Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in
economist.com
economist.com
Before anyone chimes in saying "nO tHeRe r cUrS iN tOkYo tOo" - of course there are! The point is the city isn't designed around cars. (and the parts that are are the least pleasant)
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.
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.)
Now I live in Hong Kong, bought a 1998 Porsche 911 that guzzled gas and spat good smoke, that cost me so much in eco tax and gas tax (the same thing, really) for so little use I gave up and am car-free now :D
Cant wait for massive electric cars adoption where the discussion will move away from how we murder the world for fleeting amusement, and back to transport convenience and pleasure to drive. But Im sure we ll find problems with Lithium mining or whatever.
For instance if you don’t have a car, the money save from not having a large piece of machinery sitting around most of the time would probably more than make up for a few train tickets. Another option is car share fleets which allow you to split costs and avoid a cost of owning a car.
Even with electric cars, cities should still be designed for people rather than cars. Electric cars are still a massive burden on the environment so we shouldn’t be aiming for most people to have their own.
But cars are not only transportation. They are also secure, climate-controlled semi-private spaces. If I leave a nightclub with a woman at 1am, too far from my home to walk there, trains shut down for the night, no taxis available.....
Having extra pocket money to buy train tickets is useless in such scenarios. If I have my own privately-owned vehicle (POV), I can bang the woman in the back seat, in the club parking lot. And I sure as shit don't want to "car share" with anybody ELSE inclined to do so as well!
POV ownership is like having insurance: it's often underutilized but when you REALLY need it for those rare edge cases, it's worth its weight in gold.
People love to respond that that's too expensive or unworkable or unrealistic or whatever, ignoring that it's actually the status quo that is too expensive, unworkable and unrealisitc, and that there are now a bunch of previously car centric cities that have been deliberately and fundamentally changed very successfully.
Cars are not the problem: it's their aggregation in dense city + their pollution. Remove the pollution, people stop dying, we can then discuss your dream of perfect public transport for optimization's sake.
I'd want to see some numbers to support that. What does it cost to provide round-the-clock availability of secure, climate-controlled public transport to every possible location, urban or rural? Bullet trains on standby at 0100hrs to take 1 guy from Osaka to Kanagawa would cost a fortune. In comparison, while PARKING and roads definitely have costs associated with them, the hardware/infrastructure is largely concrete, and inexpensive to maintain when operating below capacity. So 1-2 people can hop in a car and take a road trip at a far lower net/civilization-wide resource expenditure.
Japan has great public transport. Japan also has great cars and a very healthy car community. What part of Japan's transportation approach classifies it as "unworkable and unrealistic" to such an extent that completely banning cars is the optimal solution?
I think for instance we can't possibly build enough railway and bus network to serve every inch of the territory and it's simply to allow fast speed individual transport to distribute the load. It can be even automated with no pilot control, but it's impossible to schedule-base every location in a city without displacing people, rebuilding cities entirely around specific common transport etc. In Europe and Asia, where we build a lot of cities organically, it seems silly. In the US, where cars are even MORE prevalent to the point cities are built for them rather than humans, it will never disappear.
I’m really glad to see this because I moved from central London to central Stockholm 20 years ago and no one believes me when I tell them I find this town more car-centric even than London.
Away from the tourist areas, everything in Stockholm is arranged around the free-flow of traffic - from the phase of traffic lights, the dimensions of the roads vs pavements, to the sheer design of the street layout.
Unfortunately the car-mania of the 1960s and 70s still survives here, which is dangerous for kids and enervating to live with, and such a contrast to other European towns.
There are people who drive of course by the bulk of the city feels like it’s for the pedestrians and cyclists, and driving through the city itself is simply awkward.
I moved here from London. If that helps lay context.
The working classes would then commute into work on public transport, while ‘fine’ office workers would take their car. The cachet attached to traveling by car has never been lost, and any attempt to curtail car use is always met with enormous resistance ever since.
Looking at pictures of Stockholm in the 40s and 50s one can see the streets were full of cyclists.
As a result of this history, today, the social democrats (just like all other parties) pay lip service to environmentalism, curbing emissions, fighting climate change etc etc, but the truth is they rely heavily on the utterly car dependent rural, small town and suburban voters they themselves have created, and are thus constrained in how much they can really push policies that meaningfully reduce car dependency.
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https://mhrf.se/broschyr/hjulspar
När väl vågorna efter andra världs- kriget började lägga sig blev vår in- ställning till bilen och bilismen oåterhållsamt positiv och Sverige blev det land i Europa som hade det snabbast växande antalet bilar per in- vånare. Det blev snarare det övriga samhället som fick anpassa sig efter bilen än tvärtom. Dessa hjulspår kan vi idag se lite varstans, inte minst i våra städer och tätorter som så småningom fick genomgå genomgripande förändrin- gar och i många fall till stora delar byggas om för att biltrafiken skulle fungera rationellt. I samband med det stora genom- brottet under 1950-talet förändrades synen på bilen. Man såg den inte längre som en lyxartikel, bilen kom till och med att bli en byggsten i folkhemsbygget. I skriften ”Har vi råd med bilen?” slog socialdemokraterna inför valet 1956 fast att bilen både var leksak och nyt- tosak och att den inte längre enbart var en angelägenhet för överklas- sen. Bilen kallades till och med för en demokratisk kraft...
...Man drömde om att komplettera folkhemsidyllen med en lagom stor bil – kanske en Volvo PV 444 eller en Saab 92.
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https://www.tekniskamuseet.se/lar-dig-mer/100-innovationer/b...
Med det utbyggda vägnätet och det stadigt ökande antalet bilar började samhällsplanerarna övergå från att anpassa bilismen till det gamla samhället till att istället bygga ett bilsamhälle enligt förebilder från USA. Bilen ingick nu i ett gigantiskt tekniskt system där motorvägar och bilanpassade köpcentra med väldiga parkeringsplatser ingår. För att nå fram till bilsamhället började också Sveriges städer omvandlas — stadskvarter revs, vägar breddades, parkeringshus byggdes och städernas förorter utvidgades allt längre från stadskärnorna. Resultatet blev ett kulturellt och ekonomiskt bilberoende.
What surprises me more is that big Japanese cities like Tokyo and Osaka chose to build enormous rail networks (above and below ground) instead of wide, fast boulevards and raised expressways.
I live in zone 2 though. Probably things would be different if I lived further away.
The way to solve it is by finishing the bypass (Förbifart) Stockholm and an eastern ring connection and then start greatly limiting traffic going through the center.
Completely agree outside the inner city. You can feel that it was designed in the 60s and 70s and then never touched again.
Oddly the Isles of Scilly, which are tiny, and lack a proper vehicle ferry to the mainland, has about 50% of the population with a car or van. The furthest you could actually go would be able 2 miles.
a) their city is not the public transport utopia people want to believe it is
b) their city is completely unlivable without a car
Because this is quite important distinction - I suspect that many Europeans want to convey point a) but are potentially being understood as saying point b).
Even midsized towns in Germany, Austria & Switzerland will be pretty doable without a car. In less affluent countries like Poland and Czechia (I have lots of friends in both and lots of relatives in the latter) outside the major cities people expect to drive (it might still be possible just less convenient than in the German speaking countries to rely on transit). I have Greek friends who say it’s similarly inconvenient in many parts of Greece.
But I suspect almost nowhere urban in Europe will be completely unlivable without a car.
public transport is better than places like LA and Brisbane Australia (which isn't saying much), but hilariously bad compared to Tokyo and London. So it's somewhere in between.
livability without a car likewise is OK in inner city and immediate surroundings, but quickly gets a lot worse the further out you get. (unlike eg Tokyo, where even suburbs very far from the inner city are very convenient and liveable without a car)
Punctuality is pretty bad, which wouldn't be a problem if frequency was good, but it's not, so...
