東京へ転職できました！And living my dream has taught me some stuff, and hopefully, will continue to teach me. One thing I started to get into was urban planning. Leaving the US is generally a breath of fresh air in terms of understanding what urban planning could be. And 2023 has had a lot of that, given that the latter half will be in Tokyo. So here I want to summarize some thoughts: not all "things the US does poorly," too -- there's definitely some "huh, I think the US does this better?" (Or, "woah, Tokyo does this weirdly.")

Each observation will be followed by some opinions, so here's a list of them all so you can skip to things you're interested in:

1. Bikes are just slightly better cars.
2. Alarm fatigue: or the number of times one can hear ご注意してください and actually 注意して.
3. Why is picking what side to walk an exercies in 空気を読む?
4. Jay-walking. 横断禁止?
5. Should maps be oriented for the viewer?
6. Massive stations for fun and profit!
7. Through lining for the win!
8. Rail company confusion.
9. More Good Sounds.
10. Stroads? Boulevards? Both?
11. Small streets and alleys.
12. Car intersections done right?
13. なんで路面で書く字が漢字、ひらがな、とカタカナを混ざる? (This is rather specific to Japanese where I'll be complaining about the scripts, in Japanese.)
14. Canal paths, small parks, and beauty.
15. Malls are good actually?
16. 15 minute city vs the gym of life: a trivial? tradeoff.
17. Toyosu: gentrification?
18. Matsuri done right?
19. The ADA Slaps Actually? Thanks Bush (Sr.)?
20. Other Cities: Nagoya
21. Other Cities: Kobe's 商店街
22. Glossary

It's vaguely ordered by: walking, taking the train, the roads, then the built environment. But some topics overlap.

This is formatted as slides, as above, so click around and have fun!

This is also very Tokyo-centric: I've heard that other cities are very different and I can't comment on them in much detail.

This actually began to form in my head in India. In Zaveri Bazaar, we had to weave around four layers of parked motorbikes to get from the narrow street to the storefront.

Cementing this in further, was the fact that the one bike lane by the Google office in Pittsburgh had a signal for a pedestrian crossing.

Finally, I biked in Tokyo. I used 自転車シェアリング to grab a bike from Tsukishima down to Tatsumi, for a 165 yen, 22 min ride.

On the shared bike, I realized that I was pretty much functioning how I do when driving. The way I look at things, try to predict distant people's movements.

And then I had to park it at Tatsumi station, with 100 other shared bikes.

Tokyo, I think, is close to doing bikes right.

Well, it's not perfect, but I actually think Amsterdam is too much, and the US is too little. Tokyo has wide enough side walks and safe side-streets, and this is a much more useful goal I think than simply trying to emulate the Netherlands.

Not to mention: bikes are better than cars, but they're still mostly individual transit and don't scale the way public transit does. They still need parking -- you're likely going to see a high percent of time where the bike is parked, much like you do with cars. Futhermore, bikes are also dangerous. Yes, worst case fractures are significantly better than worst case dying, but it's still not as good as walking.

In Japan, it seems that you can buy bike insurance, much like you buy car insurance. Additionally, Japan discourages bike and car commuting, preferring public transit (I'm not a legal expert -- I've just heard that there are some rules here that can be complicated).

My perspective might be biased since a lot of urban planning YouTube does rant about bike infrastructure. This makes sense if the creator or intended audience are primarily in North America, as I think bike infrastructure will be a significant improvement there, but in Europe and Asia, I wonder if attention is best paid elsewhere.

In Aldous Huxley's "Island", the Myna birds are trained to say "Attention," to foster attentiveness and awareness of the present.

In Tokyo, every driveway and truck, most escalators, and some cross roads also have voices asking to ご注意ください.

While to some I'm sure there's an element of alarm fatigue, I think this has some urban planning benefits. For one, if you know when to expect the alarm, it's not tiring at all: it's actually somewhat pleasant to hear the thing you expect to. Additionally, and more importantly, I think this shows how much concern for safety is actually there.

The nicest example of this is probably the people working at certain crossings -- parking lot entryways, or for school children. We should have more of these everywhere. I particularly like that driveways for supermarket parking lots have these.

