Not sure if this was created with LLM help, but I suspect so? Not because the page is buggy (it is, though, crashed on my iPhone), but because they make data visualization so accessible. This type of presentation used to take days of work; now, if you find a unique piece of data, it's only a few hours of work to create a beautiful animated visualization.
I do think this would be more compelling with some additional context or data integration. Zoom, the ability to click and see the full details about each station, which company (my guess is that it's all JR?).
Ok final note: the intersection of Japan and trains is basically HN crack, and I love it.
I created pages with Claude before and it's very very obvious when you see one. From the font choice to the color palette, and the style of the boxes. In fact if anyone has an effective prompt that says "please don't make this look like the average Claude page" please post it!
I've had some luck giving either an example website to ape or listing out a particular era, monkey see monkey do seems to help a bunch.
I've done each of the 3 for side projects below to pretty good effects.
> This website will be run by IE6 and Windows Mobile 6, so use no dependencies, semantic HTML, a 3-pane layout, and only use JS (es3!) where absolutely necessary (and where necessary, put the script at the end of the body).
When I'm not specifically targeting support for retrocomputers I do something like this, then iterate until it looks right.
> Go look at Dokuwiki, django defaults, and common web 2.0 color schemes, use those for UI inspiration. Keep a 3-pane desktop-first layout, but enable mobile responsiveness with media queries. Use semantic html5 and prefer older boring solutions like surgical jquery or htmx-style islands of interactivity where needed, otherwise do not bring in dependencies without my say so.
And finally, if I'm doing a web app that I'm vibing out with the web stack because I want it one-shotted and not trying to do a good rust core with strong ports/adapters API surface for web or native client callers, I do something like this:
> This is a local web app, the frontend, backend, and desktop are all on the same machine. Use naive and simple development patterns that you document the style as you go, pick a boring web framework and use it idiomatically, but remember that some tricks that are intended to keep network round trips down are not as necessary because network penalties are not as bad as real traffic.
Granted, the above I don't like as much, but it does produce more 'modern' looking sites by default.
But what I find works best is to point Claude at a design system documentation website (your own company's or another public source) and tell it to use that design style. It usually does OK, and the results are usually much more in line with that style and not as Claude-y.
Fable is really, really good at this. My workflow involves giving it a bit of human inspiration, through asking it to generate a few different design templates/scaffolds (without building the whole frontend first).
Then I iterative and give it feedback, point out all the parts I don’t like, sometimes mixing and matching.
I’m sure you can do this with Opus too, but Fable is a better designer.
It’s obvious on how much information is unnecessarily repeated. One of the main give away of AI is that the text is like an Atlantic article but worse, with very-very-very low information density. Full with sentences, paragraphs, pages which add absolutely nothing.
I get the sentiment. I don't love that different browsers have different behavior even on standards compliant code. But I've also done enough web development to know that if your page crashes safari in the main user flow (in this case, just hitting 'play'), the dev owns the bug.
Not animated, but it's fully zoomable (with variable LOD at different levels), searchable (with fuzzy matching), info popups on not just stations, but things like track speed limits, and tunnels. What I do that's really different is that I'm VERY heavily manipulating the underlying data (The pre-processing pipeline is currently at something like 12k lines of python and counting, most of it doing things like advanced network topology, so that we show the actual track layouts, which if drawn at truly geographically accurate scale would just collapse to a single line.
I'm showing tons of detail..... 3.5k+ stations, and every single track - not just the main running lines, but every siding and yard track.
I hate the History API especially pushState. Even with this limit of 100 times per 10 seconds it still pollutes my browsing history too much. I need to vibe code an extension that makes pushState/replaceState noops on all webpages.
Seems like you hate the abuse of the API more than the API itself. For Single Page Apps it makes sense to support the Back button by, based on merit, populating the history synthetically
It would be interesting to see a negative bar with station closures as well. And some way to zoom the map would be nice.
As a point of interest, I'll mention Tōgeshita station. A station in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes, a station would exist purely because that's where trains needed to pass one another. Tōgeshita was one of those.
Whenever I passed the station, it was strange, almost a creepy feeling. I think it could have been a great plot for a Japanese horror movie, something in a "Blair Witch Project" style... the old one car train slows to a stop. The door opens, no one dares get off there. Except you, with your portable camera, a cavalier exit from the train. The conductor casts you a side eye with a dead pan 'arigato goziamasu.' The creaky diesel train car slowly pulls away and you're left there stranded for the next few hours until the return train comes around. I wonder what I'll find in the forest just beyond those trees....
I'd like to see something like that but on a subway. Just a platform and two tunnels with no stairs. If the service stops you're SOL and have to hoof it down the tracks.
