24 ms·

Having lived in Tokyo for years, the elephant in the room is "cars". The whole city is full of pleasant mixed use neighborhoods that are more or less car-free,

• makotobestgirl 5y ago
  This is honestly the thing that bothers me most about cities the US. Having grown up in Europe, I find many (I'm sure there are exceptions) US cities to be plain ugly and unlivable. The reason is obvious to me. It's that they are designed around cars. It makes such a huge difference.
  • MomoXenosaga 5y ago
    US "cities" are just not dense enough to be called cities. This is not America's fault. They have a resource most of the world lacks: space. Too much space and you cannot make a real city.
    • orn688 5y ago
      There's no "cannot", it's a conscious choice - if you have more space than necessary that absolutely does not require that you expand to fill all of it. And in particular this has caused issues because American cities tend towards sprawl, filling up area with low-density housing that requires significantly more infrastructure per capita, and implementing zoning laws to prevent higher-density development even as the population grows, resulting in housing shortages. Not Just Bikes has some excellent content about this, e.g.: https://youtu.be/XfQUOHlAocY https://youtu.be/XfQUOHlAocY
      • hiptobecubic 5y ago
        They sprawl because people want space. If you're from Paris or Tokyo or London you really just don't know what it's like to have a quiet, detached house with a nice garden, maybe a pool where your kids can play randomly without needing to plan a trip to the community center, space for a garden, knowing everyone within 200m of your house by name... It's a completely different way of life that is not possible without lots of space. Some people want that and so they will pay to buy it. It's not like city planners are laughing in smoke-filled rooms like, "haha! this will be our most sprawling city yet!"
        • orn688 5y ago
          As some other commenters have noted, in cities like Amsterdam and Tokyo there are enough nice safe public spaces that even young children are free to play outside on their own and there's much less planning required to go places since you don't need a car. That being said, I'm sure there are plenty of North Americans who love having a ton of space for gardening etc. But I would guess they're actually in the minority and that most people choose to live in sprawling suburban developments because they're the only affordable option to guarantee access to good schools and a safe neighborhood.
        • pxmpxm 5y ago
          People see what people want to see. An average family with two toddlers using bicycles to get around in the dead of Chicago winter. Sure, sure. I would wager that the vast majority of the folk here that are pushing this romanticized idea of car-free european city have actually grown up in upper middle class US suburbs and bulk of these attitudes are really just subconscious rejection of their parents' lifestyles. Having grown up in one of those car-free european cities myself, I can vouch that the US set up is, on average, far more convenient, which is also why you see car/pool/detached house/garage ownership rates increase with income and GDP. People that have the means clearly choose to avoid communal setups.
  • bedobi 5y ago
    I grew up in Stockholm and it too sadly is very, very car centric compared to Tokyo. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Paris and others are much better... I wish all cities everywhere was more like them! (and Tokyo)
    • tinco 5y ago
      Note that Amsterdam made a conscious flip on this, as did other Dutch cities. Take your 4 lane street, turn one lane in a tram lane, one lane into grass + trees, reduce the width on the other two lanes and add a bike lane with a heightened divider. Bam you've got a street for a more livable city center.
      • bobthepanda 5y ago
        It also took them the better part of several decades. Most cities that have tried doing this globally have only done so very recently, and it shows, but that's okay, because it took time and patience to methodically go through more or less every Dutch road and change it.
        • thanatos519 5y ago
          The US can't even imagine the collective attention span required to achieve this.
          • bobthepanda 5y ago
            You don't need outward collective action, really. We remade our cities in favor of cars, mostly through applying changes to engineering standards. We could do it again, but the current engineering establishment doesn't want to change in many cases. (They had an easier time applying their standards, because by and large no codified standards existed before them.)
      • thanatos519 5y ago
        It just keeps getting better! The next step is to eliminate car thoroughfare entirely, e.g. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hortusbrug/@52.3673495,4.9069311,177m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hortusbrug/@52.3673495,4.9... which as of a few years ago only has tram, bicycle, and pedestrian access.
  • sanxiyn 5y ago
    I think New York is fine.
    • bobthepanda 5y ago
      New York is quite loud, which is not good for your hearing and causes a whole bunch of health problems. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/31/new-york-city-subway-trains-noise-pollution-jet-engine https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/31/new-yor... I would also say that navigating the piles of garbage on the sidewalk is not fun, either.
