Comments on: Things I Didn’t Know

By: chris hutt

chris hutt — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 21:00:32 +0000

Google Street View is available for Tokyo so you can wander along and see for yourself. Mostly narrow streets with absolutely no parking on the street. It’s a weird world to west European eyes.

By: Richard Green

Richard Green — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 16:53:12 +0000

In most Japanese cities the blocks (and thus non-major roads) reflect the boundaries of rice paddies that were there for several hundred years prior and influenced the division of land. I think the causality is definately the result of the limited width of the roads rather than conscious urban planning.

And if you think it’s absurd that long gone agriculture has such a large effect on modern urban environments, consider the pencil skyscrapers built where the scrap of land under a food stall was sold. It must be just too hard to acquire a lump of adjacent properties when families sat in the same place for generations.

In terms of parking, in Osaka at least, many suburban streets are full of houses sitting over an open (but not enclosed) parking area for cars and bikes. It tends to make every street feel like an alleyway.

Making walkable environments places that aren’t visually appealing to walk through!

By: Colin

Colin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:47:32 +0000

I lived in rural Japan, and the same law was in effect there - you had to show evidence of your car space before you could register a car. There were a minimal car spaces in my apartment building, but I managed to rent one from the landlord. That’s what most people do. From memory if you owned a house you didn’t have to prove you had a car space - it was assumed you had one. No parking allowed on the street though!