Friedrichstraße was famously like that during the Cold War (West Berliners riding the lines were not permitted to exit into East Berlin), although of course the stairs physically existed. I think it's unusual for an underground station to be built without digging from the surface, so there's normally at least a fire escape.
Now we need a part two that shows how the rural parts of the same network are slowly being closed due to depopulation. As of 2025, Japan has lost 1366 km of track (about 5% of the total) since the 1990s.
Meanwhile, there's more people in the city of Tokyo than nearly the whole continent of Australia :) Japan's population is concentrating into a handful of big cities. I mean, who wants to live in a small town when there are endless options for shopping, restaurants, etc in the big city? It's not like in the US where big cities are dangerous. There's not much of a positive tradeoff for choosing small town life in Japan. Maybe you think you want to be a big land baron as all Americans seem to desire, but then you find out that undeveloped land in Japan is heavily taxed with property taxes. If you are not doing something very productive with Japan's limited land, Japan wants you to move your arse off it and let someone with a plan work it. Anyway, as rural areas empty out, the local rail lines close. JR is however building lots of bullet trains to connect the big cities. There is a new bullet train line opening soon between Shin-Hakodate and Sapporo for instance. It will probably be extended from Sapporo up to Asahikawa after that.
I love Tokyo (I spent eight months in Kawasaki in 2010), but I can see the appeal of living in a smaller place in Japan (though I’d personally be hesitant to live in a small, isolated town with little or no public transportation). Crowded trains and long lines can get tiring after a while.
I spent last summer in Toyohashi in Aichi Prefecture; I was a visiting researcher at Toyohashi University of Technology. While Toyohashi is not a small town by any means, it is far smaller than Tokyo. I found it nice for day-to-day living. Not crowded at all, and I found the bus service to be good; not world class, but comprehensive and ran frequently enough to be useful. It had plenty of grocery stores and department stores for everyday living. If I needed something unavailable in Toyohashi, Nagoya wasn’t too far away, and if I needed to be in Tokyo, I could get there in 90 minutes on a Hikari train on the Tokaido Shinkansen. I’d do it again; in fact, I’m going back to Toyohashi in a few weeks for another monthly stay.
Having just traveled through a range of cities and towns in Japan, I don't think the lack of options for shopping and restaurants are the reason that small (150,000+ population) towns are depopulating.
There's plenty of ways to spend money in them. That's not the problem. Neither is there a huge lack of conveniences. Any one of them is way more livable than almost anywhere in North America.
Poor economic prospects for the area is likely a part of the problem. The big cities pay significantly more for ~the same work.
To be fair, most countries have due to privatisation and people getting wealthier and buying cars. In my country a ton of lines have closed down too and ourv population only grows.
> To be fair, most countries have due to privatisation
Japan's system is almost entirely private and is best in the world by nearly every metric. We (the people) do not owe support to depopulated areas. If you choose to live in the boonies the government is not required to build or maintain roads, tracks, sewers, power to your place. Funds are not infinite.
Japan's private system works because the government mostly got out of the way and let them build and run complementary businesses. Most other countries either make them public, and then they eventually are underfunded and are prevented from expanding/responding, OR, if they do let them be private they find some other way to cripple them like by disallowing other interests.
This take is hilariously misinformed. Japan's long-distance network was almost entirely public until JNR was privatized in 1987, and its successors the JRs continue to be for all intents and purposes controlled by the government.
Some not-very-light reading about the rise and fall of JNR:
This is entirely wrong. Jees this is so infuriating to see repeated. Japan has ~100 train companies. JR is 1 of those (now 7). The rest are not. Hanshin, Hankyu, Keio, Keikyu, Tokyu, Toei, etc all giant train companies, all private, have been since they were foudned.
No, it's not. The successful private companies all serve suburban commuters. The long-distance network was almost entirely JNR.
As of 1996, JR group still controls over 20,000 km of Japan's 30,000 km of rail, and that's after privatizing and closing a large slab of it (mostly those duplicated by Shinkansen).
The long distance is mostly irrelevant, People use trains daily for short commutes. As for JR, the arguably only reason it was in the position it was in was because the government got in the way. If they'd stayed out of the way the private companies would have built the rest.
Further, JR started private. It was nationalized in 1906. The Tokaido Line and tha Sanyo Line already built by private companies. They forced out 17 other companies and then ran it into the ground.
The only place private "might" not have built is rural and JR built those mostly as "pork-barrel" (favors to politians) when it was run by the government. I also say "might" because it is/was common, not just in Japan, to build housing and trains to that housing. You pick a place like Enoshima, build a few 1000s homes, build a train out there to sell the homes. So "rural" places do get private trains.
