Sadly, we'll never have this in the US. (Many) people don't think of it as their bus, their street, their town, their country. (Many) people don't follow the rules and aren't aware or don't care about how their actions affect others.
To be clear, this isn't just a US problem, pretty much all countries that I've visited (just a sampling to be sure) are like this including other Asian countries. Japan really stands out as being different in this respect. I hope it can stay that way.
Sadly, this is the opposite of the UK cultural attitude. Kids here learn that cleaning up is someone else’s responsibility. Littering becomes a habit from an early age.
Even compared to Americans, we are terrible litterers. You can see this in people’s behaviours in fast food restaurants: in the US (as in many other countries), customers will bin their food wrappers and return their tray when they leave. Even groups of kids will typically do this: it’s just habit. In the UK, typical customers will just leave their mess at the table when they leave. Cleaning is someone else’s job.
Whoa, that sucks. Out of curiosity, do people in UK tip? In the states, if there's no tip, then it is expected for the customer to clean up after themselves.
You'll often see folks in cafés help out and return their trays, but it's not a guarantee - and in some establishments it's not even possible for you as a customer to do this. At the end of the day, you're paying to sit down - and clearing your table afterwards is priced into the food offer.
Fast food is a bit more of a grey area, since there's not necessarily table service. I'd throw away my rubbish at e.g. Burger King - there's usually bins provided for this purpose.
I tidy up or not based on whether there's table service. No table service = I do it myself, table service = it's somebody else's problem. I don't think anybody ever taught me this explicitly - it's just something I must have picked up, I suppose?
I don't think it's really all that outrageous to just leave the detritus on the table in either case. But when there's no table service, the tables won't be getting cleared so regularly, so it can make things inconvenient for the other patrons.
There area a lot of edge cases with this scenario. In some fast food restaurants (such as certain Burger King locations), you will get a number and the employees will bring the food to you, so there is a minimal form of table service. Also, the history of the country matters as well. In China, where there is no tipping culture, but fast food started out as fancy expensive foreign food not too long ago, the employees are expected to clean up, even as prices are now lower relatively compared with moderately expensive restaurants. On the other hand, in Korea, where there also is no tipping culture, fast food is now cheaper food, and you clean up after yourself.
How can you refuse to pay? It's part of the bill, isn't it? In most restaurants I've been so far at least. Also foreigner, so maybe I am missing something.
You can say you don’t want to or state some other total you’re going to pay that’s >= to the rest of the bill. Obviously that’s awkward and that’s why they make it the default, but you can pay less/no service charge/tip if you want to.
In the UK, we generally tip for a great service. If I buy a meal and the food and service is just fine, then no tip. Though if the food and service are great, I will generally tip 10 - 20% depending on how generous I'm feeling at the time. Tips generally aren't expected, and you won't be shamed if you don't tip.
I would clean up after myself somewhere like McDonalds or Burger King, though in a cafe or restaurant I wouldn't. In a restaurant I usually put the plates together to make it easier for the waiter or waitress to clear the table and try not to be too messy.
It's kind of a class thing though, and not down traditional class lines. There are a lot of families for whom littering would be completely out of the question.
Oh man this is so true and one of the big things that really stuck out to me when I first moved here. In the states i was used to seeing trash along the highway, but walking down city streets are relatively clean. Here in the UK when i walk down the street I'm now used to seeing tons of plastic bottles and empty crisp packs in the hedges. And you completely nailed it, cleaning is someone elses job.
France also removed most public bins in Paris after bomb attacks in the 90s (I think) but they ended up replacing them with hoops to which transparent plastic bags are attached. I'm not sure on the timeline (ie how long it took them to go from "no bins" to "crappy bins") but this seems like an okay solution. The lack of public bins in Japan is mildly infuriating
I was driving in Britain with a friend from New Zealand and he said how shocked his family was at the litter in Britain. He mentioned a UK tourist family who were rude and uncouth and became notorious for their "rampage" through NZ. Their greatest sin, and the one that first got them publicity, was littering.
Well... yeah if you're eating in a restaurant, then yes it literally is someone else's paid job to clean your table. That's what makes it a restaurant.
Do you also criticise people who go to a restaurant and expect someone else to cook their food?
Or people who get a taxi and then expect someone else to drive?
In a fast food restaurant where there is a bin where customers are supposed to throw their trash then I’m assuming I’m actually not paying to have it done.
That is: there isn’t staff enough to handle it, and those that leave their tray just ensure that prices go up (since they are using a service they didn’t pay for).
I have never left a tray in a fast food restaurant in 40 years.
I would imagine most restaurants wouldn't want customers walking around clumsily with trays of dirty plates. They don't know what they're doing and they'd be brushing past other customers unnecessarily. In a restaurant you're paying for an experience and I think it's totally reasonable for part of that experience to be someone clearing plates away after courses.
I'm talking about McDonalds, Burger King etc. Every single one here has had places for customers to not just bring their trays but actually separate cardboard, liquids, plastics, food, other, and THEN return the tray. That has been the case for probably at least 15-20 years. Before that it was also bring the tray back, but just a trashcan, no recycling.
I remember the shock of moving from Tokyo to London. Despite of London not being the dirties of the cities I saw in my life, the gap is huge. Litter is everywhere even when the trash bin can be found close by. People do not respect public places, walking with your shoes on benches is normal, no one removes their shoes anywhere (example: I even saw people walk with shoes on in the soft play area where small kids are crawling touching and licking everything around,) toilets in restaurants are so dirty that I try to avoid using them if I can help it, dog's poop on the pavement, tons of bubble gum on the pavement, too. The drop that overfilled the cup was seeing bunch of young people walking from pub to pub, one of them left with glass half of beer in his hand (red flag already,) drunk few more times, and threw the glass with the beer, what's left of it, in the flowery spot. In the city center, middle of the day. It's so depressing...
I was in Osaka this weekend and litter is everywhere. By far one of the dirtiest major cities I’ve seen in East Asia. In the city I live in in Japan, the rice fields are full of coffee cans, plastic bottles, and bento packaging thrown out from cars. Streets are covered in cigarette butts and somehow I see natto containers in the middle of nowhere. Going hiking, I see tea bottles and plastic bags from convenience stores all over the damn place.
Most parts of Tokyo and cities with tourism are generally clean because there are heavy cleanup operations. People are still littering just like everywhere else.
> Invisible dirt – germs and bacteria – are another source of concern. When people catch colds or flu, they wear surgical masks to avoid infecting other people.
But you’ll never catch people washing their hands and grandpas always pull down their mask to cough so as to not dirty it. I caught a news program during flu season last year telling people how to avoid the flu. Their recommendations? Keep your stomach wrapped and extra warm, and drink green tea since it cures influenza.
> I was in Osaka this weekend and litter is everywhere
While I generally agree, the funny part about this is that it’s not uncommon in Japan for people to refer to people from Osaka as being “not Japanese.”
I have been on a beach in Shimane-ken, it was the dirtiest I ever seen. Lot of trash everywhere. Explanation from my Japanese companion: it is from Korea. Yeah sure, this bento box has been carried by the current...
Osaka holds a strange place in Japanese culture. It is considered distinctly “un-Japanese,” but still at the same time is famous for producing all kinds of creative types (comedians, musicians, artists). And its accent is generally considered charming, if “inappropriate” for formal discourse.
