PokeMetro: From Fuschia to Pallet in Under 5 Minutes!

[TehSuigi]

Here's something that dawned on me a while ago (and got fragg'd for posting at Smogon).
Why isn't there a subway system?
I'm not counting that Rapid Transit thingy between Saffron and Goldenrod: I'm talking an honest-to-god PokeMetro.
Think about it: instead of schlepping all over the place or having to carry a pokemon that knows Fly (especially when you don't want to), just flash your Pass or pay 225P and ride the rails.
It would make transit from two places not directly connected by a path that much easier.
I want to see something like this in a hack or in 4th-Gen Games.

These are the kinds of thoughts I think about while making my one-hour commute to work every morning, and the bus isn't showing up.

After giving it some thought, I came up with two preliminary subway lines in Kanto.
Red Line (SouthWest): Starts in Saffron. Goes south to Vermillion, south to Fuschia, west to Pallet, north to Viridian, east to Celadon, east to Saffron.
Blue Line (NorthEast): Starts in Saffron. Goes northwest to Pewter, east to Cerulean, northeast to Cerulean Cape (Bill's House), southeast to Power Plant, south to Lavender, south to Eastern Coast (Routes 12-14), northwest to Saffron.

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

That would be cool. However, travel times in the games are very...strange, since in Emerald, your mother says that Norman walks the half-hour from home to work each day.

There may be such a transit system on the show, or at least things like buses, that trainers elect not to use because they would miss training opportunities.

 

[Fig]

And there we have one of the biggest Anime V Game issue : where the Anime has Norman walking that distance in half an hour, the Anime has...somewhat...more lengthy travel times.

I'm tempted to go with the Anime, because it fits the amount of things there are in the Pokémon World more efficiently than the lone Emerald Quote.

As for mass-transit, I suspect that while we do not see active subways in the underpasses in the games, they essentialy represent Saffron's mass transit.

Given the anime-based likely size of Kanto, subways don't make all that much sense connecting the various cities, though. I'd expect we're dealing with (Anime-wise) a region (Kanto) that is AT LEAST the size of one of the mid-sized North-East states (Mass, perhaps) if not larger (NY-sized?)

 

[TehSuigi]

True, true.
The game doesn't necessarily lend itself to the travel of such large distances accurately, as that was what I was basing my idea on.

 

[BenRG]

Game vs. Animé distances

The game certainly gives a very distorted image of the size of the Pokémon World and how fast that you can move around it. Given the in-game distances and time elapsed for moving between cities in GSC (the only game "family" to date to have an in-game clock and calendar, AFAIK), I would suggest that each of the game regions is no larger than a moderate-sized city (like New Orleans in the US or Birmingham in the UK). While convenient in game terms, this means that you have an entire ecosystem jammed into an area of only about 100mi^2.

In the animé, we are talking more continental-sized distances. Our heroes seem to take several weeks to cover distances which are probably in the order of 100+ miles. In this situation, it is very odd that there are not any large-scale transit systems. Remember that the Goldenrod-Saffron Railroad is a recent development. While the Ono manga series has both conventional railroads, scheduled bus services and vehicle roads, it has sufficient differences from the animé as to be an entire AU and of no use to us in determining what happens in the animé world.

The lack of infrastructure beyond population concentrations gives weight to the 'post apocalyptic' theory of the Pokémon World, with semi-isolated communities only linked together by adventurers like the Pokémon trainers.

If there was anywhere where I would expect a city-type RTS system, it would be the Saffron/Vermilion/Lavender/Celadon conurbation. All are fairly close to each other and the subways under Saffron indicate a fairly advanced city infrastructure. It might be possible to get a subway from the Breeding Centre north of Saffron and take a train all the way to Vermilion. Naturally, Trainers don't do this very often. It would spoil the fun of the journey ;-)

On a seperate but related topic, given the large size of the animé world, how long would it take to get from Vermilion to Bolder via the Diglett Caves? I'm having some trouble with this in a fanfic as I estimate that it might be a two or three week journey underground (still faster than the 3 months it takes to walk via Cerulean City). My best idea is that there is a fast-flowing underground river running through the cave system and, using specially-designed high-speed travel pods, it is possible to carry out the journey in a few days.

Thoughts and comments from other posters welcomed

 

[Fig]

I'd estimate to (roughly) about a month and a half to two months. The big advantage being that you're going in a diagonal, instead of turning at a right angle once in Cerulean.

 

[The Dude]

I'd guess that some of the larger cities would have metro transit, such as buses and subway lines. Probably Saffron, Celadon, Goldenrod, and Rustboro.

 

[Another Fan]

Well, depends on size of region. Like Kanto is said to be the size of one tiny region in japan or a continent or a state or etc. Stuff like that affects the view of the pokemon world a lot.