It can be pretty unsafe and unpleasant.
Basically, it's "OK" in inner city and immediate surroundings, but quickly gets a lot worse the further out you get.
Some trains have special brushes or water jets to clean the tracks
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2860418/End-...
I would also say that navigating the piles of garbage on the sidewalk is not fun, either.
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.
Shibuya?
In Manhattan it's more like the constant blaring of horns and near-constant sirens of various types.
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.
Those things affect urban planning a lot.
Its definitely, imo, to the point where it is becoming a responsibility of societies to provide its citizens access to these technologies because of their utility. That means subsidized / free phones and service, imo. Everyone really should have a baseline of digital access as a fundamental right, hopefully this decade. The COVID relief free cell service in the US I think has been an eye opener for me.
But the thing is Street signs and door bells don't take up any space. There's no real benefit in removing them anyway.
Private cars are a big issue but the problem is people commuting from outside the city and shared car schemes are too expensive for that.
I’d always wondered what would happen if the US had a city with an UGB and very unrestrictive zoning.
And here's a nice infographic comparing the density of LA and New York, if you're interested in more than anecdotes:
https://www.its.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/05/...
TLDR; no, LA is not mostly dense, walkable areas. Very far from it.
This one is a better list https://www.walkscore.com/CA/Los_Angeles
I grew up in a high density city overseas and I can see the appeal of both types of city. I personally prefer low density, car centric cities (obviously we need to finish solving the emissions problem from cars, but that's separate).
It is ridiculous. In order to have food and shelter you need to be dependent on not just a landlord and grocery store but also insurance companies, car dealers, oil and gas companies, DMV/DPS,mechanics,etc... and infractions against driving law can leave you unable to work, get food, go to the doctor (outside of ER),etc... a traditional city does not require a regulated license for teansporation and you don't spend almost as much as rent on transportation. Especially for low-income people, liquidity is important, it is the reason behind why it is expensive to be poor. Think if all the tragic social cost that can be avoided if people can instead spend money on their other needs instead of cars.
I read somewhere how car makers bribed and played dirty to prevent things like rail cars from being adopted by cities. To me it relfects on how much corporate-run the city is.
But then again, I'm a weirdo who pulled out a car's entire wire harness to install a CAN-BUS system and solid-state power distribution modules....
Low density suburbia can, and usually has, plenty of walking spaces with a ton of nature around. I lived in multiple suburban neighborhoods and I was always either within a short (and easy) drive to a park or had great walking areas in the neighborhood itself. Contrast with high density, where you have to deal with pollution, noise and potentially crime just to walk to a park (and in the park itself)
Regarding "fear or interacting", in my experience I have a lot of more interactions, of the cordial and polite kind, with the few neighbors I have in my low density area than I've ever had when I lived in a high density city where you can feel like an ant in a colony.
That's not plausible... think about how much gas a car consumes per year, compared to the amount of mass of tires and brake pads consumed. Even minimizing my car use, I fill up the tank every few weeks. The wear from my tires is barely visible on a week-to-week basis. I don't think they're even within an order of magnitude.
If I could, I'd give up ever having to drive again in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, here we have few realistic options given where employers are located and how poor the transportation options that remain. It's a racket.
The part that rubs me is in both Thailand and Vietnam, despite Bangkok and Hanoi being dense with inexpensive and comprehensive public transportation, even the current youth generation still want cars. When I ask "why?", it's still about status and other reasons are secondary.
I hope I'll never have to own a car again.
Where I live has walkability by accident but the car infrastructure is so massive here, to support as many (probably more, TBH) employees who commute to our area for work as there are people who live here, that it destroys your ability to walk anywhere quickly. The street crossings turn a 10 minute walk, one way, into a half of an hour or longer.
I’m angry that urban design for decades, almost a century, was planned around these machines. Obviously in rural areas they are incredibly freeing and useful. But having traveled the world I’ve come to realize and hate how peculiarly dependent we are on them in the US. We are heavy outliers among developed countries in how much we rely on cars and eschew public transit. They’re dangerous, expensive, and an annoying. In most cities in the developed world it’s normal to be able to get to a convenience store in a 5-10 minute walk.
Try it. I lived in Chicago years ago, where cars are expensive and inconvenient to own, at least by American standards. I would walk to the grocery store, which was about 4 blocks I guess, about a 10-15 minute walk. So your shop is limited to what you can carry back, so you have to shop every day or every other day, with the walk there, the shop, and the walk home taking the better part of an hour. Every other day or so. And on the way you are accosted by at least one street person asking for money, and with your hands full of grocery bags you feel a bit defenseless. And then there were the rainy days. And the cold days. Not fun walking 10-15 minutes at 6 degrees F with a 20mph wind in your face.
It had its charms, but overall it sucked. I prefer my rural house and easy weekly shop with a car now.
In Copenhagen, I can walk to several grocery stores in 5 minutes.
Although since my 15 minute cycle to work takes me directly past seven (yes, seven) grocery stores, I usually stop at one of them on the way home from work. It is essentially like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYHTzqHIngk
That’s one major reason American infrastructure is so bad. Towns have to balance their books, and that means they cannot afford to maintain their infrastructure until the federal government, which is not legally required to balance its books, borrows a ton of money to give away for basic infrastructure to be maintained.
These are city dweller opinions, and they're not going to change continued suburban and rural development.
Suburbanites shouldn't have to pay for city subway and potholes. Those are city problems.
Suburban and rural land is cheaper, the air is less polluted, and the low crime environments are ideal for raising families. If people want to live there, it's their prerogative.
You can buy a 2,000 square foot house for your family in the suburbs at a cost lower than a 700 sqft box in the city.
With remote work, it's not even clear that cities are an essential construct anymore.
https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-02/inside-th...
Cities are subsidizing your excessive consumption and land use not the other way around.
You're making value judgments about me, and they're not even factual. I happen to live in the city. I just see the value of suburbs and the incredible waste, inequality, and ineptitude of cities.
Servicing suburbs isn't expensive. With wind and solar, they'll grow even cheaper. Suburbs often have their own municipal water supplies paid for by their tax base. Roads aren't as expensive to build or maintain, and many people own trucks that can drive on dirt, gravel, and potholes.
Cities have pollution that contribute to cancer and pulmonary diseases. Noise that increases stress. Busy people that have less sense of community.
Name a city where an average American can even afford to buy a home.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2014-03/documents/lo...
I won’t disagree with your comments on noise and pollution, because those are real factors, but you are 100% moving goalposts now.
Just from a logical perspective, companies don't build skyscrapers/increase density in cities to lose money.
The best intro points to the argument are probably still https://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B... or https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gates-Fighting-Housing-America... although neither is free.
You sure went off on a tangent and didn't address a single point, correctly - but mostly at all, I or the article made. Pipes are expensive, underground utilities are expensive, roads are expensive. All of those things scale much better within a city and its population & density. Servicing suburbs IS expensive compared to cities. Water is typically metered and paid for as a user rate not from the general tax fund.
Sense of community is on you, not where you live. Either you're not getting involved or people don't want to be around you.
You are talking right past me to be heard, with subjective facts, not to have a discussion.
With suburbia, you get low cost infrastructure, but also low tax revenue. You better hope that your tax revenue exceeds the costs of supporting suburbia.