In the US you walk on the right. Similarly in the UK, you walk on the left. I think the only counter-examples I know are when there's just a mass of people going the same way. So you'd think that Japan would be nice and orderly and you'd walk on the left everywhere. でじょう？

Nope.

What you actually need to do is read the signs. If there aren't signs? Read the air.

While I don't expect this to actually be fixed on the average sidewalk, I always wonder what the logic is when this happens within a station. (I think 銀座一丁目駅 insists that you stay on the left on after the ticket barrier but exit 8 wants you on the right and I'm decently sure 豊洲 is also inconsistent.)

Japan is very anti-jaywalking. You have fences blocking you next to most of the (st)roads, and even some of the streets.

However, there are two points that stick out to me: firstly, the narrower streets don't even have sidewalks, and secondly, despite the fences, you can hear annoucements reminding you not to jaywalk.

Usually, I'm actually pro-jaywalking (or, I guess, against the term coined by car-companies). But I feel like Japan has a mix of good and bad. The fences add safety. The curbs and aforementioned crossing guards make cars feel like guests on side-walk cutting driveways. The distances between crossings aren't bad. The narrow streets are really good built environments.

Just: why do I have to either detour, go upwards, or remember to cross 250m earlier if I want to cross to get to Aeon in Shinonome from Toyosu? Sometimes the infrastructure misses a point.

Not to mention that this intersection in Shiohama is very awkward at best: from the north-west, going clockwise, we have: just stairs (north west corner), a long ramp for a bikes and pedestrians, a stair case with a ramp for bikers to push their bike up, and another elongated bike and pedestrian ramp. It's really weird that the north-west corner is completely lacking in bike support. Also, there's no real reason you'd want to cross Mitsume dori as the elongated ramps insist you might: I think there might be just as many trips where you'd have to cross mitsume dori again. Not to mention that if you just want to cross 環状３号線 you might be better of biking down the block, using the zebra crossing, and biking back up. It's a 100m detour and you don't have the cardio of climbing a ramp or carrying your bike up or down some stairs.

So yeah, some good ideas with Jaywalking: the fences are safe, and I think the principles are sound. But some places just... drop the ball.

This is really minor but something that boggled my mind. The maps in Tokyo are oriented for the viewer, not based on the compass.

IDK. I guess that's all I had to say. I'm fascinated that this was even a point worth noticing, and it's a good reflection on familiarity and hidden assumptions. Also, the maps here are otherwise brilliant. I also like the half-table half-map diagrams places have that explain how you should get to a place (example).

I don't actually know which approach is better. I guess they have interesting trade-offs.

Japanese stations can be massive and absurdly well-connected. (May be there is a profit incentive.)

Of course, there are the famous stations: Shinjuku has probably the same throughput as various other metro systems, Tokyo station is better described as a mall (and a conglomerate of at least five stations, really), and those are just the two biggest ones.

But the more fascinating point is not the massive "hauptbanhopf" or whatever -- a lot of places have really good massive main stations. The more interesting stations are the medium sized stations: for example, 豊洲 station has some really neat connections: it reaches from Lalaport through to the mall at Ciel Toyosu. It's really nice. And there's similar connectivity underground -- if not slightly more. 月島 is similarly nicely medium-sized, as is 住吉. It's convenient. And it's really nice that buildings have many ways to be reached. It's also really fun for exploring and getting places.

But you also get lost.

市ヶ谷 has sent me for a loop -- it has a transfer-only exit that I only understood after... exiting. (You exit the metro and enter JR.) That was frustrating. 飯田橋 is also kind of a maze. 日本橋 also has a confusing staircase that runs past a 銀座線 platform. But the worst is probably 永田町 or 赤坂見附駅 -- here's a whole video about it. Seriously. That thing on the 半蔵門線 is the wrong kind of cross-platform transfer (though the one at 赤坂見附 is good). 門前仲駅 is also not fully connected -- exit 1 and 2 are inacessible from the お江戸 line (but the fare gates don't charge you if you go the other way which is some odd magic), and the staircases up to the 東西線 force you to choose the direction at the bottom.

And then JR comes in with cross-platform transfers and rail arrangements that change to keep allowing more of those. If you look at the 総武線 and 中央線 from 御茶ノ水 through 新宿, particularly from 代々木 through 新宿, you see some really nice examples.

