Having been in Japan for two weeks and traveling for a week, I have spent my time on various transportation systems. The various methods of transportation I have used are the train, Shinkansen, bus, ferry, cable car, and streetcar.
We used the Shinkansen a lot this past week to travel between cities. The Shinkansen are bullet trains that reach upwards of 200 mph which makes them a quick and cost-efficient method of intercity transportation. As someone who has spent a lot of my life in India and traveled using their train system, I can say that the Shinkansen system is the ideal system for intercity travel. The Shinkansen is just as timely as the rest of the Japanese transit system, something that Indian trains are not. The Shinkansen also offers a level of comfort that makes you feel almost as if you are flying, which is something I appreciate since Indian trains are nowhere as comfy. The people using the Shinkansen are also less aggressive than the people I have seen that use Indian trains, especially when it comes to getting onto the train, and the patrons on the Shinkansen are also a lot more reserved and tend to be on the quieter side.
As we left the Tokyo area, the amount of English signs in the trains are the stations still stayed the same, making navigation from place to place easy for English speakers. Even the signs and announcements on the streetcar and ferry came in English. One thing that I found interesting was that the JR west company had designed departure times for their ferries to Miyajima in such a way that people from trains that arrived had enough time to walk over to the dock. I think this method of maximizing the ease of use for passengers is what makes the Japanese transit system so spectacular.
The streetcar and bus rides that I used were not as precise in time as the train system but that is because they do not use transitways that are dedicated entirely to them. Overall, all the methods of transport that I have used in Japan have been unique in their own way, but I liked the railway system the best as it is the most developed and is an almost perfect right-of-way type A transit mode.
Walking into the JR West Miyajima Ferry. Owned and operated by the same company that operates a majority of trains of the region.
Two different types of bullet trains developed by JR Rails. These were on display at the railway museum.