> The Green Line Extension (GLX) project will extend the existing MBTA Green Line service north of Lechmere Station and into the communities of Somerville, Cambridge, and Medford.
> The Green Line Extension (GLX) is a construction project to extend the light rail Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Green Line northwest into Somerville and Medford, two inner suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts.
I’m not familiar with the Boston area, are Medford and Somerville mainly urban extensions of Boston?
https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
We need to place more emphasis on the efficiency of transportation and infrastructure in new developments, and density is a major factor there.
I grew up in a mid-size suburban town where I knew many families in my neighborhood and generally felt a strong sense of community. I’ve lived in various cities over the years since, and I’ve never quite felt the same connection with my immediate neighbors. I still know and identify with many people in the area I live now, but they’re much more interspersed.
Then city residents shouldn't have to pay for the roads that make car-centric suburbs possible or the various subsidies given to rural residents. Honestly, one of the benefits of civilization is that we help each other out even when it does not immediately benefit us as individuals. Rural and suburban life would not be possible without cities, and cities would not be possible without rural and suburban residents.
Cities form naturally because of industrial operations that are more efficient when they are concentrated in a single place. Remote work changes nothing about it because there are still plenty of jobs that cannot be done remotely, including many of the jobs needed to support remote work (e.g. data centers, warehouses, intermodal terminals). Suburban life depends on industries that make no sense in suburbs or whose presence will ultimately transform suburbs into cities.
If suburbs were as superior as you suggest, cities would not be growing and real estate in cities would not be as valuable as it currently is. People are choosing to live, work, and raise families in cities more than they are choosing suburbs. Remote work has not changed anything and will never change anything. COVID-19 led only to a transient spike in demand for suburban homes that is already declining as people realize that the pandemic is already in its final stage.
This is commonly stated but is not backed up by any real world evidence. Infrastructure costs are on the order of 10-15% of government cost. The cost of government is almost all in paying salaries (and pensions) to employees providing services. Governments that have gotten into fiscal trouble are there because of ballooning pension cost.
The federal government maintains the highway infrastructure (and subsidizes other non-highway building) which does help enable suburban living in many places. I suppose that you aren't advocating to get rid of that because the immense usefulness of such system (travel, trucks, buses etc), though.
Eliminating the suburban lifestyle wouldn't have a massive impact on sustainability of the system because a lot of it isn't maintained by the federal government or simply needs to be maintained anyway. Reducing the number of cars that are on the road due to the suburban lifestyle will reduce the amount of money that comes from the federal government and shared money pools, but probably not too much in the grand scheme of things.
Thus, I think that saying that "suburban living is fiscally unsustainable" is an exaggeration and we should instead say "we need to better allocate the costs of suburban life to suburban taxpayers" (which wouldn't make such a huge difference anyway, especially if we also remove the city living subsidies that come from rich suburbs).
Where does my comment imply that the US needs anything?
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.
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.
Anyway, it’s been over 20 years since I visited Tokyo, and I’ve been to many major cities since. Tokyo remains my favorite.
This is incorrect. China currently holds this spot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...
Even so, the US historically took the number one spot for both total greenhouse gases and greenhouse gases per capita. If you look at it from a perspective of a longer timespan, the US is basically number one.
It is only in recent times does the US now currently take the number two spots for both categories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx85qK1ztAc
The US come in first, my home country Germany takes the fourth spot.
You're not wrong, but your plan involves either uprooting people or sending out so many buses that it would create an ecological catastrophe far greater than we have now (assuming you want to cover all of the suburbs mentioned by the op).
We are a selfish and community-less people that enjoy the frontier and adventure more than quaint small towns where people have to get along.
There are advantages but in the long run I hate it. And yes I’ve lived everywhere in America. The few that like the more euro model have to pay a 10x premium to live in SF or NYC.
As a general rule, people don't like each other. In places where people live close to one another it's not because they like it but out of some kind of combination between inertia and necessity.
Neighbors on a street in London don't love but do tolerate each other, and deal with the implications of close proximity and shared responsibilites moderately well. In the US it's much easier to move somewhere and get a parcel of land that makes you feel like a sovereign property owner. Your neighbors are not as adjacent, and may even be ignorable.
Obviously this doesn't cover the millions of Americans who live in relatively dense (generally older) cities, but it does impact the millions who live in suburban, ex-urban and rural parts of the country.
I’ll quote the American classic “elbow room” as soft proof. https://youtu.be/aHVx4nqgMPQ
It seems to completely ignore the reality of communities and society (and history, for that matter) for an unquestioning expansion of our domain, all wrapped up in this patronizing metaphor about needing "elbow room".
The European conquest of north America and subsequent repopulation with immigrants (alongside a vastly diminished indigenous population) created an ethos and an opportunity for people who wanted to live away from everybody else to do so ... by pretending that the continent had been empty, and because of the need for natural resources, this was relatively easy to do.
But alongside that process, Americans were building some of the largest cities in the world, developing and improving "urban technologies", and generally pushing the boundaries of what cities could be (a role now largely taken over by SE Asia).
Any explanation for the structure, placement, demographics and dynamics of American society that focuses on single reason for things (whether it is "elbow room", "Robert Moses" or "racism") is going to be wrong about most things.
You might not like cars but everyone else does. They like and want cities this way and in reality it’s people like us that are the outliers. We aren’t right. We are going against the tide.
We built cities around cars Because we like cars — because they put distance between us and our fellow American we don’t particularly like or want to tolerate.
> Any explanation for the structure, placement, demographics and dynamics of American society that focuses on single reason for things (whether it is "elbow room", "Robert Moses" or "racism") is going to be wrong about most things.
to which you respond:
> So cars did this entirely on their own. Come on
Is there something that unclear about what I wrote?
Look people left cities in the 50s because they didn’t like other people in cities. It’s a well known and established fact. It’s called white flight. And it continues to this day.
What's more, until not so long ago, US cities looked differently. Then a lot of what was already built got destroyed to build motorways and huge parking lots. If you look at aerial photos of US cities from around '30s[0], you will see much denser, more walkable cities. Then take a look at what General Motors proposed with its Futurama at the World's Fair; it is the essence of what cities in the US are currently, albeit cranked up to 11.
Some of Europe's cities took the road that GM pushed, and one very prominent example has been Amsterdam[1], which is currently known as one of the least car-oriented cities in the world. The changes have been reverted in the EU, but not in the US, and that is the current state of affairs.
On the last note: US historically has been a place, when local communities had to be strong, strictly because of its roots in colonizing the continent. Without local communities that then shaped into larger organizations, the history would be very different, and States would be under Britain's rule for much longer, maybe even to this day.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/bkkfww/1930_aerial_... [1] https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in...
And you are making my point. If we wanted to shift back to carless society we could, others have.
We don’t. Because…
It's entirely the other way around, car centric planning results in less community. It's much easier to be angry at the other 2t metal boxes than at your fellow human being.
American cities used to be just like European cities: designed for walking, mixed use developments, small shops, public transportation everywhere. It's only after the delusion of the car being the future was popularized - in large part due to very successful advertising by the automotive industry - that policy was written to heavily subsidise car-centric development to the point of making everything else illegal. There's even real, convicted conspiracies of the automotive industry purposefully buying public transportation just to kill it.
We would have built better cities if we wanted carless communities. But we didn’t and still don’t.
We want this. This is what we like. We are a sick people. And it isn’t Robert Moses and GMs fault, they are a product of us. We weren’t brainwashed we weren’t forced into this. There is no cabal that made it this way. We choose it. The sooner we accept that the sooner we can evaluate real options for change.
