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T (as in Tokyo)
By Suldog on Fri, 09/05/2014 - 5:52pm
Since there are so many stories and comments here about the T, I thought the following might be interesting to many of you. Andrew is a member of the T Rider Oversight Committee. He has posted videos and commentary, from a trip to Tokyo, concerning the Tokyo Subway and how it compares to our own in Boston. He has asked for commentary, so I figured some of you would be more than happy to provide that.
Here is a link to his blog about travel experiences (which includes more video of the Tokyo system in action.) Please give him feedback, if you feel you have something interesting to discuss concerning Tokyo/Boston subway experiences.
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Comments
mbta vs tokyo
Their subway is safe
Ours is not
Their subway is clean
Ours is not
Their subway is reliable
Ours is not
Other than those three reasons we are pretty much equal
Japan
is a very homogenous nation. They do not have the 'tensons' we have in a mega multicultural nation. Everyone in Japan is pretty much on the same wavelength as far
as culturally acceptable behavior. They have a strong sense of community and bo ding that we lack, which greatly contributes to many of our social problems, including crime.
Tokyo Subways RULE
Went to Japan in February and the Tokyo subway system is AMAZING! First off, there are actually two subway systems in Tokyo plus it's integrated with their commuter trains. They all run amazingly frequently, they're never late, they are SO CLEAN, and the riders are much more accommodating. Even when crammed in like sardines, people rarely push and they do things like take off their backpacks to make room for other riders.
Plus their system actually makes money. Not sure what their secret is.
I'd invite them here to run our subway system in a heartbeat. I'd even pay extra for that!!!
The main reasons they make
The main reasons they make money are the sheer volume of passengers, the better infrastructure utilization (commuter rail trains use the subway too - something unheard of in North America), and allowing them to do more with real estate - stations are usually incorporated into giant development projects that the transit agency makes money off. This holds true of most Asian transit systems.
As for them running our system, that wouldn't really fix anything. Most of the reason the T isn't like Tokyo is because Boston is smaller, and the T has far fewer passengers, and legal reasons.
Many Asian transit operators are starting to branch out though - Hong Kong's MTR recently was awarded the contact to operate Crossrail in London, and JR East has approached the feds about partnering on Next Gen HSR on the northeast corridor.
Can't do that
Subway trains and commuter trains in North America are built to different weight and speed standards. as a result the crash standards are different. A commuter train striking a subway train would collapse it like a paper airplane.
So the Federal law says they cannot occupy the same tracks ever, and for good reason.
So the question then becomes what are Japan's crash standards that allow for this, or are they simply playing a game of roulette?
I'm well aware of that (this
I'm well aware of that (this is my area of expertise) - and am not suggesting they do the same here.
HOWEVER - the federal crashworthiness standards for passenger trains are based on their sharing tracks with freight trains, and have nothing really to do with speed. Passenger trains that don't share tracks with freight trains are exempt from these standards - which is why rapid transit and light rail exist. So long as the commuter trains were segregated from freight trains completely, there's nothing preventing them from more closely resembling subway trains, like they do in Japan and elsewhere. And the segregation doesn't even need to be physical - it can be temporal, as is the case with New Jersey Transit's RiverLine.
How other places like Japan get around it is that 1) they don't share tracks with freight, because they have very, very little freight that moves by rail (virtually nowhere else in the world ships the volume of freight that North America does by rail), and 2) they don't have these ridiculous standards that we have in the States. Most places don't. Rather than designing passenger trains to withstand a head on collision with a freight train, which has about the same odds of occurring as you winning the lottery, most countries invest in more sophisticated technology to control and dispatch trains, thereby further reducing the likelihood of such an incident. American passenger trains are hideously overbuilt, which is a significant reason why they're so slow compared to their counterparts in the rest of the world - the weight results in much slower acceleration and more power required to attain high speeds.
Also, once the FRA requirement for Positive Train Control (PTC) goes into effect in the next couple years (2015 originally, but compliance is severely lagging and many railroads got extensions), the FRA anticipates relaxing it's crashworthiness standards for passenger trains to possibly allow European or Asian trains to run here almost off-the-shelf.
Back to commuter trains vs. subway - the only real obstacle here to doing the same is that we didn't build our subways with this intention in mind, while they did in Tokyo. If we had, then there'd be nothing else really blocking us from doing so.
Station Numbering
Stations are numbered on the Atlanta subway also -- so you can see how many stops you have to go to your destination.