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.
Maybe it's just me but racism on the level of being kicked out of places for being non-Japanese a handful of times in 5 years sounds terrible. Even once is insane.
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.
Hah, I should mention, I'm a westerner, but I'm ethnically Chinese. I look Chinese but I can't read or speak Chinese. This type of targeting is def an important factor against not going to japan.
I think you can satisfy my curiosity. I'm brazilian but as far as I know all my relatives up to my great-grandparents were japanese so I look no different from them. However I don't have a lot of interest in japanese culture and know just a handful of words my mother taught me like abunai. How would I be treated over there? I imagine it would be worse than a foreigner since it's expected that I know some things.
Yeah… I heard a lot of either revolting or heartbreaking stories. But also some great and uplifting ones.
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.
I guess that's true. It wasn't really kicked out (just edited it to clarify) but rather not being allowed in - It's probably also important to note that most of these places, except one, were what you would call nighttime establishments a bit on the shadier side. So we're not talking about restaurants or anything like that.
Somewhere like the Golden Gai, I'd absolutely expect that a Westerner would be waved away from some places. Some may even have signs up although I don't specifically remember.
Do snack bars in any Japanese town/city allow foreigners? I mean, I get it, these aren’t places foreigners should be going, but their forbidden nature always raises eyebrows.
> I mean, I get it, these aren’t places foreigners should be going, but their forbidden nature always raises eyebrows.
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 made friends with some Yakuza while I was there, and after awhile I would get invited to some of these places sometimes. You REALLY need to be careful hanging around them though, and don't get dragged into their shit. They usually keep that separate, but it's not guaranteed.
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.
True, I could imagine snacks to be among the places where you have problems going as a foreigner. It probably just depends on the owner.
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.
The ones in resort towns seem to always have “no foreigners” signs in English…I guess to avoid having any awkward denials at all. Seems perfectly legal to not serve foreigners, in any case.
I haven't really seen many of those signs in Tokyo. I could imagine that in resort towns they want to keep tourists out? Having tourists who don't understand what those places is asking for trouble I guess.
I’m sure the snack bars cater to Japanese tourists, these are resort towns and the snack bars line the main tourist streets. But the fact that they also attract a few foreign tourists (because we also enjoy onsens) they need the signs.
Exact same thing in South Korea. Folks afraid of embarrassing themselves with their English, but once you speak Korean (and look presentable) it's not a problem.
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.
Living in Tokyo is amazing, but working for a Japanese company as a dev is probably not a great career move if you're relatively young. Software Engineering in Japan is many years behind the rest of the world, the pay is relatively low, and it isn't considered as desirable of a career as it is in other countries. It would be much better if you could find an international or remote company that allows you to live in Japan. Then you can get the best of both worlds. If you don't speak Japanese you probably wouldn't be able to get a job at a Japanese company anyway.
> 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.
I've thought about trying to get a remote role for a company in AU/NZ and living in Japan that way, then you're "only" off by 1-4 hours. Better be good at waking up early though.
This is honestly the thing that bothers me most about cities the US. Having grown up in Europe, I find many (I'm sure there are exceptions) US cities to be plain ugly and unlivable. The reason is obvious to me. It's that they are designed around cars. It makes such a huge difference.
You don't really have real cities in the US = there are a few exceptions but most of the time it's just a very tiny center and a lot of people living away from the center. That's not what a traditional city looks like.
Exactly. The US has very few cities proper, and a lot of huge suburbs that sometimes feature a city-like downtown (L.A., Houston), and sometimes don't (most of the Silicon Valley).
The real honest dense US cities, such as NYC, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and a few others, were built large and dense before the advent of the car, and had entrenched public transportation system before 1930s.
Those that were not as lucky got remade for cars in 1930-1960s, and cemented in that state by zoning regulations.
Europe obviously had a large number of dense cities since medieval times. Even small cities in Europe often ended up dense due to land limitations, and the generally relatively high population density. Cities in the US very rarely faced this limitation early enough, with a few natural exceptions like Manhattan or San Francisco.
No need for door bells. No need for street signs. No need for taxi stops. No need for privately owned cars (rent via phone app or use Uber like service).
Walking around Toronto, Canada, I've noticed that it's getting harder to find street signs. Their placement is for drivers in cars, not for people walking.
Its still really convenient. It is really starting to pick up - I can use my phone to pay fares in a lot of metros now, have real time transit tracking, and use it for navigation even when walking.
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.
If you mean Los Angeles then I can't disagree more. Maybe Westwood, maybe downtown. But "consisting many of fairly dense walkable neighborhoods" is not a description I would ever have been expected to be applied to Los Angeles.
These are vanishingly small postage stamps compared the absolutely vast sprawl that is LA. I mean seriously. Get on the 10 and head east. Let me know when you get outside the sprawl. It'll be over an hour at highway speeds. It's that big. Just the city of LA itself is 503 square miles. Santa Monica is (nominally) 8 square miles--and most of that is not what you are referring to. 3rd street promenade, a few beachfront streets, a few blocks on Wilshire and Santa Monica blvd. I have a feeling you never really drove around LA and appreciated how absolutely massive it is.
And here's a nice infographic comparing the density of LA and New York, if you're interested in more than anecdotes:
I don’t live there, but I’ve driven around it. Just saying, it’s possible to get by without absolutely having to drive to get a cup of coffee or a bite to eat at least in some parts of LA. If that’s important to you, you can live in those parts. Most people actually don’t care about that at all. So, having to drive everywhere is not a problem for them.
How many neighborhoods in LA have a walkability score high enough where most errands can be accomplished on foot ? Quite a few, right?
