I suppose the only way to answer this sort of question is with anecdotes, so I’ll throw in another one.
I haven’t been in Tokyo since the early 80s, but it was definitely shoulder-to-shoulder (well, shoulder to chest in my case, since I’m 6’4" tall and most Japanese were considerably shorter). It wasn’t quite as bad as that first video, but there were definitely people pushing us onto the trains.
The whole system? Every single day?
Sounds like a pretty poorly designed system, then.
[/QUOTE]
Japanese or otherwise, it takes an insane amount of maintenance on the tracks themselves, plus the switches, power distribution and other wayside equipment.
Some is best done without having to periodically jump out of the way of traffic, but other work such as rebuilding or replacing track switches on a convenient maintenance schedule, as opposed to waiting for them to break at rush hour can only be done with the system shut down.
Another maintenance activity that people may not know about is re-profiling the rails - with normal use, the crowns become flattened and lumpy, leading to (among other things) reduced braking performance and increased noise. To remedy this, large multi-head grinding machines are (very!) slowly run along the rails to restore the ideal point-contact mating surface to the train’s wheels. IIRC, a good grinding gang can only do one or two miles a night, during a typical three or four hour shutdown.
Almost every rail transit system in the world needs to shut down at night to do maintainance.
The only exception I know about is the New York City subway. And it’s not really an exception – unlike most cities they have four tracks on most of their system so they can run express trains, and at night they can use switches to route around the maintainance. So the tracks which are being worked on are closed.
Yep, the London Tube shuts down nightly for maintenance. In fact, tomorrow night the maintenance workers are going on a 24 hour strike, which means the Tube won’t be running on Tuesday. Apparently the lines won’t even cope with 24 hours without maintenance grrr.
Chicago also has 24-hour rail service, but only on the two busiest lines, the Red and Blue.
CTA seems to accomodate maintenance on the Red and Blue Lines by running stretches of single-track service in the late-night hours.
It gets that crowded on Seoul subways during rush hour as well. I no longer go to/get off work the same time as the masses, but when I did getting groped once a week was normal. The thing is you’re pushed up against so many people that sometimes it’s hard to know if someone is actively trying to feel you up. I’ve probably startled a few people just trying to squirm around so I can at least breathe.
That seems a lot worse than what I am used to seeing.
Just last week, I saw some “pushers” at Shinagwa station. The train wasn’t really so crowded, but there were some stubborn people who were sticking by the door. The station guy in charge, stopped the pushers before they really got started. He yelled at the people by the door till they slunk off into the innards of the train. This was around 8:45am, the peak time.
The train in the video looks like its from the suburbs (Seibu line, as per the comments in that video). Maybe there are very few trains in the morning, which would explain the rush. According to these guys the most crowded is the Tokyu-Den-en-toshi line (The second video)
I have never heard of anyone getting seriously hurt because of the crowds, but I have seen quite a few people lose their footing, or twist their ankles. You have to be rather snippy and get out of the way quickly. The maximum I have experienced, is something like this
Somewhere upthread there was a suggestion to run more trains. The most crowded lines usually have a train running every 3-4 minutes, so there is no way of fitting more trains. The best they can do is throw in a couple extra cars every few years.
Personally, I prefer taking the subways because its more calmer.
Ahh, had to take a shot at some other place, huh? Let’s take a video of people being jammed into a train car, and then – somehow – turn that around and use it to say something negative against USA and Europe.
Under a better system, one would not need to have their body shoved into a train like that.
The only way this crowding could be avoided would be if they would build more lines to carry the overflow. And that’s what they’re doing – continuously. I was in Tokyo in 2000 and then again in 2007 and I noticed they had a couple new subway/train lines finished just in that time period. But they can never build fast enough.
People who have never been to Tokyo may not have a good feeling for just how many people are there, and how crowded the city is. It’s not just the transit system.
Absolutely. You guys really have no conception of just how many people they have to cram through there at peak times. Like someone said earlier, the trains come every 3–4 minutes. It’s not physically possible to have them come more frequently. It’s not physically possible in many places to build more train lines. Urban Tokyo has nearly 4 times the population of urban New York, and that doesn’t count the millions of people who commute up to two hours from the surrounding countryside. Seriously, funnel something like 15–20 million people through anywhere in the space of 2–3 hours and there is absolutely no way to avoid crowding.
Read the stats on Shinjuku and see how much of a logistical miracle it is to have those trains not only running, but damn near always on time. Close to 3.5 million people a day pass through that single station. The only times the trains are late or delayed are due to suicides on the tracks or something that routine maintenance can’t prevent, like gale-force winds or flooding. I may criticize Japan in a lot of other areas, but the train system runs about as well as humanly possible.
To give you a very small idea of how crowded it is all the time, I went to visit my family in the San Francisco area just before Christmas. My aunt had to do some last-minute shopping, so I went with her to the mall. As I looked around, I asked her, “Do you think the mall is crowded today?” She said, “Very.” To me, it looked like a half-deserted shopping area; like the middle of the day on a weekday when virtually everyone is at work or school but housewives, young adults between high school graduation and college, and the unemployed.