1. The public pay for and build the lines and prove market demand.
2. Decades later some 'fiscal conservatives' get elected.
3. Who then privatize them for a sweetheart deal to their friends.
4. Who then proceed to squeeze every penny they have out of the public, while foregoing expansion and service quality.
With an end result of everyone getting to pay through the nose for shit service, while profits accrue up. And nobody's building any competing lines, because rail is a textbook example of a natural monopoly, and it's hard to compete on capex with someone who got a full rail network by buying it, fully built out[1].
Nobody with a lick of sense will ever lend you the 100 billion dollars you need to open a from-scratch competitor, if you ever want to eat into the incumbent's margins. The incumbent knows this.
---
The rail company is the poster child for either a crown corporation, or at most, a 'customer-facing services outsourced on a fixed-term-contract'.
---
[1] Bonus points for rules around eminent domain changing at some point in the past century and a half, making it actually impossible to build a competing line today.
This is wrong! People keep pointing to JR and think that's the entire country and train system. It is not and never was. The majority of train lines in Japan were private, started private, privately funded, and are still private.
Haha, my experience is people buying cars feel poorer, not wealthier. Car payments, maintenance, insurance, taxes, fuel... and as soon as you finish paying it off, it's basically EOL. Time to start paying for the next one.
Unfortunately when you live in a place (like most American cities) where they’re largely built under the assumption people will drive everywhere, a car is essentially required. It’s expensive owning and maintaining a car, but it also feels demoralizing dealing with limited public transportation and neighborhoods that aren’t walkable. There are walkable metro areas in the United States, but they tend to be very expensive, sometimes more expensive than living in a suburb or exurb and dealing with the cost of commuting. I grew up poor; dealing with hour-long bus waits, late buses, multiple transfers, and limited choices is a powerful motivation to save up for a car.
Well yes but this is a choice. In a place with good public transport and alternative road modes people just use cars a lot less.
The thing is in the US cars are traditionally a huge part of the economic engine. So they get preference. You see something similar in Germany though not nearly as bad.
> as soon as you finish paying it off, it's basically EOL
The average age of a car on the road in the US today is now more than 11 years. The average new car loan is just less than 6 years. Beyond that, it's all just a different set of trade-offs. Aside from living somewhere truly dense with fantastic public transit and only going places reachable by said transit, owning a car means less time spent on transportation, and infinitely more flexibility on where you go. Lots of people prefer the lifestyle. Even in Europe cars remain quite popular.
The cost of ownership goes WAY up immediately after the warranty expires. I owned one car. A Ford I purchased brand new. I have no more desire to ever own a car. That experience taught me all I ever needed to know about cars. They are an endless money pit. Everyone I know who drives is poorer for it.
>owning a car means less time spent on transportation
See, that's how drivers think. "I need to spend less time in transportation", because it's miserable for them. You don't even consciously think about it, but subconsciously, you hate being in that car. I like riding the train. It's fun. Even the old Amtrak trains are fun to ride. I can enjoy a beer if I want. There's one cute conductor who flirts with me. I'm not getting any of that in a car.
>Lots of people prefer the lifestyle.
How many "prefer" it because they have never tried any other way. Sitting there alone, rage listening to talk radio in gridlock. No thanks. Cars are antisocial. Been there, done that, I don't care for it.
I hear the cope though, about how cars are "freedom" and can "go anywhere," but when you don't have a car for a while, you begin to realize how cars are the opposite of freedom. Cars are an anchor. Everywhere you go, you have to worry about where to put the car. You can't get too far away from the car. If you have to feed a parking meter, you can barely get a block away from the car. Can't even finish the movie, let's go back to the parking meter. You always have to go back to the car, you can't just continue on your journey and leave it behind. That's not an option. Go back to the car.
Once you have no need for a car, only then do you realize what a slave you were to the car.
> I hear the cope though, about how cars are "freedom" and can "go anywhere," but when you don't have a car for a while, you begin to realize how cars are the opposite of freedom. Cars are an anchor. Everywhere you go, you have to worry about where to put the car. You can't get too far away from the car. If you have to feed a parking meter, you can barely get a block away from the car. Can't even finish the movie, let's go back to the parking meter. You always have to go back to the car, you can't just continue on your journey and leave it behind. That's not an option. Go back to the car.
Totally agree, I didn't realise how much of an issue this was.
I often go somewhere, walk 25km and go back from a totally different station. With a car this would have made me so uneasy knowing I still have to make my way back. Knowing I can do whatever I decide in the moment really makes me feel easy.
> See, that's how drivers think. "I need to spend less time in transportation", because it's miserable for them. You don't even consciously think about it, but subconsciously, you hate being in that car. I like riding the train. It's fun. Even the old Amtrak trains are fun to ride. I can enjoy a beer if I want. There's one cute conductor who flirts with me. I'm not getting any of that in a car.