This list has 10 and doesn’t even mention all of them
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.rent.com/blog/four-walkable...
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).
We Americans are a nation of people who spend the vast majority of our waking hours inside. We go from building to building via car isolated from the world and each other. It’s an enormous waste of land and resources since every building has to have its own parking. Most parking lots at stores sit empty most of the time. It’s unhealthy that we walk so little. It’s unhealthy that we interact so little with those around us. It’s unhealthy that we spend so little time outside. We are a nation of zombies addicted to fast food, rage (caused by living virtually in information bubbles designed by Facebook and others), and a fear of interacting with each other.
The ability to walk in quiet, open spaces with low pollution is one of the top advantages of low density suburbia.
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.
I lived in a suburb with lots of walking paths and within walking distance of a grocery store. This is a rarity in the U.S. Even on nice days very few people out and about. It was rare for me to encounter more than one person on a hour long walk. While some suburbs have walking paths (and many do not) my experience is that few take advantage of it.
I understand your point that citizens in a democracy get the government they deserve. Choices are not made in a vacuum. Path dependence can lock us into local maxima. A series of rational reactions can sometimes lead to an irrational result. People complain about energy price volatility, traffic jams, and climate change but are unwilling to plan meaningful change. Short term concerns and lack of easy solutions tilt us into the same old ways of car dependency, restrictive zoning, tax funded and congested highways, parking minimums, and ever higher housing prices.
The market doesn't want this, it wants to make the most out of land near cities. It's the government (local) that bans density and mandates car-centric development.
Forget about the emissions issue, I just hate driving and having to depend on its supporting infrastructure (repair shops, gas stations, insurance...) for my day-to-day needs. I live in a US suburb. Can't even get a sandwich or buy milk or see someone without strapping myself into my fucking car. This is no way to live.
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.
I moved to SF specifically to avoid having a car. Everything about owning a car pisses me off. Insurance and registration are a racket. Parking is either expensive or miserable. Traffic and seeing how other people behave makes me hate my fellow man. Every time I try to merge onto a crowded highway I realize I’m risking my life.
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.
Moving to Thailand I haven't missed having a car. I bought a motorbike and that works really well without taking up as much space (though are louder than I like and there's no infrastructure for electric alternatives).
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.
Yeah I noticed in Thailand there's many people living in corrugated iron sheds with a big brand new pickup parked beside it. They really have weird priorities :)
I feel just the opposite. I enjoy driving. It puts me in a thoughtful state and the feeling of being free to take whatever turn, shortcut, or scenic route I want at a whim is great. I don’t look forward to the day a human driving is a weekend, closed course activity for the privileged.
But you can do all those things when walking or on a bicycle too. When I want to disconnect I just had to the natural park in the mountains beside the city I live in. It's huge and there's always new things to explore.
what is your point exactly? I can't literally choose to drive my car anywhere, as I am not the dictator of my local DOT. but there are many pleasant routes that do exist near me, and I can choose to take them any time.
> I live in a US suburb. Can't even get a sandwich or buy milk or see someone without strapping myself into my fucking car. This is no way to live.
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.
> If I could, I'd give up ever having to drive again in a heartbeat.
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
I agree, I moved to a city in Europe and not needing a car anymore feels really liberating. Not having to worry about costs, damage, fuel, maintenance, the stress of driving...
I'd sell my soul to basically never drive again. Once you find yourself In a situation that just works with out driving the concept just seems stupid. To be fair I do my fair share of ubering but at least Im reading or on my laptop while someone else deals with the incredible shittynsss of driving. For me there is no good trip where I have to drive
It means you are dependent on cars for one, which also means insurance companies, gas,car payment, etc... I am actively trying to ditch cars in a car city because of this. You wastr so much space for parking lots too. You interact with a lot less people because you are always at some destination with the journey barring you from interacting with the people of the city. Physical fitness and health is also affected.
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.
From what I can tell, depending on the "car lord" is getting worse and worse too. There may have been an era when cars got more affordable due to greater reliability and longevity. I'm concerned that the car makers have figured out how to defeat that idea by charging fees to use the electronics in your car, and that servicing the batteries is going to be a rent-seeker's heaven.
This is why it's so important to own and maintain the good older vehicles. Resto-modding reliable chassis like 1990s Lexus LS should become more popular. Developments in rapid prototyping, additive manufacturing, etc... all make this easier. I'd love to see more open-sourcing of aftermarket parts as well.
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....
Putting all preferences aside, American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing.
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.
>Putting all preferences aside, American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing.
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.
I don’t think this makes much sense. It’s mostly big cities like Chicago or Boston (still dealing with Big Dig debt) with trouble financing themselves, suburbia seems to do very well financing itself with its property tax base.
> American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing.
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.
"Suburbanites shouldn't have to pay for city subway and potholes."
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.
Migration patterns overwhelmingly demonstrate that people are migrating from high density cities to low density, "hardcore suburban" cities. In the US, high density living is a boutique lifestyle choice that is constrained in the offer side (NIMBY), thus the prices. The fact that there are people willing to pay for this lifestyle doesn't mean that they are a majority, or even a significant percentage of the overall population.
Is this really true though? Every infrastructure project in cities seems to cost billions of dollars (Boston’s Green Line Extension, New York’s 2nd Avenue Subway). It would take quite a lot of suburban road, gas, electric etc infrastructure to add up to anything close to that.
The infrastructure costs in cities are more expensive but service many more people and economic activity, they are amortized much more efficiently than a suburban bridge to nowhere.
