Lesson from Tokyo: How to Become a Human-centric City

https://www.drivesweden.net/nyheter/lesson-tokyo-how-become-human-centric-
city#:~:text=However%2C%20the%20much%20bigger%20reason,have%20somewhere%20to%20park
%20it.

Thursday, April 27, 2023

Tokyo is one of the most anti-car big cities in the world, even though it is
impossible to say so about the rest of Japan. How did Tokyo resist the car?

While other big cities are almost invariably car dependent, Tokyo somehow managed
to become more human-centric in its design. This may seem surprising, given the
futuristic sheen the Japanese capitol has. The city, however, its surprisingly
quiet: little traffic noise, honking, or engine noise can be heard because there
are so few cars on the streets. There generally aren’t even cars parked along the
side of the road. There are, of course, cars in Tokyo but the city has the lowest
car use in the world. Only 12 percent of journeys are done by private car. Cycling
accounts for 17 percent of journeys, and Tokyo has the most used public transport
system in the world, with 30 million people commuting by train each day.

Japan as a whole is quite different than the wider country. This isn’t too
surprising, considering that Japan is the country of Toyota, Honda, and Nissan,
exporting vehicles all over the world. And a lot of Japanese people do own cars.
Overall car ownership in Japan is about 590 vehicles per 1,000 people (1.06 cars
per household), which is less than American’s rate of about 800 per 1,000. However,
Tokyo is a big exception with only 0.32 cars per household. Most Japanese car
owners live in smaller towns and cities. For example, the highest rate of car
ownership is in Fukui Prefecture, on the western coast of Honshu, one of Japan’s
least densely populated areas.

So, how has Tokyo managed to become an anti-car paradise? Andre Sorensen, a
professor of urban planning at the University of Toronto says that the fact that
Tokyo is not built around the car has a lot to do with the history of urban
planning in Japan. Japanese street layouts were traditionally narrow. 35 percent of
Japanese streets are not actually wide enough for a car to travel down them and 86
percent are not wide enough for a car to be able to stop without blocking the
traffic behind it. However, the much bigger reason for Tokyo being an anti-car
paradise is that Japan does not subsidize car ownership in the way other countries
do. Moreover, buying a car is not that simple. To be allowed to purchase a car, you
must be able to prove that you have somewhere to park it. Even without this “garage
certificate” owning a car in Japan without having a dedicated parking space would
be a nightmare. Under a nationwide law, overnight street parking of any sort is
illegal (otherwise you would get fined around $1,700). This partly explains why the
car ownership rate in rural areas is relatively high compared to Tokyo.

Parking rules are not the only reason that keeps cars out of Tokyo. According to
Sorensen, a bigger reason is that from the beginning cars did not have an unfair
advantage in their competition with other forms of transport, which is reflected in
how Japan has never made expressways free (tolls in Japan are the most expensive in
the world) and how neglected they were compared to expressways in the United States
or Europe. So, unlike the rest of the world, the post-war era saw the construction
of enormous amounts of rail infrastructure. When America was nationalizing and
cutting its railways to cope with the failing demand for train travel, in Japan the
national railway company was pouring investment into the system.

Personal Comment:

This example is not about the successful transformation from a car-centric city to
a city where people make conscious decisions about using public transportation
instead of private cars. Replicating the Tokyo model, which has seen some success
in other Asian cities that have significantly reduced vehicle ownership, might be
extremely challenging in other major cities. In fact, just a three hour train ride
to the south Toyota subsidiary Woven is working on a futuristic city model that
incorporates high levels of autonomy. This isn’t an attempt to build a small Tokyo
either, which may in part be due to the OEM backing of the project.

Unlike Tokyo many cities around the world already have an infrastructure built
around cars along with high car ownership. The culture in many of those cities
would have to change significantly, because they currently say ‘yes’ to private car
ownership, as it were. In my opinion, Tokyo has managed to create a more human-
centric city due to a perfect combination of circumstances rather than succeeding
in overturning the challenges much of the world is currently facing.

Despite that, Tokyo is a good example of a city that shows how people and the city,
in general, can function well without cars. The earlier a city starts investing in
efficient and reliable public transportation system and reducing the investment in
parking and everything that is related to private cars, the earlier the city can
become a place for people and not for cars.

The Written by Kateryna Melnyk,

RISE Mobility & Systems

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How Tokyo became an anti-car paradise
https://longreads.com/2023/05/15/how-tokyo-became-an-anti-car-paradise/

Daniel Knowles | Heatmap | April 11, 2023 4,284 words

by Cheri Lucas Rowlands
May 15, 2023
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Thirty million people commute by train each day in Tokyo, and among wealthy cities,
the Japanese capital has the lowest car use in the world. In this excerpt from his
book, Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It, Daniel Knowles
explains how and why Tokyo was built to be human-centric and relatively car-free,
making it an unexpectedly calm major city that’s functional but also pleasant to
walk and live in.

And even if you are willing to pay all of the taxes, you cannot simply go and buy a
car in the way that you might in most countries. To be allowed to purchase a car,
you have to be able to prove that you have somewhere to park it. This approval is
issued by the local police, and is known as a shakoshomeisho, or “garage
certificate.” Without one, you cannot buy a car. This helps to explain why the
Japanese buy so many tiny cars, like the so-called Kei cars. It means they can have
smaller garages. Even if the law didn’t exist though, owning a car in Japan without
having a dedicated parking space for it would be a nightmare. Under a nationwide
law passed in 1957, overnight street parking of any sort is completely illegal. So
if you were to somehow buy a car with no place to store it, you could not simply
park it on the street, because it would get towed the next morning, and you would
get fined 200,000 yen (around $1,700). In fact, most street parking of any sort is
illegal. There are a few exceptions, but more than 95 percent of Japanese streets
have no street parking at all, even during the day.