Lion's share of Japanese rail ridership is also suburb-suburb and suburb-urban; that's where the most profitable routes are. Domestic manufacture is a tremendous asset to their railways, and their railway workers are unionized. The problems here aren't as simple as they look!
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Replying to @380kmh @poiThePoi
Japan's rail network is also fully privatized, yet cheap /and/ running a profit, despite building everything locally.
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(It helps that Japanese unions, unlike American ones, are not mafias.)
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Replying to @Chiakipus @poiThePoi
the rail unions were violent saboteurs during the 70s when threatened with downsizing, it took a very careful and dedicated effort by management to bring them to heel
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But its not like the Japanese model can't be applied area-by-area. No one's asking you to connect Austin to NYC but Houston roads look like this and there's still not one commuter railpic.twitter.com/GcgXOF6hW7
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Replying to @HollowFestival @planefag and
Each lane is 2000 cars/hour/lane. Assuming that the offramps aren't the bottlenecks (Narrator: They were the bottlenecks). The L train runs 24,000/hour in each direction. So best case, that's *one line* on a subway. Which goes all of 12 MPH.
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Replying to @poiThePoi @planefag and
Don't forget about highway fatalities, ever present construction, and complete jams on a daily basis
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Replying to @HollowFestival @planefag and
Don't forget about one of the largest armies on the planet, with its own international intelligence agency, that's specifically dedicated to protecting that subway system. Houston's issue is that they're smack-dab in the traffic/transit gap.
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Hell the Japanese model has a great possible application - California. Dense cities all lined up along a coast, right? Why doesn't it exist? Because >California
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right, it's almost like deterministic factors like geography and population density aren't the truly important ones in having good trains
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Texas will be the first US state to have good HSR (because they invited a Japanese company to finance, build, and operate a private line) Still not sure which US state will be the first with good suburban rail but I'll do my best to make it Massachusetts Fuck California tho
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