As an American, I’ve always felt more comfortable there because it’s way less uptight and rule-bound than other parts of Japan.
Almost every time I've been approached by a friendly, curious, Japanese person, they've been from Osaka. Regardless of age or gender, they are definitely the most outgoing and gaijin-friendly people in Japan.
While we're on the subject of Osaka stories, about 5 years ago in February I was walking with friends near the "Running Man" bridge in Shinsaibashi. Probably around 1am, and cold. A taxi pulls up close to the bridge....the driver pops the trunk, a passenger joins him at the rear of the vehicle....and they took a PASSED OUT Japanese dude outta the taxi's trunk and just laid him on the concrete. He didn't even have a shirt on. They reached in the trunk and threw a shoe at him. Then the taxi left. We're just standing there in awe thinking "No shirt, shoes off, probably drunk and lying on cold concrete in February? That dude is gonna die of hypothermia and whoever dropped him off doesn't seem to give 2 shits....man Osaka is wild."
Not surprising as this is about 2 blocks from the parking lot where all the yakuza park their exotics[1]. Look at that building in Street View and even in daytime there's a yellow exotic parked there.
I prefer Osaka to Tokyo(the central wards where I've been at least) personally.
Still very Japanese IMHO, it certainly has its own vibe.. The craft beer and brewpub scene is great, and people generally seem more friendly and open to strangers and foreigners. Cycling culture seems stronger. An outsiders observation; people are much more likely to cross a crosswalk early or otherwise outside the proper time in Osaka!
Osaka really is _different_ in a tangible sense. They seem to buck the conservative/traditional trends as a point of pride. That said, 2 of the most disgusting (public) bathrooms I've ever had the displeasure of stepping into were in Osaka. That's been a sticking point for me and it's come up in conversation nearly every time I have a conversation about Japan. I thought Osaka was fun, and it has a great culture, but you need to be prepared for it's reality if you are in Tokyo or Kyoto first.
that's very fascinating, as someone who has only experienced Tokyo, I was amazed with how clean it was compared to other Eastern Asian cities (I lived in Shanghai). Wouldn't have guessed it was a bit of smoke and mirrors.
Or the parent's comment is a big of exaggeration to downplay the general cleanliness.
Compared to most major global cities it's night and day.
I'd take a hard look on NY, Chicago, L.A, London, Paris, Amsterdam, before I complain like the grandparent about the Japanese situation which is an order of magnitude better...
Tokyo of course is on a league of its own, but here's Osaka Street View, go around, how does it compare to what you read?
Well Kabikucho is in Tokyo haha. It gets really bad every night and they clean it up in the mid morning. At around 7am it's shocking how dirty it is; a complete mind blower compared to how clean you get used to everything being.
First thing I noticed after leaving the train from the airport to Shinjuku is just how crazy clean everything was. It was certainly impressive and most of the city I visited followed suit. I spent time actively looking for trash with little success, quite different than every other city I've been to in the world. Even unpopulated areas (wilderness, forests, remote parks) you wouldn't expect to see much trash always seem to have trash.
At night time I did see quite a bit of beer cans/bottles around, however, either people or cleanup crews seemed to group them together to make cleanup easier.
If this is due to cleanup operations, I feel other cities around the world should consider such logistics because it makes travel there one of the most pleasant experiences I've had.
Those surgical masks may not be doing much either due to improper use. As they get wet due to moisture in the breath they become less permeable causing more of the air to be vented out the sides rather than through the membrane. Perhaps this could still decrease the radius of infection even in this suboptimal state.
Maybe the explanation is a bit overwrought but it’s a fact that Tokyo is astonishingly clean, and I never once saw someone drop large trash in the street, even though there aren’t bins.
That could be as simple as broken windows theory but the contrast with Brooklyn is striking.
The cultural attitude difference is real to some degree. People tend to smoke while standing in one place, a designated smoking area outside with an ashtray, not walk and smoke. This is a huge difference and reflects a priority on not annoying people around you.
That’s just one of many example I could give of what are obviously and viscerally differences in habit, custom, and perspective about consideration for strangers.
There's no bins on the street because Japanese people rarely eat, drink, smoke, etc while moving, though Starbucks/etc has changed that a little bit, but I rarely see those discarded.
You just don't have any trash to drop, you'd keep it in your bag if you did, and there's bins at konbini or vending machines everywhere.
Today, like most days, on the news they had more videos of Rugby tourists passed out on the street, replaying the subway video, etc. This time they had a segment about gaijin putting out cigarette butts with their shoes and walking off for like 5 minutes.
Haven't seen it any worse than the Rugby World Cup.. I don't want to be around for the Olympics.
I was in Tokyo and Osaka these last weeks, and China before Tokyo. Landing in Tokyo after China was magical. People didn't shout in public or have their phones blaring. They let people disembark trains instead of just barging in as soon as the train doors open, and they queue neatly for those doors. And yes everything was clean and tidy.
But the touristy area of Osaka was back to being dreadful. People cutting you off while walking, groups stopping in the middle of the way, often with their rolling suitcases blocking more of the path. I noticed there were many Chinese tourists (from the language with which they were shouting at each other..).
I don't agree that the lack of litter is only due to the cleanup. The Japanese in general follow the rules as expected, like I wrote above with queueing and putting their phones on silent mode.
> People didn't shout in public or have their phones blaring.
Yet Japan is a very noisy country. Store clerks shouting irasshaimase like robots, speaking elevators, politians in campaign and their cars with mega-phone, etc. added to paper thin (sometimes literally) walls make it sometime painful to live here.
Yeah, but you drown all of the automated noises out pretty quickly, it's just white noise. It's weird stepping into an elevator that doesn't talk to you sometimes; is it even working?
Huh, my pachinko encounter was the complete opposite. My friend wanted to go to one while we were walking around once. As soon as the doors opened I was accosted by DEAFENING noise and the oppressive smell of cigarette smoke (as if chain-smokers were hot-boxing the place). I told him nope. This is one experience you'll have to try without me.
I wonder if that's because so many other things are super quiet. The trains seem whisper quiet compared to our trains in the west. The elevators, when they're not talking, are silent. Everything seems to be perfectly lubricated and maintained to the point where things that seem loud maybe only seem loud because they're not silent?
A place that will also have good thermal insulation and central heating? One can dream... The building norms are cultural, you can’t find something that goes against the grain except by building it yourself.
They don't in trains, too. Sweet blissfullness of silence in the train is not something you appreciate until you really live there for some time and come back home for a holidays.
Some cultures are quieter than others. Chinese (25+ rural) are already as loud as a jetliner, only can be topped by Spanish tourist girls. If you survive that encounter, you have heard it all!
Glad to see someone finally repeating what I have been saying forever about Japan. It's clean because there is an army of people cleaning the place every single day. Multiple times a day.
Does Osaka have the same school cleaning culture with a meaningfully large number of schools? In particular I know some schools in Japan (not sure what percent) do not even employee janitors because of this culture of cleaning responsibility.
It'd be an interesting way to test/refute the obvious hypothesis that the article is promoting. If the answer is yes, then the hypothesis can, more or less, be rejected.
