Posts about Japan

Learning from Walk Scores: Montgomery's planners look at how their disconnected street grid creates some pockets of low Walk Score very close to otherwise highly walkable places (The Straight Line) ... Japan's real-estate sites organize listings by subway station and show walking distances to each. (Walk Score) (Comment · Share)

Robot turns snow into bricks: Local governments don't plow sidewalks and bike trails partly because standard snowplows don't fit and they don't have smaller equipment. Japanese inventors created a robotic snowplow that also solves the problem of where to put snow by squeezing it into bricks suitable for kids to build igloos with. (Inventors) (Comment · Share)

Really high-speed rail: Japan has always been a leader in high-speed trains. Their latest plan: a maglev from Tokyo to Osaka. It would make the trip, 20% farther than DC-NYC, in just 67 minutes. The Acela Express takes 168 minutes. (The Mainichi Daily News, Nazo) (Comment · Share)

"Treat the next person": A cafe in Japan (created temporarily as an art project) offers snacks and drinks. However, once you place your order, you instead get whatever the previous person ordered. No asking the other person or ordering twice. (Cabel's Blog LOL via Marginal Revolution). (Comment · Share)

Transit smart cards, improved: Tokyo's transit smart card, the Suica also lets users pay for goods in vending machines and stores. Users can also swipe near poster advertisements to get more details emailed to them, and can connect to Web services to download or visualize their movements. Some of these uses and the agency's ability to use the data raise privacy concerns. (ReadWriteWeb, Rob P) ... Transport Canada highlights the huge gains in transit ridership that resulted from joint student IDs and transit smart cards at three universities. (Comment · Share)

Bicycling

Give the robot your bike

May 5, 2009 5:08 pm

Here's what we could do with the unused parking space at DC USA: build an enormous robotic bike parking system. We covered this before, but now there's an even better video with more information (though also ads). This system grew the Tokyo neighborhood's already-high rate of bicycle usage by another 20%. (Hard Drive, Nat)

Comment — Share	— tags: bike parking, DC USA, Japan

Streets are different in Japan, too: In Tokyo, there's no on-street parking at all, because the roads are too narrow. Also, instead of gutters between the sidewalks and the traffic lanes as in most countries, the gutters are right against the buildings, with small ramps bridging them at entrances. (How We Drive, Planetizen) (1 comment · Share)

Japan's roads to nowhere: Japan has far more roads and expressways than other industrialized nations, many in places where nobody needs them, or people need a walkable street instead of a high-speed expressway. Who made them do this? Americans. (1 comment · Share)

Traffic

Weekend reading: someone is wrong on the Internet

by David Alpert • February 7, 2009 8:38 am

Photo by Prince of Petworth.

More obnoxiously judgmental? Prince of Petworth discusses the curb cut-gorging townhouses on P Street between 16th and 17th, leading to a debate about curb cuts followed by "which blog commenters are more obnoxiously judgmental," on PoP or Greater Greater Washington.

No Facebook for Annapolis: The Maryland General Assembly will block Facebook and MySpace for members and staff at their office computers. They claim that viruses prompted this, but the Baltimore Sun says Republicans think there were political reasons. Either way, legislators who use Facebook to communicate with the public will lose this valuable tool.

Tobago, DC? цarьchitect figured, if DC has a Trinidad, it needs a Tobago. He suggests the area between Van Ness and Tenleytown sometimes called Wakefield or North Cleveland Park.

Why can't we be like leafcutter ants? Leafcutter ants don't get into traffic jams, even on narrow paths like tree branches. That's because they patiently wait behind slower-moving ants instead of going around them, Wired explains. If cars behaved that way, say scientists, traffic would move more smoothly too. Via Planetizen.

5 comments — Share	— tags: Cleveland Park, curb cuts, Japan, links, Maryland, stimulus, technology, traffic

Government

Sustainable Transportation Five, please step forward

by David Alpert • February 6, 2009 12:41 pm

Five unnamed but heroic Democratic Senators refused to support Boxer and Inhofe's amendment to add $50 billion in highway spending to the stimulus. According to Streetsblog, they insisted on these criteria:

Five DC superheroes. Photo by Custom Lego minifigs on Flickr.
Allocating a minimum of 30 percent of the total to clean water and public transportation/passenger rail. Of the total funds allocated to highways and bridges, 10 percent would have to be set aside for Transportation Enhancements, i.e. bicycle and pedestrian improvements.
Giving the Secretary of Transportation discretion to redirect funds from states that were not adhering to certain criteria to states that were adhering to them. The criteria Dems and enviros wanted to see, for example, would not have allowed states to receive funds by showing that a project improves vehicular Level of Service.

Remember, Level of Service (LOS) is an outdated metric that assumes the only objective of roads is to move the maximum numbers of cars as fast as possible. When transportation departments focus on LOS, they end up with wider intersections and more lanes that reduce walkability and pedestrian safety and promote sprawl.

According to Streetsblog, the Boxer/Inhofe amendment is "nearly dead", though nothing is certain yet. Update: Infrastructurist reports that Inhofe hasn't given up. The Bond amendments to cut rail programs also appear to be going nowhere.

I'd love to know who these five unnamed Senators are so that we can thank them for their enlightened approach to transportation.

In other stimulus news, The New York Times this morning reports that Japan's stimulus in the 1990s failed to revive its economy. Economists both inside and outside Japan disagree on whether "didn't go far enough... [or] was a colossal waste." According to the article, they built "increasingly wasteful roads and bridges" instead social services. The article doesn't mention transit at all, whether in the wasteful or the more useful category. Tip: Greater Greater Dad.

In a Boston Globe op-ed, Ed Glaeser argues for a separate infrastructure bill to create the transportation network we need, and for limiting the stimulus to items like repairing decaying infrastructure that we can actually begin right away.