railway network", but it does not address the mouse in the room. Japan is approximately the size of California with a population density that is three times that of California. I would argue that a comparison of rail systems without addressing those critical issues may be interesting but isn't really informative. The issues are complex.