![]() Probably the most Japanese-like city in the US is Los Angeles, which has a relatively weak central CBD and secondary clusters of high-rise office towers spread out over a fairly wide area, especially along Wilshire, with plenty of SFR (which is really 2FR, since everyone has an illegal ADU in their backyard) not far away. How much more used would the Japanese systems be if people could buy a 80$-100$ monthly pass that would give them unlimited rides across the network like they do on most European and North American systems? (Most Japanese subway systems have unlimited one-day passes for 8 to 10$, which seems to be the only way of getting unlimited rides across the network, there are commuter passes, but, get this, they only work between two given stations, get one station further out and you have to pay) However, many European cities perform relatively poorly, with at least 33% less ridership than equivalent Japanese systems, and that despite the fact that Japanese subway systems are much more expensive for the end-user than the subsidized European systems (Japanese subway systems are profitable, not so for European systems). European subway systems are all over the map, with those of Paris, Rome and Milan getting exceedingly high ridership per km of track, Rome and Milan despite having very small systems, probably reflective of the very dense old urban cores of these cities. We can notice here that all Japanese subway systems have at least 4 million passengers per km of track, and Tokyo Metro is way up there at 12. If I could sum-up with a few schema, here is how I would represent building height (and correspondingly, density) in the different models: But there is a rationality to this chaos, high-rises are grouped at important transit nodes or near services and businesses. Different types of buildings mix, whereas in Europe and North America, types of housing are often clearly separated, stuck in their respective neighborhoods. The Japanese model of development is chaotic and organic. It's important to point out too that low-rise areas in Japan still have relatively high density. Niigata, a city without subway, mall to the right, mid-rise housing across the street That is especially important, because if jobs are only accessible by car, then people will have to own cars to get to work, and once they have cars, they have the best incentive to use them. It also means that points of attraction (malls, offices, etc.) concentrate around stations, where they are most easily reachable in transit. ![]() This offers a variety of housing that is rarely seen in Europe or North America. There are skyscrapers here, but they're massed around the major arterials and the subway stations, less than a kilometer away, you have low-rise areas. One of the clearest examples of that is the area around Shinjuku station in Tokyo: Whereas both in Europe and North America density tends to progressively fall as one gets further away from the center of the city, in Japan, though the center does tend to be denser, the density of cities tend to extend in ribbons around rapid transit lines. Commercial areas like malls will also tend to attract high-rise developments to them. Density happens near places where it makes sense, so it's not rare for there to be high-rises next to train or subway station, with low-rise constructions a bit further out. The result is very striking in Japanese cities. The Japanese are also much more tolerant, if not outright welcoming, of neighborhood changes, and the dominant mentality says that houses with wooden frame ought to last 20-25 years and housing with concrete frame should last 30-40 years, after which they can, and perhaps ought to, be replaced. I've already written about Japanese zoning laws, and these seem to represent the Japanese mentality around city-building well: very lax controls and respect for private property rights, high tolerance for building heights and mixing uses.
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