Is this true? As a case study, Boston’s population is about 700k, call it a million people living in a genuinely urban environment in greater Boston, of a metro area of 3 million. I think there’s more suburbanites than urbanites in most American metros.
Where do the suburbanites work? That tunnel, rail, or subway is allowing who to get into and out of the city easier?
> 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?
They cost billion of dollars but they are also supporting places that also pays a lot more taxes.
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.
> 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.
I didn't intend to, I meant cities are subsidizing suburbia.
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.
Where is pollution coming from? Cars generate lot of noise and pollution when they through city streets or on highways. Motorcycles can be especially loud if nobody bother to muffle them.
This is a reference to the NIMBY/YIMBY fight, where the YIMBY position is that most non-single-family-home developments, other than the super high end, have been effectively been made illegal through a combination of zoning laws, neighborhood review processes that add extraordinary costs, unreasonable requirements and delays, and other arbitrary veto points.
Cars are the main source of noise pollution and air pollution in cities, nothing else comes to mind. Factories and such were either moved to other continents, or zoning was updated to ban them in population centers. I guess fossil fuel combustion contributes as well, but that's on its way to becoming less of a problem.
Why should cities be expected subsidize rural and suburban living? Those higher infrastructure costs are rural and suburban problems, no need for states to transfer tax revenue simply because cities make more money for less infrastructure costs.
You’ve set up a bit of a straw man argument there. The person you’re replying to isn’t saying suburbanites should pay for city potholes, they’re saying suburbanites need to be able to pay for their own (suburban) potholes, and the ugly truth is that suburban infrastructure maintenance is economically unfeasible. Suburban development has only progressed as far as it has via ponzi-like borrowing schemes that are entirely dependent on new growth.
I don’t like StrongTowns personally, it just doesn’t grok with my experience that many suburbs are wonderful communities where neighbors know each other and kids play together and folks go watch high school football games. I’ve found that cities make you more anonymous. Living in a high rise in a city I knew just about zero of my neighbors, in my suburb I know all of my neighbors by name.
Yeah, I can definitely relate with you on that point.
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.
This varies a lot across the country. Most of the local suburban streets are maintained through a combination of local city/county and gas taxes and don't come from the "city money" general tax pool. Not to mention that most states don't have a dense city to speak of, so they are in practice >95% low density.
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).
Cars are expensive and use an enormous amount of energy. You can buy dozens of e-bikes for the price of one EV, and charge dozens of e-bikes from one fully charged EV battery. EVs do not fix the emissions problem, as most emissions are from brake and tire residue.
>>> most emissions are from brake and tire residue.
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.
After moving to Europe (and Eastern Europe), I can't really consider those places in the US "cities" and get an uneasy feeling that something is off when I'm back stateside.
Concur totally after living in Sevilla (Spain). US cities - with the exception of New York - are just cookie-cutter strip malls. There’s a fundamental lack of coherence that’s hard to explain.
It’s pretty easy to understand when you realize Americans don’t like eachother. If we liked living together we wouldn’t be so car centric, it’s not like the cars built the cities for us. And we keep getting worse. Small towns I drive through now are full of angry people who seem to want to be left alone. It’s incredibly sad.
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.
> If we liked living together we wouldn’t be so car centric
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.
So this is not as black and white as it seems. There are three major pushes that end up pushing people out of the 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...
Exactly. I said “don’t like” to avoid making this explicitly about racism but it’s true. And those planners that made these cities people currently complain about had droves of people who “didn’t want to be near other Americans of another color or class” and loved car filled suburbs and strip mall towns.
You know I used to believe that for many years and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is just a “bike-city” circle jerk scapegoating Robert Moses in order to ignore our deeper problem: Americans don’t like each-other.
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.
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.
Sure. I’ve studied that for years and I’ve come to the conclusion that is not the root cause. At the end of the day it’s a boogie man people trot out to excuse the fact that they did that and continue to do it together. They let it happen because they wanted it.
That people ultimately do what they want. They aren’t brainwashed. Car companies or lobbies don’t build our cities. We build them they way we want them. If we wanted them some other way we would. And most people live in suburban sprawl where they distance themselves from their fellow American — who they don’t particularly like very much.
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.
Pacific Heights is indeed one of the most desirable neighboors, and is very much non-surburban in its nature.
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 wouldn't say it's an emergence of a general dislike of each other. It was desegregation; the dislike always existed, but before Brown vs Board of Ed and other decisions in the same cities different racial groups lived in different worlds.
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.)
I’m very unconvinced but this. New Yorkers famously all hate each other yet if you can afford to live in relatively central parts of New York, you don’t need a car. Though New York is still somewhat car-focused. Internationally, London has similar but a slightly milder case of car-dependent sprawl to New York (but people still famously don’t like each other). Swedes are also known for their desire for space and privacy yet they somehow manage to live in cities that don’t follow the North American model. And many Dutch cities used to be going in the direction of the American model (held back by the lower wealth after the war preventing mass car ownership) and only changed direction in the 70s after won’t-somebody-think-of-the-children political campaigning and some very slim majorities in votes on the topic. And the transition was a slow one too.
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.
It's more than that. Jews, Asians (individually, Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, etc), Italians, Polish, Irish, Arabic ... all segregated into their own neighborhoods. The "melting pot" was never really real. We are a nation of immigrants that never really got along with one another except when common interests were threatened.
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.
I think the intensity matters: my Irish ancestors weren’t considered white when they got here but there wasn’t a mass exodus from cities rather than sharing infrastructure, and they were allowed into whiteness over time (especially when large numbers of cops were needed to police black populations). The ones who served in the military weren’t restricted to certain units and duties, etc. When white people moved to the suburbs, the neighborhoods which were razed to make highways had a very uneven distribution.