I've been all over the world, including Tokyo and Osaka. You are wrong and spreading misinformation. But good on you for knowing the word Orientalism. A neatly packaged box of shit.
Hiking.. have you actually hiked anywhere in else in the world? Most places you can fill a garbage bag in an hour just walking on a trail. Took my climbing friends from Canada on a long Hike in Kita Alps, they brought a garbage bag as they always do to gather other peoples trash. We managed to find 2 empty water bottles in 3 days having covered close to 50km. See the campsites near huts after people leave in the morning they are EMPTY.
Try camping at a car camp sites.. now compare that to the clusterfuck of drunks, blaring music, trash, puke piss, shit that you get in NA. Went to Ishikawa for a week this summer camped by the sea, huge camp site tons of people actually very nice. Same thing in US? God fucking help you. This is why they actually don’t have assigned lots for tents, in Canada people would get killed every long weekend if anyone was dumb to try that(car camping)
Of course there is garbage in cities in some places but compared to vast majority of the world it is clean. They actually clean public toilets.. it is a miracle.
Where do you camp otherwise where you are seeing all this trash? Even in developed sites I don’t think I’ve ever seen what you are describing here. Definitely nothing even remotely like that once you get a little further from the trail.
There are a couple of places where people have left shotgun shells that I can think of around some of the 4 wheeling areas around Phoenix, but it’s nowhere near any sort of hiking trail.
Agreed. There's very little litter in the UK countryside because (generalising) the people who litter don't go there and the people who do are included to pick it up.
British towns and cities aren't great, embarrassingly bad compared to the Japanese cities I've been to.
I spent a weekend in Lisbon recently and was fairly shocked at how bad the litter / rubbish was. The worst I've seen in Europe. Warm climate made it smelly too.
Bugger me for living in a country with no mountains at all.
Japan's Alps really are quite something. Leaving the area cleaner than you found it is taken quite seriously by Japanese hikers.
I've hiked in the Southern Alps, including up Kitadake, Japan's second highest mountain, during my stay there as a graduate student. The occasional views you get of Mount Fuji standing far out in the plains are breathtaking! I joined a hiking group at the university I was staying at, which proofed a rewarding way to get to know Japan's hiking culture.
To be fair though, as soon as you leave the family-friendly day-trip hiking trails leading from the valleys to mountain hotels/restaurants well below the treeline in Europe's Alps behind and get to the trails that require at least a minimal amount of preparation and gear the story is much the same. People clean up after themselves, and pick the incidental wrapper or bottle lost by others along the way. People who hike up a mountain are on the whole a lot more respectful of nature and personal responsibility.
15 years ago, it wasn't like this. As recently as 8 years ago you started seeing people exhibiting blatantly antisocial behavior in public, littering, not giving way in the roads, noisy devices, etc. When they open their mouths you realize they are not Japanese. The frequency of such encounters has increased steadily with time.
I was in the area last year and was shocked at how bad it's gotten. Rokko-san, trashed. Garbage bags ripped open and left to lay on the streets of Osaka. It's unbearably sad to see this happening.
>>>By far one of the dirtiest major cities I’ve seen in East Asia.
Compared to which other cities? Bangkok, Manila, Hanoi, and Ho Chi Minh City all make even the dirty parts of Japan look like a surgical suite. Seoul, Taipei, and Hong Kong are kinda okay, roughly equivalent to Tokyo when it's a little dirty.
As a Dane travelling abouts I have been stuck how clean the following three countries seemed compared to my home country: Australia, Singapore, and Japan.
As a San Francisco resident, I can say almost any major Western city is cleaner. SF is filthy, at least in the downtown areas. Every sidewalk needs a good power washing and there's poop everywhere.
Yeah...I don't much bat an eye anymore as often as I've seen someone urinating on the side of a building in a US city, but it's only SF where I regularly see someone cop a squat and take a dump on the ground. Just lucky, I guess...
I would say the big difference is that in Australia (or least Brisbane where I was) laws against littering are actually enforced. And public drinking is a lot more regulated.
Anyone growing up in Australia in the 80s would remember the "Do the Right Thing" TV ads. I think they were quite effective in making littering socially unacceptable, along with the threat of a fine.
Singapore seems to have a reputation for being very clean. But being here now after Tokyo there is no comparison. The amount of litter and general cleanliness of the sidewalks are much worse here compared to Tokyo.
I think it's worth noting that all of Japan isn't as clean as many of the cities are. A lot of people's homes are still rather dusty and when I visited in 2012 the outskirts of Osaka and the countryside looked pretty similar to Europe in terms of how much trash there was in the ditches next to the road.
The cities were noticeably cleaner than Swedish cities though, a lot fewer chewing gums and cigarette butts from what I remember.
Except Shibuya, we walked there yesterday after the typhoon and had to avoid the big rats that normally live in the big trash piles, probably they were looking for food since yday there was no trash. I've seen similar situation with crows.
This is a mostly invisible issue for tourists since trash collection happens in the morning and people take the trash out the night before, so the piles of trash and animals are visible at night mostly.
And they then enter the convinis (warning, gross rats inside convini):
I don’t think putting trash out at night and picking it up early in the morning is an exception to cleanliness. What else would they do? No one’s trying to say Japan produces no trash.
But I'm taking about having big trash bags piled on the street for 12+ h practically everyday. For instance, an easy solution would be to put them only 2-3h before the trash trucks come (I've seen them before the last train at ~11pm, the truck comes at 9am). A cultural-change would be to have big metal containers to put the trash away so that animals don't have an easy way in.
There are street cleaners in Japan. I used to visit Tokyo often and I would go running just before dawn. I saw plenty of people (usually elderly) collecting trash and sweeping up.
A lot of shop and home owners clean the street infront of their land. After a typhoon recently I saw what I assumed was the manager of the Louis Vuitton (or similar) store sweeping the front of the shop as a ton of branches had fallen (probably took him 30 minutes or more, it's a very wide sidewalk).
Interestingly, I saw people using rakes to clean up as opposed to noisy blowers. We've got tons of people 'cleaning' in the US but show me a decent sized city than can compare with the cleanliness in Tokyo.
When I was in grade school, students took turns cleaning and maintaining the school. It was also a lesson in democracy, since we had a meeting every month, run according to regular procedure, where students were elected to the various jobs such as sweeping the floor, washing the blackboards, cleaning the erasers, emptying the wastebaskets and burning trash, maintaining the outhouses, and pumping and bringing in drinking water.
Alas, this is one of the American values we have lost.
The cleanliness is impressive, but what impressed me even more was the efficiency.
One morning in Tokyo, I saw construction workers starting to dig up a street. It was a large operation, they were exposing some massive pipes, and there were a few policemen, politely pointing pedestrians to a way around the site.
In the evening I went the same way again, to see how far they had gotten with the digging. However, there was no hole anymore. They were already done, and the street looked like new, with hardly a trace of what had happened.
I felt kinda bad about my place (Germany), where this would have taken at least a week.
A) just an inspection
B) regulated to the same degree as in Germany (i.e. digging a hole and covering it up is easy if don't have rules)
C) succesful
D) done properly
Potholes yes, those take forever. But just this week I just saw a pipeline/conduit repair under the street in SF (like the GP described happening in Japan) that took 1 day. I suspect the job was prioritized somehow, or that it was just not too complicated.