At the time, I lived an hour and a half away by shinkansen from the Tokyo area. It was the Japanese equivalent of what Americans would call, “the middle of buttfuck nowhere” out in the countryside. It’s still more crowded there than most urban areas in the US.
Japanese people tend to do things at the same time as everyone else, not just work commutes. On holidays and other busy times, the highways and regular roads are so congested that you could almost literally walk faster. In the summer, a bunch of people go to the countryside for hiking, onsen, sightseeing, etc. The busiest time is the last week or so before September. The crowds returning home were so bad that I remember seeing a report on the news about a 40 km long traffic jam that lasted several hours.
Wherever they can improve infrastructure, they’re doing it. Believe me, Japan loves to build stuff. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport’s motto could be, “Pave our planet.” It doesn’t matter how much they build, how efficiently they run it, how well it’s planned, there will be bottlenecks and there will be far too many people trying to use the roads and trains during peak times.
Roughly 1/3 the entire population of Japan lives in the Kantô area. Try to imagine cramming 40 million people into an area the size of Montana. Then try to imagine that the majority of the people live in half that land area, because Ibaraki, Tochigi, and Gunma are sparsely populated compared to the Tokyo-Saitama-Chiba sprawl. Heck, even the inland half of Saitama is relative countryside, so something like 60% of the population there lives on the Tokyo end of the prefecture. There are cities in the world with higher population densities, but most of those cities have far fewer total people than the Tokyo Metro area. You really do have to experience it to believe it.
Wow. Scary. Is the population growth rate changing? Are there any policies to limit future births?
Japan’s population is shrinking. On the plus side, this lowers congestion. On the minus side, it means that they’ve paved over a lot forest and farmland for the sake of housing a certain population count which is going to go away.
Unless they demolish houses and apartments without replacing them, that ought to mean that the average Japanese person has more living space. From what I read, that may be a good thing (housing is relatively cramped in Japan for a First World country).
Yeah, that’s not going to happen. The money is in construction, not demolition. Construction companies have massive clout in getting government money to spend on dams, bridges, concrete embankments, you name it. Big developers have massive clout in getting any available land for large-scale apartment buildings. Everyone wants to live in a nice high-rise. Few people want to live in a house. A lot of people don’t even want to live in a big place, they want to be near a major train line. In most countries the land right next to a railway would be the cheapest; here, it’s the most expensive.
Land parcels are small because in some cases ownership goes back centuries. There’s no concept of imminent domain. If granny wants to keep her hovel in the middle of a block of condos, there’s shit-all anyone can do about it except [del]bribe her offspring[/del] offer her an incentive to move. Practically speaking, there’s no zoning in most places. The tax structure is set up to strongly discourage leveraging real estate sales for profit, unless you’re going to re-invest in real estate.
For those reasons and more, land here is always going to be tied up in small parcels with various owners, or it’s going to be massively developed, no in between. Between the population decline and the decades-long economic stagnation, if a property falls into disrepair, no one is going to pay to have it torn down, and if someone is going to develop it, it’ll be developed all to hell and gone. Even 50 years from now when the population is supposed to drop below 100 million, I don’t expect that buildings will be more widely spaced than they are now. Actually, it may be the opposite since economies of scale in construction, living, and transportation, along with cultural trends would both still push for high population density.
I’ve been “helped” into a carriage on the Hong Kong MTR too. Everyone’s very nice about it - unlike the ninja grannies at the bus stops, who poke you with umbrellas to ensure they get on in front of you.
If it takes that long to cram people in and the trains run every 3-4 minutes then adding more cars would eliminate the need for cramming and thus additional trains could be added in the course of a day. If 30 seconds is saved each train load then every 8th load would free up time for another train.
Train lengths are primarily limited by the length of platforms. If a train is 10 cars long, but 2 cars don’t stop next to the platform, then those 2 cars will not be used much. On an underground system it can be very expensive to make platforms longer.
As Giles said: Trains already are the entire length of the station. They can’t be made longer without making the stations longer, which is incredibly expensive, especially in the subways.
Pity there is not a ‘roadway" like in Heinleins "the roads must roll’ - a beltway with seats and such that run in an eternal band, like those people conveyor belts you see in the occasional airport, just with seating for commuters. In the novel, there are several paralell ones, going different speeds so you work your way over to the fastest one if you are going a long way [I know, an insurance nightmare nowdays]
If it was the horizontal version of a paternoster elevator, so there were no breaks between people carrying sections, it might work. I just cant really see how to get clumsy idiots off and on safely. Or make such long stretches of conveyor belt
I remember some station (Tokyu Ikegami line?), which had a platform shorter than the train length. So the doors of the last few cars would not open. Instead there was an announcement to move to the front of the train. Of course, highly non-standard behavior.