The secrets of the Shinkansen
worksinprogress.news95 points by WillDaSilva 5 hours ago
95 points by WillDaSilva 5 hours ago
"The Japanese love cars, but they take trains because they have the best railway system in the world"
That's exactly it. It's not because of some cultural bias or whatever.
I'm in Japan. I use trains because it's so very easy and it's so very reliable. It's simply the best option for travelling. If I wish to go to Tokyo? I check a website quickly, I look up the best connection for my schedule (easy to find), I may pay in advance, or not. I take my bicycle and go ten minutes to the nearest station, park the bicycle in the bicycle parking there, and off I go. As it's a small station I change to a limited express train (where I've booked a seat) after ten minutes, then, after another forty minutes I reach a big station and I switch to the Shinkansen and I'm off to Tokyo. I'm relaxed all the time. I buy a coffee on the train, and/or I buy coffee and lunch at the station and bring on the train.
Every other way of getting there is way more complex, and would take way more time.
Maybe some trains could be more redneck coded somehow? Steam trains with sweaty stokers and buffalo shooting from the windows of course had plenty of that, but how to bring something from that aesthetic to the present? Bar carriage with sports screens still sounds still a bit passive and cliche. Maybe a gym car? There are already kid and pet cars after all at least here. In German trains you get a real glass pint for your beer, I think that's a big plus.
> “An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport.”
Japan's railroad system has a big geographic advantage - the country is long and narrow. The railroad system is primarily a long end to end line with short crosswise branches.[1] That's an efficient structure. The branch lines don't have to be fast. Many are still narrow gauge, at 3 ft 6 in.
The US had to fill a huge area in the railroad era. That left a lot of underutilized track once the road network got good.
> the country is long and narrow
The northeast and west coast metropolitan corridors are similar, and combined have comparable populations, densities, and distances as Japan. Yet we can't even build a single high-speed line. And for all the excuses about the difficulty of building rail through developed regions, the existing rights of ways and infrastructure in both the NE and California are comparable to what everybody else has had to work with, at least in the past 50 years. The density of the NE is nothing like what you see elsewhere in the world, especially Asia, and Japan and China specifically.
It's lack of political will and ambition, period, by both the community and leadership. And excusing our inability by pointing at the hurdles, insinuating that others succeeded because they didn't face the same challenges, only perpetuates the paralysis.
> The density of the NE is nothing like what you see elsewhere in the world, especially Asia, and Japan and China specifically.
Yeah, I defy anyone who claims the US can't build trains "because of density" to fly to Tokyo, and actually take the Seibu Shinjuku line west from Shinjuku station. Look at those buildings built right next to the tracks, for many, many kilometers. People live in those -- if the windows opened, you could reach out and touch the laundry on the balconies that overlook the tracks [1].
Compared to that (and let's be clear: that's one average line in west Tokyo), even the Acela line in the east coast is a bad joke, density-speaking. The US doesn't build decent trains because the US is corrupt and sclerotic and run by incompetent people, not because of some mythical structural advantage in Magical Asia.
[1] I have no idea how people manage to live like that -- these trains are loud, and run basically from 4AM until 1AM every day -- but it's not lost on me that the fact that people can build houses right up next to the tracks might be the true advantage of Magical Japan.
I think a big part of it is also that (partly because of the necessity of building for earthquake resistance), Japanese construction is a lot more robust than American housing, and also tends to have extremely good soundproofing on windows and doors. Actually, it's most of the rest of the world, except the US.
> Japanese construction is a lot more robust than American housing, and also tends to have extremely good soundproofing on windows and doors.
This must be a different Japan than the one I'm familiar with, where exterior walls are often uninsulated and only a few inches thick and single-pane windows are still the norm in a lot of housing. I wouldn't be surprised if soundproofing were better for railroad-adjacent buildings, but compared to American homes the soundproofing here is surprisingly poor.
> Japanese construction is a lot more robust than American housing, and also tends to have extremely good soundproofing on windows and doors.
Oh, you’re definitely engaging in Magical Japan, here.
While building standards have certainly improved in the past 20 years, the average Japanese house is built just strong enough not to fall over when someone farts. In particular, windows tend to be single pane, and you’re lucky if they block a strong wind, let alone noise.
I’m exaggerating a little, but not by much.
As the sister comment said - the houses are just strong enough not to fall over in a "normal", all-the-time earthquake. Our house sways a lot under typhoons and far-away earthquakes (far away = long wavelengths). It's only relatively recent that building codes have been updated to handle real earthquakes without falling over like a house of cards. Remember the Noto earthquake Januar 1, 2024? Large areas didn't have a single house still standing.