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.
> The reality is that streetcar companies were already unprofitable
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?
Everybody has a budget. Going red is just very bad. Sustainability is the keyword here.
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.
Just because a business turns a loss doesn't mean it isn't sustainable.
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.
I don't think that is true. If you look at how larger residential areas looked in the States historically, you'll these placese were very livable, since there weee no cars.
The main issue in the US is that at some point the jobs of city and regional planners were hijacked by car industry lobbyists. The current state of affairs is what followed.
Are you sure this is what really happened? The US built cities like any other country on this planet, but the influx of immigrants and people's pursuit of wealth pushed them to settle new lands and establish new population centres.
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.
Am I sure that westward expansion in the 1800s really happened? A lot of people seems to quote a lot of stuff in HN while missing the pretty obvious big picture.
And you are making my point. If we wanted to shift back to carless society we could, others have.
I'm not asking whether the expansion happened, but whether you think whether it happened because people in the US dislike each other, which is a completely different questions altogether
The north east (unsurprisingly) has many nice small towns, with moderately OK rail connections to big cities, and decent communities. Northern NJ (for example) is full of them. They’re obviously less common as you go west.
Is there a shred of data to support Americans hate each other more than other countries? I will even take a buzzfeed poll slapped together in a minute.
Good try. I am not American. I am an Indian citizen who loves the opportunities available in the US than in India.
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.
I do a lot of road-trips through rural Oregon, California and sometimes Texas. I get middle fingers, angry truck drivers actively trying to run me off the road. Someone even hit me once, for no reason. I get threatened semi often in towns where I look like I don’t belong, but trust me they do it to each-other too.
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.
> It’s pretty easy to understand when you realize Americans don’t like eachother.
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.
When I go to France or England or India (city centers and countryside) people may not Love each-other but they seem to generally be ok with being together and cooperating a bit more. In America it’s a whole new level. Except for a few idyllic small towns and suburbs that are actually economically and racially exclusionary that seem to have a faux-community.
I think the point is that for a series of reasons, during the 20th century the US built a lot of infrastructure that allows a lot (not all!) people to get further away from each other than is typical in Europe (probably elsewhere too, but I have no experience other than the US & Europe).
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.
Wow, I had never seen that before. What a bizarre video with a forced tie-in of the whole manifest destiny idea with lunar missions (1976).
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".
Yes. It is our narrative. This is one of the most honest videos I’ve ever found of our true views on life in America vs the ivory tower discussions that constantly blame GM and Robert Moses for destroying their “communities”
If that is "The American Narrative" how did Chicago or New York City ever happen? How is it that a majority of Americans live in metropolitan areas rather than further out where they can more "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?
Because you comments are constantly just boiled down to “it’s too complicated to understand”.
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.
Those quaint European neighborhoods, towns and villages are all also racially and culturally homogenous. And where that is changing, there is animosity and discord.
I can understand why you're being downvoted but I think you have a point. Someone who drinks beer and listens to country music is not going to be doing neighborhhod dinners with orthodox jews. We can claim to be all multicultural and all accepting but we always seek out like minded people. Culturally homogeneous communities let people put their guard down and give people common ground to connect on. You could argue that we want to create a new type of homogeneous culture--one where nobody eats pork, nobody wears MAGA hats, people keep their religious beliefs to themselves, etc. but that's still a homogeneous culture.
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 you live in Japan without a car you will probably end up taking a taxi from time to time. They are lined up outside the major train stations. Overall, relying on mass-transit probably is more pleasant there, and takes less lifestyle-modifications, but you still have less freedom than owning a car. And probably take longer to get around usually. Also in plenty of Japan, by the way, you definitely need a car to get by reasonably. It's not like countries in Europe where half the population lives in the capital city.
If your goal is to avoid any sort of exercise (and the "forced" exercise is one of the biggest reasons to go carless in my opinion) then yes large sections of US cities may seem inacccessible without a car. But if you like walking like I do (at least up to a half-mile or so) then you can live just fine in US cities without a car, in my experience. I've done it all over.
Public transit in Tokyo is faster than cars for the vast majority of trips. The only exception is if there's no lines connecting where you want to go, and you need to transfer a couple times. Nobody complains about "lack of freedom". When people want to go on trips, they rent a car, but even then, they usually take the train to their destination, and then rent a car there.
I live well outside Boston but have lived in Cambridge. I'd mostly be fine with walking and taking transit around the city itself--which I've done. And probably mostly wouldn't want to drive. But I'd regularly want to get out of the city for hiking and other activities and I wouldn't want to deal with rentals every time. (People I know who do live in the city and do similar activities generally own cars.)
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.
True, but the problem here in the US is that the places you can do this are so limited that the price to live that car free lifestyle is astronomical. You either pay 2,500+ a month in rent, have a house payment that is 5,000+ a month, or have to buy a car, move out to the country and shop at a dollar general.
Portland like mentioned about European cities and towns is also incredibly homogenous culturally and racially by most American standards . Lived there for 6 years as a brown person and glad to have gotten out.
I grew up in Stockholm and it too sadly is very, very car centric compared to Tokyo. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Paris and others are much better... I wish all cities everywhere was more like them! (and Tokyo)
Note that Amsterdam made a conscious flip on this, as did other Dutch cities. Take your 4 lane street, turn one lane in a tram lane, one lane into grass + trees, reduce the width on the other two lanes and add a bike lane with a heightened divider. Bam you've got a street for a more livable city center.