 

[BenRG]

Size & infrastructure

Yup, as I said in my post above, the size of the regions determines everything.

We basically have two views of the size of the Pokémon World.

The first is the game viewpoint. Someone has pointed out that Kanto greatly resembles the area immediately around Tokyo. Given that this is a fairly small area, no distance takes more than a day to walk (say, about 10 miles at most). In this situation, beyond the use of bicycles, faster public transport just simply isn't needed.

On the flip side, the animé portrays a continent-sized Pokémon World (the size of Japan or the Philippines). In this scenario, the lack of public transport links between population centres is rather bizarre. I can only think of a few situations where the characters have even seenroads as opposed to dirt paths. Population centres seem largely isolated.

There are several strands of evidence, however, that suggest that Ash and his friends choose to walk the walk rather than take the bus. Firstly, the extensive and developed ferry systems between regions suggests that large-scale infrastructure does exist. Secondly, Ash's mother, Delia, is able to get to Johto within a few days in the third movie, demonstrating that there is fast public transport between the regions (as Delia isn't someone important who can just commandeer transport, like Professor Oak). Additionally, the tourist beaches seen in several episodes also demonstrate the existance of large public transport infrastructure, as tourism requires such to exist.

If I am right, Ash and his friends just prefer to rough it in the wild. There is more chance of catching wild Pokémon that way. :-D

Ultimately, it just depends what universe you prefer.

 

[Fig]

Guys, I just ran some calculation.

We've SERIOUSLY underestimated the real world Kanto region (Tokyo and surrounding)'s size. Therefore, we're equally underestimating the size of Game-World Kanto.

It's not small. It's VERY much not small.

The real world Kanto is made up of seven prefectures of Japan, in the Tokyo region. Their total size according to Wiki : 32 391 square kilometers.

That's HUGE. Huge as in, larger than Massachussets (or pretty much any state east of the Hudson not named "Maine"). There's just no way in hell for even game-Kanto, if it is based on the Tokyo region, to have 5-minutes subways or anything remotely close to that.

Edit : looking at a scaled map of Japan, I'd estimate real/game Kanto's dimension along the lines of 170 KM E-W per 190 KM N-S. That is, however, a guess. IIRC, while 170 KM is NOT much travel for a car, it is VERY MUCH a lot of travel by most other means of transportation. The not much longer (250 KM) distance from Montréal to Québec was several days of travel by horsecarriage - on one of North America's best road at the time; I can easily imagine that a group frequently getting lost, stopping by a spot for hours to hunt certain wild pokémon, and traveling often by less developed road in montainous terrain would need weeks if not more on such distances.

Thus, it would seem that after all, Anime-Kanto, Game-Kanto and Real-Kanto might not be as far from each other as we used to believe.

 

[Zhen Lin]

In addition to Kantō in the real world, game Kantō also incorporates these: half of Shizuoka, Yamanashi and Nagano - corresponding to the western quarter of Kantō. So it's even bigger still.

 

[Fig]

Not sure there - minimal parts at best. The overwhelming proportion of those prefectures belong in Johto. What parts belong in Kanto were mostly added in to "connect" the two regions. Thus I'm counting them in Johto for now.

Which gives Johto about 73 000 square kilometers of area.

Hoenn is considerably smaller: 35 000 square kilometers for the main island, to which one must add some smaller islands : I'd estimate about 40 000 square kilometers total - not counting the sea routes, of course.

 

[Zhen Lin]

Well, we'll just have to make do with these speculations. Meowth also had his own list, but that's gone now...

 

[Fig]

Hmmm...I'd call in question MANY of these choices - there seems to be a dangerous tendency to put things too far west, which winds up with such issues as Vermillion on the wrong side of the bay (it's in the north-east corner of the "Bay of Kanto"; roughly in the same position CHIBA occupies on the Bay of Tokyo; Yokohama is completely on the wrong side of the bay!).

EDIT : and RE : the SEvii Islands, the Island 6 region is ready identifiable as part of the Bonin Islands ; specifically, the Chichijima group.

 

[Fig]

In other news : some conclusive evidence regarding the size of Kanto, courtesy of everyone's favorite GoogleMaps.

All of the following pictures are at the same scale.

The "Real" equivalent of KANTO :

The REAL equivalent of JOHTO :

Hoenn (note : this map is flipped)

Now, comparative real world areas :

The East Coast of the US, roughly from NYC to Salem (Massachussets)

Northern Italy, from roughly Genoa to Venice.

 

[eX.A.K.R.]

In other news : some conclusive evidence regarding the size of Kanto, courtesy of everyone's favorite GoogleMaps.

All of the following pictures are at the same scale.

The "Real" equivalent of KANTO :
http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/attachment.php?attachmentid=4467

The REAL equivalent of JOHTO :
http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/attachment.php?attachmentid=4468

Hoenn (note : this map is flipped)
http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/attachment.php?attachmentid=4470

OK... these maps are scaring me...