Well personally I hate transportation too, but the car was more of a phenomenon. I had a car because I lived 70km from work. Now I live close and no longer need a car, and I waste less time on commute.
True but at least where I'm from it's a huge status symbol. Every time a neighbour gets a new car the whole street is jealous and talking about it.
I personally find driving very stressful and wasteful of my time so I hate cars. Even when I had one from work. In fact that was worse because they only give you a work car because the job involves loads of driving. Even though the tax man wanted lots of money for something I didn't even want in the first place.
It was because until the 90s in Holland public transport was seen as a community service, not a business so even lines with limited traffic were served. During the 90s the neoliberal craze began where everything had to be a market.
Yeah, I've noticed this as well. They not only slowly close old stations, but they almost stopped building new ones since about 2007.
I don't understand why people downvote your comment. It isn't like you're forcing them to have babies and do something about the world by stating the fact about Japan's decline
The "decline" you mention is privatization of JR and their efforts to make it more profitable. Privatization started in 1987, but it wasn't fully privatized until 2006.
If it has anything to do with babies, you have your cause and effect reversed. Autos are a cause of declining birth rates...
Fun bit of trivia: Japanese train stations each have their own custom stamp, and if you have a piece of paper or a notebook they'll stamp it for you at the ticket booth (this is a fairly common thing to do there). If you get an A5 notebook, it's a neat way to document a trip -- one stamp for your departure station, one for your arrival.
Sadly not all of them, much to my ill discovery! They are fun souvenirs and I encourage everyone to collect them if they want a free momento (ideally bring your own stamp pad).
This is awesome! The website screams claude to me. I'm not bashing it, in fact I think it's great. That was just my first thought when I opened the webpage. Good transition into the learning tool as well.
Japanese from the inaka here. My contribution to this dataset: nothing. No station in my town, never was one. The nearest line is an hour by car and it's openly next on the chopping block.
Oh, someone is jealous. His country will never be responsible for the longest underwater tunnel in the world. How will he continue to tell himself he is the greatest country? :)
Cool idea!
Not sure if this was created with LLM help, but I suspect so? Not because the page is buggy (it is, though, crashed on my iPhone), but because they make data visualization so accessible. This type of presentation used to take days of work; now, if you find a unique piece of data, it's only a few hours of work to create a beautiful animated visualization.
I do think this would be more compelling with some additional context or data integration. Zoom, the ability to click and see the full details about each station, which company (my guess is that it's all JR?).
Ok final note: the intersection of Japan and trains is basically HN crack, and I love it.
I created pages with Claude before and it's very very obvious when you see one. From the font choice to the color palette, and the style of the boxes. In fact if anyone has an effective prompt that says "please don't make this look like the average Claude page" please post it!
I've had some luck giving either an example website to ape or listing out a particular era, monkey see monkey do seems to help a bunch.
I've done each of the 3 for side projects below to pretty good effects.
> This website will be run by IE6 and Windows Mobile 6, so use no dependencies, semantic HTML, a 3-pane layout, and only use JS (es3!) where absolutely necessary (and where necessary, put the script at the end of the body).
When I'm not specifically targeting support for retrocomputers I do something like this, then iterate until it looks right.
> Go look at Dokuwiki, django defaults, and common web 2.0 color schemes, use those for UI inspiration. Keep a 3-pane desktop-first layout, but enable mobile responsiveness with media queries. Use semantic html5 and prefer older boring solutions like surgical jquery or htmx-style islands of interactivity where needed, otherwise do not bring in dependencies without my say so.
And finally, if I'm doing a web app that I'm vibing out with the web stack because I want it one-shotted and not trying to do a good rust core with strong ports/adapters API surface for web or native client callers, I do something like this:
> This is a local web app, the frontend, backend, and desktop are all on the same machine. Use naive and simple development patterns that you document the style as you go, pick a boring web framework and use it idiomatically, but remember that some tricks that are intended to keep network round trips down are not as necessary because network penalties are not as bad as real traffic.
Granted, the above I don't like as much, but it does produce more 'modern' looking sites by default.
Anthropic's own frontend-design skill attempts to do that. You can install it in Claude Code, or you can tweak it to be closer to your own style:
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...
But what I find works best is to point Claude at a design system documentation website (your own company's or another public source) and tell it to use that design style. It usually does OK, and the results are usually much more in line with that style and not as Claude-y.
That skill has not been updated since its release.
I would suggest checking out this project for a boost in design skills:
https://impeccable.style
Not sure that's necessarily any bigger a deal than when every Web site had the "Bootstrap look."