It also took them the better part of several decades.
Most cities that have tried doing this globally have only done so very recently, and it shows, but that's okay, because it took time and patience to methodically go through more or less every Dutch road and change it.
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.)
These US vs EU cities discussions appear a lot on HN and when I see people lamenting that their European city is too car-centric I always wonder if they mean
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).
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)
Stockholm's inner city is about as walkable as any other European city I've visited, and much nicer as you're much less likely to get into dilapidated areas (there's almost no graffiti or dirt on the streets, unlike places like Milan, Lisbon or Bruxels) except for a couple of places where, unfortunately, the beggers from south-east Europe congregate, making the place look like a gipsy camp. But the suburbs outside the central area are much more like American or, more closely, Australian cities, with a huge sprawling area where having a car becomes more important the farther you go, but still with decent public transport at least for peak hours... that's just due to the low population density in those areas... Stockholm attracts a lot of young people and families because that's where the jobs are, mostly, so this situation seems unavoidable to me... Adelaide is in the top 3 livable cities, and the situation there is very similar (actually it has a much smaller central area and a perhaps even bigger and less dense suburban sprawling), the differences in ranking between them seems to me mostly artificial unless you're taking into consideration Adelaide's beautiful beaches and mostly great weather compared to most of Europe.
Genuinely curious: what do you find "hilariously bad" about public transport in Stockholm? I've never lived there, but as a casual visitor the T-bana, trams, ferries etc seem to work just fine.
Often, trains and subways will straight up not run because "there were leaves or snow on the tracks" or whatever. Like, OK? No other city I've ever lived has had that problem, lol? (let alone that often! it happens all the time)
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.
Almost every big city has problems with trains running late or being cancelled, I think it's more common than you might think. I live in Stockholm and before the pandemic (when I commuted daily on the pendeltåg and before that, with the roslagsbana) I agree with you it could be pretty bad (there were several days where they simply closed off the trains and everyone had to squeeze into much smaller replacement buses, and a few times when even the replacement buses didn't run - you had to find a cab to get home... and good luck finding one.. but at least the government covered the fee if you could show there was no other alternative at the time) but having lived in a few other countries, I've seen all sorts of crap like that as well, and other things that nearly never happen in Stockholm are quite routine at other places, like stations and trains where passengers squeeze like sardines, buses so full some people go hanging outside the doors (the bus driver is supposed to close the door, ofc, but the situation is so precarious they try to let in as many as they can as they know how terrible it is to be just left behind because there's no space), robberies on night buses (which to my knowledge can happen in Stockholm but are extremely rare)...
There are almost certainly very few cities in the world (if any) where residents who need to use public transit day in and day out think it's a consistently great experience.
Depends which city but it’s A for decent sized cities in central/north/Western Europe (less so for eastern and Southern Europe although major cities there will also be like that).
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.
Lived in Paris for years but wanted to go to my native Normandy 90 minutes away by car often, with friends (so train is uneconomical, and whatever): I love car free cities just as much as I love cars, but I feel they always miss the massive parking space at the periphery. Those have to be free one day, and truly understood and desired, so we can sort of mix the intra city metro/bike, the intra regional car, and maybe the rest by train (but again, train multiply cost for a group when car divides it so hard to choose).
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.
Making cars electric doesn't solve any of the problems with cars though. Cars, no matter the technology, are the problem. I'd much rather get rid of more or less all cars, permanently, period.
I don't get that one. Cars are mostly fine if they don't pollute. They'd just be large bicycles. Why do you think the concept of automated personal transport is "the problem" ?
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.
Cars create opportunities for working class people that wouldn't exist otherwise. You're advocating for removing mid to long range personal transportation entirely? what's the basis for this? I'm all for city neighbourhoods being less car centric.
Of course you can't stop at simply getting rid of cars and calling it a day, there's countless other things that would have to come with that. Obvious ones include improving public and active transport, but really, fundamental transformation of entire cities to be less like Houston and more like Tokyo and Amsterdam is what's needed.
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.
But that's silly. Everyone agrees with you but what if you need to go to your grandparents in the country side village of 200 farmers ? You could build a once-a-day bus line or you could just let people take a non polluting car from a lot outside the city.
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.
>>>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
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 that there much better approaches to your problem than to just wack a great big car park on the outskirts.
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.
>>>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.
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.
> I grew up in Stockholm and it too sadly is very, very car centric compared to Tokyo. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Paris and others are much better...
I’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.
I lived in Stockholm for sometime before moving to London. There are a lot of parts in London where it's very easy to live without a car. I think the main reason is because it's essentially made of small towns that eventually all merged together. One is never too far from a fully functional high street and etc. Stockholm is built differently and having a car there makes life much easier even though the public transport is very good.
we left London last year after spending there 10 or so years. We spent the last 5 in a leafy part of South London. Commuting to work( before covid) was pretty easy with trains but also time consuming. Arrival of our child did change things and not having a car was putting limits on certain things by quite a lot. If I'd turn the time back, I'd definitely buy a car.
There are many boroughs in London with a majority of households not owning a car - more than 60% in Islington, Hackey, Tower Hamlets, Camden, Westminster, City, with Haringey, Hammersmith/Fulham, Kensington/Chelsea, Newham, Southwark, Lambeth, Newham, being over 50% without a car.
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.
It’s not all of Sweden though. I live in Malmo and I haven’t felt the need to drive at all.
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 city council in Stockholm in the 60s had a plan to empty what they saw was the slum-center of the town, the residents of which they felt were morally degenerate, and move them out to the suburbs.
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.
