Comment by dublinstats
11 days ago
Their streets tend to be super narrow, with pedestrians and bicycles sharing the shoulder. And back streets are basically alleys with pedestrians sharing the street with cars. Obviously parked cars there would be a disaster.
Also it tends to cost more via tolls to drive any significant distance than to take the train or bus (or plane for that matter), unless you have multiple people in the car. The car situation in Japan strikes me as more a case of regulatory capture than wise use of land. Because even small towns with vast empty spaces operate this way.
It's significantly more efficient to provide services to compact towns than sprawled towns, so I'm not sure this registers to me as a downside.
It's pretty common for small sprawled towns to struggle to keep up with maintenance of roads/water/power, which is less of an issue with compact towns.
The same applies at the city level, of course.
The lack of sprawl is also a consequence of how mountainous the country is. While not as bad as a lot of western sprawl, the areas of Japan that are a bit wider and less populated do have an element of car dependent sprawl to them. Then of course the villages that aren't covered by the train network and aren't boxed in by mountains have a pretty similar relationship to cars as a small western town.
Where I think the US and Australia both struggle is trying to make the car work in dense cities as populations grow. We do actually have pretty dense cities in Aus, yet cannot give up the car.
“Regulatory capture”? This term means something very specific and doesn’t apply in this case at all.
So in other words… they internalized a number of heavily subsidized externalities of individual transportation by car?