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Toyama and Uber experimentation
According to a joint 2014 paper by Kyoto and Toyama Universities, Toyama is the Japanese prefecture with the highest prevalence of vehicle usage to get from A to B (82.3%), and conversely with the lowest usage (1.7%) of public transport of any kind. Possibly for this reason Toyama has been the location for a number […]
On-demand bus services in Yamagata
Back in 2015, I spent about two weeks travelling from Morioka in the North of Japan via the slow and picturesque local train network back down to Tokyo. After experiencing the seafood and beef delicacies of Sendai, I wove my way through the mountainous interior on the Flower Nagai railway line before branching west towards […]
Akita and fully autonomous road tests
Nestled in the mountains at equal distance between the northern cities of Akita and Morioka, Akita Prefecture’s Tozawa Lake is an unlikely place for fully automated driving. But it is now the Japanese government’s first designated location for open-road fully automated driving tests. During the first tests back in November 2016, the test vehicle travelled […]