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Stuck in Traffic for 1000 Yen
The truth about cheap highway tolls:
Last weekend we visited my wife’s family in Iwate prefecture 530 km (320 miles) north of Tokyo and paid only 1,700 yen ($17) one-way in tolls, much cheaper than the 10,000 yen that it would have cost on a weekday. The shinkansen (bullet train) would have set the four of us back almost 35,000 yen.
To beat the traffic we got up at the crack of dawn, loaded up the SUV with three days worth of clothes, diapers, and enough toys to occupy the kids, and hit the road at 6:30.
Unfortunately, everyone else had the same idea. We immediately ran into heavy traffic on the Tohoku Expressway and crawled along around 40 km per hour through much of the first 100 km before things eased up a bit.
Just when we thought the worst was over, we hit a 25-km backup that looked like a parking lot. All we could do was grin and bear the bumper-to-bumper traffic as my 11-month-old son threw a fit in the back seat while my 5-year-old boy said: “Dad, we should have taken the shinkansen.”
I never wanted to get to my in-laws’ faster than at that moment.
We eventually made it in about 9-1/2 hours – more than three hours longer than it would have taken had there been no traffic jams.
“Next time, let’s not go on a 1,000-yen weekend,” my wife said.
And yet the public does this every year with the full knowledge that the roads will be clogged. But because they think they are getting a deal, they don't stop to think about the diminishing returns of cheap highway tolls: more people on the roads, longer traffic jams, and more time wasted sitting in traffic. It's interesting how people love a bargain but place so little value on their own time. It may be cheap to drive from Tokyo to Aomori for ¥1,000, but paying the extra money for shinkansen tickets to travel a lot quicker and more comfortably surely outweighs a 9-1/2 hour drive. This is something that even the author's child understands.
Comments
Yup. Its that Nova student mentality of quantity versus quality. It seems that wasting ones time in traffic jams and basically not having a vacation is much more important, so long as you same some yen.
Actually, I just had a chat with my girlfriend about this a couple hours ago, as she mentioned that a 69 KILOMETER traffic jam at 4 AM - yes 4AM!! - occured during Obon. You would think people would learn from past mistakes, such as LAST OBON and their previous trips, or at least having read the news about last years Obon traffic issues - NOPE! Will it happen again next year.. yes! And the group, non-critical way of thinking is good - why?!
"This is something that even the author's child understands."
... but curiously, not the author!!
It's easy to criticize, but surely it can't have escaped Shawn's attention that he too was one of those people filling the roads for ten hours!
Of course criticizing is easy, but I was pointing out how dumb we can be. We know that traffic will be bad, but despite knowing better, we choose to drive because we perceive a 1000 yen highway toll to be a deal. It's not. The author's child gets it. Taking the shinkansen, while more expensive, is a far more rewarding journey. It's fast, there's lots of stuff to look at out the window, the boy can get up and move around, there are snacks and vending machines, and there's a washroom. This is preferable to being seat-belted in a slow-moving car where there's nothing to look at but other cars.
Shawn
I live in Iwate and have travelled between here and points South on many occasions. My father-in-law is also a truck driver who has had more than a few scrapes with the authorities over such issues as weight limits and so on. What I learned from him is that there are a lot of back roads between Tokyo and Iwate that are virtually unpatrolled, avoid built-up areas and have few or no traffic lights. The truckers know them and use them and very few others are aware of them. Some maps show them if you know what to look for but it pays to be adventurous as you can discover other helpful tricks that way too. In Japan the shartest distance between two points is rarely a straight line!
Thank you for that post. I'll use it to defend my route on my family's next trip.
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