New York City proper (five boroughs) has a population of 8.4 million. Sweden has a population of 10.35 million. But yes, I agree with your sentiment about having high density of manufacturing in a particular segment will probably skew your policies towards it. This might explain why Munich is so rich, but has such poor mass transit compared to Berlin.
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.
Tokyo has an extensive network of raised expressways. They're just so extortionately priced (roughly $1/km) that nobody uses them unless they really have to, but since Tokyo is so crowded, they're jam-packed all the time anyway.
Overwhelmingly, it's the Social Democrat party, not evil capitalists or car manufacturers, who are responsible for aggressively promoting cars and car centric policy and infrastructure in Sweden. This fact will grind the gears of both Swedes and misinformed Americans alike, lol.
The history of "folkhemmet" is a topic about which entire books are written, but I'm not sure there are any that focus specifically on the car, I've appended some stuff from a quick google below.
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.
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.
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.
You have to remember that after the self-imposed devastation of WW2 all European countries wanted to catch up with the US. Fridges, televisions comfortable houses and yes cars- these things were available to every worker in America. Living standards equal to the US were finally reached in the 1970s.
Just to note. The abbreviation for the Social Democrats in Sweden is "S". The "SD" party is the Sweden Democrats, a socially conservative right wing nationalist party.
I thought that the social democrats have been having close ties to the industry for a very long time? Maybe not capitalists in a strict sense, but industrialists? To me it seems like it's the social democrats, the industrialists and the unions who for long time worked quite a lot together and aligned?
I think Stockholm's greatest problem is the geography. Everything going north or south in the entire region has to pass through the same few islands in central Stockholm, all options are awful. Therefore we end up with the horrific traffic on for example Hornsgatan or Sveavägen used for essentially thoroughfare when they instead should be calmed nice livable streets.
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.
A counter argument is that US has a very developed suburban living culture with families living in houses. And while obviously this is comfortable living, you then need a car to get to the city center.
Having said that, I agree that nothing beats the walkability of European cities, quality of living wise. US has a lot to learn from that.
The attribution is much more grey with the advent of so much globalization. As humans we like to pin the blame on a singular entity but the real world is far more complicated.
Technically it shdnt. Just imagine you send your oil to another country to produce stuff for you, should the carbon emission for that be counted for country A or B? I think clearly country A. Now what if the oil doesn't come from country A but is bought from the money for the goods from country C. Well, technically you shdnt attribute it to country B. Either A or C.
per capita is the more accurate measure. Yeah I note my mistake in another reply.
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.
My bad, number 2 largest producer of greenhouse gases per capita. Right behind Australia which basically has the same type of suburban city design centered around cars.
Good public transportation systems require a certain level of density to be practical, roughly on par with where European cities are at. This is why places like New York have fairly decent public transportation systems compared to the rest of the country.
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).
Japanese houses are quite different from US ones. My in-laws live in a house in suburban Chiba well outside Tokyo, but it has literally no garden space and the neighborhood is so densely packed a taxi can't even pull into the little laneway it's in. Within a 100 meter radius there's a grocery, a drugstore, several restaurants and more, and everybody gets around on foot, by bicycle or by bus.
I want this for my kids (stuck in US suburbia), but have instead opted for them to grow up close to their grandparents. I’m not always sure that I’m making the right trade off, and it annoys me that I even have to make such a choice.
Anyway, it’s been over 20 years since I visited Tokyo, and I’ve been to many major cities since. Tokyo remains my favorite.
If you haven't seen it already, the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes has a great video making the other decision (ie. moving to the Netherlands) with some compelling reasoning: https://youtu.be/ul_xzyCDT98
They do, Tokyo is full of detached homes, and the people living in them don't need a car. (some have cars, some don't, but a car is not needed, and even those who have one, chances are they can't use them for things like grocery shopping etc even if they wanted to)
Agreed. The closest you'll get to a walkable/non-car focused designed city in the US is NYC or Boston. MTA is accessible nearly anywhere in NYC (not without exceptions) and runs 24hrs
A big limiting factor with many cities though is if you need to commute to an office. In Boston, for example, many professional jobs will require commuting out to the suburbs. In tech specifically, there's more in the city than there used to be--there were basically no major employers in the immediate urban area any longer as of a couple decades ago. But the majority of engineering jobs broadly speaking require driving to a suburban office.
This 100%, I measured the volume in my neighborhood in Central Tokyo 5 mins from the nearest station (it’s one of the more popular spots in the city) and it clocks in at 30dB or less. Compared to Manhattan where it’s deafeningly loud all the time.
Aside, NYC’s train system is, besides being filthy, unreliable, slow, poorly maintained, and a pain to switch between transit agencies, it’s also unfriendly to anyone who isn’t fully able bodied (the escalators and elevators are always broken and only present in a small fraction of stations), and neighborhoods are often designed in ways that lend places outside of the Manhattan core to be more dangerous and unpleasant than they have to be. Not to mention the usage of land in and around stations is very poorly used (the ~2 shops in Times Square station are a hilarious joke for what’s ostensibly the financial capital of the world), and any expansion of the system is prohibitively expensive for stupid political reasons.
But I suppose it’s still better than the transitless wasteland that is most of the USA.
>This 100%, I measured the volume in my neighborhood in Central Tokyo 5 mins from the nearest station (it’s one of the more popular spots in the city) and it clocks in at 30dB or less. Compared to Manhattan where it’s deafeningly loud all the time.
No, but even there if you walked 5 mins from the station towards Ebisu (away from the arterial road), Shinsen, Yoyogi Uehara, or even towards Harajuku on Cat Street it would probably be similarly quiet.
