Comment by numpad0
1 month ago
Japanese rails are all built on commuter style architectures and the tracks are generally owned by its users. So train operators are strongly incentivized to keep them in good shape.
Also, Far East right now is also massively cash poor yet labor rich relative to the rest of the world. Everything is crazy undervalued and there are clear gaps between amounts of money changing hands vs work being done. Skilled-labor-intensive tasks are going to be much easier when cheap skilled labor is just perpetually available.
2 questions one rail related, one societal.
1) Can you expand on your first sentence? When you say user owned what does that mean exactly?
2) If skilled labor is undervalued does that mean those with those positions live kind of meager lives? Or what is that like?
1) There are type 1/2/3 train operators that owns everything/borrows rails/owns just rails as Japanese laws classify them, but type 3 lines are mostly rural low-traffic branch lines. Most high-traffic lines are owned(+accesses leased to type 2s) by train operators. Some of regional Shinkansen lines are technically owned by government run JRTT agency and leased to local JR company, which are probably as unrelated as UK government and its Royal Mail are.
2) I mean, like, it's the place where the English loanword for "death by overwork" came from. Also, undervalued means things costing less than they are worth. Trash costing little isn't undervalued, that's more adequately valued.
Thank you, haha on answer 2 !!
Answer 1 is still not clear to me. Can you contrast it with how Spanish track is managed?
1 reply →
Japan GDP PPP per capita is about USAs in 2012, so they aren't exactly impoverished.
High public competency and government capacity allows a lot to get done.