(Which is why we're now tearing down our old house and building a new, stronger one. Post-war Japan was more concerned with a) building a lot of houses, and b) keep lots of jobs, which meant, as far as houses were concerned, building use-and-throw-away houses. Then build another. And another. And don't talk to me about sound proofing.. it's non-existing. What with no insulation in walls.)
When I lived in Japan it was in a relatively recent (last 10 years) but not brand new apartment block - Maybe if you are talking about a rural area or an old postwar Showa era house, sure. But either way the sound proofing is worlds better than any new construction in the US.
I'm in a 20 year old two-storey apartment right now (while we're building a new house), and the sound-proofing isn't non-existing but not as bad as some other apartments I'm aware of (where you can't make a sound without the neighbors start knocking on the walls/floors, and you're privy to thing you don't actually want to hear..) - but we can hear every footstep when the neighbors walk the stairs to their upper floor. The rooms which are more distant are fine, we don't actually hear them talking. Most of the time.
> these trains are loud, and run basically from 4AM until 1AM every day
Not that bad actually. You get used to it and even if trains are frequent they don't need 10 minutes to pass by your home.
I live in a unique community which is sandwiched between a public-transit light rail line, and a freight line as well.
The light rail can run a frequency of 12-20 minutes in each direction. The freight's schedule: who really knows?
But the freight train is generally inhibited from sounding its horn or bells near residential neighborhoods. So, unless I am really paying attention while awake, I cannot detect it passing by, no matter the size.
The light rail is audible from where I sit, usually, but only just. It toots the horn mostly as it passes, but it's not disruptive or annoying to me, anyway. I sort of enjoy the white noise it all makes. There are cars that do a lot worse.
I think that the architecture here is helpful, too. The buildings are clustered around a central courtyard, and really insulated from the road noise. At any given time, there may be folks splashing in the pool, or running the jets on the hot tub, anyway.
The light rail stations are a major convenience to living here, and the train noise is absolutely the least of our worries!
I've heard people say that, but I find it hard to believe. I think I'd go nuts. And sure, they don't take 10 minutes to pass, but the busy lines (like the Seibu line I mentioned) are running at least 2-3 trains every 10 minutes, so they might as well be continuous.
The houses built next to the crossing points, in particular, have always boggled my mind. BING BING BING BING BING....
I noticed when I visited Japan that the crossing chimes quieten once the barriers have fully lowered.
Just another example of Japanese attention to detail and human oriented design.
Not where I am standing right now!
(I mean, maybe you’re right in some places, but it’s certainly not everywhere. Ironically, I happened to be standing next to a completely empty crossing, gates down, bonging away, while reading your comment.)
The nearest crossings where I live indeed stop the chimes when the barriers have been lowered. This doesn't actually make much of a difference really, because the train arrives only a few seconds after, and, because it's a local line, there are never more than three cars in the train so it passes very quickly.
Not that I'm bothered by the chimes at all. And grandson loves them.
The advatange they have is that all 4 of their major metropolitan areas are in a straight line across flat land. The enemy of high-speed is any diviations from flat and straigh. On he accela top speed can be maintained less then 40% of the trip.
All the major metro areas on the Acela corridor are also on a straight line, on significantly flatter land than Japan. Notice how the Acela never spends 10+ minute periods in long, deep tunnels under mountain ranges. The Acela primarily spends most of the trip going below 100 mph because it is operating on 100+ year old infrastructure that has only ever been upgraded piecemeal as it starts to fail.
It's always feels funny to me when taking the Acela between Boston and NYC that you go screaming along at 150mph... for a small portion of track in Rhode Island. The rest of the time you're going much slower. It's almost like, why even bother for that small section?
The Shinkansen was a very different experience when I took it.
That's got zero to do with anything. you do not need to add rail to the whole country.
As an example SF Bay Area and Switzerland are about the same size, SF has double the population density. It has a Bay, Switzerland has mountains. Switzerland has like 10x the trains. There's no reason SF Bay couldn't too.
It's similar for most metro areas. LA used to have a huge train system. Bad insentives and government policies killed it. They're adding new ones back but they're adding them in the worst possible way, making them unprofitable and designed only for people who can't afford cars means they'll only be a money sink at best, or they'll get underfunded and decrepit at worst
Even the lowest density US states have most of the population in corridors or areas with sufficient density.
E.g. Montana used to have passenger rail through the most densely populated Southern part of the state. That region has comparable density to regions of Norway that have regular rail service. (There are efforts to restart passenger service in Southern Montana)
And it's not like places like Norway have rail everywhere either - the lower threshold for density where rail is considered viable is just far lower.