Fable is really, really good at this. My workflow involves giving it a bit of human inspiration, through asking it to generate a few different design templates/scaffolds (without building the whole frontend first).
Then I iterative and give it feedback, point out all the parts I don’t like, sometimes mixing and matching.
I’m sure you can do this with Opus too, but Fable is a better designer.
Just give it actual ideas of what you want instead of "make me a web page". Garbage in garbage out.
Though it standard look & feel is not that bad, IMHO.
It’s obvious on how much information is unnecessarily repeated. One of the main give away of AI is that the text is like an Atlantic article but worse, with very-very-very low information density. Full with sentences, paragraphs, pages which add absolutely nothing.
The Claude style (colors/fonts) give it right away. The website did also crash for me too with the famous nextjs death screen.
> Not because the page is buggy (it is, though, crashed on my iPhone),
Maybe you meant Safari is buggy and crashed? I can easily get Safari to crash by zooming in and out a bit. Reports to Apple go ignored...
I get the sentiment. I don't love that different browsers have different behavior even on standards compliant code. But I've also done enough web development to know that if your page crashes safari in the main user flow (in this case, just hitting 'play'), the dev owns the bug.
Safari didn't crash. The web app did, for abusing the browser history API.
> SecurityError: Attempt to use history.replaceState() more than 100 times per 10 seconds
If I may pimp my own similar, also railway related project...
https://tylereaves.github.io/uk-rail-map/
Not animated, but it's fully zoomable (with variable LOD at different levels), searchable (with fuzzy matching), info popups on not just stations, but things like track speed limits, and tunnels. What I do that's really different is that I'm VERY heavily manipulating the underlying data (The pre-processing pipeline is currently at something like 12k lines of python and counting, most of it doing things like advanced network topology, so that we show the actual track layouts, which if drawn at truly geographically accurate scale would just collapse to a single line.
I'm showing tons of detail..... 3.5k+ stations, and every single track - not just the main running lines, but every siding and yard track.
Yea, it's beige though, thought in my case I'm trying to emulate (without directly copying) the feel of Ordinance Survey maps like this: https://www.muchbetteradventures.com/magazine/content/images...
it's so easy to tell it's claude. nonsense oblique text. beige bg. noise texture. 'crafted' eyebrows.
Super cool but I did get this error while scrolling the timeline on safari/iOS
Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading jivx.com (see the browser console for more information).
Yep, seems to refer to "SecurityError: Attempt to use history.replaceState() more than 100 times per 10 seconds"
I hate the History API especially pushState. Even with this limit of 100 times per 10 seconds it still pollutes my browsing history too much. I need to vibe code an extension that makes pushState/replaceState noops on all webpages.
Seems like you hate the abuse of the API more than the API itself. For Single Page Apps it makes sense to support the Back button by, based on merit, populating the history synthetically
Then you'll discover many pages are SPAs in disguise.
Such as?
Because joke’s on you, my browser gets so slow that I know when a page is a SPA, even when it uses History API.
StopTheMadnessPro > Protect History.
https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/
Same on Firefox/Linux
It would be interesting to see a negative bar with station closures as well. And some way to zoom the map would be nice.
As a point of interest, I'll mention Tōgeshita station. A station in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes, a station would exist purely because that's where trains needed to pass one another. Tōgeshita was one of those.
Whenever I passed the station, it was strange, almost a creepy feeling. I think it could have been a great plot for a Japanese horror movie, something in a "Blair Witch Project" style... the old one car train slows to a stop. The door opens, no one dares get off there. Except you, with your portable camera, a cavalier exit from the train. The conductor casts you a side eye with a dead pan 'arigato goziamasu.' The creaky diesel train car slowly pulls away and you're left there stranded for the next few hours until the return train comes around. I wonder what I'll find in the forest just beyond those trees....
This is a station which exists solely for transfer between two lines. It has no entrance. Idea always made me a bit nervous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manulla_Junction_railway_stati...
I'd like to see something like that but on a subway. Just a platform and two tunnels with no stairs. If the service stops you're SOL and have to hoof it down the tracks.
Friedrichstraße was famously like that during the Cold War (West Berliners riding the lines were not permitted to exit into East Berlin), although of course the stairs physically existed. I think it's unusual for an underground station to be built without digging from the surface, so there's normally at least a fire escape.
i hope that safety regulations everywhere simply would not allow any station to be built without a way out.
Now we need a part two that shows how the rural parts of the same network are slowly being closed due to depopulation. As of 2025, Japan has lost 1366 km of track (about 5% of the total) since the 1990s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_closed_railway_lines_i...