Older US cities have many of the same characteristics as cities in other parts of the world. Those characteristics can vary, from small single-family homes tightly packed into a walkable neighborhood to large scale apartment dwelling with city squares and boulevards nearby.
Americans used to build cities this way. Whether it was Moses or the emergence of a general dislike of each other, or a multitude of other possible reasons, we generally no longer do.
Moreover, many of those older city neighborhoods are considered extremely desirable to live in, even today, so much so that they have become very exclusive areas available only to those with plenty of income or wealth. That doesn't imply that most Americans would necessarily make that choice even if they could, but the continued elevation of housing costs in the best of these "old world" neighborhoods suggests to me that your thesis is at best incomplete and at worst just incorrect.
But I live in Pacific Heights, one of the most desirable old world communities in America, and it’s mostly empty and full of ghost capital homes.
People like it for a while but they leave for the suburbs pretty fast and go looking for elbow room away from others. And it’s mostly because the energy under the surface of the beautiful homes is rude, selfish and inconsiderate. From the owners to the workers that come to service the homes. Regardless of class we are really angry people.
but ...
The current situation in uber-expensive real-estate markets when it comes to high-end housing should not be over-interpreted as having more to say about what most Americans want from the places where they live.
Pacific Heights current situation is also very similar to wealthy old neighborhoods in cities across Europe. London at the very least is full of such examples.
> I don’t understand what you are refuting.
>> We would have built better cities if we wanted carless communities. But we didn’t and still don’t.
There are multiple studies and historical accounts documenting exactly this TsunamiFury. Car lobbies are actually clearly tied to many city planning decisions, combined with white flight and corresponding government loans to create suburban communities that essentially cut others out.
Additionally interstate commerce in a comparatively intensely large land mass like the US did create a need for additional transportation, but the sprawl has indeed been very much tied to the factors PaulDavisThe1st and others have pointed out. Its not 'not liking' each other. Its money + racism + poor representation of the populous. Like a lot of things.
What studies or books lead you to your conclusion?
Blockbusting was a real phenomenon in which real estate agents would move a black family into the neighborhood to get white families to fire sell their homes, and it worked because they could no longer legally isolate minorities from their children. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting
We know that this happens today, even with minority groups that are affluent and do well in education metrics. https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/07/silicon-valley-whit... (And before anyone accuses me of "wokism", the original story was broken by the Wall Street Journal, which is decidedly not a "woke" publication.)
Specifically white Americans want to avoid living with brown Americans. Once segregation was no longer law, it launched a wave of destruction for public infrastructure: pools, schools, transit, even things like sidewalks all became things to oppose if they had to be shared.
I don't know that it's uniquely American thing either, I think this happens anywhere that different cultures come together. Humans are deeply tribal.
Check out Shellings model of segregation [0]. Global seggregation doesn't necessarily mean that local decisions have strong preference for their race.
e.g. for two types it's enough to have preference "I want at least 33% of my neighbours to be same type as me" to reach segregated global result.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schelling%27s_model_of_segrega...
That’s definitely not perfect (and it’s like, say, Chinatowns weren’t raided or sacked) but that option of coexistence wasn’t on offer in much of the country.
The GM conspiracy bought streetcar companies to replace them with buses, not to eliminate public transportation.
The reality is that streetcar companies were already unprofitable, killed by infrastructure cars and poor urban planning. So it was already easy for GM to buy these companies.
What seems to me to be a good takedown of “public transit must be profitable or be dismantled”, or “the US post office must be profitable or be dismantled” is: How profitable is the US military?
A streetcar enhance economic activity and transportation, especially when built with proper urban planning, and may even make a profit.
With the profit, the public transit agency can use the fund to improve infrastructure with hopefully less political influence in order to further it missions.
You could of course make a trade off and not mandate the agency to be profitable and subsidize it, but it's a political tradeoff.
Public transport is unprofitable pretty much everywhere, because the explicit transactions don't offset costs of operation. However, the cost of not operating public transit is that you end up with awful car centric cities, more respiratory disease from increased traffic, lost efficiency from congestion, higher real estate prices in walkable areas, etc.
Additionally, there's a ton of positive externalities that are not factored in when judging profitability. Effective public transport increases foot traffic, which increases economic activity.
Even if public transit was 100% free, it would still be worth running. The market is awful at evaluating long-term large scale effects, and just disregards them as "externalities". You can't blindly trust markets to build your cities.
* the aforementioned highway boom, but this is not enough to actually kickstart the whole thing; most European nations also had a highway boom around this time with much less sprawl
* lending standards. Prior to the Great Depression, banks are wholly in control of mortgage lending. The collapse of the economy also collapses the banking system and the housing market; banks have to foreclose on properties that are no longer worth anything. As part of the bank stabilization efforts, the FHA creates national standards for loans that it will insure. These standards are restricted to single family homes, and to properties without commercial (small businesses have a really high rate of failure). This has the effect of encouraging banks and developers to stampede into single family suburban development; the cost of financing is a lot cheaper because of the Uncle Sam guarantee, and it's a lot more profitable as a result. No other type of property is given this kind of preferential treatment to this extent, and this still more or less persists today.
* desegregation. This is the big one; prior to the civil rights era, suburbs are expanding rapidly, but cities are still growing. The moment Brown vs Board of Ed passes in 1954 all hell breaks loose. The real estate practice of blockbusting gets into full gear, where real estate agents spook the white people out of a neighborhood by having one black family move in; they proceed to buy the houses on the cheap from white people fire selling as fast as possible, and then take advantage of black and minority sellers. Whites move into suburbs in droves, because it's "where the good schools are" without the minorities they used to be legally separated from. And this is a national phenomenon. Even today, we see whites flee school districts with increasing minority populations; they do so even in districts where the minority groups are affluent and educational metrics remain positive, like Cupertino, CA or Johns Creek, GA: https://psmag.com/news/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessin...
One of those opportunities was a good PhD education that taught me how to spot bullshit.
So to confirm what is happening here for a neutral observer, are just cooking up things when you say Americans hate each other more.
I would say Europeans hate each other more. They had two world wars centered around Europe in the last century and way too many real secession movements: Brexit, Catalonia etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_separatist_move...
I would love to know how you determined that.
Rural life has always been hard and rough but it’s sad. Their towns are dying and they look, act and feel miserable to each-other.
The way American communities were laid out by previous generations was not caused by the recent political strife.
I'd say it has much more to do with available modes of transit when the place was settled than it does any national characteristic of incivility.
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.
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.
Even given a decent commuter rail system it doesn't help for those sorts of activities.
So it's not really getting around the city but getting anywhere outside the city that isn't on convenient mass transit.
They could do more for sure, but all the bridges and roads that are now public transit only are quite the breath of fresh air.
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.
Not Just Bikes has some excellent content about this, e.g.: https://youtu.be/XfQUOHlAocY
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!"
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.
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.
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.
You're not making Greta angry enough, don't you want a personal Olympic-sized swimming pool as well??
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.
I know many parts of the world have problems like this, but Europe doesn’t have many places like that.
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.
Is there sufficient social support for the families of young black males? If not, it may make sense economically to provide it, if it would make American cities functional again.