The actual proportion of the US population that lives in areas with too low density to support rail is really tiny.
There is no excuse for the US’s failure. Many countries have large areas to cover. China is a similar size and has massive HSR coverage. The US could too if they didn’t waste all the money on corruption.
China also has nationalized rail systems. The major reason for the failure in the US is that the rail lines are not publicly owned. The reason the rail systems never got upgraded and Amtrak couldn't deploy high speed rail everywhere (despite it being a national priority in the 70s, 80s, and 90s) is that outside of the northeast corridor, Amtrak doesn't own the lines and couldn't get the owners to allow Amtrak to upgrade them for passenger high speed rail.
> China also has nationalized rail systems. The major reason for the failure in the US is that the rail lines are not publicly owned.
The article we're discussing explains that Japan has the best passenger rail system in the world, and which happens to be privatized, along with privately owned track. So which one is it? Go figure.
I believe the Japanese private rail companies also own the lines where their traffic is. This would explain a lot. There are other countries (including my native one) where the trains are run by one company and the lines are owned by another. This does.not.work. For what seems like obvious reasons. There's no economic gain for the owner of the infrastructure to spend money, quite the opposite in fact.
In every EU country the infrastructure company (companies) is separate from companies that operate trains, with some usually small exceptions.
Russia is far larger and far less populated, it's an economic backwater and a cultural dead end. Yet despite that they have rail connecting their country together.
So did France. There is a common factor at play with Russia. Has little to do with the country's shape.
It's like saying certain rats solve the maze because the path is simpler. Except that the failing rats happen to have a different incentive.
> So did France. There is a common factor at play with Russia. Has little to do with the country's shape.
You'll have to make yourself clearer, I have no idea what you're implying
Once you get past the Urals, most of Russia's development is along an east west axis until you reach Baikal and the the far east. Also as a Marxist dictatorship for some years, there was little emphasis on independent travel (cars etc)
To call Russia a "cultural dead end" is a bit much, considering all the great artists of various kinds that country has produced. In fact, you'll find that famous Russian novels like Anna Karenina and Doctor Zhivago feature trains as motifs.
Great point about trains being featured in Russian novels. I imagine trains are well-represented in Japanese literature too, as well as film and maybe poetry. That's an angle I'd enjoy investigating further for other cultures. Surely the U.S. is more of a "car culture", but even offhand I can think of, for example, the novel On the Road with train-hopping having a significant role.
"The US could too if they didn’t waste all the money on corruption."
China is also corrupt, but it is a dictatorship with massive central planning. Central planning leads to wastage and human costs in many areas but it is good at producing new infrastructure.
Japan is also mostly mountains and is prone to natural disasters like earthquakes and Typhoon induced floods.
Sonce our first trip in 2017 at least two railways we rode have been damaged enough to be partially inoperable and under lengthy restoration work - Hisatsu line (washed away bridges) and Kurobe Gorge railway (bridge destroyed by earthquake).
Here in Spain a huge chunk of the population lives along the coast, so obviously what we need is a radial network along the coast, with a few spokes connecting to Madrid in the center. But for whatever reason it's impossible to make any trains that go anywhere other than the capital.
The Netherlands is a similar shape to the continental contiguous United States yet we have an excellent public transport system. Very good trains and every population has awesome cycling infrastructure.
The US could have all of this and more in their populated areas. They're the richest country in the world. Why is the infrastructure so neglected? It's clearly a choice.
The question to ask is "who owns the rail lines?". That matters for having a good rail system. It's basically the same problem for why the US doesn't have fiber internet available everywhere, too.
Good parallel. An article recently explained how Switzerland has the fastest fibre optical network: all companies share the same cabling. Dig once. No need to hook the property or do anything when switching provider.
US army can deploy air force, tankers, soldiers and all the logistics together with Burger King anywhere in the world within days and somehow people that pay for it still think a simple rail in their home turf is impossible.
Isn't Netherlands trying to deter from car use by laws and taxes and at the same time funneling public money into railroads and bike infrastructure?
>The US could have all of this and more in their populated areas.
Probably people in US have other priorities and that means there are other public policies.
I dunno, centre right national governments in recent years have been pretty car friendly. Driving can be cheaper for family outings. For two adults and two teens to go from Utrecht to Amsterdam and back (26 minutes each way) is €48 (with discount if you buy a flex pass monthly) or €80 without a discount. Suddenly driving is pretty competitive
The USA's westward expansion was indeed facilitated by the timely development of railroads, and so many of the cities were built around the ability to haul freight and service depots along the rail lines, much like ancient cities sprang up alongside rivers and bays because of boat shipping.