Same in Italy, but with a twist, the actual work is actually done in two or three days, at the most four of five, but one day per week and a couple of weeks when noone is on site.
It's as bad if not worse in the US. There are plenty of national examples, so I'll just tell of a local one. Where I live, recently they decided to repair 3 sidewalk squares. I figure I alone could have done this in a few hours, a day at most. The crew of 3 spent the first day taping off the sidewalk. Day 2 tearing up one square. Day 3 tearing up the other 2 squares. Day 4 pouring one square. Day 5 pouring the other 2 squares. Day 8(after weekend) removing the caution tape. Six working days for one very tiny project.
Aren't violators caned as well? Singapore was awesome when I visited. Incredibly clean. Even lower class areas like around Orchard Towers (four floors of _____) was well above board compared to a clean US City.
no they are not caned. instead they are made to put on the high visibility vests with the words 'Corrective Work Order' and made to pick rubbish. But they are a rare occurrence. Usually only a composition fine.
It isn't clean at all tho. For a place that on paper has hefty fines for littering the city is a dump.ok sure enough the inner city center is quite clean but you only have to travel 5-6 stops away for exampleto Lavender (Indian neighbor... Hehehe) and it's a total dump with trash all over the streets.
American (US) in Tokyo for the first time here. About an hour ago (10:30 pm here) I saw two men with a bucket and washcloth scrubbing the floor right next to Shibuya Crossing ("the busiest crosswalk on the world"). Moments before that a man was sweeping a walkway between passer-bys). The clothing store withers swept each changing room in between guests. Though a block away was the smoking area, littered with thousands of cigarette butts (not sure what conclusion to draw about smokers).
I was in Osaka earlier in the week, and Kyoto after that. And these cities were also quite clean and orderly, with Osaka being the most orderly (and much more relaxed and slow paced, which makes order easier).
One of my favorite parts of Japan's cleanliness is their cars. They are all sparkling. Even the delivery trucks are shiny and splatter free! The gas/petrol station near me had at least two attendeds at each car, one to pump, and the other to clean the car's windows and paint!
Another fascinating thing is how escalators have two lanes, one for walking and one for standing. Why doesn't everyone so this?! It's so perfect!
Others in this thread don't speak too highly of Osaka, but it was definitely the most orderly and trash free of the three cities I've visited. Of course, these cities are quite huge, compared to cities in the US, so perhaps these conversations should be more fine grained, generalizing by prefecture rather than city.
I've found that I've been lining my things up neatly, and organizing my clothes and toiletries here in my in my hotel. It's been inspiring to see all the order here.
> Turns out, strangely, that it actually reduces throughput compared to just having everyone stand
Wait, what? How can this be true?
Imagine an escalator w/ both lanes filled with people just standing. Now imagine the left lane starts walking: clearly, higher throughput.
Now, maybe you're imagining a scenario where people don't want to walk. Now everyone stands on the right, and the left lane is completely empty. OK, now we've reduced throughput by half compared to "everyone standing".
So as we consider moving between the extremes of "no walkers" and "walker saturation", there will be some break-even point of throughput. And beyond that having a walking lane will be more efficient.
(Also, besides raw throughput, having a walking lane gives you a better "fastest possible traversal time", which is also valuable, for people in a hurry.)
My first reaction to learning this was also about the same, haha.
The issue with the "everyone starts walking" is the same reason why stationary cars are closer together than moving cars. If people walked with military trained precision you could get the same density and vastly higher throughput by walking. But for civilian strangers, it turns out two lanes of standing gives high enough density to trump the increased speed of walking, in terms of total throughput. I'm fairly certain there's even a study showing this. They tested it in london underground at least.
But yes, it's certainly better for the few walkers.
Ah, I didn't consider density, that's a good point!
Taking a look at the study you mention (linked in other comments), it seems like the escalators they studied were well to the "too few people want to walk" side of the curve to be efficient.
I wonder how close the break-even point is to the simple metric, "do you have to wait to enter on the right?"
Or thinking of the queue length for standers, clearly when the length is 0 allowing walking is more efficient (you've taken nothing away from the standers, and the walkers are more efficient). But there is some point where the stand-queue length, let's call it N, is big enough that the corresonding wait-time means overall throughput is lowered by allowing walking.
I think it would be quite reasonable to require standing in those situations.
So the rule could be something like, "stand on the right, walk on the left, unless there is a queue of more than N people waiting to stand on the right, in which case you may stand on the left." Easy right? ;-)
(I wonder if N would vary w/ escalator length? Intuitively, almost certainly. So we'd have to post signs next to each escalator w/ its individual stand-queue limit. :-)
> Now, maybe you're imagining a scenario where people don't want to walk.
Agreed that this is an imagined scenario because people in a hurry will want to maximize their speed by walking/running up the escalator.
More importantly, people generally (I'm imagining) do not want to stand on the same escalator step as another person, especially if they are strangers to each other.
That means in a 2-lane standing escalator there will be breaks between people standing to the left or the right which, effectively, will turn a 2-lane standing-only escalator into a "1-lane" standing escalator.
That's actually how it should be. People should stand alternating left-right-left-... Not having one empty step in front/back of you is quite dangerous especially with packed escalator.
Standing people stand closer together than walking people. However, I think they should optimize for minimum annoyance, not maximum throughput. With a walking lane, there's lower latency for people willing to walk.
> Standing-only escalators had a "throughput" of up to 151 passengers per minute, while an escalator where commuters were still allowed to walk saw around 115.
Your thought experiment's completely right, but in real world circumstances, once an escalator is above a certain height, people rarely use the walking lane:
> But a 2002 study of escalator capacity on the Underground found that on machines such as those at Holborn, with a vertical height of 24 metres, only 40% would even contemplate it [walking up]. By encouraging their preference, TfL effectively halves the capacity of the escalator in question, and creates significantly more crowding below, slowing everyone down.
Transport for London should politely refrain from any statements like that, I believe. They hardly can allow people to enter the platform because there's no space to fit the crowd. There's sea of heads almost every morning in front of most popular stations' gates. Not because they have a gates issue, or any other unusual problem - they are just regulating flow that way. So, I'd kindly ask them start modernizing platforms to allow more throughput in the first place. Then let them experiment and play with statistics, by all means.
The volume of the escalator is reduced by greater than half, and the departure rate is a function of density, so reserving half of the escalator for people who want to depart slightly faster than others (in single file, with space) apparently doesn't overtake what a single, densely packed transit could carry.
The problem is that people who want to walk are limited in reality by how quickly the slowest person ahead of them is traveling as well as conventions that make it unlikely that people would get within 1 full step of the person in front of them, reducing the lane's volume to 1/3 (the step you're on plus the step you're taking + space) of the possible occupancy of the standing lane.
So I could definitely see that assertion being true.
It's a long escalator, so few people walk (40% according to the Guardian article). And then during rush hour there's a crowd in front of the escalator.
The optimal policy is to have everyone walk 2 abreast as densely as possible, so this about debating two suboptimal policies. Presumably if it was actually a problem they would just build another escalator.