The name for welfare discouraging marriage is "the marriage penalty", but it's a general policy thing that people still argue about, so I couldn't find anything good about the old AFDC marriage penalties on short notice. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/wedding-bell-blues-marria... does a quick outline in passing.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/black-family-40-years-lies...
https://www.roadsnacks.net/murder-capitals-of-america/
The same is probably true of other crime as well.
for one thing, it depends a lot on how city borders are drawn. for example, baltimore city usually shows up in top five lists for per capita murders, and indeed it is an unusually violent place. but unlike many (most?) american cities, baltimore county is completely separate from the enclosed city. if you calculated murders per capital for baltimore city and county as a single population, it would still be bad, but it wouldn't be in the national top five every year. a corollary to this is that murder rates can vary much more neighborhood-to-neighborhood within the same city than they do when comparing entire cities. most cities I've been to have at least one or two dangerous areas to be avoided if possible.
second point: even in "dangerous cities" upper-middle class professionals are unlikely to be victims of violent crime. they generally choose to live in safer enclaves of those cities. realistically, property crime is a greater concern for this demographic, which does not scale linearly with violent crime and is not restricted to the "bad neighborhoods" the same way. interestingly, "safe" cities like seattle and SF actually have higher rates of property crime than baltimore.
Addressing the context, though, Baltimore certainly belongs in any discussion of unpleasant downtowns. Altercations are a potential issue even driving (more so than walking actually). But there's also increasingly little to even walk to. The nightlife and culture all moved to the surrounding neighborhoods, now you just go downtown for the aquarium or the occasional bureaucratic necessity.
are you referring to the complimentary car wash at president and lombard? but yeah I agree, there's a lot that's wrong with baltimore's downtown.
if you assume that most people have to commute to work, it does make sense to have a downtown that's mostly office buildings and well-connected via public transit. so I kinda expect most downtowns to be kinda boring, not sure why you would expect them to be fun to walk around it. of course, nowhere in baltimore is particularly well-served by public transit, and the downtown is not merely boring; it's downright unpleasant and somewhat unsafe.
I guess you could imagine restaurants switching from lunch to dinner service, but yeah the whole idea of downtown lends itself to emptiness I guess. Certainly not helped in Baltimore's case by how many of the offices are just empty.
The problem is more that America has areas where most of the inhabitants are living in fear.
What used to be a nice, safe neighborhood near uptown no longer is. Leave your car doors unlocked if you park on the street overnight, or else you'll find the windows broken by morning by kids looking for stuff to steal (happened to a coworker, the one night her husband forgot to not lock the doors).
In the last two years, theft of catalytic converters from cars, as well as carjackings, have skyrocketed citywide. It has definitely changed the mood on the streets.
We also have homeless camps, which get cleared out when the annual deep freeze comes through (amazing that people try to sleep outside when the temp can drop to -40). Those same encampents leave used drug needles all over public parks adjacent to schools.
Granted, I'd have the problems we have over what CA cities have to deal with, but then again I also chose to bail entirely to live out in the countryside.
The northern east coast is what I believe the GP was referring to. We don't really have homeless people. I've honestly never seen a homeless person before, until I left. Neither has anyone tried to "get something" out of me, until I went down south or out west.
I think it's cultural. The people who had moved out West were those that weren't necessarily successful or prosperous in their homelands (e.g. Britain, Russia, or the original 13 colonies, comprising mostly of the propertied class). So what you get is a bunch of grifters, drifters, and people who didn't "fit."
And well, if that's what your communities are comprised of, I expect them to be antisocial.
The saddest thing is I have family there, who have children; and seeing those children slowly take on the typical West Coastian attitude (and believe that property, violent, and sexual crimes are simply the way the world is), has been heartbreaking. I'm sure they will perpetuate the cycle of shit, in their own unique way -- even if it is minor.
"grifters, drifters and outcasts" really doesn't describe us at all.
It seems like I still have many more places to visit.
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.
> 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.
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)
How did you fare after the bubble economy burst in the 90s?
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.
Communicable diseases?
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.
Have done this in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya and they have been fantastic cities to bike commute in.
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.
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.
This is amazing! Free parking is a scourge in urban areas
Amsterdam is similarly regarded as excellent for biking and walking, but it’s also great for driving. This is hugely different from America, where basically every transit mode sucks (in dense areas) because dense areas are designed for cars at the local level. The solution that Amsterdam (and seemingly Tokyo) have used is to separate the two. You have roads which are excellent for high-speed cars, and local streets which are excellent for people to walk and bike. But you shouldn’t mix the two with local streets designed for high speed driving. (These are sometimes called “stroads”, and are one of the most common road designs used in North America for local access to shops.)
The reality is that if you follow the advice of walking/biking infrastructure advocates, you also get a city which is nicer and safer for driving, because cars are much more separated from the most dangerous and stressful elements of city driving!
Meanwhile in NA the market has shifted to ever larger and larger pick up trucks, which are more and more dangerous for pedestrians.
It really all depends what you want from a city. As I do not have or want kids, and I work 12 hours a day (by choice!), when I finish, I don't want to hear kitchen is closed etc. No clue why I would pay the money to live in a city then (and I don't as there are no real 24/7 cities that I like in the EU; Berlin but too cold; for the atmosphere I would live there though).
I quick search suggests the average size house in Tokyo is 66sq meters where as in LA it's 167sq meters or nearly 2.5x larger. And that's just LA. My guess is plenty of other suburbia cities the average is even larger.
I lived in Tokyo for 15 years. My last place was 54sq meters. I like there are more options in sizes than most cities I think USA and I don't believe that everyone needs a huge place.
But, I so am envious of people who have space. Space for workshops, craft rooms, etc. My mom is into Love it or List it, and people have enormous houses with yards in suburbia. I'm jealous even though at the moment I prefer carless city lifestyles
Just avoid the train during peak hours, and you'll enjoy every moment staying there.
I lived there and I saw the bad sides, too. To keep this amazing tidyness, order, extremely high quality of service, people go to their limits - with low pay and low perspectives. We have these "bad" jobs also here, people in those jobs are half-assing them, are rude or just quit. In Japan, at least from my experience, it's the conservative conformity, the anti-individualism, the meat grinding discipline that keep people doing bad jobs at high pace and quality.
It's paradox to me why many individualism loving Westerner are going to Japan and are loving it so much. It's a hell for many many people.
Many Japanese are racist, sexist, pedophilia was normalized for a very long time. Women are supposed to be housewifes in middle class families, gender is clearly defined.
All this is clearly against the western values that i often hear quoted when I hear the same people talking about "China". But Japan seems to be ok for them.
Paradox.
Just wished people would start thinking about their attitude towards other nations and would develop norms and values that they apply without bias to everyone in order to avoid double standards.
Overall, i enjoyed the positive racism in Japan, i was special and I felt it. I experienced racism, too, but i just ignored it. Working in Japan was bad. I also worked in China and felt that the overall package of racism/work/life/society was better for me.
To be fair, Japan isn’t perfect. But a lot of things make sense for us.
Are you a westerner? It seems that your way of thinking is just different than ours. We value things differently. For example, have you ever stopped to consider that maybe Japanese woman prefer to be in traditional role?
The western world has a lot of problems too. And its a choice that the western world makes. We make our choice according to our values. This is what we prefer.
Harmony takes the first place. Harmony over diversity. We like diversity too but harmony always comes first. Harmony first, diversity later, when we need it. I can talk a lot about this.
Western people are often pro Japan but anti China. If people would apply the same norms, this wouldn't be possible as there is clearly a double standard.
My wish is that Western people (i am one of then) stop apply their world view, norms and values to everyone else on this planet. We believe that so many things that define us are universal and we expect that all people around the world start demanding that and thinking that.
I totally understand your pointed that harmony, order, hierarchy works for you and many other countries. I respect that - however I like many Western norms better because they work better for me. It doesn't mean that I want that Japan or China stop behaving the way they behave.
I am an advocate for your points.
