Fuck Cars

9372 readers

297 users here now

A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

Rules

1. Be Civil

You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.

2. No hate speech

Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.

3. Don't harass people

Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.

4. Stay on topic

This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.

5. No reposts

Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.

Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.

Posting Guidelines

In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:

[meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
[article] for news articles
[blog] for any blog-style content
[video] for video resources
[academic] for academic studies and sources
[discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
[meme] for memes
[image] for any non-meme images
[misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories

Recommended communities:

[email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

184

How is it that Germany and Japan can maintain good urban planning despite being home to some of the largest car companies? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

74 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Ever since ditching car culture and joining the urbanist cause (on the internet at least but that has to change), I've noticed that some countries always top the list when it comes to good urbanism. The first and most oblivious one tends to be The Netherlands but Germany and Japan also come pretty close. But that's strange considering that both countries have huge car industries. Germany is (arguably) the birthplace of the car (Benz Patent-Motorwagen) and is home to Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and BMW. Japan is home to Toyota, Honda, Nissan and among others. How is it that these countries have been able to keep the auto lobby at bay and continue investing in their infrastructure?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The Shinkansen is absolutely great and I love traveling in Japan by train, much better experience overall than Germany. That said, there are still so many things that are oddly outdated. Like, why is there no app to book tickets? Even when booking online, physical tickets are still needed and have to be collected at the train station.

Now with the typhoon a lot of connections were cancelled. Hundreds of people had to go to physical counters to exchange their physical tickets to cash. Because there's an emergency schedule on some lines, the ticket machines don't work and customers have to go to counters to get tickets. Even Germany is more digitized than that. Granted, Germany has a lot more experience with cancelled train connections...

It's like, Japan was ahead of everyone else and just stopped there. Still a great experience but it could be so much better with relatively little effort.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

You can book through the JR app (EkiNet, though it is kinda shit), IIRC. Definitely through their website. I don't believe you need a physical ticket anymore, either, if your phone functions as your IC card (I'm not sure about actual IC cards, but I assume it's the same). I do end up getting physical tickets most of the time because my local train gets shut down somewhat regularly and doesn't run for hours at a time making it hard to know when to book in advance.

That said, we definitely need to do better at digitalization here in Japan. Even what is there for the government is pretty limited and, when it works, has an abysmal UX.