dandan.

For a start, there's the massive difference of scale. Tokyo prefecture has a population of 12 million (about 20 times City of Seattle's population), in about 2200 square km (about 10 times Seattle). The Yamanote-line the guy talks about runs in the area that's known as the special district with 23 wards, with a combined population of 8 million in an area that's about three times the size of Seattle (or about 1/8 of King County, for a bit of perspective). You can see that the population density just doesn't compare, even considering the entire Tokyo against the most dense areas of the Emerald City.

Shinjuku station, one of the Yamanote line (whose entire length is about 22 miles) stations, gets more than 200,000 users daily. Okay, these people don't all use Yamanote line (Shinjuku station serves about 10 lines by 5 different railway companies), so let's look at another station. Harajuku station is a much smaller station with just Yamanote line going through, and it gets about 72,000 people getting on and off one of these trains daily. Oh, and guess what? These railway companies are generally just getting by, most of them in the red.

If the proposed Lake Union line (about 1/3 the size of Yamanote, maybe?) is to be viable, it needs to get at least 30,000 people using it every day. How many people live in the city again? That's right -- that means about 1/24 of the entire population of the city needs to use the thing (be it light rail or trolley, going around Lake Union) every day. Is that too big a number, or small enough to achieve for Seattleites? Let's see...

King County Metro transits get annual ridership of 100 million. Impressive enough for an American city for sure, but that's less than 300,000 daily all over King County. Would one person in ten of these people who already ride the buses use the new line, every day? Probably not.

All this number crunching means nothing really. The numbers are kind of arbitrary, and we are essentially comparing apples and oranges. I didn't mention the massive cultural difference that exists between the Americans and the Japanese, or the rest of public transportation infrastructure that supports these "hub" lines such as Yamanote. The point is, why go to Japan to look for a model? I am just a bit puzzled. I mean, did the author study all these numbers and say, Oh the readers won't know the difference, or was he just ignorant of his myopia. Has he been to Japan?

Is it just Seattleites simply like to think big? Or is this another case of Japanese fetish we are seeing everywhere these days here? I am very much amused and mildly flattered that my home country is getting so much attention from the intelligentsia (and the teenagers) here, but I often see the dumbing down of nuances, differences and distortion of minor (and not so minor) facts. Am I being fastidious?