      • presentation 5y ago
        This 100%, I measured the volume in my neighborhood in Central Tokyo 5 mins from the nearest station (it’s one of the more popular spots in the city) and it clocks in at 30dB or less. Compared to Manhattan where it’s deafeningly loud all the time. Aside, NYC’s train system is, besides being filthy, unreliable, slow, poorly maintained, and a pain to switch between transit agencies, it’s also unfriendly to anyone who isn’t fully able bodied (the escalators and elevators are always broken and only present in a small fraction of stations), and neighborhoods are often designed in ways that lend places outside of the Manhattan core to be more dangerous and unpleasant than they have to be. Not to mention the usage of land in and around stations is very poorly used (the ~2 shops in Times Square station are a hilarious joke for what’s ostensibly the financial capital of the world), and any expansion of the system is prohibitively expensive for stupid political reasons. But I suppose it’s still better than the transitless wasteland that is most of the USA.
        • Dracophoenix 5y ago
          >This 100%, I measured the volume in my neighborhood in Central Tokyo 5 mins from the nearest station (it’s one of the more popular spots in the city) and it clocks in at 30dB or less. Compared to Manhattan where it’s deafeningly loud all the time. Shibuya?
          • 5y ago
  • ekianjo 5y ago
    You don't really have real cities in the US = there are a few exceptions but most of the time it's just a very tiny center and a lot of people living away from the center. That's not what a traditional city looks like.
    • nine_k 5y ago
      Exactly. The US has very few cities proper, and a lot of huge suburbs that sometimes feature a city-like downtown (L.A., Houston), and sometimes don't (most of the Silicon Valley). The real honest dense US cities, such as NYC, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and a few others, were built large and dense before the advent of the car, and had entrenched public transportation system before 1930s. Those that were not as lucky got remade for cars in 1930-1960s, and cemented in that state by zoning regulations. Europe obviously had a large number of dense cities since medieval times. Even small cities in Europe often ended up dense due to land limitations, and the generally relatively high population density. Cities in the US very rarely faced this limitation early enough, with a few natural exceptions like Manhattan or San Francisco.
      • monkeypawfan 5y ago
        I can't help but think that we're doing a repeat with building things around mobile phone use too
        • ido 5y ago
          How do mobile phones affect city planning?
          • aurelianito 5y ago
            No need for door bells. No need for street signs. No need for taxi stops. No need for privately owned cars (rent via phone app or use Uber like service). Those things affect urban planning a lot.
            • 5y ago
  • OJFord 5y ago
    It took me a while to realise what it was that bothered me, but yes there's a real lack of 'high street shopping' and markets type organisation from what I've seen in North America - instead drive to a big square ~car park~ 'lot' surrounded by 'big box stores'. Everything scaled up. If you like it fine, can't really say either's objectively better, it's just really quite different and I suppose you likes what you grow up with or are used to.
  • freediver 5y ago
    A counter argument is that US has a very developed suburban living culture with families living in houses. And while obviously this is comfortable living, you then need a car to get to the city center. Having said that, I agree that nothing beats the walkability of European cities, quality of living wise. US has a lot to learn from that.
    • andi999 5y ago
      I thought a lot of people also live in houses in and around Tokyo.
      • dustintrex 5y ago
        Japanese houses are quite different from US ones. My in-laws live in a house in suburban Chiba well outside Tokyo, but it has literally no garden space and the neighborhood is so densely packed a taxi can't even pull into the little laneway it's in. Within a 100 meter radius there's a grocery, a drugstore, several restaurants and more, and everybody gets around on foot, by bicycle or by bus.
        • micromacrofoot 5y ago
          tbh a yard seems less necessary when you can walk everywhere
          • aeharding 5y ago
            And kids can actually walk places by themselves, have social lives and develop some independence instead of being stuck in the backyard.
            • christophilus 5y ago
              I want this for my kids (stuck in US suburbia), but have instead opted for them to grow up close to their grandparents. I’m not always sure that I’m making the right trade off, and it annoys me that I even have to make such a choice. Anyway, it’s been over 20 years since I visited Tokyo, and I’ve been to many major cities since. Tokyo remains my favorite.
  • cpursley 5y ago
    After moving to Europe (and Eastern Europe), I can't really consider those places in the US "cities" and get an uneasy feeling that something is off when I'm back stateside.
    • VeninVidiaVicii 5y ago
      Concur totally after living in Sevilla (Spain). US cities - with the exception of New York - are just cookie-cutter strip malls. There’s a fundamental lack of coherence that’s hard to explain.
      • vasilipupkin 5y ago
        It’s pretty easy to live in big cities in America ( Seattle, SF, Boston, Chicago, parts of LA ) without a car or without regularly using a car.
