Ever since ditching car culture and joining the urbanist cause (on the internet at least but that has to change), I’ve noticed that some countries always top the list when it comes to good urbanism. The first and most oblivious one tends to be The Netherlands but Germany and Japan also come pretty close. But that’s strange considering that both countries have huge car industries. Germany is (arguably) the birthplace of the car (Benz Patent-Motorwagen) and is home to Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and BMW. Japan is home to Toyota, Honda, Nissan and among others. How is it that these countries have been able to keep the auto lobby at bay and continue investing in their infrastructure?
It may not be as bad as the US, but Car culture in Germany has left it’s impact on german citys as well. Both Munich and Berlin for example have massiv highways going right through them. And keeping that at bay or even reversing it is an ongoing struggle.
Source: lived in both citys
I thought Munich was bad (lived there and in its suburbs for most of my life) but I recently moved to Leipzig. Jesus Christ.
Lol, have you been to Germany? It’s not a concrete hellscape like some of the US, but it’s very car centric if you compare it to e.g. Denmark or Netherlands.
Edit: also, German car lobby is powerful, that’s why their highways are free to use and constantly maintained and kept at a high quality. Trains on the other hand are constantly being delayed and have to slow down due to bad rail quality
German asphalt sucks though, compared to Dutch asphalt
Just use Belgium as the baseline, then everyone in Europe has great asphalt
I am very certain that here in Belgium they simply don’t put on the top layer of the finer wearing layer.
I watched the workers work on a road as I biked to and from work. They were done in 2 days and they put down 1 single layer on top of the base layer that they tore down too. It was extremely course, not nearly liquid enough (probably not enough binders), and after a week or so now of medium traffic, it acts only a little better than a loose gravel road.
It will probably be a wreck in a year because that is a high traffic road by the container park with a lot of trucks moving.
Not surprising. The Netherlands has way more money per square meter.
Both germany and japan have really strong car culture and fucked up rural infrastructure . The cities having nice public transit ≠ the country.
You can take a train to nearly every corner of japan. Japanese cities make sure you have a parking spot before you can buy a car. There is very little on street parking so many streets are open. The streets are narrow and often able to be shared between pedestrians and slow traffic. Roads specifically meant for cars are often seperated from pedestrians.
Japan has done a lot more than most other countries. Rural areas will always be more difficult to service due to their density but i still think japan has done better there than most.
Thier housing culture also makes it easier to move where you want to, which should make moving from rural to the city more feasable for those whom can’t handle the rural lifestyles.
In the popular perception sure. Having lived in Japan, reality is far different. Anywhere outside of cities has no sidewalk, in places where there would be some in europe. Train stations that are rural have no bus connections at all (having grown up in switzerland, this was hard to get used to). Cars are seen very highly, to the point where they have priority over everything else in planning.
And for tourists, sure the shinkanzen is cheap, because the tourism tickets are affordable, but the average person can barley afford it. And most use planes to get around where could be covered by shinkanzen.
Japan is similar to France, excellent tranit in between cities (fast trains; but expensive), cities have a robust network. But the rest of the country is unlivable without a car.
Switzerland is very car centric too, and we’re less good at high speed trains and comprehensive urban transit. But man, the rural trains + buses means you can get literally anywhere without a car. Japan doesn’t have that at all, despite being extremely dense like switzerland.
Im plagued by a north american perspective where anything more than hourly bus service is considered excellent transit service. I’m steps from downtown in my city and even downtown there are streets with sidewalks only along one side, causing extra time and crossings for pedestrians.
Japan absolutely hasn’t commited to car priority, if they did they would have abolished proof of parking spots for ownership and would jave opened nearly every square inch of their cities as free on street parking. They may be giving cars more space and priority than in the past but they havent bulldozed half their city for surface level parking and 6+ lane roads (or at least they haven’t done so as extremely as north america). Japan can still shift away from car ownership being madatory for life, much of north america is already trapped in that mindset.
I’ve also lived in Japan and my experience is that people rarely fly domestically and almost always take the train. But since domestic travel is so expensive, their vacations are often international instead of within Japan.
Definitely not the case where I lived (rural Niigata prefecture), but I was friends with people who were definitely poor.
Switzerland is very car centric too, and we’re less good at high speed trains and comprehensive urban transit.
Maybe, but Switzerland has the most rail usage per capita making it arguably the most rail centric country in the world.
we do. But still everything is built for cars and train is a second thought. We have great infrastructure, because in the past this was different. But currently, we’re barely investing in the train system, the infrastructure is starting to bottleneck (the Geneva - Lausanne axis is a disaster already), whilst we are adding more and more highway lanes. The far right party has had control over the transport ministry for a while now, and it is showing.
Well, cars are certainly important everywhere in the world and still too important in Switzerland. But relatively speaking compared to other countries they’re really not that important.
Right now there’s a vote coming up to build more highways, it’ll be interesting to see how that turns out.
To put some numbers on things, we spend 4-5 billion per year on rail, we spend 8.8billion over the next 3 years on road maintenance plus total another 11 billion until 2030 for new road infrastructure. I wouldn’t call that ‘barely investing’, it seems roughly equal to me.
One factor that may ‘help’ japan in getting less car-centric over time is that the japanese rural areas and the smallest rank of cities are basically depopulating (dying out), with young people (and not so young too) moving to large cities and metropolises (like Tokyo). So, more % of japanese people will live in the not car-centric areas. Tourism will of course exist for some rural and small urban areas, but that occasional use can be served by short term car rentals.
Anime Manga <> Reality
Dunno… Maybe because the companies are not in charge of running the country?
And on top of that, i believe most of those cars are sold in the US…
For most german automakers the biggest market has actually been China for a while.