It took me a while to realise what it was that bothered me, but yes there's a real lack of 'high street shopping' and markets type organisation from what I've seen in North America - instead drive to a big square ~car park~ 'lot' surrounded by 'big box stores'. Everything scaled up.
If you like it fine, can't really say either's objectively better, it's just really quite different and I suppose you likes what you grow up with or are used to.
There's no "cannot", it's a conscious choice - if you have more space than necessary that absolutely does not require that you expand to fill all of it. And in particular this has caused issues because American cities tend towards sprawl, filling up area with low-density housing that requires significantly more infrastructure per capita, and implementing zoning laws to prevent higher-density development even as the population grows, resulting in housing shortages.
They sprawl because people want space. If you're from Paris or Tokyo or London you really just don't know what it's like to have a quiet, detached house with a nice garden, maybe a pool where your kids can play randomly without needing to plan a trip to the community center, space for a garden, knowing everyone within 200m of your house by name...
It's a completely different way of life that is not possible without lots of space. Some people want that and so they will pay to buy it. It's not like city planners are laughing in smoke-filled rooms like, "haha! this will be our most sprawling city yet!"
People see what people want to see. An average family with two toddlers using bicycles to get around in the dead of Chicago winter. Sure, sure.
I would wager that the vast majority of the folk here that are pushing this romanticized idea of car-free european city have actually grown up in upper middle class US suburbs and bulk of these attitudes are really just subconscious rejection of their parents' lifestyles.
Having grown up in one of those car-free european cities myself, I can vouch that the US set up is, on average, far more convenient, which is also why you see car/pool/detached house/garage ownership rates increase with income and GDP. People that have the means clearly choose to avoid communal setups.
As some other commenters have noted, in cities like Amsterdam and Tokyo there are enough nice safe public spaces that even young children are free to play outside on their own and there's much less planning required to go places since you don't need a car.
That being said, I'm sure there are plenty of North Americans who love having a ton of space for gardening etc. But I would guess they're actually in the minority and that most people choose to live in sprawling suburban developments because they're the only affordable option to guarantee access to good schools and a safe neighborhood.
Loans are overcollateralized, so you need to put in the same or more amount of capital that you're loaning out. That may not seem useful at first, but it allows you to have exposure to multiple assets. For example, you may want to use ETH temporarily, but you only have BTC. But you want to keep your BTC investment for the long term. So you're putting up BTC to borrow ETH. You keep your exposure to BTC, but you have liquid ETH.
It's the same concept as putting up your house as collateral. You don't want to sell your house just because you need some liquid cash temporarily.
> It's the same concept as putting up your house as collateral.
The crucial difference is in a mortgage loan the borrower keeps the collateral and gets to use of it, e.g. live in it, while they pay off the loan, whereas in a DeFi "loan" the lender has to keep the collateral the whole time.
Yes, the "smart contract" keeps it. The point is the borrower doesn't get to keep the collateral. This makes DeFi loans unsuitable for a large number of purposes.
What's an example of something you'd want to "do" with your crypto asset while using it as collateral? Obviously you can't spend it, give it away, use it as collateral for another loan etc as that would conflict with the first loan.
But you can do other stuff. For example you could covert ETH to one of the many tokens that represent staked ETH (rocketpool rETH for example) and use that as collateral. Now you are have collateral and staking revenue with the same funds.
Well, that's the point, 1) you need 100% collateral, 2) the collateral needs to be in the form of digital tokens and 3) it needs to be kept in custody by a third party (the "smart contract"). Yes, you can still do useful things despite these limitations, but at the same time be aware that 99% of the borrowing/lending activity that goes on in the real world is not possible with this technology.
This really sounds most like gambling. And not a financial instruments that is very supportive for economy. Like let's say company loaning money to purchase equipment.
Yes, these loans can't be used to fund investment or consumption in the real economy. The only use-case of crypto-loans, as far as I know, is making leveraged bets on the prices of crypto-currencies.
Because if I already have $10,000 to put as collateral, to get a $10,000 loan to buy a $10,000 car, it means I didn't have a need for borrowing funds to begin with. I can go straight to buying the car without borrowing money. Whereas if I need to borrow the funds, I won't be able to get the loan because I don't have the 100% collateral required.
Yes, we had already established that. The point is that requiring 100% collateral does not allow the borrower to trade future consumption for present consumption, which is the whole point of borrowing as far as consumer and businesses are concerned. This is why DeFi loans are unsuitable when it comes to funding consumption or productive investment.
Uncollateralized lending in DeFi is very nascent (right now primarily targets crypto businesses, and are typically ran by centralized companies who have launched a protocol on chain).
TrueFi, Maple Finance, and Goldfinch are the biggest and primarily have permissionless lenders and kyc'd borrowers. Some of those borrowers may make consumer loans (Goldfinch is like this).
Permissionless uncollateralized borrowing has yet to take off (even though contracts for this already exist and are live), but I suspect it will once decentralized stablecoin on chain supply gets decoupled from current centralized stablecoin supply (decentralized credit based stablecoins built on top of incentivized permissions management of on <-> off chain flows [via over collaterlized decentralized stablecoins and centralized stablecoins alike] and on/off chain risk [via derivatives]). Decentralized derivatives protocols will be key to permissionless uncollateralized lending growth imo, but we are not there yet (I think we need to continue to see global markets break down more in OTC/CCP IRD's and tradfi counterparties continue to lose trust with one another in derivative transactions for this to grow faster in DeFi).