>closed due to depopulation
Meanwhile, there's more people in the city of Tokyo than nearly the whole continent of Australia :) Japan's population is concentrating into a handful of big cities. I mean, who wants to live in a small town when there are endless options for shopping, restaurants, etc in the big city? It's not like in the US where big cities are dangerous. There's not much of a positive tradeoff for choosing small town life in Japan. Maybe you think you want to be a big land baron as all Americans seem to desire, but then you find out that undeveloped land in Japan is heavily taxed with property taxes. If you are not doing something very productive with Japan's limited land, Japan wants you to move your arse off it and let someone with a plan work it. Anyway, as rural areas empty out, the local rail lines close. JR is however building lots of bullet trains to connect the big cities. There is a new bullet train line opening soon between Shin-Hakodate and Sapporo for instance. It will probably be extended from Sapporo up to Asahikawa after that.
I love Tokyo (I spent eight months in Kawasaki in 2010), but I can see the appeal of living in a smaller place in Japan (though I’d personally be hesitant to live in a small, isolated town with little or no public transportation). Crowded trains and long lines can get tiring after a while.
I spent last summer in Toyohashi in Aichi Prefecture; I was a visiting researcher at Toyohashi University of Technology. While Toyohashi is not a small town by any means, it is far smaller than Tokyo. I found it nice for day-to-day living. Not crowded at all, and I found the bus service to be good; not world class, but comprehensive and ran frequently enough to be useful. It had plenty of grocery stores and department stores for everyday living. If I needed something unavailable in Toyohashi, Nagoya wasn’t too far away, and if I needed to be in Tokyo, I could get there in 90 minutes on a Hikari train on the Tokaido Shinkansen. I’d do it again; in fact, I’m going back to Toyohashi in a few weeks for another monthly stay.
Having just traveled through a range of cities and towns in Japan, I don't think the lack of options for shopping and restaurants are the reason that small (150,000+ population) towns are depopulating.
There's plenty of ways to spend money in them. That's not the problem. Neither is there a huge lack of conveniences. Any one of them is way more livable than almost anywhere in North America.
Poor economic prospects for the area is likely a part of the problem. The big cities pay significantly more for ~the same work.
A UK one would be more dramatic, losing over 8000 miles over the twentieth century, most in the 1960s https://www.transportxtra.com/files/13108-l.jpg
To be fair, most countries have due to privatisation and people getting wealthier and buying cars. In my country a ton of lines have closed down too and ourv population only grows.
> To be fair, most countries have due to privatisation
Japan's system is almost entirely private and is best in the world by nearly every metric. We (the people) do not owe support to depopulated areas. If you choose to live in the boonies the government is not required to build or maintain roads, tracks, sewers, power to your place. Funds are not infinite.
Japan's private system works because the government mostly got out of the way and let them build and run complementary businesses. Most other countries either make them public, and then they eventually are underfunded and are prevented from expanding/responding, OR, if they do let them be private they find some other way to cripple them like by disallowing other interests.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-japan-has-such-good-rai...
This take is hilariously misinformed. Japan's long-distance network was almost entirely public until JNR was privatized in 1987, and its successors the JRs continue to be for all intents and purposes controlled by the government.
Some not-very-light reading about the rise and fall of JNR:
https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/aura-of-success-the-first-ye...
https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/the-death-and-privatization-...
https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/the-death-and-privatization-...
This is entirely wrong. Jees this is so infuriating to see repeated. Japan has ~100 train companies. JR is 1 of those (now 7). The rest are not. Hanshin, Hankyu, Keio, Keikyu, Tokyu, Toei, etc all giant train companies, all private, have been since they were foudned.
No, it's not. The successful private companies all serve suburban commuters. The long-distance network was almost entirely JNR.
As of 1996, JR group still controls over 20,000 km of Japan's 30,000 km of rail, and that's after privatizing and closing a large slab of it (mostly those duplicated by Shinkansen).
The long distance is mostly irrelevant, People use trains daily for short commutes. As for JR, the arguably only reason it was in the position it was in was because the government got in the way. If they'd stayed out of the way the private companies would have built the rest.
Further, JR started private. It was nationalized in 1906. The Tokaido Line and tha Sanyo Line already built by private companies. They forced out 17 other companies and then ran it into the ground.
The only place private "might" not have built is rural and JR built those mostly as "pork-barrel" (favors to politians) when it was run by the government. I also say "might" because it is/was common, not just in Japan, to build housing and trains to that housing. You pick a place like Enoshima, build a few 1000s homes, build a train out there to sell the homes. So "rural" places do get private trains.
