eh, this is the cart before the horse.

the US had public frequent transit systems at the turn of the century. the problem was they couldn't compete with brand new free Interstates. It's hard to compete with free.

Well for context, outside of an EZ pass, it costed me about 7$ each way to get from Oakland(hills) to Foster City roughly each way, and I had to drive my own car. And for reference, we call them freeways ;) legacy i know.

I mean, parking in this lot in Chiyoda is 400JPY for 20 minutes. https://www.parkme.com/en-gb/lot/275008/-tokyo-japan

That's a significantly higher parking rate than I've ever seen charged in the US. And generally in Japan street parking is not permitted in busy areas.

This issue was compounded by the death of streetcar lines across America, being replaced with buses. In Tokyo some of these streetcar lines evolved into subway and train lines. For example, the stretch of the modern Tokyu Den-en-Toshi Line that goes from Shibuya to Futakotamagawa (where Rakuten’s global headquarters are located) replaced the old Tokyu Tamagawa Line, which was a streetcar line.

In an alternate universe, Los Angeles’ once-extensive streetcar system, which I believe was operated by private companies (though I could be wrong), could’ve been upgraded to become an extensive train and subway system. I believe the company that built the streetcar connecting Los Angeles with Pasadena also developed real estate along the route to encourage the use of the streetcar. This is exactly Tokyu’s business model; Tokyu played a major role in the development of “garden suburbs” influenced by the garden city movement of the early 1900s: first with the Den-en-Chofu neighborhood of Tokyo in the 1920s (which is served by the Tokyu Toyoko Line), and then with the development of Tama Den-en-Toshi (Tama Garden Cities) in once-rural parts of Kawasaki and Yokohama beginning in the 1960s. Of course, a crucial difference between the original garden city concept versus Tokyu’s implementation of it is that Tokyu’s garden suburbs are generally not job centers; while there are plenty of service jobs there, the majority of good-paying professional jobs are located in the city center (such as near Shibuya Station, which conveniently is heavily influenced by Tokyu), hence contributing to Tokyo’s legendary train congestion.

The issue with the la streetcar network was that it was designed specifically to sell Henry Huntington’s land tracts. Once he sold that off he didn’t much care if the remaining transit network could actually stand on its own two legs. Some lines were frequent like downtown lines but these days there are a lot of interlining busses going downtown where you really could have multiple busses a minute coming in on a street. Other lines were a lot worse than today like the line that connected santa monica to LA, which eventually only ran once a day in contrast to todays expo line running every 8 minutes or so.

One major difference is that the streetcar companies in the US sold the land whereas Japanese companies held on to the choicest parcels to self-develop.

This meant that 50 years later when everything was at end of life, the streetcar companies could not repeat the trick.

Yep! It was a pretty scammy system.

In NA effectively the streetcars were a scheme to sell real estate, with the streetcar being the sweetener to convince people to buy into the neighbourhood.

Once sales were over the streetcar was then a pointless drag on profits. No surprise unscrupulous business persons cut back on maintenance and abandoned the "unprofitable" streetcars.