It sounds to me that the walk/stand system is nice because it creates a priority queue. Some people would rather wait and stand than not wait and walk. The people who are in a hurry get to walk and not wait. If the norm was "always stand", the 40% of people who walk would be much more annoyed. Even when the escalator was only at 5% capacity, there would be enough side-by-side standers that they wouldn't be able to walk.
Even if it does reduce throughput, which from what I've seen comes in waves (after disembarking a train), the people who are okay standing there get to stand without being pushed, while those that are in a hurry get to hurry without pushing. Not everything has to be at max efficiency all the time, sometimes the optimal solution is relative.
Each time I've been to Osaka it has been remarkably different than the other cities we traveled to in Japan. It may come down to timing. My wife and I have only visited Japan during times of Japanese festivals.
Escalators having two lanes is a thing in tons of places. Generally the larger the city, the closer to the cbd you are, and the more rush hour it is, the more likely it is to be a thing that everyone does.
> Another fascinating thing is how escalators have two lanes, one for walking and one for standing. Why doesn't everyone so this?! It's so perfect!
I wish they'd just draw lines on escalators in Germany already. Keeping the left side of the escalator free and standing on the right is an unwritten rule here, but about one in twenty stand on the left anyways (tourists? people lost in thought?).
In the morning I often want to catch a connecting train that departs only about minute later, and pretty much every time I have to ask one or two people to step aside so I can pass. The fastest way to reach the other platform happens to be by means of two escalators. Other people who have been to Berlin Friedrichstraße station probably know which escalators I'm talking about.
The fastest way I have found of getting people to step aside is startling them with a firm "SORRY!" - works on tourists as well as Germans.
When I see more than three people on the left side I usually just give up though. By the time they'll have sorted themselves out the train will probably be gone anyways and I don't fancy breaking into a sprint just to make up for the lost seconds. I'd rather suck it up and wait a few minutes for the next train while getting a coffee on the platform.
I guess what I'm saying is that something as simple as two lines on escalators can make a difference of ten minutes or more in the commute of some people.
Well, as a Korean, I think that this is due to the difference of importance of how other people think me.
I've heard that the western world is very individualistic, and people in general don't care much about how other people acts.
In Korea (and AFAIK Japan too), people very care of what other people think about them.
They consider the consequences of every action carefully.
One of the results is that people generally don't litter in front of other people, and that makes the city clean.
The places without much people, they are dirtier than others because there aren't other people around them.
Having lived in 세종시, and Seoul, I strongly disagree with your statement.
Sejong is a brand new city, made in 2014, yet there was litter everywhere, especially right near bus stops. I distinctly recall seeing empty coffee cups tossed in the planters/hedges nearby.
There were almost zero trash cans so what do you expect. The bathrooms didn’t have tissue or anything either, you had to go to one of the nearby stores or cafes and get some.
Seoul has plenty of dirty areas just like any other enormous city.
People litter everywhere. Some Japanese people may be more conscious about not littering, but so are some Americans! This article reeks of orientalism.
Japan has a lack of trash cans also. The idea is to get people to think about their waste and carry it home. It goes hand in hand with their hyper recycling culture, which I could never really figure out what bin to put stuff in on my last visit.
> Sejong is a brand new city, made in 2014, yet there was litter everywhere, especially right near bus stops.
Mostly due to people who wait at the bus stops alone; I've never seen people littering at the bus stops at the rush hour, but I've definitely seen people leaving their empty coffee cups on the benches when (they think) nobody's looking.
> There were almost zero trash cans so what do you expect.
That's mostly because of the stupid decision of that trash cans 'look' dirty, which causes the broken window effect... but IMO that was a stupid decision.
> The bathrooms didn’t have tissue or anything either, you had to go to one of the nearby stores or cafes and get some.
Hmm, that's not what I experienced, I've rarely seen public bathrooms without any tissue.
My experience visiting small town Japan (1990s) is that there were several improvised garbage dumps, so Japanese are indeed pigs when nobody is watching.
On a trip to Japan last year I posed a similar question to a friend-- why restrooms so much cleaner in Japan? I'm constantly amazed at how few many in the United States don't flush the toilet in public bathrooms.
My friend concluded that much of it had to do with collectivism vs individualism. Either way I think Americans need to improve their bathroom etiquette.
I was cycling in Japan for about 2 weeks, just a few weeks ago. I was also impressed in most places by how clean it was, not only in the cities, but more generally speaking about everywhere.
At some point though, I was cycling along the coast of Mie then Wakayama prefectures, and although the scenery and roads were clean, I had a glance just behind the ramp walk, and realized that behind the trees, in the bush next to the road were hundreds of garbage bags, litter of all sort, really anything, just lying below. There was such a contrast from what my eyes were seeing until, I was shocked.
In another town several kilometres after (I forgot which place exactly, must have been while cycling up towards Wakayama city), I passed next to a big commercial area on my right. On my left there was a small patch of forest then the sea and again, that forest contained many many plastic bags, full but neatly tied up, every couple of meters or so, for several hundreds of meters.
I originally thought the first thrashes I saw along the road in the country side where "mistakes", like things flying off the window or pushed by the wind from another place (although there was a lot of garbage anyway). But when I saw these tied up plastic bags, they weren't there by chance, really people throw these bags away on the forest right here. That made me a bit sad, especially since it broke the original image I got.
(And I haven't spoke about the beaches and seafront all along that peninsula; I wouldn't walk bare foot there).
Then I came home in Switzerland, looked up the small water stream close to my place, and realized it wasn't as neat as one can see at first glance... So I should probably start with that before criticising other countries sigh
I did 6 times but weather was a bit crap and many places were already closed (and I really needed that shower at the end of the day :p). On the other end, I was practically alone most of the time (I shared a barbecue under a tarp under the rain with a Japanese guy on my last camping day) and most of the camp sites were just by the sea, which was pretty cool.
This [1] is more of less what I did. There wasn't much of any dedicated cycling lanes (such as the Shimanami Kaido road) anywhere I went, so sometimes the traffic was not so cool.
The parts in and out of the Alps, and in Mie prefecture (despite the off-road garbage ;) were the best to me: no so much traffic, few people, and the scenery was quite cool. My time was short and there were several places I wanted to connect, so YMMV.
Because people clean it constantly. I still find it amazing how many people I see cleaning when I'm in Tokyo. I was in a store mid-morning and a man was vacuuming. I walked by again in the afternoon and I noticed he was vacuuming again. In the west, that happens once/day after the store closes. There it was continuous. But nothing blew my mind more than when I was on a dirt walking trail and there was a man sweeping twigs and leaves off the trail.
As much as that surprised me, it also kind of didn't because there are people working everywhere on everything all the time. The number of concrete mixers driving around was amazing. Infrastructure is never finished and always seems to be well funded. I feel kind of embarrassed when I see Japanese people visiting my city, like they've come to some kind of pioneer town with our litter everywhere, far too many cars for the available roads and with our laughably inadequate public transit infrastructure.
These sort of articles about Japanese cleanliness and homelessness are intellectually dishonest if you don't mention massive factors like the fact that Japan eschewed the deinstitutionalization process that most wealthy countries went through toward the end of the 20th century
and as a result, they have four times the rate of involuntarily locking people up for mental illness as the average:
> For the last 40 years mental health care has shifted from hospital-based settings to community-based ones in most countries. As a result the number of psychiatric care beds has fallen considerably internationally (Glasby & Tew, 2015:106). More and more people with mental disorders are living and being cared for in the community. In contrast, Japan still has a very high ratio of psychiatric care beds per capita among member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), with 269 beds per 100,000 population compared to the average of 68 (OECD, 2014:11).
