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Comment by diggernet | Hacker News Reader

At first I struggled to make sense of the numbers in the circles. Surely there can't be 10,110 locations in a space the size of the SF Bay area? But yes, yes there are...

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One thing that struck me when visiting Tokyo (as an American living in San Francisco), was that it was not uncommon to go to a restaurant or bar on, say the 3rd or 4th floor of a building.

In America and Europe, restaurants and shops are basically all zoned to be on the ground floor, with residential or office units above. This gives the density a different feeling, because commercial/dining space extends upward.

Oh, interesting point. So when I see a marker on every block in places, that doesn't mean you can just walk off the street into them, they might be upstairs?

Convenience stores are almost always ground floor. I can only think of times where there is a mezzanine or similar that they might be on an upper floor. They are always placed to have high foot or vehicle traffic.

Exceptions would be places like railway stations, where there might be more people on a different level.

THIS! I was just talking to a city council member about my trip to Japan and how this level of density (multiple stores in the same location vertically but not horizontally) Had some interesting effects on walkability, sales tax revenue per sq mile, and mixed use residential.

In the US, Chicago is also like this. I've been to a "shopping mall" that had ten stores but was spread among four floors.

Makes it hard to believe Americans when they claim their city is "very dense" when it is mostly single story buildings surrounded by parking lots.

Right? Our only truly dense city seems to be New York City. Almost everything else is not even close.

Manhattan is dense. The city is still a wide area with many low density apartments and single family homes.

In the US, Chicago is also like this. I've been to a "shopping mall" that had ten stores but was spread among four floors.

Chicago used to have a number of "vertical malls." I think Water Tower Place (7 floors) and The Shops at 900 (7 or 8 floors, IIRC) are the only ones left. Unless you also count smaller places like Block 37 (4 floors).

Some are now shadows of their former selves. Some sit empty (Chicago Place), or in various stages of redevelopment.

ADA law in the US financially prohibit this. Once you need an elevator, the costs go though the roof for the building. Elevator design, installation, inspection and repair are incredibly expensive and eat up a lot of square footage on every floor.

Have you been to Japan? Elevators are quite common, and in most of the buildings with multiple levels and restaurants on higher levels.

Elevators are smaller there. But I think the cost of building is lower there, for a variety of reasons, which makes this more feasible.

Japan is _dense_ in the major cities. As someone from London, not exactly a quiet village, it's on a completely different level.

I'm reminded of some stat (which I haven't verified) that there were ~15k tripadvisor restaurants in London (a "large" city). There were 65k for Hong Kong... Tokyo had 80k

Granted, Tokyo is very large. I got a bit burned out in my first two trips because hauling from one side to the other constantly to hit different sites is kind of exhausting but yes as another comment mentioned - it's totally normal to find restaurants on floors 1 through 10+++ so you can stack a lot of restaurants vertically. Within the city I was told not many people cook and a friend living there told us a lot of apartments don't even have a kitchen beyond a tiny heater for cooking instant noodles or simple stuff.

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