        • ghaff 5y ago
          I only somewhat agree. First of all, it depends if you have to commute to an office in some industrial park (even if it's only one or two days a week). Then there's the question of where your friends live, whether you regularly do activities outside the city, etc. Zipcar and Uber definitely make it easier not to own a car. But my observation of people I know in SF who don't own a car is that they make ample use of both Uber and regular/short-term rentals. People can definitely get by but it's often by adjusting their lifestyles and activities in that you just don't do things that are hard to do.
          • simplestats 5y ago
            If you live in Japan without a car you will probably end up taking a taxi from time to time. They are lined up outside the major train stations. Overall, relying on mass-transit probably is more pleasant there, and takes less lifestyle-modifications, but you still have less freedom than owning a car. And probably take longer to get around usually. Also in plenty of Japan, by the way, you definitely need a car to get by reasonably. It's not like countries in Europe where half the population lives in the capital city. If your goal is to avoid any sort of exercise (and the "forced" exercise is one of the biggest reasons to go carless in my opinion) then yes large sections of US cities may seem inacccessible without a car. But if you like walking like I do (at least up to a half-mile or so) then you can live just fine in US cities without a car, in my experience. I've done it all over.
  • throwaway743 5y ago
    Agreed. The closest you'll get to a walkable/non-car focused designed city in the US is NYC or Boston. MTA is accessible nearly anywhere in NYC (not without exceptions) and runs 24hrs
    • ghaff 5y ago
      A big limiting factor with many cities though is if you need to commute to an office. In Boston, for example, many professional jobs will require commuting out to the suburbs. In tech specifically, there's more in the city than there used to be--there were basically no major employers in the immediate urban area any longer as of a couple decades ago. But the majority of engineering jobs broadly speaking require driving to a suburban office.
  • turtlebits 5y ago
    Americans like their own yards and giant houses and lots of storage. Personally, I'm guilty of this (except the huge house part). I want 5 acres of land and don't want to see my neighbor.
    • b0ner_t0ner 5y ago
      > I want 5 acres of land and don't want to see my neighbor. You're not making Greta angry enough, don't you want a personal Olympic-sized swimming pool as well??
• LAC-Tech 5y ago
  I feel like this is a chicken and egg problem. In many western cities - and I won't name names - the downtown area is not pleasant due to anti-social behaviour. So even when they do make it walkable, I don't want to walk there, I'd rather drive to a suburban mall and reduce my chances of an altercation. Until that's fixed it's a non-starter.
  • albertgoeswoof 5y ago
    Is this a problem that America has generally? I.e there are areas where most people are scared to walk through in every city? I know many parts of the world have problems like this, but Europe doesn’t have many places like that.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • 1123581321 5y ago
      I wouldn’t say danger and unpleasantness are the same thing here. Every decently sized city has higher and lower crime rate areas. Locals tend to be more sensitive to this than tourists and the higher crime areas often have their own charms, because the crime isn’t really visible. True unpleasantness is only found in a few notable cities, is very visible, and both locals and tourists avoid it or have developed a coping framework or take a mission-based approach to their encounters with it. But those unpleasant areas don’t necessarily come with a greater chance of mugging or stray bullet shooting or auto part theft.
    • rootsudo 5y ago
      Yes, it's a known problem. Lax law enforcement, most social services are also "downtown." While the commenter said they wont name the cities, it can be Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, etc. It makes it unpleasant, and if you do have to live in the middle of downtown or such, not only are you paying more - you have to for safety. Safety of a living place, safety of controlled entry, safety of a garage for your car, etc. In General it's all depressing, you'd imagine downtown cores would be the "best" of a city, but in the USA they generally are not. Now whether or not it's true insecurity, fear or such can be up to person/gender but criminal statistics do not lie. You can pull up a map and see where the majority of crime is reported of happening - and there you go. Then you can look at the threshold and severity. But nowadays we live in an era of political correctness or wokeness, so saying or making direct observations of that data can become very faulty quickly, especially once you bring up age, gender and race of the perpetrators. So eh.
• ErikVandeWater 5y ago
  Shoutout to Not Just Bikes for thoroughly and enjoyably diving into the problem with cars as primary transit: https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes
• ehnto 5y ago
  You really notice it too, walking around the city feels very quiet even though there are so many people and a decent amount of noise from businesses. When you make it to a busy road, there's a notable lack of businesses nearby and you really notice the noise difference. That said, car speeds in Japanese cities are slow, and cars are heavily regulated so they're just not as loud as other cities. Cars add a sort of tense background track to life, perhaps because we perceive the danger subconsciously as a pedestrian. Sitting in my house in the burbs I can hear the highway out the window, in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, there was a type of quiet I just wasn't expecting from a city. I think the enabling features for this to occur are of course public transport and mixed use streets, mixed use sets the stage for a sensible compromise between cars and people. The majority of streets do actually allow cars, but you barely see any using them because they'd be incredibly slow, like walking speed. This means that if you decide to use one, you must really need it and so you can, but if not then you'll just use a road more suited to fast cars.
