5 ms·

tokyo has a big ass green belt around it's river http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=35.738057,139.824747&spn=0.004441,0.009903&t=h&z=17 http://maps.google.com/?

• blasdel 16y ago
  There's also epic flood control stuff on the river north of Tokyo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Area_Outer_Underground_Discharge_Channel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Area_Outer_Undergr...
  • fungi 16y ago
    i'm constantly floored by the scale and quality of infrastructure in japan, and not just tokyo even out woop woop they have rail, road, water and telco infrastructure that makes our efforts look feeble. amazing shit you can do when you run public debt at close to 100% of GDP :)
    • wakeless 16y ago
      And when you have population density. It makes economic sense to provide better services when you have x number of people per m^2 as compared to the Australian density. I'm a big believer that Australian cities should be bearing this in mind and building up rather than out.
    • jacques_chester 16y ago
      Japanese public debt is actually at ~200% of GDP. Australia is not seen as a particularly safe bond issuer, we could not sustain that level of debt.
• brc 16y ago
  Well, the riverside of Brisbane is mostly private property, including the CBD. Unless you're going to forcibly confiscate private property, people are not going to leave of their own accord - and even if they do, others will be happy to move in behind them. So it's a choice of leaving things where they are, or suspending democracy, private property and freedom of choice and doing a dictatorial thing like clearing all the houses and buildings along the river and creating a park. Even if you did it under existing laws, the amount of money required to resume all the properties would be immense. Everyone of those riverfront homes is worth at least a million dollars. The buyout and demolition would far outweigh any reconstruction costs. These people know they live in a flood zone. There are flood markers all over the place and every property purchase inclues a 1974 flood report as to the level of flooding in the particular property. People choose to live in these place of their own free will in the full knowledge the river might one day come and flood them. So a wide green belt along the river might be a good idea. But it's also completely impractical and only good as a theoretical talking point.
  • jacques_chester 16y ago
    > Even if you did it under existing laws, the amount of money required to resume all the properties would be immense. IANAL, but as I recall, the guarantee that forced acquisition occur on just terms only binds the Commonwealth, not the states. Queensland may not have just-terms laws, and even if they do, Parliament would be able to suspend them.
    • brc 16y ago
      IANAL either, but anything that happens with regards to forced property acquisitions also means the person with the confiscated property has to be compensated fairly at full market value for said property. And the cost of acquiring all the riverfront property along the Brisbane and Bremer Rivers would be astronomical. So they only way to resume the properties and provide a benign area for flooding is to either (a) borrow or tax a lot of money for the acquisition or (b) suspend the laws and steal the properties from their owners by means of modified legislation or other force. I'm not saying that forced property acquisition should never occur, clearly there needs to be cases where this happens ('The Castle' notwithstanding). But to forcefully acquire all the property along the Brisbane river? Another flood mitigation Dam would be a lot cheaper and keep a lot more people happy, and provide more water for droughts. Queensland is still woefully under-equipped for long dry periods. Wivenhoe was designed to mitigate flood waters and guarantee supply until 2000. SEQ needs another large dam.