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?
https://t.co/rLumhzU3of
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.
No one, presently, sees the Moon rotate like this.
That's because the Earth's moon is tidally locked to the Earth, showing us only one side.
However, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has this view: a full Moon rotation.
What's up for March?
The Moon will appear red during a total lunar eclipse on March 3. On the 8th, Venus and Saturn snuggle close in the night sky. Plus, March 20 is the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. More: https://t.co/Ohi4c6w6FR
Time dilation by Albert Einstein ✍️
It is a phenomenon in physics where time slows down for an object moving faster through space, particularly as its speed approaches the speed of light. According to Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, time is not a fixed constant for everyone; it is relative to how fast you are moving. Since the speed of light must remain constant for all observers, "time" itself must "stretch" or "dilate" to make up for high-speed travel. This means that if you traveled on a spaceship at incredible speeds for a few years, you would return to Earth only to find that decades or even centuries had passed for everyone else. You would be physically younger than your peers who stayed behind. While this effect is only noticeable at extreme speeds, it is a proven reality that scientists must consider every day to keep technologies like GPS satellites accurate.
Mark Your Calendars !
FEBRUARY 28, 2026
Don't forget to look up the planets will drift quietly across the sky, reminding us how beautifully the universe can align.