  • ehnto 5y ago
    Replying to my own comment because I had a thought, > Sitting in my house in the burbs I can hear the highway out the window, in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, there was a type of quiet I just wasn't expecting from a city. I'm also wondering if it's because of the density of buildings. In the burbs, I can hear a dog barking a block away, and the highway is pretty far from me but I still hear it. In Tokyo, it can almost feel like the city is muffled, and I wonder if that's because of the intense amount of concrete, medium height buildings and narrow, sometimes winding, crosshatching streets. In the immediate space you'd expect some reflection, but there's no way you'd hear something a block away.
• franciscop 5y ago
  I also live there and one interesting bit that, in retrospective is OBVIOUS, is that there are also no cars parked on the streets! Like, if you look at pictures or walk down the street it feels so pleasant for some reason but difficult to put your finger at it, until you realize there's no huge cars piling on the sides. I prefer European Architecture for downtown buildings, but the no cars bit generally overpowers this preference in making Tokyo at a similar level of beauty for me, and the bits where there are particularly beautiful buildings in Tokyo or Japan well that's just perfect. (also warning like parent, there is some street parking, but it's just minuscule)
  • bedobi 5y ago
    Yeah, it really adds to the pleasantness of everything when everything is not covered in cars and infrastructure for cars. The whole notion of street parking is bizarre. No one would tolerate if you used public space in the middle of a busy city to store your stuff. But if it's a car, suddenly it's OK. Just what?
    • ehnto 5y ago
      Bike parking is everywhere too. Trying to get bike parking in our city is like asking for the council for their first born. All of a sudden funding and public safety are all extremely dire concerns. Whipping a 4x4 through the CBD and plonking right in front of a business is fine though.
  • throwaway2037 5y ago
    Interestingly, this also greatly improves visibility for all forms of road locomotion: walk, bike, (push/electric/motor) scooter, car, truck. That said, there is also something zen about urban drivers in Tokyo. They are unusually patient and careful. I have never seen anything like it in other countries.
  • enaaem 5y ago
    I believe it’s because Tokyo does not have public parking space. Parking lots are private and when you buy a car you have to proof you have access to a parking lot. Makes sense if you think about it. Land in cities is valuable, and the cost parking should be priced in the cost of car ownership.
• tkgally 5y ago
  Another Japanese city that would be quite livable without a car is Osaka. I myself have lived carless in Tokyo and Yokohama for nearly forty years without any problem. About ten years ago, I started going to Osaka several times a year and have found it similarly easy to get around on foot and public transportation. The center of Osaka is quite flat, and a lot of people there also use bicycles. If I weren't settled in Yokohama, I would be happy to live in Osaka.
  • Dracophoenix 5y ago
    What got you into Tokyo 40 years ago?
    • tkgally 5y ago
      Basically mid-twenties wanderlust. I was planning to stay for maybe a year, supporting myself teaching English, before either going on to another country or returning to the U.S. But as soon as I got here I got a strong urge to learn the language, and I spent the next couple of years studying it intensively. I then starting doing freelance translation work and, over the next few years, gradually settled in both careerwise and in my personal life. It’s now my home, and I will stay here after I retire from my current university job next year at the age of sixty-five.
      • Dracophoenix 5y ago
        Did any of your translation work involve anime or video game? How did you fare after the bubble economy burst in the 90s?
        • tkgally 5y ago
          > Did any of your translation work involve anime or video game? No. I translated a wide variety of texts for many different clients, but I was never asked to do any anime, manga, or video games. Not being into those things myself, I didn’t seek that kind of work, either. I knew quite a few other professional Japanese-to-English translators in the 1990s, and only a couple were doing otaku stuff. I wrote a bit more about this at [1]. > How did you fare after the bubble economy burst in the 90s? No effect. After the bubble burst, I realized that some of the work I had done in the late 1980s had indeed been “bubbly”—fluffy PR materials for purely domestic companies that had no need for PR in English but were spending their borrowed money on things they didn’t need. But when those jobs disappeared, other work arrived to fill their places. I had as much work as I could handle pretty much continuously until 2005, when I took an academic position. I knew only one freelance translator who left the business because of the burst bubble. He had been working mainly for real estate developers, and real estate was the sector hardest hit by the downturn. Rather than trying to build up a new slate of clients in another field, he changed careers. If you have any other questions, feel free to contact me privately. My profile page contains the URL of my website; see the About page. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29576575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29576575
• jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago
  You want to live in a city that pushes people into subway cars like cattle? Communicable diseases?