However, the United States is also a nation built upon the motor vehicle, and our much-vaunted freeway system here was built deliberately as a national defense measure that could easily move materiel and troops between cities and states, in the event of a domestic invasion or future wars on our own soil. The freeways enjoyed deep investments also due to commercial utility, and again, many cities and habitations sprang up at the nexus of various freeways, as truck-based shipping could service them as well.
I think one of the main obstacles to rail lines in the United States is our car-centrism, and many motorists of any socio-economic class really, really hate trains and public transit of any kind, and any other type of transport that may impinge on their freedom to drive wherever they want on as many highways as possible.
Therefore it is extraordinarily difficult for railways to get good rights-of-way. Amtrak is a redheaded stepchild. Commuter rail may be better respected in places where it was established, like the Eastern Seaboard, but if I asked any voter or motorist here, they would be voting against any sort of rail project whatsoever.
Japanese rail companies are allowed to buy land, then build infrastructure, then enjoy the increased value of said land. American rail is hobbled by the extraction of increased land values by those who already own land by the stations. Of course, freeways are similar, but people don’t mind roads losing money.
There are also other factors. Heavy bombing during the war had the effect of clearing a lot of previous infrastructure so they were in effect building from scratch in some areas.
>the country is long and narrow
This is a little counterintuitive but it does make a difference.
I recently moved from a coastal city (that is very linear) to a landlocked city spread evenly in all directions. I had naively assumed the new city would be easier to get around in, since on average places would be closer to you. But the first city has decent commuter rail, which meant I could get to the other end of the city in an hour, and use cabs for last mile connectivity.
I'm sure you can have good public transit in "round" cities too, but it is certainly more difficult to plan.
>I'm sure you can have good public transit in "round" cities too, but it is certainly more difficult to plan.
You don't have to be "sure", take a look at London which is a "round" city with excellent public transit.
The subway system in Kyoto (Karasuma line) is operated by the local government. I visited during the busiest time of the year (Gion matsuri), and the trains were not overcrowded, were frequent and arrived on the dot. The subway system is nicely air conditioned which was pleasant as I visited during a heatwave.
I'm mostly in favor of privatization, but this is an example where the local government provide an exceptional service which is in no way inferior to the privately operated ones.
It’s fascinating to read but I have a hard time imagining a public western railway provider could evolve into a train based mega corporation doing real estate and health services.
The Swiss SBB also has a real estate division, which makes them a lot of money actually (I think a lot of that comes from leases from shops in train stations).
They also have an energy company which runs some hydroelectric power stations.
Transport for London (TfL) have a fledgling property development arm called Places for London which aims to try and replicate some of the successes of Japanese railway companies. They propose the mooted Bakerloo line extension is partially subsidised by over-station developments.
TfL can barely build some flats in Zone 2 without the locals rioting like they're destroying a Cotswolds village. Actually, it can barely fix the literal busiest station in the country without a bunch of minor celebrity detractors riling up everyone about how much of a travesty it is that we're doing it.
Without the public or central government support, the efforts you're talking about amount to very little.
> Actually, it can barely fix the literal busiest station in the country
Liverpool Street isn't managed by TfL, it's managed by Network Rail.
That's actually pretty common.
Deutsche Bahn does everything from real estate to infrastructure to truck companies (no longer in Europe, though, they had to sell that off) to car sharing to energy production to IT development to trading lumber, workforce rental and startup venture capital. The list changes every few days, so some they may no longer do, others they will now do. It's a megacorp.
Many of these have grown out of the original business model.
Because most western train companies are nationalized or co owned by the state. They don't even have to turn a profit.
These mixed companies can be very confusing to tourists especially. I'm always answering questions from tourists who are confused why they can't buy a ticket to where they want to go.
If you intend to do a fair amount of travelling and your stay is <3 weeks, it may be worth getting a JR Pass[1]. It doesn't work for all lines, but does include the Shinkansen and several of the major inner-city lines. Buses too.
Probably not worth it if you're only visiting one city as the pass is quite expensive. There are regional tourist passes though.
Unfortunately the 70% price rise on the JR pass back in 2023 made it much less likely to be economic for most people compared to just buying tickets as you go, even for trips that visit more than one city. Last time I was there I did a loop up from Tokyo to Hokkaido and back by rail, and it was still cheaper to buy individual tickets. (There are obviously still some itineraries where it works out cheaper, but it's much less of an "obviously good idea for most people" than it was back before 2023.)
Almost everything works with Suica, no? Although to be fair I guess tourists are _more_ likely to use the heritage lines with slightly different rules.