So yeah, it's not perfect. But there's some good and some bad.

The sheer number of places some train lines can go is startling.

The Yurakucho line comes with three or so branches. The Tozai line has extensible ends. But then the Hibiya line or Asakusa line come in with their double-ended branches. The Fukutoshin line can have a service that runs all the way onto the Yokohama metro. Some trains really never give up.

There's a trade-off: this might be why trains over-crowd and it does get genuinely confusing to understand if you're getting on the right train. (Here's an extreme example.) But I think the connectivity boost is worth it.

It is pleasant that drivers change per line. This feels like a good safety thing, though it may also have business rationales.

想像して下さい：喫茶店でカフェラッテ飲んで、会計を積む時コーヒーと牛乳の別払いがあって合計がほぼメニューで書かれていた数字。 調べたら、牛乳会社とコーヒー会社が違うから別払いになる。

Translation: imagine you're at a cafe. You order a latte. On the receipt, you see that the milk and coffee are itemized separately and their sum is about the total you'd seen on the menu. You ask about why and it's explained that the companies are different so the payments have been split.

That's what changing rail companies feels like. On one hand, it is a miracle that all this works -- even with through-lining. But the payments and ticketing are baffling.

Train chimes are somewhat famous in Japan. In fact, there is commentary on all the sounds of the train station. (That is the deliberate artificial ones, not the accidental shrieks of trains.)

One thing that is worth adding to the discussion is a minor observation on smaller stations: the voices are separated by gender. A female voice announces everything about one direction (usually bilingually in Tokyo), and a male voice announces the other. This is very useful for when they end up speaking in tandem -- you sort of realize which gender you need to follow. (Of course there's something to be said about the fact that gender is the axis JR and Tokyo Metro chose, but it works.)

A second thing that I have not fully understood is the sheer variety of the chimes. In particular, the train company seems to chose the chime per station. This means that, for one, Tatsumi has a small variety of chimes thanks to Tokyo Metro, Seibu, and Tobu. But also Toei has the lamest chime and it's the same per station.

It is rather shocking how many stroads Tokyo has. The 6-lane behemoths that tear a broad grid across Koto-ku are the closest to me. Many of these are quite obviously stroads: they connect lengths of the city while having businesses and side-streets draining into them everywhere.

However, to pretend that all stroads are the same cancer on the built environment feels strange. Or even to really look at all stroads as equals. After all, if a stroad is in the middle of a city, does it really serve the same purpose? I think there's a slight distinction, perhaps one that we could reason about.

From the driver's perspective, which I can only take in the US, I wouldn't think of fifth Avenue as a stroad, though it probably is. There's too much entropy on the large street for me to really think that I can go fast.

Furthermore, as a pedestrian, I am not unwelcome -- I could be more welcomed onto those six luxurious lanes -- but I feel like I have space (mostly) and that the cars are not particularly dangerous.

To explain this urban stroad, I think I want to co-opt the word "boulevard." I think the urban stroad is actually what the boulevard was supposed to be when the French drew these wider tree-lined carriageways across Paris.

In Tokyo, the boulevards that come to mind are Chuo-dori in Akihabara and Ometesando. Eitai-dori and Shin-Ohashi-dori are stroads (in places). I think the distinction is important. It classifies the overall use of the street (and later on road).

Now that I live in a city large enough for such mixes of usage and expectation, I'm realizing that the worst of stroads really is in the subarbs. They aren't good for cities, I'm sure, but their downsides are mitigated by density.

The better Japanese roadsides are the small streets and alleys.

Firstly, of course, the increased safety is paramount. These make alleys feasible.

With that bar cleared, we come to the best streets in Japan.

Imagine a world without sidewalks. Where you can saunter in the middle of the street without looking. Where you can go store-front to store-front not caring which side of the street they were on.

That is a small street in Japan.

And there are a lot of them. A lot of Tokyo is actually connected through the smaller streets and alleyways.

Some are even pedestrianized so you don't even have to think about the rare unwelcome car.

Car intersections are very interesting. There's a lot of potential innovation in this contrived realm of metal, plastic, traffic, and graph theory.

Of course the Dutch have smart lights and optimized clearance times. But a lot of what I'm trying to write here is how we don't have to strive to be Dutch, that landing somewhere along the way can be really beneficial too.