On the other hand. I think Japan is trying to have a good balance between western style democracy with harmony, hence Japan is not as totalitarian as China. Due to bushido culture, Japanese individuals have more shame built-in so it is easier to have a homogeneous society compared to China, to the point that this bushido culture is sometimes frowned by westerners.
Each society makes their own laws and values, with its pros and cons, and it is reflected differently.
And YET, they have an opinion on China.
Great, good for them, everything should work out. It's not the women who want to be subservient to men that I'm worried about, it's the ones who don't. Japanese society doesn't leave a lot of room for them and I don't think that's OK.
To answer your question. Yes we have a lot of single women, doing careers instead of doing families just fine.
This is a pretty recent development in Japan's history and the world hasn't forgotten.
And for those those single women - why not also married women? How many of them are CEOs? The numbers don't look good for women in Japan when it comes to representation in the higher levels of business https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915832...
What do you mean? No, it's not. With the exception of WW2, Japan has seen way less conflicts and very little wars in it's history compared to other countries.
As for your link, I cannot access the source, but your comment seems biased by the meaning of marriage in the first place.
Basically, in Japan getting married means starting a family. If you don't plan to have children, you usually don't get married. Because if you remove the cultural and sentimental value given to the act of being married in the west, there is not much practical advantage or benefit to it in the first place.
Except for the one time Japan teamed up with Hitler and tried to rape and pillage the world, and not giving up until someone invented and then used nuclear weapons to make them stop. That is a pretty huge asterisk on Japan's claim to being a peaceful nation. I think Japan's neighbors might have a list of other incidents they could bring to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Japan
> As for your link, I cannot access the source
Here you go: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com%...
It has nothing to do with marriage or definitions. Here's the abstract:
This paper examines the effects of female chief executive officers (CEOs) on firm performance. Using data on nonfinancial listed firms in Japan, we show that only 0.8% of some 42,000 firm-year observations have female CEOs. There is also little evidence that firms appoint more females as CEOs during our sample period. While the stock market reacts positively to the introduction of a firm's first female CEO, the relationship between CEO gender and firm accounting performance is generally not strong. However, when we classify the type of female CEO, the estimated coefficient for a founder female CEO and Tobin's Q is positive and significant.
I guess this just serves an example how western mindset and our mindset in Asian countries are just different. Even the questions seem weird to us.
Your comment here is 100% the problem we're talking about. In your mind, women get married for the sole reason of having kids, and further, it's their job to do so. It's incredibly sexist and that's not because of Western ideals.
how can you know this for certain?
if Japanese culture writ large is "woman should be homemakers", and most Japanese women become homemakers due to societal pressures of cultural conformity - not ever having the opportunity to freely consider alternatives - is that really a "preference"?
This obviously can’t be true for all Japanese women, so what’s your solution to that? At least in Western countries there is progress being put towards letting women chose if they’d rather be a housewife or an independent person. In Japan there is no such option.
Reading between the lines, your answer so far is "Sucks to be them".
Do you seem to know what’s best for our country?
And I know you weren't taking the counter position to this, but there are also many intangible benefits from the values you mentioned being preeminent in Japan.
More traditional families means fewer children raised in single-parent households, and thus lower incarceration rates, and fewer anti-social types leaving paths of destruction through society.
More aggressive policing means less drug use and no opioid epidemic claiming tens of thousands of lives each year. It also means far less violence on the streets. See how many people are knifed and bottled in the UK for contrast. Not having to worry about random outbursts of terrifying violence makes for a significantly higher quality of life, with people feeling like they have more genuine freedom.
More discipline means no riots with hundreds of millions of dollars in businesses going up in flames.
And a more conservative culture allows the laws that make all of the above possible to remain in place instead of being swept away in counter-culture social movements that rail against traditional values.
I think you're jumping to conclusions here.
Are people in Japan disappeared for criticizing the government? Do they have their organs harvested / altered for believing the wrong religion?
I'm OK with a society with very different defaults than my own. In fact, I prefer it - real diversity doesn't come from mixing (like we do in the West - the mix of all colors is shitty brown), it comes from people being strongly different, yet managing to coexist.
So Japan is OK. It works as a society. Also for the "different" (well... somewhat - there are problems with overworking, herbivore men, low natality etc. but the West has analogous problems). China doesn't work; people aren't free; it's a repressive regime.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_of_Japa...
Care to explain more to a foreigner? How/when did it stop being normalized?
Until 2014 child pornography was legal to own in Japan. The law has changed, but the sexualisation of minors continues. "Chaku Ero", which means "erotically clothed" is a kind of soft porn - it doesn’t involve nudity, but it can get very, very close and is often overtly sexual.
Questions?
Do you refer to Daikanyama here? Easily my favourite neighbourhood of Tokyo (so much so that I just bought an apartment to move there in two weeks!)
However, you can't get something for nothing. Even in the suburbs there are essentially no gardens (a friend of mine lives way out of town and has a 10m by 10m garden which is enormous and unusual). Houses and apartments are significantly smaller too.
I think the tradeoff is worthwhile. You can meet friends at a restaurant instead of at home. You can go to the park instead of play in the garden.
I used to like living in the city with a kid. Lots of access to interesting places and activities, able to walk to school and playgrounds and such. It’s lost some allure during the pandemic.
Many places were shut on and off due restrictions during our time. Definitely makes thing harder.
The only thing I like better about where we live now is the much higher salary (even with cost of living) and the access to outdoor activities. You'd have to take a train at least an 1.5 hours away to get to larger green spaces in Tokyo. Arguably, this might be more convenient for those that don't like driving but getting several kids ready and babysitting them on a long train ride is a bit difficult.
Boarding public transit is definitely an issue. Going anywhere with small children is a bit difficult to be honest as their are quite a lot of rules. For example, no toys in the pool.
Constrained and limited places to play outside. Outside of the park everything is concrete and many types of play are banned. When out, I had to watch them like a hawk. Here they go over to a neighbors yard to play and have no such worries.
Childcare is also expensive to get if both parents do not work (in that case it’s free).
That said I knew plenty of expats from population dense areas that were of different opinion. They had cars too :)
Having lived in Adelaide and visited Toyko, Osaka and a bunch of other Japanese cities, I can take a crack at the difference:
Adelaide is a great lifestyle city, if you don't actually want to live in a city, love car enabled lifestyles and the outdoors. Tokyo would be great if you just love city life and have an insatiable desire to discover city culture, and you want to spend most of your time as a pedestrian. You just can't run out of things to discover in Tokyo or Japan in general, and everything is easy to get to in Japan from Tokyo.
In Adelaide, you need a car to get out of the burbs, it's very car centric, and because you'll eventually run out of stuff to do in the city since it's quite small, you'll need the car to drive out to new places. Public transport is spotty, or non-existent. Trains aren't too bad, if you move here, move near a train.
I would recommend Adelaide if you're pretty content with a median lifestyle, and just want to focus on hobbies, sports and don't mind going to the same handful of cafes every year. I think you'd get more mileage out of Tokyo if you want to dive headfirst into city life and city culture.
The other difference is that with a low population, hobby groups in Adelaide are small, and what you love may not even be in Adelaide, getting supplies for things can be difficult. Lots of new things don't make it there due to that issue as well. It can feel a bit dead-end in that way. In Tokyo, if you like it, there's a group for you somewhere, and what you want is probably sold nearby.
Their low populations mean they just don't have much of the things that make cities desirable. (like, lots of culture, lots of diversity, lots of options for dining and activities etc etc)
Granted, that can make them comparatively pleasant and peaceful, with good access to outdoors and fresh air, but yeah, it's disingenuous to even include them in a comparison that includes Tokyo, London, New York, what have you.
