4 ms·
I love how life in Tokyo is so middle-class and family oriented compared to US cities like SF and NYC.
by eecsninja 8y ago
I love how life in Tokyo is so middle-class and family oriented compared to US cities like SF and NYC.
- paulsutter 8y agoYoung children ride the subway alone to school, it’s a different world
- woogiewonka 8y agoI see tiny kids walking down narrow (I would call dangerous due to traffic) streets. See them crossing sidewalks. As a parent of a one year old I find this scary and fascinating.
- jpatokal 8y agoTraffic in residential Tokyo streets is also super slow, because drivers are well aware that they're full of kids, grannies, cats, etc. And you're pretty much automatically at fault if you hit a pedestrian.
- coldtea 8y agoSo, like New York up until the 80s?
- closeparen 8y agoUS cities would be middle class and family oriented if middle class and family oriented people chose to live in them. There’s nothing natural or inevitable about suburbia.
- fzeroracer 8y agoIt's immensely unfortunate that there's still this ingrained mindset that in order to live a proper middle-class life you have to settle in the middle of suburbia hell where there's nothing around for miles. Though it doesn't help that the entire system is built to subsidize and encourage islands of suburbia separated by long stretches of highway. Japan's centralization of population, strong public transit systems and city design is something that vastly appeals to me.
- eecsninja 8y agoCan't blame American families for choosing suburbia. US cities are a mess -- too many crazies, needles and trash everywhere, traffic congestion and poor public transit, expensive housing, and so forth. And there's no political will anywhere in the USA, suburban or urban areas, to change any of this.
- closeparen 8y agoUS cities are a mess because middle class families abandoned them for the newly built suburbs in a coordinated, subsidized, and regulated movement. Individual families were not expected to walk out into the fields and personally make them habitable. They certainly weren’t turned away by policies designed to preserve the status quo, compensate/empower those adversely affected by a proposed change, etc. Highway construction, planning codes, development and mortgage finance, public debt, subsidized infrastructure, etc. were all assembled and optimized to make it as easy as possible for suburbia to happen precisely as it did. That was a choice. We could make the same choice about urbanism. (Imagine an Interstate Highway System-level investment in urban subways). We don’t.
- Tempest1981 8y agoWe’re funding mass transit at a fraction of the rate necessary, and I don’t see that changing - along as governments are considered incompetent and taxes are considered evil.
- eecsninja 8y agoWe're also building transit at 5x the cost per unit of distance. Compare the costs of NYC second avenue versus recent Tokyo and Paris lines.
- closeparen 8y agoThat can’t really be the philosophy - even red states love their highways.
- 8y ago