Contribution from Matthew Nguyen

I found your blog on transportation is very interesting and my only criticism is that you guys might not have enough to write about. I have gone through your blog and would like to recommend some ideas to help you when you have to write your weekly reports. It seems like you covered pretty much most of the forms of transportation, but I am really curious about the different customs and norms in Japan compared to Calgary, like when riding on the trains.
http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2016.html (guide for traveling by train)

To summarize some of the information found from that website, they mentioned that there are some trains that allow smoking. Another interesting thing I found is that talking on cell phones inside the train is forbidden and as a norm you should put backpacks on the floor or onto the baggage shelves. Of course we do not have such all of these rules here in Calgary, since our trains are never as packed as Japan and our culture is different.

More of these posters can be found here.
http://www.tokyometro.jp/anshin/kaiteki/poster/index.html

The top 10 bad train manners from a survey were:
1. Noisy conversation and horsing around
2. Music from headphones
3. The way passengers sit
4. Cell phone ringtones and talking on phones
5. Pushing, shoving when getting on and off the trains
6. Applying make-up
7. Littering
8. Sitting on the floor of the train
9. Riding the train drunk
10. Riding a crowded train with a child in a stroller

Since many of us will be riding on the train I think it would be important to know most of these manners, but many of them are really common sense.

I also heard that people who miss the last train are allowed to sleep at the station for the first train to arrive in the morning, like for university and college students who finish late and it does not bother the station attendant which I find intriguing. Since you covered hours of operations maybe you could also include duration per train and how long it would take to get to one place to another. When you are covering rush hour, you can compare the time of rush hour with Calgary’s rush hour.
http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/rush-hour-tokyo (train culture)

In Calgary trains come every 5 minutes during rush hour (6:30 a.m. to 9:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.) and in Japan it comes every 2 minutes.
http://www.shinkansen.co.jp/jikoku_hyo/en/ (time table)

Although this might seem out of place since you guys are experimenting with different forms of transportation per week, but how about comparing the different forms of transportation to get to the same destination by bus, train, biking or walking. This comparison could include the cost of the fare and the duration. Also what are the differences between their transportation system and our own? Do they have a transfer system when riding buses and what are the Japanese people’s thoughts on transportation, like what do they think is the best, and other facts similar to how we covered ちかん and the traffic problems due to train routes in class.

I am also curious about the other forms of transportation, if you guys get the chance to also research about, such as motorcycles and how many people own cars and what they think about airplanes as a method of travel, since they have the 新幹線 (しんかんせん) and also what is the most common form of activity done while on the train, such as reading a newspaper, playing on the Nintendo DS or texting etc…

Overall to repeat my suggestion, I think it would be great if you guys could research some of the differences between Japanese transportation system and our own transportation including technology and maybe get some opinions and perspectives of some of the Japanese people who have taken transportation in another country and how they feel about foreign transportation compared to their own. Any question I presented above are also suggestions. Continue to keep up the great work.