Or, more commonly, they have:
1. The public pay for and build the lines and prove market demand.
2. Decades later some 'fiscal conservatives' get elected.
3. Who then privatize them for a sweetheart deal to their friends.
4. Who then proceed to squeeze every penny they have out of the public, while foregoing expansion and service quality.
With an end result of everyone getting to pay through the nose for shit service, while profits accrue up. And nobody's building any competing lines, because rail is a textbook example of a natural monopoly, and it's hard to compete on capex with someone who got a full rail network by buying it, fully built out[1].
Nobody with a lick of sense will ever lend you the 100 billion dollars you need to open a from-scratch competitor, if you ever want to eat into the incumbent's margins. The incumbent knows this.
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The rail company is the poster child for either a crown corporation, or at most, a 'customer-facing services outsourced on a fixed-term-contract'.
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[1] Bonus points for rules around eminent domain changing at some point in the past century and a half, making it actually impossible to build a competing line today.
This is wrong! People keep pointing to JR and think that's the entire country and train system. It is not and never was. The majority of train lines in Japan were private, started private, privately funded, and are still private.
>people getting wealthier and buying cars
Haha, my experience is people buying cars feel poorer, not wealthier. Car payments, maintenance, insurance, taxes, fuel... and as soon as you finish paying it off, it's basically EOL. Time to start paying for the next one.
Unfortunately when you live in a place (like most American cities) where they’re largely built under the assumption people will drive everywhere, a car is essentially required. It’s expensive owning and maintaining a car, but it also feels demoralizing dealing with limited public transportation and neighborhoods that aren’t walkable. There are walkable metro areas in the United States, but they tend to be very expensive, sometimes more expensive than living in a suburb or exurb and dealing with the cost of commuting. I grew up poor; dealing with hour-long bus waits, late buses, multiple transfers, and limited choices is a powerful motivation to save up for a car.
Well yes but this is a choice. In a place with good public transport and alternative road modes people just use cars a lot less.
The thing is in the US cars are traditionally a huge part of the economic engine. So they get preference. You see something similar in Germany though not nearly as bad.
> as soon as you finish paying it off, it's basically EOL
The average age of a car on the road in the US today is now more than 11 years. The average new car loan is just less than 6 years. Beyond that, it's all just a different set of trade-offs. Aside from living somewhere truly dense with fantastic public transit and only going places reachable by said transit, owning a car means less time spent on transportation, and infinitely more flexibility on where you go. Lots of people prefer the lifestyle. Even in Europe cars remain quite popular.
The cost of ownership goes WAY up immediately after the warranty expires. I owned one car. A Ford I purchased brand new. I have no more desire to ever own a car. That experience taught me all I ever needed to know about cars. They are an endless money pit. Everyone I know who drives is poorer for it.
>owning a car means less time spent on transportation
See, that's how drivers think. "I need to spend less time in transportation", because it's miserable for them. You don't even consciously think about it, but subconsciously, you hate being in that car. I like riding the train. It's fun. Even the old Amtrak trains are fun to ride. I can enjoy a beer if I want. There's one cute conductor who flirts with me. I'm not getting any of that in a car.
>Lots of people prefer the lifestyle.
How many "prefer" it because they have never tried any other way. Sitting there alone, rage listening to talk radio in gridlock. No thanks. Cars are antisocial. Been there, done that, I don't care for it.
I hear the cope though, about how cars are "freedom" and can "go anywhere," but when you don't have a car for a while, you begin to realize how cars are the opposite of freedom. Cars are an anchor. Everywhere you go, you have to worry about where to put the car. You can't get too far away from the car. If you have to feed a parking meter, you can barely get a block away from the car. Can't even finish the movie, let's go back to the parking meter. You always have to go back to the car, you can't just continue on your journey and leave it behind. That's not an option. Go back to the car.
Once you have no need for a car, only then do you realize what a slave you were to the car.
> I hear the cope though, about how cars are "freedom" and can "go anywhere," but when you don't have a car for a while, you begin to realize how cars are the opposite of freedom. Cars are an anchor. Everywhere you go, you have to worry about where to put the car. You can't get too far away from the car. If you have to feed a parking meter, you can barely get a block away from the car. Can't even finish the movie, let's go back to the parking meter. You always have to go back to the car, you can't just continue on your journey and leave it behind. That's not an option. Go back to the car.
Totally agree, I didn't realise how much of an issue this was.
I often go somewhere, walk 25km and go back from a totally different station. With a car this would have made me so uneasy knowing I still have to make my way back. Knowing I can do whatever I decide in the moment really makes me feel easy.
> See, that's how drivers think. "I need to spend less time in transportation", because it's miserable for them. You don't even consciously think about it, but subconsciously, you hate being in that car. I like riding the train. It's fun. Even the old Amtrak trains are fun to ride. I can enjoy a beer if I want. There's one cute conductor who flirts with me. I'm not getting any of that in a car.
