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Japan has the world’s best railway system. 28% of Japanese passenger-kilometers are by rail. Germany manages 6.4%, and the USA manages 0.25%. Just one Japanese company, JR East, carries more passengers than China’s entire railway system, and four times as many than Britain’s. What is the secret of its success? worksinprogress.co/issue/why-japa… Part of the answer is that Japanese railway companies don't just operate trains. They run hospitals, supermarkets, department stores, amusement parks, office complexes, and retirement homes around their railway stations. One of them co-built Tokyo Disneyland. Another owns a baseball team. A third created its own all-women musical theater in 1914, which is still running today. The logic is elegant: a railway increases the developable value of land around its stations, but normally that value accrues to landowners, not the railway operator. Japanese railway companies captured this value by owning and developing the land themselves. About half of the revenue of Japanese railway companies comes from ‘side businesses’ like these. Allowing railway operators to capture more of the value they created meant that more lines were profitable, making a far larger system financially viable. This may sound like a radically novel approach. But in fact, an exactly similar system existed in nineteenth-century America. The success of Japanese railways does not lie in some unreplicable feature of Japanese culture: it lies in good policy. If they learnt the right lessons from it, many countries could replicate Japan’s success. Read more (much more) in @Borners1's & @carto_graph's new piece for @WorksInProgMag Issue 23.



@wangwatchworld 我觉得武统的话现在就是最好的时机,特朗普那鸟样必定屁都不敢放,放几个小制裁罚酒三杯过了,其他国家更没胆量叫板了,不会有世界大战。但是特朗普这傻子下台后换了新人风险就大多了。

پیام دریافتی از خانواده #مهدی_سالاری کودک قربانی جمهوری اسلامی در میناب.


Iranian forces appear to have damaged or destroyed multiple USAF KC-135 tankers parked in the open at Prince Sultan Airbase in Saudi Arabia.


中国大使館3尉侵入に関する新華社の出した6つの質問 1.単独犯か組織的犯行か? 2.犯行は自衛隊で受けた歪曲教育や極右価値観と関係が有るか? 3.歴史を反省しているか?文民統制は機能しているか? 4.「遺憾」を述べるのみで無責任では? 5.自衛隊の軍拡の意図は? 6.メディアの取り上げ方も無責任では?







在政治制度上,在国民精神世界,周边国家都在进化,只有中国把自己关在历史的笼子里返祖,螺旋式退化。这一阵,退化出一支叫“皇汉”的猕猴。