This implies that the main cause of trash is homelessness. Although homelessness probably causes an increase of trash, I think it's clear that a culture of littering also causes trash, which is clearly not present in Japan.
Bringing in the subject of homelessness seems tangential to the topic at hand.
It certainly doesn't imply that this is the main cause, it suggests that it's an important cause (say, > 10%) that has to be acknowledged in a 10k word article. I also think dwelling on a "culture of littering" is much vaguer and less likely to make falsifiable predictions.
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadTo be clear, this isn't just a US problem, pretty much all countries that I've visited (just a sampling to be sure) are like this including other Asian countries. Japan really stands out as being different in this respect. I hope it can stay that way.
Even compared to Americans, we are terrible litterers. You can see this in people’s behaviours in fast food restaurants: in the US (as in many other countries), customers will bin their food wrappers and return their tray when they leave. Even groups of kids will typically do this: it’s just habit. In the UK, typical customers will just leave their mess at the table when they leave. Cleaning is someone else’s job.
Not in a fast-food restaurant, no.
You'll often see folks in cafés help out and return their trays, but it's not a guarantee - and in some establishments it's not even possible for you as a customer to do this. At the end of the day, you're paying to sit down - and clearing your table afterwards is priced into the food offer.
Fast food is a bit more of a grey area, since there's not necessarily table service. I'd throw away my rubbish at e.g. Burger King - there's usually bins provided for this purpose.
I don't think it's really all that outrageous to just leave the detritus on the table in either case. But when there's no table service, the tables won't be getting cleared so regularly, so it can make things inconvenient for the other patrons.
I would clean up after myself somewhere like McDonalds or Burger King, though in a cafe or restaurant I wouldn't. In a restaurant I usually put the plates together to make it easier for the waiter or waitress to clear the table and try not to be too messy.
I’ll bite. Why?
Though as the article notes, Japan similarly has few rubbish bins.
Well... yeah if you're eating in a restaurant, then yes it literally is someone else's paid job to clean your table. That's what makes it a restaurant.
Do you also criticise people who go to a restaurant and expect someone else to cook their food?
Or people who get a taxi and then expect someone else to drive?
That is: there isn’t staff enough to handle it, and those that leave their tray just ensure that prices go up (since they are using a service they didn’t pay for).
I have never left a tray in a fast food restaurant in 40 years.
I was in Osaka this weekend and litter is everywhere. By far one of the dirtiest major cities I’ve seen in East Asia. In the city I live in in Japan, the rice fields are full of coffee cans, plastic bottles, and bento packaging thrown out from cars. Streets are covered in cigarette butts and somehow I see natto containers in the middle of nowhere. Going hiking, I see tea bottles and plastic bags from convenience stores all over the damn place.
Most parts of Tokyo and cities with tourism are generally clean because there are heavy cleanup operations. People are still littering just like everywhere else.
> Invisible dirt – germs and bacteria – are another source of concern. When people catch colds or flu, they wear surgical masks to avoid infecting other people.
But you’ll never catch people washing their hands and grandpas always pull down their mask to cough so as to not dirty it. I caught a news program during flu season last year telling people how to avoid the flu. Their recommendations? Keep your stomach wrapped and extra warm, and drink green tea since it cures influenza.
While I generally agree, the funny part about this is that it’s not uncommon in Japan for people to refer to people from Osaka as being “not Japanese.”
They also completely disown their litter. It’s always foreigners, even if it’s natto boxes.
As an American, I’ve always felt more comfortable there because it’s way less uptight and rule-bound than other parts of Japan.
While we're on the subject of Osaka stories, about 5 years ago in February I was walking with friends near the "Running Man" bridge in Shinsaibashi. Probably around 1am, and cold. A taxi pulls up close to the bridge....the driver pops the trunk, a passenger joins him at the rear of the vehicle....and they took a PASSED OUT Japanese dude outta the taxi's trunk and just laid him on the concrete. He didn't even have a shirt on. They reached in the trunk and threw a shoe at him. Then the taxi left. We're just standing there in awe thinking "No shirt, shoes off, probably drunk and lying on cold concrete in February? That dude is gonna die of hypothermia and whoever dropped him off doesn't seem to give 2 shits....man Osaka is wild."
Not surprising as this is about 2 blocks from the parking lot where all the yakuza park their exotics[1]. Look at that building in Street View and even in daytime there's a yellow exotic parked there.
[1] https://goo.gl/maps/dyPU7rzM5QbkLtTEA
Still very Japanese IMHO, it certainly has its own vibe.. The craft beer and brewpub scene is great, and people generally seem more friendly and open to strangers and foreigners. Cycling culture seems stronger. An outsiders observation; people are much more likely to cross a crosswalk early or otherwise outside the proper time in Osaka!
Hanami is also spectacular in Osaka and Kyoto.
Compared to most major global cities it's night and day.
I'd take a hard look on NY, Chicago, L.A, London, Paris, Amsterdam, before I complain like the grandparent about the Japanese situation which is an order of magnitude better...
Tokyo of course is on a league of its own, but here's Osaka Street View, go around, how does it compare to what you read?
https://www.google.com/maps/@34.675107,135.5261238,3a,75y,27...
https://www.google.com/maps/@35.6960715,139.7029924,3a,75y,2...
We can compare that to a random spot in skid row, LA.
https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0413292,-118.2437281,3a,75y,...
https://www.google.com/maps/@34.6687543,135.5013888,2a,75y,3...
(Now let's compare with the sorry state a lot of European cities are in)
At night time I did see quite a bit of beer cans/bottles around, however, either people or cleanup crews seemed to group them together to make cleanup easier.
If this is due to cleanup operations, I feel other cities around the world should consider such logistics because it makes travel there one of the most pleasant experiences I've had.
That could be as simple as broken windows theory but the contrast with Brooklyn is striking.
The cultural attitude difference is real to some degree. People tend to smoke while standing in one place, a designated smoking area outside with an ashtray, not walk and smoke. This is a huge difference and reflects a priority on not annoying people around you.
That’s just one of many example I could give of what are obviously and viscerally differences in habit, custom, and perspective about consideration for strangers.
You just don't have any trash to drop, you'd keep it in your bag if you did, and there's bins at konbini or vending machines everywhere.
Today, like most days, on the news they had more videos of Rugby tourists passed out on the street, replaying the subway video, etc. This time they had a segment about gaijin putting out cigarette butts with their shoes and walking off for like 5 minutes.
Haven't seen it any worse than the Rugby World Cup.. I don't want to be around for the Olympics.
Many were removed as a security measure after the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway.
But the touristy area of Osaka was back to being dreadful. People cutting you off while walking, groups stopping in the middle of the way, often with their rolling suitcases blocking more of the path. I noticed there were many Chinese tourists (from the language with which they were shouting at each other..).
I don't agree that the lack of litter is only due to the cleanup. The Japanese in general follow the rules as expected, like I wrote above with queueing and putting their phones on silent mode.
