It's got the party places. It's got the party people. Now if only someone could come up with a way to get the people to the places, Tokyo could truly call itself a 24-hour city.

Over the last few years, Tokyo's night life has exploded: restaurants, shops, bowling alleys, gyms, supermarkets, dance clubs, catering to an untiring crowd of nocturnal revellers. Everyone seems to have realized that longer hours mean more business (and more pleasure) -- except Tokyo's transportation industry, which cites "little demand" for 24-hour trains and buses.

"It is too much of a burden for us," says a spokesman for East Japan Railways, who declined to be named. "For instance, even if we do run the trains, it wouldn't be any use running just the Yamanote Line," he claimed. "We would have to run the other lines as well, and this whole operation is too costly for something that has little demand."

"Little demand"? Anybody who can say that with confidence hasn't taken the last train home. For workers who've been putting in overtime, and those spilling out late from the city's watering holes, this is their last ticket to ride. For those who miss the train, it's usually a choice between a night on the sidewalk, or whiling away the hours at a bar near the station till dawn.

Or, if you're feeling flush you could take a cab, if you have the cash -- although until recently you'd have been lucky to find a late-night ATM nearby as businesses other than banks could not operate them. So until 1999, when banks closed, ATMs closed too. "At first, we had only 10 to 20 unattended cash dispensers because of the restrictions [by the Financial Services Agency]," says a spokesman for Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp., the first Japanese bank to try out the new 24-hour ATMs. "But, with recent moves in the area of deregulation, we were able to set them up in convenience stores."

But now, with 24-hour ATMs in convenience stores, home is just a pricey cab ride away.

So with ATMs doing the 24-hour circuit, will the transportation service be next? After all, for Tokyo to really kick off as a 24-hour city, efficient round-the-clock transport is vital. Sadly, the transportation industry does not see it that way.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government agrees with JR East. It has been running a late-night (but not 24-hour) bus service since 1988. But with the burst of the economic bubble, they say fewer people have been using it, which led them to dump most of the routes. The few that remain run to residential areas, but even so, the latest leaves Oji Station at 1:05 a.m. -- not much later than the last JR train.

However, many other major cities in the world, including New York and London, have 24-hour transportation in the form of buses and/or subway services.

"In New York, the trains run on several tracks," says Hajime Mori, a metropolitan government spokesman. "But in Japan, they run on single tracks. Therefore, if trains are running for 24 hours, there is no way we can take care of the tracks."

Even though railway authorities say that they cannot run 24-hour trains because of the single tracks, new subways are still being built using the same single-track approach.

"We cannot afford more space [for multiple tracks] because the underground land is extremely expensive," says Mori.

The transportation industry seems to think that a large investment in a multi-track system wouldn't pay off. But with so much to do in the middle of the night, providing 24-hour transportation would have a spiral effect on various people and industries.

Akichika Doi, the 28-year-old owner of a restaurant bar in Shibuya, closes his place at around midnight. According to Doi, he decided on this schedule because of the last-train system.

"It would be great if trains ran all night," Doi says. "I'm sure the sales would go up, and there would be so much more I could do for our customers. And, I wouldn't have to worry about my employees' last trains either."