Anyway, I think that a mass transit system definitely exists in the Pokémon world. Pokémon trainers usually won't use it, though, and prefer to use the routes (which I suspect are nature/wildlife preserves for Pokémon) in order to catch/train Pokémon. Any mass transit routes are likely to be built away or under (as in underground) these areas.

 

[Fig]

Mass transit, yeah, but not mass transit in the usually understood "commuting" sense. The mass transit of the Pokémon World is long range intermunicipal and even interregional transportation, more akin to AmTrak and the Greyhound buses than to the New York subways.

Some more considerations :

-The Roman legions, in days of old, were expected to march about 15 miles a day. Now a large part of that is due to building breaking camp, etc - but then again, roman legions did not wantonly stop to accept challenges to battle by random trainers and did not stop every other two miles to try to catch a random pokémon that'Ks making noise in the high grass. 15 miles a day is a generous average for Ash and co.

-Now considering that, let's try to evaluate Ash's journey. The distances are as birds fly (ie, near straight line, only avoiding major bodies fo water such as the Bay of Tokyo/Vermillion). They're also approximative, and often based on guesswork as to the exact location of the various cities :

Ash's Journey, as the bird fly :
Viridian - Pewter : 80 miles.
Pewter-Cerulean : 80 miles.
Cerulean-Vermillion : 50 miles.
(Maiden,s Peak has been estimated to be near Lavender. Thus, Lavender-Saffron) : 40 miles.
Saffron-Lavender : 40 miles.
Lavender-Saffron : 40 miles.
Saffron-Celadon : 40 miles.
Celadon-Fuchsia, through EAST side road (they crossed the big bridge AFTER Fuchsia) : easily 90 miles.
Fuchsia - XXX. This is where it gets hard : there is no way to say where they went next. Due to Sunny Town et al, I will estimate that they came close to Celadon (by WEST side road) before going anywhere else : about 60 miles.
Celadon-Coast near Cinnabar - about 60 miles, though that is, in large part, a guess.

After Cinnabar, they used various means of transportation to head back to Cerulean. From Cerulean, a straightway line back to Viridian is close to 100 miles, and there we come to Ash's "it's been a year" comment.

Thus we have a 650 miles journey. Now, for the cause, we will give Ash (as was mentioned earlier) a 15-miles average walking day. Given random stops to try to capture wild pokémon, probably random trainer battles we never saw, and so forth - it's perhaps generous. Second, the distance; 650 miles is as the bird fly; as the Ash walk, it's likely several times that. I think given how often the group walked around in circles, a 500% modifier to their speed is more than fair (at times it would of course be far less than this, but at others, rather more). Finally, we must consider several weeks (at least!) spent stopping in various locales where they did NOT leave immediately : Celadon comes to mind, as do Porta Vista, and various others. Stacking in several days spent in one place due to gym leaders rematches, etc, and I think we have a few months easily enough.

So we wind up : 3250 miles journey (650 * 5)/15 miles a day : 217 days walking. That leaves just over four months spent not walking : a bit much, but not entirely unreasonable given several lengthy stays over the course of the anime (Celadon springs to mind, again).

 

[Another Fan]

Well, less then a year so it is imaginable to search a region in a year. Makes sense, really. So cool. Everything is good but of course making things harder for trainer but it isn't like continent size. That would be crazy.

 

[BenRG]

OT - Times taken

We know that the second episode (which properly introduces Misty and introduced Team Rocket) to the Earth Badge battle was very approximately one calendar year; Brock says so and, before Max came along, he was The Oracle of Knowledge ;-) This gives a guesstimated total Kanto Journey duration of 12-13 months, not including the Indigo League.

Johto seems to have taken much longer, mostly due to the enormous lengths of time it took for the team to travel the distance between Violet Town, Goldenrod City and Ecruteak City. We know that Ash was in a major Johto City (probably Goldenrod) on the aniversary of his departure from Pallet Town at the start of his first journey, so as long as 18 months is indicated for Johto. Given that Ash stopped to tour the Whirl Islands and compete in the Whirlpool League, though, this isn't so shocking.

These are the only occasions where we have been given enough information to extrapolate some kind of time line. AFAIK, we were not given any timestamps for Houen or Orange.

 

[eX.A.K.R.]

Mass transit, yeah, but not mass transit in the usually understood "commuting" sense. The mass transit of the Pokémon World is long range intermunicipal and even interregional transportation, more akin to AmTrak and the Greyhound buses than to the New York subways.

When I was talking about mass transit, I was using it in a rather broad sense; it included anything from mini city buses and people movers/light rail systems to long-haul coaches and intercity commuter rails and high speed railways.