Yet Japan is a very noisy country. Store clerks shouting irasshaimase like robots, speaking elevators, politians in campaign and their cars with mega-phone, etc. added to paper thin (sometimes literally) walls make it sometime painful to live here.
You need to choose your place not to pick a cheap rent with paper thin walls...
Glad to see someone finally repeating what I have been saying forever about Japan. It's clean because there is an army of people cleaning the place every single day. Multiple times a day.
It'd be an interesting way to test/refute the obvious hypothesis that the article is promoting. If the answer is yes, then the hypothesis can, more or less, be rejected.
Hiking.. have you actually hiked anywhere in else in the world? Most places you can fill a garbage bag in an hour just walking on a trail. Took my climbing friends from Canada on a long Hike in Kita Alps, they brought a garbage bag as they always do to gather other peoples trash. We managed to find 2 empty water bottles in 3 days having covered close to 50km. See the campsites near huts after people leave in the morning they are EMPTY.
Try camping at a car camp sites.. now compare that to the clusterfuck of drunks, blaring music, trash, puke piss, shit that you get in NA. Went to Ishikawa for a week this summer camped by the sea, huge camp site tons of people actually very nice. Same thing in US? God fucking help you. This is why they actually don’t have assigned lots for tents, in Canada people would get killed every long weekend if anyone was dumb to try that(car camping)
Of course there is garbage in cities in some places but compared to vast majority of the world it is clean. They actually clean public toilets.. it is a miracle.
There are a couple of places where people have left shotgun shells that I can think of around some of the 4 wheeling areas around Phoenix, but it’s nowhere near any sort of hiking trail.
British towns and cities aren't great, embarrassingly bad compared to the Japanese cities I've been to.
I spent a weekend in Lisbon recently and was fairly shocked at how bad the litter / rubbish was. The worst I've seen in Europe. Warm climate made it smelly too.
Japan's Alps really are quite something. Leaving the area cleaner than you found it is taken quite seriously by Japanese hikers.
I've hiked in the Southern Alps, including up Kitadake, Japan's second highest mountain, during my stay there as a graduate student. The occasional views you get of Mount Fuji standing far out in the plains are breathtaking! I joined a hiking group at the university I was staying at, which proofed a rewarding way to get to know Japan's hiking culture.
To be fair though, as soon as you leave the family-friendly day-trip hiking trails leading from the valleys to mountain hotels/restaurants well below the treeline in Europe's Alps behind and get to the trails that require at least a minimal amount of preparation and gear the story is much the same. People clean up after themselves, and pick the incidental wrapper or bottle lost by others along the way. People who hike up a mountain are on the whole a lot more respectful of nature and personal responsibility.
People don't throw when it's clean, like how the NY subway changed.
I've never seen people pull down mask to cough in the middle of others.
You sound like running a negative campaign.
15 years ago, it wasn't like this. As recently as 8 years ago you started seeing people exhibiting blatantly antisocial behavior in public, littering, not giving way in the roads, noisy devices, etc. When they open their mouths you realize they are not Japanese. The frequency of such encounters has increased steadily with time.
I was in the area last year and was shocked at how bad it's gotten. Rokko-san, trashed. Garbage bags ripped open and left to lay on the streets of Osaka. It's unbearably sad to see this happening.
Compared to which other cities? Bangkok, Manila, Hanoi, and Ho Chi Minh City all make even the dirty parts of Japan look like a surgical suite. Seoul, Taipei, and Hong Kong are kinda okay, roughly equivalent to Tokyo when it's a little dirty.
I would say the big difference is that in Australia (or least Brisbane where I was) laws against littering are actually enforced. And public drinking is a lot more regulated.
The cities were noticeably cleaner than Swedish cities though, a lot fewer chewing gums and cigarette butts from what I remember.
This is a mostly invisible issue for tourists since trash collection happens in the morning and people take the trash out the night before, so the piles of trash and animals are visible at night mostly.
And they then enter the convinis (warning, gross rats inside convini):
https://twitter.com/Ginkai19990324/status/115807601769873408...
What'll it be this time? Communism? Authoritarianism?
Alas, this is one of the American values we have lost.
One morning in Tokyo, I saw construction workers starting to dig up a street. It was a large operation, they were exposing some massive pipes, and there were a few policemen, politely pointing pedestrians to a way around the site.
In the evening I went the same way again, to see how far they had gotten with the digging. However, there was no hole anymore. They were already done, and the street looked like new, with hardly a trace of what had happened.
I felt kinda bad about my place (Germany), where this would have taken at least a week.
A) just an inspection B) regulated to the same degree as in Germany (i.e. digging a hole and covering it up is easy if don't have rules) C) succesful D) done properly
It's more a function of the size of the city, at least in rich countries with a functioning public service.
I wish we could invent some super-efficient equipment that makes road-building/construction 10x faster...
A:Because there is a horde of foreign workers doing the cleaning up.
I was in Osaka earlier in the week, and Kyoto after that. And these cities were also quite clean and orderly, with Osaka being the most orderly (and much more relaxed and slow paced, which makes order easier).
One of my favorite parts of Japan's cleanliness is their cars. They are all sparkling. Even the delivery trucks are shiny and splatter free! The gas/petrol station near me had at least two attendeds at each car, one to pump, and the other to clean the car's windows and paint!
Another fascinating thing is how escalators have two lanes, one for walking and one for standing. Why doesn't everyone so this?! It's so perfect!
Others in this thread don't speak too highly of Osaka, but it was definitely the most orderly and trash free of the three cities I've visited. Of course, these cities are quite huge, compared to cities in the US, so perhaps these conversations should be more fine grained, generalizing by prefecture rather than city.
I've found that I've been lining my things up neatly, and organizing my clothes and toiletries here in my in my hotel. It's been inspiring to see all the order here.
Turns out, strangely, that it actually reduces throughput compared to just having everyone stand. So not exactly perfect I guess.
But yea I agree in the general matter. When my MIL (a master organizer) visited Japan she thought that was great.
EDIT: spelling
First random video I googled for nyc escalator shows this behavior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmCOjC_9Iyc
Wait, what? How can this be true?
Imagine an escalator w/ both lanes filled with people just standing. Now imagine the left lane starts walking: clearly, higher throughput.
Now, maybe you're imagining a scenario where people don't want to walk. Now everyone stands on the right, and the left lane is completely empty. OK, now we've reduced throughput by half compared to "everyone standing".
So as we consider moving between the extremes of "no walkers" and "walker saturation", there will be some break-even point of throughput. And beyond that having a walking lane will be more efficient.
(Also, besides raw throughput, having a walking lane gives you a better "fastest possible traversal time", which is also valuable, for people in a hurry.)
The issue with the "everyone starts walking" is the same reason why stationary cars are closer together than moving cars. If people walked with military trained precision you could get the same density and vastly higher throughput by walking. But for civilian strangers, it turns out two lanes of standing gives high enough density to trump the increased speed of walking, in terms of total throughput. I'm fairly certain there's even a study showing this. They tested it in london underground at least.
But yes, it's certainly better for the few walkers.
Taking a look at the study you mention (linked in other comments), it seems like the escalators they studied were well to the "too few people want to walk" side of the curve to be efficient.
I wonder how close the break-even point is to the simple metric, "do you have to wait to enter on the right?"