In case anyone thinks this is me being uncharitable, I currently live in Brisbane Australia, which is hardly a cosmopolitan global elite city either, so this isn't me throwing shade, I'm just saying.
The lists seem to bias toward those things you mentioned, family homes and access to nature, so I think they're targeting a really specific demographic with that.
I'm big on urban wandering, dining out and social stuff but I can see why someone might retire in Adelaide instead of Tokyo if they want to relax their retirement away. I think I'd rather Tokyo, just because of the public transport. You'd be able to go anywhere even after you can't drive.
For example in Adelaide, a 3 bedroom home with a garage, front yard and large back yard is pretty common. But mostly I see two story narrow townhouses, or small apartments in Tokyo.
Worthless list.
But also low crime, low noise, not too crowded. And you can hop in a car and head off to relatively nearby nature of some sort.
Many don't want to live in Manhattan which, while an extreme example, means really committing to the urban lifestyle. Doesn't mean you can't go somewhere else for a long weekend but it's not a trivial undertaking.
I think the problem is that the idea of habitability is not always clearly defined in facile compilations of locations. And the compromises and sunken-cost calculations are not always clear.
Any good community, big or small, is healthy. Clean air, water, good food, waste management; sensible urban planning and shelter cost; access to nature, infrastructure, and health services; intellectual and cultural prospects such as libraries, bookstores, museums, music, galleries.
A "city" as a market/marketplace is rarely very healthy. Some people might choose to trade health for money and prestige. These are personal choices, but do not scale well over time to a large population.
Does anyone live in Japan as a dev and not really know how to speak japanese? How has the experience been?
The point is there will be a period of time where I don't know the language and hang out with my fellow ex-pats. Additionally I will never ever really actually master the language to the point where I'm indistinguishable from a native.
I'm just wondering is Japan bearable under these conditions?
On average, the country and its people are incredibly inviting and kind to guests and appreciative of foreigners that learn Japanese. However, you will always be viewed, by the vast majority, as being a guest - even after many many years and fluent Japanese.
And some people are fine with that, and some people can't stand that.
I think this is largely the case for asian countries where the people are more homogeneous. You get much less of this in countries or cities that are much more ethnically and culturally diverse.
I know what you mean, but I wanted to say that this is true essentially in all parts of the world, with the notable exception of some parts of North America.
I think you refer to the subtle changes of behavior that come with the "you're our foreign coworker" that are specific to a lot of Asian cultures and are highly unpleasant, sometimes even racist.
That, however, is also present in China, Thailand, South Korea, Vietnam, etc.
Interestingly, in my limited experience, the Philippines is an amazingly open and hearty country without this "insider vs outsider" mentality.
Many foreigners in Japan have no marketable skills, and therefore get stuffed into the comfortable role of Foreign Guy, and never leave the role. It's a seductive role: you can get by with pretty minimal language skill and cultural awareness, make enough money to live in a nice place and do fun things, and you don't have to live with any of those annoying rules that drive the natives crazy!
So people get to a certain level of cultural proficiency, and stop. Perhaps they teach English (or some other non-Japanese language), and their professional identity becomes...English. They go to foreign-hangout places, and hang out with foreign people. They don't learn the cultural norms beyond tourist-level schtick, and stick out like a sore thumb in any social situation. So yeah, of course those people tend to attract people who fetishize foreigners. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I've also met foreigners living and working across the country, in real professional capacities. They have colleagues and friends spouses and lives that I characterize as native as you can get. You're never completely native -- but that's true anywhere.
I spent 6 months in Japan a while ago. Working with other gaijins, hanging out with gaijins… My best contact with locals were at gaijin bars. They could speak some English, I could talk to locals.
Was it bad? Definitely no. Could I make extra effort to talk to locals more? Yes. But since my goal in life isn’t to cosplay a Japanese…
The biggest issues are crowding and racism. Don't expect to get into any role of importance, and don't freak out when you hear "gaijin dame" (no foreigners allowed) in some places, or people sudenly moving to seats and tables further from you. On the other side of the coin, you won't be expected to understand how things work, so they'll be very forgiving (in a condescending way) of social gaffes and the strange way you act (after all, you're a foreigner; they all act that way). Many rules won't apply to you, unless you make an effort to have them apply to you (don't do this). You'll make few (if any) friends of the same gender. You will alway be an outsider. If you can live with this, you'll have a fun and interesting time there.
Edit: Also, make friends with some oldtimers in the expat community (as long as they're not the jaded kind). They are a treasure trove of information and help.
Edit 2: Don't learn Japanese from someone of the opposite gender (unless they're a trained language teacher). You'll sound ridiculous when you speak otherwise, because men and women use very different words and turns of phrases in many cases (nothing worse than hearing a man say "atashi" or the up-pitch "ne" unless he's in drag). Reading Japanese comic books can be helpful here because they tend towards hyperbole, which makes it easier to pick out the differences. I've found that female artists tend to play with language more than male artists.
Edit 3: DO NOT BREAK THE LAW. Getting arrested in Japan is a hellish experience, and prison is even worse. Their justice system is still quite medieval. Quoting a friend of mine: "Japan is the most advanced 3rd world country I've seen."
I'm a big guy, sometimes people make space for me on the train or whatever. It isn't racism. I'm a scary and weird looking guy too by local standards, it isn't racism when people gawk a little sometimes. People talk to me like a kid after I completely botch some basic phrase
The only racist thing that ever happened to me in years living there was this: I went to a bar with my white friend, and they said "No American" and made an x sign at us. I asked in Japanese "sorry, what was that you said?" and suddenly they welcomed us in.. I guess they just didn't want rowdy dudes who can't speak the language. Definitely not acceptable behavior from them, but not too bad IMO. I get way worse treatment in the USA for being Hispanic than I ever do for being a foreigner in Japan
The expat community in Tokyo is kinda obnoxious. There are a lot of lazy, burned out guys who complain about everything
How is that unique? Sounds like the expat community in any other Asian city.
I recognize the word "dame" from playing the game of Go, where it means [1] a neutral point of no value. Curiously, that page says "It also has the everyday Japanese meanings of bad, don't do it."
So foreigners are bad, don't do them :-)
I have noticed the same problem. Interesting to hear someone else say that, too. I always thought it was a "native male" thing... women could make native women friends that were only friends. Any native men "friends" were roughly always trying to be slightly more than friends. Men could make native women friends and truly only be friends. Men didn't make friends with many native men, at least beyond superficial relationships...
That's surprising to hear. I have lived in Tokyo a fair amount of time (5+ years) and only experienced true racism, e.g. being not being allowed in a place for being non-Japanese, a handful of times, and those were mostly for what would be considered nighttime establishment that are a bit shady. Not doubting your experience, just putting this here as another data point.
Most of the times being treated differently was just other people being scared of talking English and avoiding me, but that usually fixed itself when they realize I speak Japanese.
Unrelated, but I think a lot of the foreigners in Tokyo are oversensitive to racism because they have never experienced looking different in their own country - that leads itself to interpreting all kinds of tiny acts as racist when something doesn't go the way they want. But in reality many of the acts have a different cause behind them, like the insecurity of the other person.
EDIT: Clarification
I haven't been to many, so I can't really speak to that. I tried a few times and had no trouble getting in, but I was with Japanese friends. May have been a different story if I had been alone.
This is not to say there is no racism in Japan, but for resorts it's most likely they don't have the capacity to help in English/Foreign Language.
If it's some seedy thing, like a cheap/seedy bar, karaoke, J/KTV or sexual services then it's both, no English and they want discretion.
