Japanese public transport is good, but no match for the Swiss system. Outside of big cities, the coverage is spotty, and even reasonably large towns are only connected by reserved-only trains every couple of hours that get booked out days in advance. The almost complete lack of digitization is also remarkable (reservations have to be made with machines in the stations). There are other annoyances such as the public transport in Tokyo shutting down completely at midnight. In contrast, the Swiss government-owned system delivers usable connectivity to almost any human settlement, even most mountain villages. The ticket prices are also not so different, which is surprising considering the large difference of salaries in the two countries.

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justanotherjoe 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's worth mentioning that swiss is a nation of 9 million, whereas Japan has 128 million people. I'm not sure how comparable it is. You probably don't need to pass through a lot of settlements for any public projects in swiss, for example.

	▲	YmiYugy 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think it's more politics and economics. Switzerland is quite a lot richer than Japan and is extremely decentralized politically. That creates strong incentives to provide good public services even to mountain villages. It also helps that Switzerland isn't experiencing population decline. The Swiss population as a whole is growing quite rapidly and from what limited data I could find even rural regions are growing. I think land acquisition doesn't really play a huge role. They are both mountainous countries where rail projects have to squeeze in valleys or bear the expense of tunnelling.

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kohsuke 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can make reservations online: https://www.eki-net.com/en/jreast-train-reservation/Top/Inde...

	▲	5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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MichaelZuo 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How could a route busy enough to completely fill a train every few hours not justify some kind of regularly scheduled service?

	▲	weberer an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Most cities at least have night busses. Tokyo has 0 options after midnight.