You would expect lots and lots of traffic in a city with so many people like Tokyo, and while the central business core and expressways are infamous for their traffic jams, most of the Tokyo core is quite busy but amazingly uncluttered with cars.
The only American city you can compare to Tokyo is New York City, and there really is no comparison. The Big Apple is home to eight million people, while Tokyo has fourteen million, and Yokohama, the commercial suburb just to its south along Tokyo Bay has morphed into Japan’s #2 with almost four million. So, we’re talking about eighteen million people living in and around Tokyo.
New York City is a perpetually gridlocked traffic scrum, with taxis honking their horns and emergency sirens wailing at all hours of the day, clogged intersections, and accidents popping up like clockwork. In comparison, Tokyo central is almost eerily quiet and devoid of vehicular traffic. It’s a model of efficiency. And you only see pedestrian and train jams.
There is a maze of highways, train tracks, and pedestrian sky ways, running right through Tokyo wherever you go. It’s like Future World. And every road, bridge, sidewalk, train track — ALL of the public infrastructure — is meticulously maintained.
Inna and I regularly walked the Tokyo streets at what one would assume was rush hour only to find virtually vacant streets. To prove this point, we often stepped out into the middle of a major boulevard and snapped a photo at, say, nine in the morning and there were only a handful of vehicles — usually just buses.
Tokyo is a town designed for transit, pedestrians, and bicycles. And the city planners have devised and ingenious way to reduce traffic by putting traffic lights at every intersection and then timing it so the lights are not synchronized, thus making it a giant pain in the ass to drive. It takes forever to get anywhere in a car. Without any real traffic to speak of, it still takes about ten minutes to drive just a mile which is essentially walking speed.
Now, this cannot be accidental, not in a city where they move 80,000 people each hour by train. Some folks have referred to the Tokyo train system as a daily mass migration. And that’s not hyperbole. We’re talking twenty million people on trains every day between 5 AM and midnight. That’s a larger number than the population of almost one hundred countries in the world and twice the world’s population each year! And they do it on time. Because if they didn’t, the whole damn system would implode. So, when they say that Train #105 on the Subu Line will leave the Chiba Station at 9:43 AM, it’s on the move at exactly 9:43. I rode a lot of trains during my recent stay and I looked at my watch every time, and every train I took arrived and departed precisely on time. It was incredible!
If the powers that be wanted vehicular traffic to run efficiently, they could easily do it. But they don’t. Why? Because they don’t like cars, and they don’t want them on their streets. If you doubt my words, consider this: they provide way more parking lots and garages for bikes than cars.
I didn’t realize all this until I noticed on about the third day in-country what it was that made Japanese streets look so different than their American or European counterparts. No parking. They do not provide on-street parking. That space is for bikes and buses. And if you don’t like it, then don’t drive.
And you know what? It works!