• freddie_mercury 5y ago
  I live in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and while it has many issues the general "not designed around cars" makes everything feel much more human scale which is something I miss when I visit the US. Unfortunately, cars are a status symbol and becoming increasingly prevalent, which then puts pressure on government officials to design around them. It doesn't help that government officials all have cars and clearly see cars as superior and a sign of being a rich country.
  • ciphol 5y ago
    It's not designed around cars, but it is designed around motorbikes! Worse in many ways, although perhaps not in terms of "scale".
    • freddie_mercury 5y ago
      It isn't designed around motorbikes either. They didn't really exist in numbers 30-40 years ago which is when much of the infrastructure was put in place. Go watch some videos of Saigon in the 1980s, it is mostly bicycles with a tiny smattering of motorcycles and cars.
• flor1s 5y ago
  I think Tokyo still has too many cars (and plenty of two or three lane roads) and Japan as a whole isn't really bicycle friendly. The city is very dense however and the cost of parking spaces makes cars only accessible to upper class families.
  • bedobi 5y ago
    I actually agree with this. Tokyo isn't like Amsterdam, where there is an explicit goal to reduce reliance on cars. Instead, the relative lack of cars is kind of an accident resulting from other policies and ideas. I'll take it over explicit and deliberate car-centrism, but I do wish Japan was more like the Netherlands - that would be perfection.
  • discordance 5y ago
    Japan as a whole may not be bicycle friendly, but you can get across all the major cities on bike quite easily without interacting with high speed cars. There are either bike lanes on main roads or back streets with no traffic to circumvent interaction with cars. Have done this in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya and they have been fantastic cities to bike commute in.
    • flor1s 5y ago
      There are definitely some areas were biking is amazing, such as Shimanami kaido, Biwa lake and Kasumigaura. Cycling in Tokyo is a bit of a mixed bag in my experience, some streets have bike lanes, some have a bicycle strip on the main road (though this is often shared with temporarily parked cars), sometimes bicycles need to share space with pedestrians. Signage is often unclear. I guess calling it bicycle unfriendly is a bit harsh, but at the same time it often feels that bicyclists rank third behind cars and pedestrians.
      • golemiprague 5y ago
        Biking in Tokyo is more casual and for short distance, people don't bike to work, they bike to the nearest train station or shopping street. It is very different attitude, there is no need for helmets, the speed is low and there are no dedicated lanes, most traffic is mixed with pedestrian traffic. I find it much nicer than the lycra culture of biking in countries like the US or Australia, but each biking culture makes sense when considering the different environments.
• NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
  I lived in Tokyo for almost five years, and owned a car while I was there ... I don't think this is a question of the city being "designed around cars". There's a lot more "design for cars" in Tokyo than there is in, say, New York City - look at the Shuto expressway with its multiple rings of highways that run around the city and the radial routes that join them together; its elevated sections and tunnels through the most densely populated parts of the city... There are also many areas in the urban core with multilane roads, but these always seem to be complemented with pedestrian over/under-passes. Driving in Tokyo is very much more pleasant than driving in the NYC metro area. There is no street parking (by law), but there is often masses of underground parking to compensate: go to Akihabara, for example, and you'll find a five-story deep parking garage with >500 spaces under the Yodobashi Camera store. One thing that Tokyo does have is a regulatory regime that means that cars are unavailable to the less well-off. That awesome Shuto expressway is a toll road. You have to provide documentation of owning a parking space in order to be able to register a vehicle. The biennial safety inspection (shaken) and taxes are very expensive by comparison with U.S. standards. Gas costs the best part of $6 per gallon.
  • throwaway6734 5y ago
    >You have to provide documentation of owning a parking space in order to be able to register a vehicle. This is amazing! Free parking is a scourge in urban areas
    • stjohnswarts 5y ago
      I can't agree, just because it works for tokyo and fits the culture doesn't mean it fits the culture everywhere.
      • throwaway6734 5y ago
        Tree parking is an unneeded subsidy. The state/city should either sell or rent spots
        • 5y ago
• Tiktaalik 5y ago
  and the cars that are there are smaller, with special kei car classes being smaller still. Meanwhile in NA the market has shifted to ever larger and larger pick up trucks, which are more and more dangerous for pedestrians.