- Fifty years ago this month, Japan’s bullet trains completed their first trips and were welcomed by hundreds of people who had waited overnight in the terminals. The new high-speed line connected two massive economic hubs, Tokyo and Osaka, cutting the travel time between them from about seven hours to four. The shinkansen, as it’s called in Japanese, has carried roughly 10 billion riders since then, with a pristine record of safety and dependability: There haven’t been any fatal train derailments or collisions, and the average delay is 36 seconds.
This article is also about the Shinkansen, albeit less positively...: [...] Meanwhile, the bullet train has sucked the country’s workforce into Tokyo, rendering an increasingly huge part of the country little more than a bedroom community for the capital. “The purpose was to connect regional areas to Tokyo,” Hara said. “And that led to the current situation of a national Shinkansen network, which completely changed the face of Japan. Travel times were shortened and vibration was alleviated, making it possible for more convenient business and pleasure trips, but I have to say that the project just made all the [connecting] cities part of Tokyo.”
This is an interesting point. But if the regular travel to and from the bedroom communities is a cleaner, safer alternative to the near constant-rush-hour traffic that is possible in larger US cities ... couldn't that make the bedroom community development plan sustainable and economically available to the workforce? It seems like as good a way as any other of weening the USA off of the teat of Exxon/Texaco/Shell is to recreate the same life-style without the daily car culture taking over the beginning and the end of the day. I suppose driver-less cars might do it. But only if they would VOLTRON into something cooler. Folks that live in places with passable public transit (Seattle, SF, NYC, Chicago) might not recognize how most cities in fly-over country absolutely still require a car for daily life. But short of some cataclysmic event ... of which Japan has seen many ... the future of centralized governments and their nation/state is easy to imagine more like Toyko less like Dallas.
Well, if you look at planning history, over and over again people have tried to get people to live somewhere they don't work. The Garden City movement of the 20s. The massive suburbanization of the postwar era. The satellite cities. They may not have the same mode of transport (respectively steam trains, cars and metro / lightrail) but their goal is always to reduce demand for the big cities and increase a cities workforce. The problem is that these cities are defined by transportation, defined by the big city. They are completely useless as a city. All the cool stuff is in the main city, anyway, and since it's easily accessible, why bother making the suburb / sattelite a good city? So yes, it might be good from an economic and ecological standpoint but as a community or from a societal standpoint, these kinds of developments have failed most of the time. There are exceptions, though, like Houten, which is absolutely amazing.This is an interesting point. But if the regular travel to and from the bedroom communities is a cleaner, safer alternative to the near constant-rush-hour traffic that is possible in larger US cities ... couldn't that make the bedroom community development plan sustainable and economically available to the workforce?
That's the subway system, not the Shinkansen. The high-speed trains require seating, just as the TGV does in France.