Station of despair: What to do if you get stuck at end of Tokyo Chuo Rapid Line

Japan is definitely high trust and has a lot of advantages downstream of that. Though I think lots of that list is more of a "vibrant Japanese city" vibe (go up to some dying onsen town and you'll see plenty of broken shit and TVs dropped on the side of the road).

Cleanliness is... mostly downstream of storefronts and the like picking shit up _all the time_. There are pockets of land that don't end up people's direct responsibility and end up getting very dirty very quickly. Little micro-pockets of trash that pile up (very quickly!). But lots of places you tend to have someone going around and just picking something up.

For like a year there was a guy consistently eating his cup noodles or lunch box near my building, and he would just drop it near the bike parking. But we had somebody come by the building twice a week to deal with trash and the like and he was picking it up (I'd throw it into a garbage bag if I saw it and had one in my hand). Still though, like if I'd go on a midnight walk I'd see it.

Turns out that the way super crowded places can be clean is by cleaning constantly (see also restrooms, which need to be constantly cleaned). "Nothing is broken" also definitely feels downstream of people fixing stuff promptly. Low latency when trying to deal with issues might be key.

And an aside for the public transit... while the transit feels clean, ask most any woman living in Tokyo how they feel about riding public transit. Many might still grade it above other ones but I have heard many nasty experiences that white guys just don't get exposed to at all. Groping, verbal harassment, the works.

EDIT: I mention lots of this to get to a bigger point: good things are possible! There is no magic entirely localized in the Japanese Isles.

Japanese are obsessed with being clean. Like wiping the pen with tissue paper before handing it to you. On more than one occasion I have had a stranger passenger on long distance train clearing my cup of coffee as she goes to throw hers in the trash. May be she is signalling you can't trust these foreigners to clean up before they leave!

Having never been to Japan, I don’t dispute anything you say, and as an American I definitely agree those things sound great.

However I do think it’s fair to point out the existence of women-only train cars in Japan, which I believe exist at least in part due to groping. Seems like YMMV depending on gender.

Looks pretty similar to what I'd expect to a regular European town.

What are you comparing it to that you see such a drastic difference?

> - Accessibility strip for blind people (bumpy yellow stripe in train stations and sidewalks)

Have you tried to find an elevator? There's one in every station, but they don't tell you where it is.

Also, they like making sidewalks out of the slipperiest substances you can find. It's a problem when it rains and can't be easy for anyone who walks unsteadily.

I went to Japan (first time) a few months ago, and I was blown away by almost everything (including what you mention). It's just so different from the US in almost every way, but so nice overall (people, cities, transit). I loved it and want to go back already.

What is it that makes this possible in Japan? And why doesn't it happen in the US?

If this is the station drunks end up at after passing out, then there is a high probability of seeing throw up or a passed out person on the weekends.

The green cars are double deckered and you can ride them for free until April!

To note, ending within the suburbs doesn't help that much if everything is closed and your choice is wandering the streets, spending 5h at the only opened bar, forking for an hotel or paying a cab.

That said, France is the same regarding commuting trains, oversleeping in Paris's RER will lead you to pleasing but pretty far away towns.

Did it once, and spent about 5h visiting the sleeping town by foot to mark the occasion. Did it again in the midst of winter, and the staff allowed me and the two other blokes to stay for the night in the next departing train with the heating on.

Spain had trains going well into the mountains as well. I can't imagine how it goes for Russia, China and India.

Six of the London tube lines have all night service on Friday and Saturday nights, so if you fall asleep on these, you won't be stuck.

https://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/tube-improvements/what-we-are-do...

My route home is via commuter rail so I don't have that luxury. I wouldn't possible know what it is like to wake up after a few beers and find myself on the last train of the night, four stations past my stop, but rumour has it that the night bus network is pretty good at getting me^H^Hpeople home, even if the wait can be cold, so long as you've not actually left London. Or Uber.

https://sucs.org/~cmckenna/maps/busspider/2012-14/west-londo...