Well personally I hate transportation too, but the car was more of a phenomenon. I had a car because I lived 70km from work. Now I live close and no longer need a car, and I waste less time on commute.
Trains make me motion sick, and they don’t go into the wilderness. You live in a bubble.
True but at least where I'm from it's a huge status symbol. Every time a neighbour gets a new car the whole street is jealous and talking about it.
I personally find driving very stressful and wasteful of my time so I hate cars. Even when I had one from work. In fact that was worse because they only give you a work car because the job involves loads of driving. Even though the tax man wanted lots of money for something I didn't even want in the first place.
Closing lines in the 90s would be unusual; the big spurt of line closures was generally _far_ earlier in most places, generally 50s or 60s.
It was because until the 90s in Holland public transport was seen as a community service, not a business so even lines with limited traffic were served. During the 90s the neoliberal craze began where everything had to be a market.
Yeah, I've noticed this as well. They not only slowly close old stations, but they almost stopped building new ones since about 2007.
I don't understand why people downvote your comment. It isn't like you're forcing them to have babies and do something about the world by stating the fact about Japan's decline
The "decline" you mention is privatization of JR and their efforts to make it more profitable. Privatization started in 1987, but it wasn't fully privatized until 2006.
If it has anything to do with babies, you have your cause and effect reversed. Autos are a cause of declining birth rates...
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/731812
So a reduction in trains causes a reduction in birth rates, not the other way around.
Never seen this one before:
"[Error] SecurityError: Attempt to use history.replaceState() more than 100 times per 10 seconds"
I had a near-instant crash too, but different kind. Firefox iOS. The vibes are leaking
On iOS, all browsers use WKWebView behind the scenes as required by Apple. So crash behavior is similar to Safari.
Super cool! I did something similar (in terms of visualisation) a few years back, a map of cities by their birthdate on wikipedia: https://cpa.github.io/wiki-cities-birthdates/
Fun bit of trivia: Japanese train stations each have their own custom stamp, and if you have a piece of paper or a notebook they'll stamp it for you at the ticket booth (this is a fairly common thing to do there). If you get an A5 notebook, it's a neat way to document a trip -- one stamp for your departure station, one for your arrival.
Sadly not all of them, much to my ill discovery! They are fun souvenirs and I encourage everyone to collect them if they want a free momento (ideally bring your own stamp pad).
Tell-tale signs of AI-built UX:
- Extremely low contrast typography
- Serif typefaces with body in sans serif
- Black + red/maroon color combo
- tiny, tiny typefaces
I’m not sure what I am looking at. I see a number going up but the methodology is missing and analysis is lacking.
Has Japan ever closed a railway station?
Are the 1872 stations the first ever in Japan?
Is this a plot of all stations ever constructed or just the ones that still exist?
Has the number of stations ever gone down?
What events are corollated with building booms and what direction does the arrow of causality point?
This is awesome! The website screams claude to me. I'm not bashing it, in fact I think it's great. That was just my first thought when I opened the webpage. Good transition into the learning tool as well.
Did they catch Perry's Miniature Train? https://repository.library.brown.edu/viewers/image/zoom/bdr:...
Japanese from the inaka here. My contribution to this dataset: nothing. No station in my town, never was one. The nearest line is an hour by car and it's openly next on the chopping block.
I made something similar, with sound - https://sheets.works/data-viz/bells-of-tokyo
Very cool. I am a sucker for good design and this site was beautiful to look at.
I noticed that most of the track was laid down in the 1920s and 1930s. Any ideas why?
It's just default Claude design.
> I noticed that most of the track was laid down in the 1920s and 1930s. Any ideas why?
They were originally built for military logistics to move troops, guns, and supplies around the country.
You have to appreciate how people would think long term back then. We lost that quality -- our corporate leaders can't think past 1 quarter.
Would be cool to somehow see how the volumes of passengers grows as well.
I also want to see if we have this information for Switzerland.
That whole website is just beautiful. I'd love to see more work by the designer.
Good/bad news: you will definitely see more work by them -- this style of website is clearly the output of a coding agent, maybe Claude Code.
It's beautiful I agree, but that "designer" is just claude opus.
Lots of examples on x and on reddit of similarly styled apps made with the help of opus.
On mobile pressing play makes the timeline go from 1872 to 2026 in a single step.
This occurs for me on desktop as well (Firefox, Linux)
On Brave desktop as well
Stations, surely?!
I love the fractal nature of it.
At first glance I thought this was a photo gallery. Still interesting, although a photo gallery would have been more interesting, at least for me
really cool wow
So tired of all the AI picking this terrible font.
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Oh, someone is jealous. His country will never be responsible for the longest underwater tunnel in the world. How will he continue to tell himself he is the greatest country? :)
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