I can see that in the next 10-20 years, 20% of the eurodollar system with be contained within (multichain) permissionless DeFi protocols as HNW individuals and tradfi institutions outside of the US abandon CCPs and typical OTC derivatives txs.
I won't have to argue with folks at ihsmarkit like I do now for making EOD CDX data public (like it was before they were acquired by shit & pee global), when I can pull it from on chain contracts in real time.
I think you're not understanding the fundamental problem that uncolletarelised DeFi lending faces, which is the fact that the borrower can simply walk away with the money. None of the companies that supposedly offer uncollaterilised borrowing do what they claim to do. This is obvious if you read the fine print. And it's to be expected, because if they did, borrowers would borrow all the available funds and walk away, never to be seen again. That's not a sustainable business model.
> I think you're not understanding the fundamental problem that uncolletarelised DeFi lending faces, which is the fact that the borrower can simply walk away with the money.
I understand it very well, that's pretty much the risk to be mitigated (or not) by who the loans are extended to on the protocol level (when not trying to do it in the KYC/ofchain legal agreement way which is how its done now for the most part). Pools of capital can be lent to specific actors in a non permissioned way that can be governed by the the protocols users or on/off by the on chain contracts themselves automatically when certain on chain conditions are met.
Also, for the non corporate uncollateralized lending in defi now through flash loans (i.e. via Aave), it is impossible for the borrower to walk away from borrowing the funds because the loan must be paid back in the same transaction or entire transaction reverts. However this isn't appropriate for typical consumer loans.
Currently, a lot of the centralized companies with their protocols on chain mitigate the risk just by restricting the pool of borrowers to those who they can legally go after to recoup any losses in the event of a default (just like in tradfi, but still the risks remain).
In the case of a derivatives protocol, writers can borrow against buyers deposits (instead of having to put up their own stablecoin deposits to back the writing) to open positions with the expectation that the writers can write enough volume to net out the delta most of the time while capturing a spread. If/when they (the writers in the derivative liquidity pools) can't and if enough addresses choose to withdraw the decentralized overcollateralized/centralized stablecoins from the protocol (rather than transferring/swapping their protocol credit to another address who wants to buy or write derivatives, or use as a unit of accounting outside of the protocol) and there is a shortfall, decentralized overcollateralized/centralized stablecoin yielding debt tokens can be issued by the protocol automatically (as well as raising decentralized overcollateralized/centralized stablecoin collateral requirements across the board for writers who haven't been cleared by protocols risk management contracts or by some kind of on chain governance) to those trying to withdraw who can sell it on a dex at a premium or discount to par value of the stablecoin yielding debt token.
The risk doesn't go away in tradfi with all the uncollateralized lending now, it gets spread throughout all the actors of the system in various ways, much of which isn't very transparent to all actors in the system (and even for those in the know, it is not in real time). The same (spreading risk through various actors that engage with the protocol) can be done in a DeFi context minus the opacity we have now (we all can see what addresses have/done what, regardless of whom/what is behind the address).
There isn't going to be a one size fits all approach to uncollateralized lending in DeFi. Protocols will do it differently based on what the users see fit to do with their funds and will manage the risks in many different ways (some of which will be better than others).
Thanks for the information, but none of that addresses the problem I described earlier. All these pseudo-decentralised lending platforms that you mentioned happen to rely on a central party that "approves" borrowers. Once a borrower gets "approved" they sign a loan agreement with the central party. In the case of default, the central party can initiate legal action against the borrower. This is how these "decentralised" loans work. The only reason they work is because they aren't decentralised at all. They're conventional loan agreements that are enforced by courts of justice. The pseudo-decentralised platform plays the same exact role as a financial intermediary in conventional finance. Decentralised lending platforms where borrowers can get uncollateralised loans DO NOT exist. The technology does not allow it. There are no mechanisms through which make the borrower repay the loan.
> Decentralised lending platforms where borrowers can get uncollateralised loans DO NOT exist. The technology does not allow it. There are no mechanisms through which make the borrower repay the loan.
They do exist, Aave allows for this, there is no one to approve the flash loan. Just that you can only borrow the funds for specific context that I described and the borrower will have to pay off the loan or the loan wont be made and will fail. You can't do this at all in tradfi.
> They're conventional loan agreements that are enforced by courts of justice.
And even if these happen traditionally, no defi involved, the borrower many not be able to pay of the loan. Risk will be eaten by someone. Courts of justice can't squeeze blood from stone. But Aave doesn't face this risk. Maybe other protocols will, but thats the risk people have to accept when they engage with the different protocols.
As a curiosity, a "flash loan" is a loan in which the principal is received and repaid simultaneously and therefore has little practical utility, other than facilitating wash trading and other forms of market manipulation, which are prohibited in regulated markets.
I guess there's those like yourself that would deem it of little practical utility for anyone to borrow permissionlessly and without a large pool a capital of their own to take advantage of arb opportunities that arise in markets (and make those markets more efficient for those that use it). Luckily, defi participants are not bounded by your opinions.
It's unclear whether these flash loans can even be used to exploit arbitrage opportunities. Arbitrage involves simultaneous transactions in different markets, whereas flash loans only allow simultaneous transactions in the same blockchain. Anyway, arbitrage is not a sufficient condition for market efficiency. There's plenty of evidence showing that crypto-markets are rife with fraud and are anything but efficient.
Useless/scam tokens are a problem, but it's not specific to Uniswap. That's a problem inherent to permitting anyone to create a new token, like with ERC-20 tokens.
If you want to trade useful tokens, Uniswap's data is the most truthful.
It's not that the system can't be gamed, it's that he costs of gaming are transparent and predictable.
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