The public transit is poor because it wasn't liberalized along with the property zoning. If the government is the only one allowed to do public transit then a company won't come along as trying to compete with the government (which would be suicide). People all over the west (US, Canada, and Europe) try really hard to ignore the amazing success that is Japan's public transit system (that's mostly privatized).
> People all over the west (US, Canada, and Europe) try really hard to ignore the amazing success that is Japan's public transit system (that's mostly privatized).
Most metropolitan public transit systems receive only about 50% of their income through ticket prices, the rest come from subsidies in various forms. That doesn't mean those public transit systems are dumb and useless, they add a lot of economic value to their cities, it's just they can't recover that value add through ticket prices alone.
Now, back to Japan's privatized railways, they also get about 50% of their income through ticket sales, however, crucially, the railways own the land around the stations, where they run hotels, grocery stores and whatnot in addition to renting. This allows them to capture some of the value add of the railways through higher land values, and enables them to work without subsidies.
This is nice and all, but probably quite hard to replicate in other countries; What you gonna do, have the government expropriate the most valuable land in the cities and give it to the railway companies? Yeah, that will go down really well...
Japan by far had the most confusing and hardest to use metro of any major city I've been to. Stations with the same name that could only connect by exciting and reentering. Platforms with the same number at the exact same station. It's amazing what happens when multiple companies all own different parts of the network, but success would definitely need a better defined metric here.
