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I walked around Tokyo marveling at the infrastructure. Fully enclosed (or perhaps 3/4 enclosed) freeways that explode out of the ground, split off to surface s

I walked around Tokyo marveling at the infrastructure. Fully enclosed (or perhaps 3/4 enclosed) freeways that explode out of the ground, split off to surface streets, and arch up through the sky and around corners. Well-engineered, rubberized mounting systems and the enclosure mean you only heard the faintest hint of cars rocketing by at speed. Highways branching to high-capacity, multi-lane surface streets, which further branch into narrow neighborhood streets (similar to an alley in the US) meant that pedestrian traffic was quite safe, and generally well-respected. By contrast, American cities have a couple of arterial freeways, a massive grid of wide-yet-low-capacity surface streets, and neighborhood streets that people speed through in an effort to shave seconds off their commute. And when they get to work, they park in huge parking lots, instead of stacked parking structures (ideally under the target building itself). American transportation infrastructure is terrible.

deegles 13y ago
I think the road infrastructure pales in comparison to the subway/rail system. The volume of people it moves is incredible. Also remember that it's all built in an earthquake-prone area!
- was_hellbanned 13y ago
  I didn't even bother getting into the rail system, since I assume everyone realizes how advanced it is. I really wanted to put this in though: I've watched Shinkansen pull into the switchyard at night to "go to bed". It's quiet. Here's a bullet train, cruising into a rail yard pretty much in the middle of a neighborhood, idling along after midnight, and you only hear a very muffled motor as it glides by. Compare that to America, where our trains seem to be built solely to meet basic load requirements, and where they honk four times (as long or short as they want) before every crossing that's not guarded with quad-gates.
lovemenot 13y ago
Quite so. Furthermore, the preponderance of bicycle-riding and perhaps the best public transport network in the world makes Tokyo, in some ways, a role model for urban design. Outside of the big cities　in Japan though, you see the same infrastructure that characterises the US: strip malls and the like. Population density seems to be the major driver and, perhaps contentiously, willingness to subsume one's own freedoms to the common good is a secondary one.

deegles 13y ago

I think the road infrastructure pales in comparison to the subway/rail system. The volume of people it moves is incredible. Also remember that it's all built in an earthquake-prone area!

was_hellbanned 13y ago
I didn't even bother getting into the rail system, since I assume everyone realizes how advanced it is. I really wanted to put this in though: I've watched Shinkansen pull into the switchyard at night to "go to bed". It's quiet. Here's a bullet train, cruising into a rail yard pretty much in the middle of a neighborhood, idling along after midnight, and you only hear a very muffled motor as it glides by. Compare that to America, where our trains seem to be built solely to meet basic load requirements, and where they honk four times (as long or short as they want) before every crossing that's not guarded with quad-gates.

lovemenot 13y ago

Quite so. Furthermore, the preponderance of bicycle-riding and perhaps the best public transport network in the world makes Tokyo, in some ways, a role model for urban design. Outside of the big cities　in Japan though, you see the same infrastructure that characterises the US: strip malls and the like. Population density seems to be the major driver and, perhaps contentiously, willingness to subsume one's own freedoms to the common good is a secondary one.