I took the train to go to a panel on public transportation in downtown D.C., which was only fitting. Unfortunately for me and the rush hour commuters I was traveling with, the trains were running extremely late that morning because of the unusually cold weather. The old equipment that Washington D.C.’s Metro system relied upon couldn’t take the frigid temperatures and trains were malfunctioning inbound and outbound. The more trains malfunctioned, the more commuters were crammed into the functioning ones, and the overcrowding caused even more malfunctions.

Needless to say, I arrived at my event much later than I intended. I completely missed the welcome speech and the introduction to the presentations. In this at least I was fortunate: I was already familiar with the event I was attending. Called the 3^rd JASC-KASC Trilateral Symposium, it was a series of three presentations put on by college students who had participated in either the Japan-America Student Conference (JASC) or the Korea-America Student Conference (KASC) the previous summer. Each panel addressed some issue that was of particular importance to the United States, Japan and Korea. The presentation I was most interested in seeing was the third, Urban Challenges, which specifically tackled public transportation.

I had grown up here in the suburbs of D.C. where public transportation was inconvenient at best and where getting a driver’s license was a rite of passage for a typical teen. Having a car was a basic necessity and most families I knew owned two. I was completely unaware of the importance of public transportation until I spent a year living abroad in Tokyo, a city of millions whose public transportation system is renowned. There I was empowered, so to speak, to go anywhere I wanted in the city quickly, cheaply and without a car. For example, I could make it from my local station in the outskirts of the city to downtown Tokyo in 25 minutes or less. Public transportation opened the doors of Tokyo to me in a way that D.C.’s metro system never had. I wanted to know what the student presenters, with their Korean, Japanese and American backgrounds, thought of the differences in public transit between our three countries.

The overarching theme of their presentation was that public transportation systems have developed differently in different parts of the world and that the U.S., Japan and Korea can all benefit from studying each other’s systems. The students gave three specific examples. The first was London’s system of using new technology to wirelessly charge drivers for driving in the city. The second was D.C.’s bike share program that opened in 2008 and expanded into the suburbs in subsequent years. The third was the extensive networks of trains that are common in and between Asian cities, with Tokyo cited as the prime example.

However, as the presentation went on it became clear to me that it was really our Asian allies who could teach the U.S. about developing, structuring and implementing public transportation on a city- and country-wide scale. The heart of the matter is that Japan, like many other Asian countries, is a train-centric society. Trains, buses and bikes are integrated into daily life, city infrastructure and the economy in a way that is rarely seen in the car-centric U.S.

Take for example Kichijōji Station, located near downtown Tokyo. The first time I went out the turnstile, I was shocked to find myself in the bowels of a four-story mall looking at shops, restaurants and cafes. The train station was literally inside the mall. Unlike the U.S.’s suburban set-up where strip malls and restaurants are located off of highways and surrounded by large parking lots, in Japan shopping and dining are clustered around train stations, which are the accessible hubs of urban life.

Being a train-centric society also means that more time and effort is invested into the development of trains. Simply put, the train technology in Asia is better than anything we currently have in the U.S. The most famous example of this is the shinkansen, dubbed “bullet train” by English-speakers, that travels between all major Japanese cities at 200 mph. But more importantly, Japanese technology is more advanced on a local level as well. Not only are trains in Tokyo newer on average than trains in U.S. cities, they are more reliable and extremely precise. Every time a train pulls into a station, its doors align with certain markings on the platform, which tell riders where to wait.

This is a far cry from the state of trains in the United States. Assuming your city has a train system, chances are its trains are the same ones that were being used thirty years ago. Out of date and unreliable, public transportation is a nuisance that most Americans avoid in favor of their cars. Without a car, the 18-minute drive from my comfortable neighborhood to my doctor’s office becomes an hour-long trek whose timing is dictated by the train. Low demand for train service means that even with government subsidies, most cities can’t sustain a public transportation network that would be sufficient for anyone making do without a car. This has substantial socioeconomic repercussions, as the JASC-KASC presenters rightly pointed out. Inconvenient, unreliable public transit causes low-income families to sacrifice time that they do not have to lose. And for low-income workers, time is literally money.

In their ideal view of the world, the student presenters hoped that the U.S. would learn from Asia and, by improving public transportation, improve the quality of life of the people who use it. Waiting for the still-delayed train to take me home, I mulled over how challenging adapting such a system would be, and not just because of the more practical funding concerns. Our cities and suburbs have developed based on the assumption that residents own cars and we as a country are practically married to them. Giving up our cars would be more than a question of functionality. We believe that we have a right to drive everywhere and we have convinced the government to support that right, to invest in new highways and not new train lines. So it is our responsibility to convince ourselves, our friends and our government that it is in our best interest to build, and then take, the train.