Ahh right on. Either case they are an export item that’s not staying in country.
But they are. Lobbyism is literally the problem why nothing is happening to further prevent climate change.
So having been to Japan and ridden the trains there I genuinely can’t imagine Tokyo where everyone drives. And once you have that and the Shinkansen you may as well build out a strong train network. But also, in bumfuck Japan everyone drives. Just because you can take a train to the middle of nowhere doesn’t mean you don’t need to drive when you get there
Germany should not be in the same conversation as Japan when it comes to urban planning. Germany is very much car centric and most German cities are hideous.
…while Japanese cities are beautiful…LMAOOOO
They’re cleaner and more pleasant than German cities. I haven’t been to a Japanese city as gross as Frankfurt.
“The auto lobby at bay” sounds weird in the ears of a German whose city is being flooded with cars and whose life is being endangered by reckless drivers every day…
It’s not as bad as the US but it’s far from good. Germany is car brain country, and it shows in ugly ways.
Generally i agree, is far from good. Where is it good though other than the Netherlands and a few select cities?
You got that right: The point is that it’s good in only a very few places. The people complaining are not whining or so - car brainism really is a big, big problem all over the world.
So you’re focused on withstanding road brain.
After WW2 everyone was broke. In Germany there was no money to build new massive freeway projects. No one had money to buy cars anyway. You can watch the movie “Judgment at Nuremberg”, it’s fiction but one thing that stuck out to me was people riding bicycles. They also had a lot of things to focus on. It took a long time to get things back on track.
Japan also had no money, though they did try the car thing for a while afaik. There were many problems. First was there was not much room for the cars and car parks. Land is tight there. Second was there was no massive domestic gasoline production. I think they finally realized that if everyone drove like Americans, that they would be sending a ton of money outside the country for oil.
As for how Japan became home to massive car companies. First the lack of resources led to the Japanese car companies making a new production technique called Just It Time manufacturing. Instead of lots of inventory of parts to assemble, they timed everything to arrive just in time. Sometimes called lean manufacturing. It may not sound like much but it leads to much cheaper production. And they committed to high quality with “Andon” which was a pull cord workers could pull to stop the line and call management over to quality or production issues. They really got the manufacturing process down because of necessity. Finally they really needed things to export, cars were one of them. Cars are high value and relatively easy to export.
The German domestic market was still big enough on its own to keep their companies aloft. I’m not sure how those expanded.
It’s due to different reasons, but very little to do with car manufacturing.
Cities in Europe are blessed and cursed with being established long before cars. This makes it expensive to expand the roads, and it is also difficult to increase the size of cities outwards, because there’s not a lot of available land anywhere. So when populations increases, it makes sense to make public transport better, because it’s the cheaper and only option.
It’s not all good though. Only the largest cities have good public transport. Smaller towns are increasing outwards because rural land is cheaper. Parking is limited or costly in the centres, so people drive out of the town for shopping where parking is free and easy. This kills the businesses in small town centres despite their population growth. A large group of the population living outside the capitals is currently getting more and more car dependent, not by choice, but by necessity.
Japan is different. They simply planned ahead and invested heavily in public transport in the years after the war, 1947-1987 before their population grew. They literally built railroads and the Tokyo metro before it was needed. With huge success. The cities grew with the public transport.
Another historical difference is that while both European and Japanese public transport started as government projects and both have since been privatized, the fragmentation in European states and municipalities have made it difficult to do in a profitable way. It’s usually government subsidized, and therefore still depending on local political will to budget for it, while the larger Japanese railway companies are (somewhat) less dependent on local political budgets. In short: JR rail can more easily add another departure if they think it makes sense, whereas a European railroad company would need to know how much the government is willing to pay for having more departures etc.
I do have hopes that Europe will catch up again, because the long term environmental pledges are pushing politicians in the right direction. It’s no longer enough to only consider the cost and corporate interests. The people want less pollution and traffic and vote accordingly.
Many cities is europe expanded beyond their medieval borders. Their cities are built better because they are designed better and more thoughtfully. The American methods is more like a cookie cutter, just place the same things anywhere they can fit.
Europe is better designed because people actually took the time to plan their cities, not just because they are old.
Europe is generally planned according to 1000 year old desire paths.
James May of Top Gear fame actually went into this in an episode of “Cars of the People” season 2 episode 1. Basically, he claims it was actually World War II that set things on that course. Pretty enlightening episode IMHO. Worth a watch for a history lesson.
I think for Germany it’s simply the fact that our infrastructure grew in large parts before the invention of the car, plus it’s, compared to the US, very densely populated. So it’s easier to create a useful rail system, there isn’t enough space in the cities for to many cars, even though there are way to many for my taste.
Large export markets.
Infrastructure funding for other transportation modes combined with less subsidizing of gasoline.
Japan focuses on overall health and how a building fits into its environment rather than focusing solely on urban development and expansion as a means unto itself, its urban planning is very environment and people- focused.
their priorities are better, so they plan and execute cities, factories and planned environments that fit into an existijg system and are better for people.
it doesn’t mean that capitalism and development doesn’t have a place in their society, but it does mean that it has a specific place.
Anime and Manga and a one week trip which I spent in Akihabara is my only source of Japan knowledge moment
I reckon being bombed to oblivion during World War 2 gave opportunity for re-designing their cities.
Not at all, at least in the case of Japan. Most of their roads are old and narrow, designed before cars were a thing.
The opposite was the case in Germany, sadly. Partly because of the destruction in WW2, the city planners in the late 50s went a bit nuts with their concept of the „autogerechte Stadt“, the car-centric city. Many cities still suffer from that period of planning madness, but it gets better. At least there, where conservative shits like the CDU aren’t ruling.