Also, you're expected to be on your BEST behaviour. DO NOT EMBARRASS PEOPLE, because the responsible person will suffer for it (not you, but please, don't be a dick).
Actually, if you want to get a peek at what the underbelly looks like (with a lot of creative license of course), check out "The Naked Director". It was quite refreshing compared to the regular pablum of Japanese television.
Snack bars aren't anything forbidden or erotic, they're bars where women are employed to speak to the customers and entertain them (again, not in an erotic way), that's it. I live in a suburb with lots of them around, it's not some kind of red light district filled with brothels, they're just bars I pass that usually have badly sung karaoke blasting out.
I also don't understand the replies you're getting as they seem to have run with this misconception, I can't be sure these people have even visited Japan!
I'm white so don't have any personal experience, but my partner is a brown immigrant to the UK and has experienced nothing even remotely close to that anywhere she's been in UK or Europe.
There is your occasional nutjob small business owner that also kicks foreigners out, but that’s actually quite rare.
But this is the racism that Western people suffer. Chinese people, especially mainlanders, are targetted quite badly.
I will not lie - the moment that you are perceived as Chinese, a lot of people can become assholes. Unfortunately, there is way too much nationalistic propaganda around.
But it’s also a place full of amazing people too. People who will appreciate you for what you are. I wouldn’t write off the whole country. But you do have to develop a thicker skin, unfortunately.
Funny thing about the oversensitivity to racism: many foreigners assume racism, but if they understood Korean they'd figure out that either they're not the topic of discussion, or the locals are gossiping or speaking the same way they would about a local Korean person as well.
I worked in a Japanese company for years and made a number of good friends (of the same gender) who I’m still in contact with, and see whenever I go back.
Also the more you learn the language the more chance you’ll have of reaching a role of importance. That’s the same pretty much everywhere though. If people have trouble communicating with you or you cannot express a complex concept then you’ll be bypassed.
But, yeah, using emi (笑） or ww as a guy is a very huge social gaffe if not used sarcastically. You can use it it, but better with close relationships, like really close - and that whole "ne" and up pitch voice also is 100% accurate.
With that said, ne, "sou da ne?/そうだね" is acceptable as a guy if it's usually sarcastic or mocking - context: drinks, talking about friends or such - or teasing one another about their gf/wife - 100% acceptable. Doing it at a mall, store, work, no - and they won't tell you!
-- For the older timers/gaijin bubble, it depends. I find the older crowd, if they're settled and have a family a huge plus. If they're an English Teacher/in Eikawa, avoid - that sounds rude and cruel, but if someones early 20's and in JET - that's acceptable, if they're mid 40's and trying to play as they're still in their 20's - they may know a few things and such but it's not a good sign usually.
It goes without saying your experience will be incomparably better the sooner you learn Japanese, and it's nowhere near as hard as popularly portrayed.
Give it a shot, you only live once.
It's likely that I'm just looking in the wrong places, though. About all I understand how to do is to just trawl through public job boards looking for open positions. I still think it would be nice to work in Japan, even if it's only a thing that lasts as long as I can bear it. However, the pandemic has set back so much as visiting Japan as a tourist by several years, so I don't know how that bodes for working there.
> However certain things like culture the language, and making new friends has held me back
I think it's really hard to generalize because it's different from person to person. However, I think it's a very different experience if you speak Japanese. Roughly 95%+ (if not more) of the population in Tokyo does not speak English more than a few words. You can certainly get everything done in English, make contracts, find housing, find friends, there is a big enough community, but your social life will be extremely limited if you don't speak Japanese.
Both the highs and the lows have been bigger than I expected. I've loved the place on the whole but there have definitely been significant downsides too. If you don't like the culture I'd be very cautious about coming here.
Learning the language isn't hard either, I passed JLPT N4 within 3 months of just showing up in Tokyo.
Max pay would be 40-60K/yr until you get PR &/OR N1/N2. Then it may balloon up a bit but not so much. You should be able to score a free apartment though.
I work mostly in MLOps. Life is really not that bad. I would probably never go back to US. I work in niche ML & robotics domain and there is enough scope for growth and making new things.
About life in general, what expats miss is that Japanese people forgive you for not knowing the language, but they do take offense at not following the general customs of the place. Being loud, making hand gestures, acting aggressively, talking on the phone in a public space & metro etc are big no-no. Too many foreigners feel unwelcome because they refuse to blend in & want to be the sore thumb sticking out.
Once someone blends in their society and manages to have japanese folks invite you in their inner circles, you become as thick as a family member. It all boils down to being respectful of the local way of life. If you live in Japan as a Japanese, (and maybe speaking some Japanese e.g N4 level), life is really comfortable & easy
The pay is good (~35M JPY/300K USD at L5) but there are very few companies with this level of compensation so the real cost is in the limited opportunities.
Like everywhere, there's good and bad parts to living in Tokyo, but I've enjoyed it for the most part. It's friendly, clean, safe, and relatively cheap. On the other hand, there's sometimes discrimination against foreigners (especially in housing) and I don't appreciate how cramped apartments and houses are.
Those are basically your options. Outside of these, TC will go down quickly
I found that not speaking Japanese was not that big of a deal especially if you live in central Tokyo or one of the suburbs that have a lot of expats. Most businesses that you would likely frequent will have english menus or speak enough broken english to get by. I had a few health problems while I was out there and there are several clinics that have native english support.
The thing I found the most difficult about Japan is making Japanese friends. You will always be an outsider and in general Japanese folks just have different expectations when it comes to "work" friends vs "real" friends. You might think you're super close to a colleague from work but in reality you're a total stranger. It's not uncommon to not even know if someone is married or not. On the other hand if you're okay with having mostly expat friends, the community is very welcoming.
This made me think: how does this supposed US hatred for itself compare with European hatred for "the other"? Living in Moscow I heard from a German girl that she was scorned for being German; in another situation I heard form a Russian man that he felt unwelcome in Germany for being German. I'm not even getting into ancient Spain x Portugal, Poland x Germany kind of enmities.
On the other hand, if we aspire to be like Tokyo, we might consider what the Tokyo area originally looked like as a natural environment and how the unchecked growth in density turned most everything to concrete.
How many places in America:
* have good schools and offices within walking distance
* have such good public transport that you don't need a car
* provide easy access to nature and parks
* are affordable to midde-class people?
[0] https://abc7ny.com/laguardia-airport-improvements-renovation... -- though technically he was talking about LaGuardia
Yes, certain traits predominate as they do in any culture but if you go looking I'm pretty sure you'll find what you're looking for in Tokyo.
Whatever your culture or interest is, there will be a place you can find that in Tokyo, probably more so then any other city on Earth.
TFA:
> [...] Tokyo is now the world’s largest city, with 37m residents in the metropolitan area and 14m in the city proper. It is also one of the world’s most liveable, with punctual public transport, safe neighbourhoods, clean streets and more restaurants and Michelin stars than any other. In the liveability index of the Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister group, Tokyo comes joint fourth, but its population is larger than the combined populations of the others (Adelaide, Auckland, Osaka and Wellington). “It’s possible to have a liveable city at any scale - Tokyo proves that,” says Gabriel Metcalf, at Committee for Sydney, an Australian think-tank. // It offers lessons to developing cities elsewhere. In 1950, 30% of the world’s population was urban; by 2050, 68% will be [...]
There is a lot of anti-urban content out there and I’m fairly used to people who don’t live in mine maligning it anyhow. So yeah, I saw the title and took it to be that with a twist. And I read far too much of that already so I didn’t read further.