Japan highway videos in YouTube

[mukade]

YouTube has a wealth highway and road videos from Japan. If you have time on your hands, they can be quite interesting.

Tateyama-Kuroba Alpine route near Toyama after a dusting of snow. I think I read this is the snowiest place on earth

Nara Kotsu bus route on National route 168. The highway is being upgraded, so the route goes from a dangerous one lane winding road with blind curves to a modern highway (changing back and forth with no warning) thru the mountainous Kii Peninsula. This is taken from a big bus maneuvering these roads.

July 20, 2014 after the completion of the Maizuru Wakasa-Expressway (from Kobe/Sanda to Tsuruga). This is a fairly long video on an expressway that has a lot of two lane sections. The last part of the video east of Obama apparently just opened.

From Wakkanai city  down the Ororon Line. Wakkanai is the northernmost city in Japan and is only a few miles south of Sahkalin Island in Russia. This is not a real large city, and this drive does not look too dissimilar from a ride thru a US city.

[Joe The Dragon]

long super 2 there

[Chris]

Super two expressways are very common in rural parts of Japan. The Japanese non-expressway network is very slow, the speed limit is only 60 km/h and there are a lot of towns and curves. In Japan they build controlled-access expressways for low traffic volumes, often initially as a super two if traffic volumes are under 10,000 vehicles per day, and then duplicate it to a full expressway if traffic warrants it.

This means you rarely have to drive longer distances across non-expressways, due to the good access to the expressway network.

[cpzilliacus]

Super two expressways are very common in rural parts of Japan. The Japanese non-expressway network is very slow, the speed limit is only 60 km/h and there are a lot of towns and curves. In Japan they build controlled-access expressways for low traffic volumes, often initially as a super two if traffic volumes are under 10,000 vehicles per day, and then duplicate it to a full expressway if traffic warrants it.

This means you rarely have to drive longer distances across non-expressways, due to the good access to the expressway network.

A colleague who has driven a lot in Japan tells me the Japanese toll roads charge tolls that are rather high by U.S. standards.

I watched a fair amount of the first video, and on the overpasses, it was obvious that they had been designed with the intention that the road would become four lane divided at some point in the future.

I also found it curious that there were very few large trucks ("heavy goods vehicles') on that segment of road.  Quite a few buses, but not many trucks.

[Chris]

Nearly all major cities in Japan are at the coast, so there is a lot of domestic freight via coastal shipping. Still, 64% of freight transport in Japan is by truck and 32% by ship. The remaining 4% is by rail.

Almost 66% of passenger kilometers in Japan is by car. 29% is by rail, the remainder by air. Japan has the highest rate of travel by train of any developed country (except for city-states), but still a large majority is by car. It's also notable that despite the (perceived) lack of space, car ownership in Japan is fairly high, comparable to most of Europe. There are 58 million cars in Japan. There are also 15.5 million trucks.

[mukade]

When I lived in Japan in the 1960s, train travel was much more prevalent. Many of the lines in rural areas have been abandoned since then, and if you watch any Japanese train videos, you can see the trains in rural areas are generally empty. Thru the windows, you can see newer, modern roads while the railway track beds and railway structures look old. Still, trains look to be pretty frequent, even if empty and short. If you think about it, just like in the US, cars are far more convenient in those areas.

We also lived in Kobe (in a megapolis), and the large cities now have many more commuter train/subway lines than back then. As a great way to avoid congestion, it only makes sense as well. What is surprising, however, is that how many people now own cars in the cities.

The Shinkansen trains (that system is still expanding) garner a large percentage of JR revenue compared to the mileage. JR West gets 40% of its revenue from the Tokaido-Sanyo Shinkansen that connects Shin-Osaka and Hakata, for example.

Back to the topic of the thread, when driving thru Japan you see a lot of amazing infrastructure - large bridges and long tunnels. This video is taken from a double decker bus that starts on the largest island of Honshu and ends in Matsuyama on Shikoku island crossing some impressive bridges. In Matsuyama, you can also see the skill of the bus driver turning around that huge coach.

[mukade]

Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism has an interesting web page: Our Key Challenges: Expressway & Toll Road System. On that page, there is a link to a document Expressways in Japan.

This PDF answers some of the questions on objectives, history, which roads are tolled, how they finance their expressways, and how the Japanese expressway network compares with other countries like South Korea and China.

Another great introduction can be found in an NHK World production called BEGIN Japanology - Expressways Of Japan (日本の高速道路).

Look for the string "高速道路" in YouTube to see a lot of pretty good videos. I saw a couple that were 15 and 16 hours long (in case you have insomnia). Here is one: Kagoshima to Tokyo.

[bing101]

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCZt9t6n9w1hBeDIgMtCDcVQ. Here is an update.