Or thinking of the queue length for standers, clearly when the length is 0 allowing walking is more efficient (you've taken nothing away from the standers, and the walkers are more efficient). But there is some point where the stand-queue length, let's call it N, is big enough that the corresonding wait-time means overall throughput is lowered by allowing walking.
I think it would be quite reasonable to require standing in those situations.
So the rule could be something like, "stand on the right, walk on the left, unless there is a queue of more than N people waiting to stand on the right, in which case you may stand on the left." Easy right? ;-)
(I wonder if N would vary w/ escalator length? Intuitively, almost certainly. So we'd have to post signs next to each escalator w/ its individual stand-queue limit. :-)
Agreed that this is an imagined scenario because people in a hurry will want to maximize their speed by walking/running up the escalator.
More importantly, people generally (I'm imagining) do not want to stand on the same escalator step as another person, especially if they are strangers to each other.
That means in a 2-lane standing escalator there will be breaks between people standing to the left or the right which, effectively, will turn a 2-lane standing-only escalator into a "1-lane" standing escalator.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/it-is-faster-to-s...
> Standing-only escalators had a "throughput" of up to 151 passengers per minute, while an escalator where commuters were still allowed to walk saw around 115.
Your thought experiment's completely right, but in real world circumstances, once an escalator is above a certain height, people rarely use the walking lane:
> But a 2002 study of escalator capacity on the Underground found that on machines such as those at Holborn, with a vertical height of 24 metres, only 40% would even contemplate it [walking up]. By encouraging their preference, TfL effectively halves the capacity of the escalator in question, and creates significantly more crowding below, slowing everyone down.
(from https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jan/16/the-tube-at-... , which has a great graphic showing the two systems)
The problem is that people who want to walk are limited in reality by how quickly the slowest person ahead of them is traveling as well as conventions that make it unlikely that people would get within 1 full step of the person in front of them, reducing the lane's volume to 1/3 (the step you're on plus the step you're taking + space) of the possible occupancy of the standing lane.
So I could definitely see that assertion being true.
It's a long escalator, so few people walk (40% according to the Guardian article). And then during rush hour there's a crowd in front of the escalator.
This blog post estimates walking is 26 seconds and standing is 40 seconds: https://www.capgemini.com/gb-en/2016/04/would-standing-on-th...
The optimal policy is to have everyone walk 2 abreast as densely as possible, so this about debating two suboptimal policies. Presumably if it was actually a problem they would just build another escalator.
I wish they'd just draw lines on escalators in Germany already. Keeping the left side of the escalator free and standing on the right is an unwritten rule here, but about one in twenty stand on the left anyways (tourists? people lost in thought?).
In the morning I often want to catch a connecting train that departs only about minute later, and pretty much every time I have to ask one or two people to step aside so I can pass. The fastest way to reach the other platform happens to be by means of two escalators. Other people who have been to Berlin Friedrichstraße station probably know which escalators I'm talking about.
The fastest way I have found of getting people to step aside is startling them with a firm "SORRY!" - works on tourists as well as Germans.
When I see more than three people on the left side I usually just give up though. By the time they'll have sorted themselves out the train will probably be gone anyways and I don't fancy breaking into a sprint just to make up for the lost seconds. I'd rather suck it up and wait a few minutes for the next train while getting a coffee on the platform.
I guess what I'm saying is that something as simple as two lines on escalators can make a difference of ten minutes or more in the commute of some people.
In Korea (and AFAIK Japan too), people very care of what other people think about them. They consider the consequences of every action carefully. One of the results is that people generally don't litter in front of other people, and that makes the city clean. The places without much people, they are dirtier than others because there aren't other people around them.
Sejong is a brand new city, made in 2014, yet there was litter everywhere, especially right near bus stops. I distinctly recall seeing empty coffee cups tossed in the planters/hedges nearby.
There were almost zero trash cans so what do you expect. The bathrooms didn’t have tissue or anything either, you had to go to one of the nearby stores or cafes and get some.
Seoul has plenty of dirty areas just like any other enormous city.
People litter everywhere. Some Japanese people may be more conscious about not littering, but so are some Americans! This article reeks of orientalism.
Mostly due to people who wait at the bus stops alone; I've never seen people littering at the bus stops at the rush hour, but I've definitely seen people leaving their empty coffee cups on the benches when (they think) nobody's looking.
> There were almost zero trash cans so what do you expect.
That's mostly because of the stupid decision of that trash cans 'look' dirty, which causes the broken window effect... but IMO that was a stupid decision.
> The bathrooms didn’t have tissue or anything either, you had to go to one of the nearby stores or cafes and get some.
Hmm, that's not what I experienced, I've rarely seen public bathrooms without any tissue.
I believe that is what Shintoism teaches.
My friend concluded that much of it had to do with collectivism vs individualism. Either way I think Americans need to improve their bathroom etiquette.
At some point though, I was cycling along the coast of Mie then Wakayama prefectures, and although the scenery and roads were clean, I had a glance just behind the ramp walk, and realized that behind the trees, in the bush next to the road were hundreds of garbage bags, litter of all sort, really anything, just lying below. There was such a contrast from what my eyes were seeing until, I was shocked.
In another town several kilometres after (I forgot which place exactly, must have been while cycling up towards Wakayama city), I passed next to a big commercial area on my right. On my left there was a small patch of forest then the sea and again, that forest contained many many plastic bags, full but neatly tied up, every couple of meters or so, for several hundreds of meters.
I originally thought the first thrashes I saw along the road in the country side where "mistakes", like things flying off the window or pushed by the wind from another place (although there was a lot of garbage anyway). But when I saw these tied up plastic bags, they weren't there by chance, really people throw these bags away on the forest right here. That made me a bit sad, especially since it broke the original image I got.
(And I haven't spoke about the beaches and seafront all along that peninsula; I wouldn't walk bare foot there).
Then I came home in Switzerland, looked up the small water stream close to my place, and realized it wasn't as neat as one can see at first glance... So I should probably start with that before criticising other countries sigh
I did the short Shimanami Kaido over the inland sea which was, of course, wonderful.
[1] https://drive.google.com/open?id=1nuRT79jhVqLFPncCh9PnUhxK6K...
As much as that surprised me, it also kind of didn't because there are people working everywhere on everything all the time. The number of concrete mixers driving around was amazing. Infrastructure is never finished and always seems to be well funded. I feel kind of embarrassed when I see Japanese people visiting my city, like they've come to some kind of pioneer town with our litter everywhere, far too many cars for the available roads and with our laughably inadequate public transit infrastructure.
Is it to stop germs from spraying in the air or is it more a polite thing? Or maybe to avoid having to carry the soiled tissue.
Do they hide in an alley to do it?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation
and as a result, they have four times the rate of involuntarily locking people up for mental illness as the average:
> For the last 40 years mental health care has shifted from hospital-based settings to community-based ones in most countries. As a result the number of psychiatric care beds has fallen considerably internationally (Glasby & Tew, 2015:106). More and more people with mental disorders are living and being cared for in the community. In contrast, Japan still has a very high ratio of psychiatric care beds per capita among member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), with 269 beds per 100,000 population compared to the average of 68 (OECD, 2014:11).
http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S...
Bringing in the subject of homelessness seems tangential to the topic at hand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome