Reflections on Japan

November 21, 2024

Earlier this year I visited Tokyo (September 17 - September 23) for about six days. Nothing special or unique. I’m not going to pretend I’m any good at being a tourist. I didn’t take many photos or a detailed log of where I went or what food I ate. I mostly enjoyed the pleasure of not being here. The same reason why people travel. To get away.

It has been a long time since I flew international. I’ve visited Frankfurt three times, all airport work related with varying amounts of work and volume of alcohol consumption. I last flew international to Frankfurt in 2015. I took a high school trip to Ireland and England at the end of my senior year in 2010 feeling disappointed by the rigid pacing and long stretches of bus travel. I’m not including visits Canada because by and large the feel of Canadian cities is so similar to the US it does not feel novel. I often sense an overlap in culture between the US and Canada, mostly in terms of brands and media consumption, but few in Canada would openly admit to it.

With Japan, I didn’t have anything planned ahead of time. This is the opposite approach for what most people do when they choose to travel far away like Japan. Not me. I had loose ideas of what I wanted. But I made a few mistakes. I didn’t sleep on the plane. Normally this wouldn’t have affected me so much but was awake already since 4:00 AM. We landed in Tokyo at 2:50 PM. Meaning I had been awake already for 20 hours. Then I didn’t factor in even though the train might only take one hour, I ended up having to wait extra 20 minutes for the train as I decided not to try and get on the free wifi or activate my cell service. Maybe if I wasn’t so sleep deprived I would have been in a much better presence of mind. Or who knows how long it took me from the moment I stood in line trying to buy a ticket, only to realize they do not take credit card to going back to find an ATM.

Japan prefers cash and digital money (IC card), a phrase which feels borrowed from the future. Compared to back home where there is a mixture of cash preferred to cash not accepted.

I took the subway and trains to get around, as everyone does in Tokyo. The speed and reliability of the trains stands out the most. Maintenance could be improved as there were a few stations with broken air conditioning. As the transit nerd I am (have been reading Seattle Transit Blog for 10+ years), I notice and think more about the design of the stations much more than if I were a regular tourist.

Seeing platform screen doors, I became envious as I daydreamed about if Sound Transit installed those on Link Light Rail. The principal reason for adding these is safety to prevent people from falling onto the tracks. Perhaps the less common advantage they provide is higher approach speeds into the station. See a post from Pedestrian Observation for a more detailed look at platform edge doors.

From the perspective of Sound Transit, adding platform edge doors adds extra capital investment for something without obvious benefit. However in the recent months with the opening of the Lynnwood Link extension on August 30, 2024, the system reliability is lagging behind increase in ridership for a number of complex reasons. Platform edge doors could alleviate this problem, decreasing the overall travel time and improving reliability by adding buffer into the schedule.

The current crop of issues stems from the delayed opening of the 2 Line across Lake Washington. Defects in track construction across I-90 have a number of cascading effects, but it means the trains meant for use on the 2 Line between Lynnwood and Redmond must stay on the Bellevue side of the lake while increased service must be operated with the existing 1 Line trains. Sound Transit has acknowledged there are a number of mechanical issues, including a lack of vehicle availability.

Extra capital investment and expense for platform edge doors may seem expensive relative to the minor decrease in overall speed, but there are plenty of capital projects Sound Transit with outsized costs, but minimal improvement to the overall system. Adding parking garages at Sounder stations is the most obvious of an example of capital investments by the Sound Transit board with zero gain in reliability.

As we eagerly await for construction to wrap up, it should also be noted once the 2 Line opens, there will be (in theory), 4 minute combined headways between Lynnwood and International District station during peak hours. This should reduce crowding on the most popular segments and hopefully reduce the occurence of someone holding the door open. I did not see this happen in Japan for a number of reasons. Mostly because the trains are so frequent it’s not worth it to delay the train for everyone when there will be another train coming in a couple of minutes. But like many things in Japan, the social contract is different.

But what if combined headways here could be 3 minutes instead of 4 minutes as it is planned. Time will tell if even 4 minutes is realistic, but this meants 15 trains per hour. If capital improvement could reduce the headways to 3 minutes, this would be 20 trains per hour, a 33% increase. Does Sound Transit even have enough light rail vehicles? Could maintenance and repair keep up?

All of this means coming back from Japan, sitting on the slower light rail makes it hard to forget in the rest of the world, the trains run better.

See also, Show Report: Experimental Sounds in Japan on my noise blog for a look at where I went for seeing live music.