But if you don't wake up til the end of the line, it's probably pretty much like in Japan, except less clean.

Uxbridge, High Barnet, Edgware, all painful for a wake-up nudge from a rail worker at 1am.

Cockfosters was proper despair, and Mordor (or Morden) well... don't.

What took the cake though was flying back and arriving at Stansted after midnight and waiting for the 5am escape back home in the depths of winter.

London offered many memorable evenings for those silly enough to party in the city a while back.

Not drinking so much is probably a way to avoid the despair, but where is the fun in that?

Crewe is a station of despair for the British rail network despite not being a last stop, instead in fact because it's something like the heart of the network. If you try to travel far enough across the island (especially from the north, I think) and you depart lateish or don't have the right tickets or enounter delays, the chances are excellent that you will be spending several hours overnight in Crewe. You can forget about finding a convenient and affordable bed, so instead you'll be slumped on a chair in the little waiting room, which at least is lit and heated, and feels like it's the secret heart of Britain. Or at least that's how it all still was the last time I was there, but I doubt anything much has changed since.

I slept on a train from London once and ended up in Edinburgh. But that was planned :)

Also not a despair place. But the point is you can go far. Same must be true in Japan.

Berlin has this and it's Schöneweide. There is a light rail ring with two lines going in opposite directions... and one line going straight into the middle of nowhere. If you don't pay attention it's easy to end up there by accident.

Chicago, too, particularly on Metra (the commuter rail network). The longest line is the UP Northwest line, about 63 mi/102 km to the far rural town of Harvard, Illinois.

Or, if you're heading to Indiana, the NICTD South Shore Line can take you all the way from Chicago to South Bend.

[delayed]

My understanding is they do a _lot_ of maintenance at night.

I have to imagine it might not be worth it though. The whole "city that never sleeps" vibe is relatively localized to a couple neighborhoods and having all lines run through the night would be a bit of an extravagance (all that for, what, the 5 hours they're not running?). Train drivers aren't cheap! And we invented technology for getting small groups of people home already, it's called taxis.

Post COVID I think there's been a huge push to just chill out even with the 24 hour stuff. Lots of places close earlier than they used to, and some places that used to be 24 hours just go until midnight now.

There was a bus that would go between a couple of the nightclub spots throughout the night, never took it though. Maybe there would be a decent business in running "commuter"-y buses throughout the night between certain areas, at least to try and get closer home.

Maintenance, perhaps? For the London Underground at least, the power is switched off after the trains stop running (4th rail) so workers can safely go onto the tracks.

Also, it would almost definitely run at a loss (excluding externalities)... same reason why many Chinese cities' subsidised metros close quite early. Agreed that it's probably beneficial in the big picture but maybe hard to justify to superiors?

I've heard the theory floated that this is at least in part due to furious lobbying against it by taxi companies, who currently have a de facto monopoly on transport at night.

More likely it's just for train maintenance, and indeed, 24-hour train operation is vanishingly rare, with NYC and Chicago the only well-known major cities with it. Tokyo does stand out by not even having night buses though. (It used to have a skeletal network, but even that was killed off by COVID.)

As others have suggested, running trains overnight hugely complicates routine maintenance. When people are working on the line, any train movements will hugely increase the risk profile.

The more sensible option is generally night buses, which are considerably less expensive. The London Underground runs a limited night service on some lines on Friday and Saturday nights, but London has a fairly extensive night bus service.

They could get rid of this phenomena if they had the train schedule end in a lively area. Meaning the last train arriving an endpoint is followed by a single last train that only goes halfway. I imagine that extra half-route is opposite that most passengers are traveling though.

Like others said, it's probably maintenance. But presumably they could run late night bus service along essentially the same routes as the trains.

Trains are good at bypassing traffic and carrying large numbers of people, but you don't need to worry about those things in the middle of the night, so a bus should work fine as substitute.