>Where do Americans like to vacation? Walkable places.
No, only some Americans vacation there. It's not like 80% of Americans all travel to European cities every year. In my observation, many Americans prefer to go to various US cities and rent cars, or to go to beach resorts, or spend their time on cruise ships drinking all day long.
>Americans will say that cars give them freedom to go anywhere, then complain all the good places don't have enough parking.
Right, this is one of the fundamental problems. Americans just don't understand that you can't have both.
>Anyways, I guess I'm jealous you get to live in Japan, because I totally wish that America could invest in our transit like Japan has.
Japan invested in transit because everything was already very dense. You can't just slap transit into a city like Houston and expect it to work out: you need high density to make it work. Living in Tokyo generally involves a LOT of walking (and stairs!); it's not like every destination is a block from a train station. It's why so many people own bicycles. Trains (and esp. subways) are extremely expensive to install and run and maintain, so you need very high ridership to make them work economically, and American cities outside of Manhattan just don't have that. You would need to change many things to get to Tokyo-level density; it'd be easier to just bulldoze the entire city and start over.
If you want to live in Japan and have tech skills, there's plenty of companies hiring here.
> No, only some Americans vacation there. It's not like 80% of Americans all travel to European cities every year. In my observation, many Americans prefer to go to various US cities and rent cars, or to go to beach resorts, or spend their time on cruise ships drinking all day long.
Of course it's not everyone, but it's more than just those that go to Europe. There are walkable pockets in America, and people go to them. Cruise ships are really mini walkable cities. Many beachy resort towns have a walkable commercial district. Disney is a giant walkable area, complete with a transit system.
I don't know all the history of Japan, of course, but I assume there some chicken-egg situation. If there is better transit, it'll encourage people to choose greater density (presuming it's legal to build). I would love the existing cities we have to (1) encourage dense, walkable buildings (eg. dense, w/ activated sidewalks) and (2) proactively build transit to suburban towns, to provide alternative transit options for commutes.
When I visited Japan, I noticed that beyond the typical subways of Tokyo, there are lots of regional trains that get to smaller cities outside of the megalopolis. I think that could be a great first step that America is equipped to do today. We have commuter rail in our biggest cities (eg. NYC), but we could continue to build that out to more places, to normalize using trains.
> If you want to live in Japan and have tech skills, there's plenty of companies hiring here.
Maybe I should learn Japanese first :) But a tempting proposition.
>I don't know all the history of Japan, of course, but I assume there some chicken-egg situation. If there is better transit, it'll encourage people to choose greater density
No, the history is exactly the same as those walkable European cities. The cities were built and grew (usually organically) long before the automobile was invented, or even before trains existed, back when people got around by walking and horse. Eventually, trains and subways were invented and installed in places. Cars came later, but by then the city was already there and quite large so there was no easy way to retrofit tons of parking spaces for everyone to drive everywhere. Subways weren't even built in Tokyo until well after the war, for instance; they're relatively recent. It's probably the same for most European cities.
American cities mostly grew after WWII and the popularization of the car, so they were designed for cars (outside very small downtown areas that predate the car, when the city had a small fraction of its later population).
Spending billions to build more train transit in American cities now doesn't work that well, because people still need cars to get from the train station to wherever they're going, because the density is so low. There's no real way to fix this, other than to change the policies to push for higher density, build a bunch of transit at taxpayer expense, and then wait a few decades for it to not be an economic black hole, all while voters are mad that they're paying SO much money for a transit system that has low ridership and continues to cost them dearly.
>(2) proactively build transit to suburban towns, to provide alternative transit options for commutes.
That only works well if 1) you build lots of parking at the suburban train stations for everyone to park in, and 2) everyone is generally going to a very small number of destinations (e.g. downtown). These days, though, the workplaces are usually in more suburban areas away from the city center.
>When I visited Japan, I noticed that beyond the typical subways of Tokyo, there are lots of regional trains that get to smaller cities outside of the megalopolis.
Yes, but those smaller cities themselves are generally walkable and dense too. They're not like American suburbs.
>We have commuter rail in our biggest cities (eg. NYC)
Right, because so many jobs are actually in NYC, so people need to commute there, and driving into (central) NYC is infeasible because there's no parking and the roads aren't that large. This is totally abnormal for American cities. NYC is extremely unusual. It's a very old city built mostly long before the car was invented, just like those European cities. The only other places in America like that are now just small downtown districts, such as the French Quarter in New Orleans, or the boarded-up downtown districts of dying rust belt cities like Gary, Indiana.
>Maybe I should learn Japanese first :) But a tempting proposition.
The companies recruiting foreigners usually have English as their working language. Learning some Japanese certainly helps, and makes it much easier to live daily life outside work here, but for those companies it's not a requirement.
No, only some Americans vacation there. It's not like 80% of Americans all travel to European cities every year. In my observation, many Americans prefer to go to various US cities and rent cars, or to go to beach resorts, or spend their time on cruise ships drinking all day long.
>Americans will say that cars give them freedom to go anywhere, then complain all the good places don't have enough parking.
Right, this is one of the fundamental problems. Americans just don't understand that you can't have both.
>Anyways, I guess I'm jealous you get to live in Japan, because I totally wish that America could invest in our transit like Japan has.
Japan invested in transit because everything was already very dense. You can't just slap transit into a city like Houston and expect it to work out: you need high density to make it work. Living in Tokyo generally involves a LOT of walking (and stairs!); it's not like every destination is a block from a train station. It's why so many people own bicycles. Trains (and esp. subways) are extremely expensive to install and run and maintain, so you need very high ridership to make them work economically, and American cities outside of Manhattan just don't have that. You would need to change many things to get to Tokyo-level density; it'd be easier to just bulldoze the entire city and start over.
If you want to live in Japan and have tech skills, there's plenty of companies hiring here.