76
[article] Japan is inventing trains
(newatlas.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
76 points (94.2% liked)
Fuck Cars
9663 readers
162 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Switzerland has:
While I haven't travelled in Japan by rail (or any other mode), I have been to Switzerland. From what I've heard, in Japan there are many smaller local stations, where an ancient train arrives a few times a day.
Whereas in Switzerland, it seems like nearly every local station has at least one train per hour.
It is true that in Japan there are many local stations that only arrive a few times a day, but I've found that this is generally for places that are very low traffic; ala middle of nowhere Fukushima countryside train. I'm usually more surpised the train system even goes there than I am surprised by the frequency. For pretty much anywhere you'd expect local trains to exist, they're usually very good. Not trying to compare countries or anything (I've never been to Switzerland). Just describing my experience in Japan (not expert; only lived there ~6mo)
But Switzerland has these tiny local stations too.
For example, this one:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alp_Gr%C3%BCm_railway_station
It's a tiny station with 440 passengers per weekday - yet it seems that two train lines, one of which is hourly stop there. Most of the passengers are likely commuters, so the bulk of all passengers will be during morning and evening rush hour. Outside these hours, hardly anyone uses this station I believe - yet trains still stop there.
(Note: I have just searched for "Least used train stations Switzerland" and picked a random result, this might be an exception. But it goes to show that stations with few passengers still get a lot of connections.)
As I said, I'm not trying to compare or enter a discussion about what system is better, since I've never been to Switzerland. I like it when places have good trains, and it sounds like both places have that. So that's good enough for me. I was just replying to give you a better idea of what it's like in Japan.
Yeah fair enough. Japan has great rail, I'm just frustrated that prestige projects like HSR seem to be everyone's focus.
HSR is important, but local trains and freight trains are equally as important even though they get much less attention.