After that discussion, I had a full work day ahead of me which included visiting both campuses I will be teaching at here in Japan this semester, neither of which is close to each other nor particularly close to where we are living here. That meant about three hours on public transportation for me, which gave me plenty of time to ponder public transportation in Japan and what the Massachusetts and the U.S. can learn from it. The first important point is that it’s ubiquitous. If you look at map of public transport, it’s pretty easy to get overwhelmed by how dense public rail is in the city and suburbs.
It’s important to note – this map doesn’t include buses either. That’s just a map of public rail.
Second, public transportation is convenient. There are stops for trains everywhere, with bus stops filling in between. They run frequently; the longest we’ve had to wait is about 10 minutes, and usually the wait is well under five minutes. Furthermore, all of these forms of transportation can be accessed using a Suica or Pasmo—transit cards that work on any form of transportation in the whole region. You can get just about anywhere in the Tokyo/Yokohama metro region with your card. In fact, there are often multiple ways to get somewhere, which can be confusing. I’ve gone to the Shonan campus of Tokai University twice now, and I haven’t gone the same way on any of the trips there or back. Different routes are more efficient depending on when you leaving, giving everyone plenty of options.
The third important point is that public transportation is reliable. The trains run like clockwork in Japan. So much so that you can tell which train you need to get on (helpful if English signage is not available) by looking at your clock. Not sure if the train coming in to the station is the local you need or the express? Google Maps (or a number of other handy apps) will tell you the exact time you need to step off the platform and onto the train. This makes it so, so easy to plan a trip. I can sit here on Sunday and plan exactly when I need to leave on Wednesday to be at campus at the time I want. I can be pretty confident everything will go exactly as planned too; there’s little need for back up plans.
As such, it’s very, very easy to live without a car here. And it seems like most people do, which is the fourth important point. Everyone, regardless of social status, relies on public transport to some degree. In the area of Yokohama where we live, it is uncommon to see more than one car parked at a house and the car (often a very nice car, but sometimes not) is often parked there the entire working day, which suggests at least one household member is relying on public transportation. In talking with my colleagues here, they have confirmed that pretty much everyone uses public transport, unless you’re super famous. This seems to be the result of policy choices favoring public transport over cars (although we’re still learning about this one). For instance, my husband and I had to rent a car to pick up our stuff the other day. We followed Google Maps to get to it, which took us on the highway. To our surprise, the toll to get on was 1300 yen—or just under $12—one way! Metro rides aren’t necessarily cheap (a typical fare is about $2 one way), but we can get into Tokyo for about six or seven dollars each way. Trains in Japan are notoriously packed, but from what we can see, traffic jams don’t seem to be all that common. Even if you did drive, once you get where you are going, there is virtually no place to park your car. We’ve seen metered street parking twice in our wanderings, and there’s no such thing as free street parking. So when you arrive at your destination with a car, you have to pay to park in a private lot or garage, which ain’t cheap.
Now, all of this is facilitated by the fact that the population density is extremely high in Tokyo and Yokohama. Tokyo has 9.2 million people, and Yokohama has over 3.7 million people. That kind of population density makes public transit investments pay off; that’s a lot more difficult in Massachusetts which has fewer people than Tokyo. At the same time, people use public transit here because it’s convenient, reliable, and comparatively affordable—words that are almost never used to describe public transit in Massachusetts or even anywhere in the U.S. Creating a public transit system like this requires public commitment and investment, something I am not convinced we’re prepared to do here in the Massachusetts and the United States more generally. But as we do move forward on modernizing our transportation infrastructure, I hope we look to the examples that other countries can provide.