Comment by nervousvarun
10 hours ago
Right as an American this reads like "American who's never been to large Asian cities like Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing etc..
10 hours ago
Right as an American this reads like "American who's never been to large Asian cities like Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing etc..
I'm with you. Tokyo is incredible. It's the only large city I've ever been to where I left thinking, "I'd love to live there."
Transportation in Japan is a whole other level compared to my experiences in Germany and Austria.
I've never been to England, though, so can't make that comparison.
London and Berlin felt pretty comparable to me, with the airport situation better in London but the biking situation better in Berlin (marginally).
Tokyo is just on another level entirely.
You should visit Taipei.
I think the fundamental issue here is that many in America don't actually want dense cities, public transit, and more generally shared spaces. I, for one, would not want to live in condo when I can live in a house. When enough people want this, you end up with "urban sprawl" and one or more cars per house.
Genuinely dense cities basically don't exist in the U.S. The average "dense" city downtown in a U.S. city is broadly comparable to the worst car-dependent suburban or exurbian hellscapes of Europe and East Asia, and things only go worse from there. City downtowns near the East Coast are an exception since they were built in colonial times or thereabouts, so when you think "dense" you should really think of e.g. the densest boroughs in NYC.
You make it sound like the construction of US cities were not at all lobbied by the auto industry back in the day and that urban sprawl was exclusively people's choice.
> American who's never been to large Asian cities like Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing
30% of all Americans have never left the North Western hemisphere.
[delayed]