Tourists are often buying paper tickets. There's no way for a foreign Android phone to use a digital Suica, so people with Android are stuck with a physical card or paper tickets, and there's a lot of outdated information online that the physical cards are in low supply (They were last year but this year they're not).
When we visited Tokyo last year, what stopped us from even trying was the online information we came across was unclear and suggested we could only get the physical cards at the airport and at some tourist office, and we forgot to look for it at the airport... I don't know if that is correct or not, but compare Oyster in London which is advertised at practically every corner store, so even if you get into town not knowing the system, it's hard not to find somewhere you can get a card (or you can just use contactless - I haven't had an oyster card in years).
The UK is completely chaotic ticket-wise on a national level, though.
> we could only get the physical cards at the airport and at some tourist office, and we forgot to look for it at the airport
Little over a decade ago I did exactly the same. I ended up buying a Suica card at Ueno station from a clerk, which was a bit of an adventure since she was eager to help but barely spoke any English and I barely spoke any Japanese. Together we skillfully massacred both languages with an ad-hoc pidgin and lots of gesturing. Due to an issue with my wireless hotspot I only had an old school phrasebook at my disposal, which was about as helpful as the infamous Monty Python sketch implies. The airport seemed much more convenient as a tourist since everyone there at the very least spoke basic English. At the time it was certainly possible to get a Suica card at a major train station, though admittedly not easy.
The card mentioned in the guides you read is the "Welcome Suica" that's only for tourists.
You can get a normal Suica just about anywhere.
Is this an Android thing? My US iOS works fine with digital Suica.
Apple doesn't make regional variants of the phone, so all models have the technology built-in, even if it's disabled by default. Android phones outside of Japan lack Suica support.
And Pixel phones have the tech, but you need to flash a Japanese ROM to be able to use it.
It's basically one card for everything, independent of company, in Japan. Only certain trips require tickets from specific companies.
I'm drawn by the style and aesthetics of the charts in combination with the fonts used in them.
I was hoping for some 'technical' secrets.
Like: you can actually change the lightbulbs for the headlights of the Series 0 train while it being underway - there is a service hatch that opens to a human-sized service area accessible from the driver's cabin which allows such repairs.
It's a good article, but I think the "it's not culture, just good governance" idea is a little hand wavy. The two bleed into each other greatly. The fact that houses are more disposable and wealth is less intergenerational in Japan does a lot to tamp down the NIMBY issues that plague e.g. the UK.
The UK is so far gone that the transport authority in it's largest city can't revamp stations or do add-on development without literal years of hand wringing. And even then it's often rejected or reduced in the end.
London is probably the worst-governed, or worst-planned, city of its peers. NYC has famously bad governance but at least it actually has its own government.
The national government controls all London budgets, the Mayor has no power, there's no legislative body for the city (GLA is not one), and there are 33 different borough councils that don't owe the Mayor anything.
The idea that culture can be divorced from other aspects of society seems like one of the biggest misconceptions of the 20th century.
>The UK is so far gone that the transport authority in it's largest city can't revamp stations or do add-on development without literal years of hand wringing. And even then it's often rejected or reduced in the end.
They just finished a line that traverses the whole city. It's 73 miles from end to end and carries one seventh of the UK's rail journeys (600,000 trips per day).
The Elizabeth Line is basically at the bare minimum for a global Asian city. It's not even that good by comparison. It's really a joke that London only has one line of that caliber and it took them literally decades to build.
So it's touted as some great success but to me it's a sign of failure. They'll say similar things if they ever finish HSR in California. Yeah I'm sure the end product will be fine but the whole process is disgraceful.
Never mind the fact that the Elizabeth Line is only so over-utilized because London completely fails at building density in and around its center. So it has to make its people live in zone 30 and sit on the train for two hours every day.
> At its most extreme, three separate commuter lines compete for the traffic between Osaka and the port city of Kobe, running in parallel, sometimes fewer than 500 meters apart.
Sometimes fewer than 100 meters apart. Or connecting to each other's with a bridge.
> the most striking institutional feature of Japanese rail is that it is privately owned by a throng of competing companies.
Knowing the author I knew it was going to be his main argument before even opening the blog post. And it's obviously wrong, these companies don't compete with one another, they all have a local monopoly. (The article itself acknowledges that and even acknowledges the organizational benefits of such monopolies, but the author could refrain himself from praising the virtue of competition nonetheless…)
Title should be "The secrets of the Shinkansen" which is odd for a (very well written) piece about Japanese commuter trains (non-shinkansen versions).
Maybe it's a carry on though "This is the third article we have released from Issue 23".
On the magazine itself, it seems to be labeled "Why Japan has such good railways"[1] instead
[1] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-japan-has-such-good-rai...