The one thing I find particularly odd is why these special right turning stop lines aren't a thing outside Japan. See this video for examples. You'll notice that on large enough intersections, there are places where, after the zebra crossing, there are a pair of lane lines turning right that end at a slanting stop line. The intent is that a right turning driver would stop before the zebra crossing on a red signal, but as the signal turns green, they can proceed to the next line where they can more clearly see oncoming traffic and the road they seek to go to.

These lanes feel like they add a lot of safety. They seem to make the right turn easier to make. And they make the intent of the cars clearer for pedestrians and cyclists.

That's just a little paint and a guideline from driving schools. Shouldn't be hard to add elsewhere.

(This is rather specific to Japanese where I'll be complaining about the scripts, in Japanese.)

日本語の特徴の一つは書き方です。文字を3つ持ってる特徴です。

慣れると読み安くなる書き方ですけど、ぱっと見れば分かりづらくもなれる。それに、同じ意味を現す全く違う書き方も含んだら、早めに理解できない。

「速度」は意外と様々なようにかかれています。見ていた限り：

• 速度
• そくど
• スピード

歩きながら見えたら普通に読んで進んだけど運転したら本当に読み切れる自信はない。

たまに、漢字と平仮名の差で同じ発音の文字列も別の意味を持つ。それを考えば、よりわかり難くなります。

When I first left Japan, my parents had a book titled "you know you've been in Japan too long when..." and then it had various (外人向け) jokes on things you get used to in Japan that don't really exist elsewhere. One of the ones that confused me was about parks: there was a picture of a park bench and a tree and the caption was along the likes of "... you think this is a park." I didn't understand it then and I don't fully understand it now.

May be the joke is jealous of the fact that you can get whisked away into quiet, serene spaces next to the loud bustle of the city. You do find the one-lot shrines almost everywhere and they somehow still create a vibe. The non-shrine park-like spaces are also nice. Perhaps the right word for these spaces is more like "square" -- like the few benches at Madison Square. Yes, the Japanese counterparts are still smaller, but they're also more frequent.

Some of these parks are actually more like New York's high-line: they reuse old rail rights of way to make pedestrian paradises.

The other tendency might just be a coincidence of where in Tokyo I am: since I'm in the reclaimed side, I see a lot of canals many have nice walking paths next to them. These tend to be quite pretty, especially if they have their own botanical features: willow trees, lotuses (depending on the purpose of the water), or flower beds. To continue comparing this with New York: imagine some water feature in the middle of the high-line.

As a kid, I had an anti-consumerist disdain for malls.

Not really.

There were two issues: that a lot of the shopping had nothing do to with me, and (particularly later on) that the malls were boring.

As an adult in Japan, both things are alleviated.

However, even if I don't have to actually shop at a mall, the accessibility and events generally draw me to malls in Tokyo anyway. I think a lot of malls in the US could exist by becoming more integrated with their surroundings: hosting events while beint easy to access.

There are two popular catch phrases in urban planning: the 15 minute city -- the idea that you can reach most of your daily needs in 15 minutes; and the gym of life -- the idea that walkability and existing in good urban planning leads to healthier lives since people will naturally tend to exercise.

I think these contradict a little bit: if you live in a 15 minute city you might be able to get insufficient time in the gym of life.

But also, the resolution is obvious: 15 minute cities are more inclusive to those with mobility impairments, so we should prioritize them. Those who need more time in the gym of life can expand their city: simply move beyond the 15 minutes.

When I grew up in Tokyo, Toyosu was some sort of limp vestigial island hanging off nicer bits of Koto-ku. When they opened lalaport in 2006, I was thoroughly confused, even as a kid, thinking "why is this nice mall in the middle of nowhere?"

Now, somehow, they decided to move chunks of Tsukiji there and are actively developing a tourist zone there. In fact, the Yurakucho line noticably empties there in the mornings and fills up there in the evenings. Furthermore, property values in Toyosu have sky-rocketed.

If we think about similar examples in the US, we stumble upon the word "gentrification." This is generally considered a "bad word." In particular, people believe that as property values rise, the people who lived there and the communities rooted there are displaced and something soulless comes in instead. Apparently this also happens in the UK.

I'd like to argue that this doesn't quite happen in Japan. Not in the sense that there aren't any similar issues, but in the sense that they are expressed differently.

I think the things I'd like to disentangle are: rising rent costs, the displacement of communities, and the soullessness of newer buildings.

I pay what I used to pay for rent in Pittsburgh within five kilometers of Tokyo station. Rent is not a huge issue in Japan.

It is higher in Tokyo and that is high relative to the average Japanese income, but it's not as obscene as New York or San Francisco.

The reason for this is apparently simply that Japan incentivizes building much more than other countries tend to, so the market tends to favor tentants instead of landlords.

So, simply, the issue of spiralling rents is not the same in Japan as it is in the US and the UK. Related YouTube video.

The most compelling critique of gentrification is that it comes at the expense of the community that was already there.

Toyosu is probably not a good example of that since it was built for gas works and then slowly built up a community that is still there. History lesson if you're interested. However, Tsukishima is an example.

Tsukishima has a long history, starting as a fishing island in the early 1600s before eventually growing to the island it is. The Tsukuda tower mansions came in in the 80s and completed the very different aesthetic.

There is some argument that the local businesses are being displaced. However, this displacement isn't quite the lack of opportunity that similarly displaced people in the US experience: it seems more like the displaced here do move upwards economically.

To me, it seems like gentrification in Japan isn't pure economic cruelty: it is just cultural change.

The average tower mansion or danchi has no soul. Especially compared to older buildings.

But caring about this is, I think, a Western set of values. Furthermore, with the fire hazards and earthquake risks, we can see that property actually depreciates over time here. Therefore, developers cannot really value aesthetics -- they end up valuing efficiency instead.

Simply, things are very different in Japan, but you can smell gentrification.

Anime covers Matsuris quite often and a lot of them are simply celebrations of folk festival so are a lot like the things in anime.

However, sometimes, you can find more than that: you can find the regional day that tells you about activities around you. This also lets you meet other people in the area and understand what's going on.

The city even can put out stalls about the local planning and events.

The accessibilty of stations and public transit is not perfect. There are some stations with few elevators -- particularly relative to the number of exits. Futhermore, many underground paths are randomly interrupted by stairs, sometimes with escalators.

Most busses are accessible -- unless overcrowded.

It's surprising not to see as many elevators around and ending up going up and down stairs.

Nagoya has a reputation of being a car-dependent city. It is near the Toyota plants, so there are people with the Cadillac or Flint style attachment to car manufacturing.

Nagoya is also known for having a sparse metro network. And the neighborhoods covered by the metro are, like streetcar subards, the oases of walkable areas. Areas far from the metro are either imporverished or car-dependent.

It's also apparently known that roads in Nagoya are wider, and unfamiliar visitors do not cross them quickly enough.

I learned this in Kobe, but it is by no means isolated to there.

商店街 are the best. Almost always pedestrianized shopping streets with the best local stores. Furthermore, almost all these streets have character -- small local shops you would never see elsewhere and nice vibes that only flourish in local streets made for thriving communities.

There are a few of these in Tokyo. Kagurazaka is like that towards the end (futher away from Idabashi), Monzennakacho has similar vibes, Sugamo has a really nice street by the station, and Sunamachi Ginza is a really nice bit of town to walk through.

Osaka's big 商店街aren't the same in that they have larger chain stores, but they still have a lot of personality, particularly compared to the main streets of Ginza and Roppongi in Tokyo.

Kobe also has a few different nice 商店街 too -- including its Chinatown.

Vocabulary is hard but also interesting. And vocabulary for a niche can extra fun by connecting different view-points on it. So here are some Japanese words.

語彙力を増やすのは難しいけど興味深いです。それに、専門用語を学んだら他の捉える方もわかるようになる。 でわ、街作りの英単語を見ましょう。

English	日本語	Notes on the Japanese	備考
Urban planning	街作り	It's more like "town's built state."	「アーバン計画」を意味する
Car dependent society	車社会	It's just "car society."	「Car dependence」は「車必要性」みたいな意味を持って、「車が必要社会」といいう意味です。
Through-lining	直通（電車）	You actually hear this in announcements, which I think is really cool.	日本では駅の案内等でよく聞かれる言葉ですけど、英語にはあんまり聞こえないです。