8 City and Town Planning Thoughts from My Trip to Japan

I just got back from two weeks in Japan.

This will not be another “high-speed trains rule, Amtrak drools” article. I don’t need to tell you that the state of passenger trains in the U.S. compared to Japan makes me want to sob each time I stand on the platform at Harlem-125th St.

Here are some thoughts I had as I wandered around Japan.

1) Order and Punctuality Extends to More Than Trains

The trains are frequent, on-time, and clean. And comfortable. With cushions.

Yet as I rode in busy trains, I noticed many cultural norms beyond the cleanliness.

“Priority Seats”

On a busy Osaka train car, I noticed that four seats stayed empty, the ones listed for the elderly, disabled, pregnant, or otherwise what we might call “priority seating” in the U.S. It’s as if they had a forcefield around them.

Nobody sits in the priority seating unless you’re a priority person.

Standing Areas While You Wait for a Train

While you wait for a train, there are signs on the floor for where to stand depending on which train you’re taking, and sometimes even which car to board.

Nobody Crosses the Street Until the Crosswalk Light Changes

In New York, you walk if it’s clear, regardless of the walk signal.

In Japan, everyone waits for the crosswalk to change. At first, I hated this. With time, I saw the upside.

You don’t hear honking horns or citizens yelling at each other or even those silent stare-downs we give each other as we negotiate street space. I’m quite fond of staring down a driver who cuts me off on my bike in New York. There’s no need for such passive-aggression in Tokyo or Kyoto.

Perhaps… Too Much Order in Parks and Pedestrianized Places

Japanese cities felt to me like the calm of a placid lake. They are active and brimming with life, yet it maintains a serenity that led me to inhale some deep breaths of fresh air.

Yet, I also found myself so tempted to dart across crosswalks, scram up escalators, and chat it up inside train cars.

I found myself asking, all this cleanliness and order is a marvel, but do I want this? Would I trade the New York City subway for this?

I noticed as I strutted around a city like Kyoto or Tokyo, or as I sat down on a train car that had a cushion and no sign of any trash or mysterious liquid, that I would answer yes. Yes I would trade New York City’s subway for this.

I’ll never talk on the subway, fast-walk across a red crosswalk light, or run up an escalator again if I could have Japan’s public transit system.

Craig Mod, an American who has lived in Japan for many years, understands this far better than I ever will, and I love the piece he wrote about the differences between New York and Tokyo.

2) For The Love of God, New York, Invest in Platform Doors

Every single train I took had what are called “Platform Doors.” These are panels that run the length of the platform that slide open only once a train has pulled in and lined up with them.

Yes, they save lives. In New York City, roughly 100 people die each year on the tracks.

After seeing it in Japan, lacking this protection makes me feel like we are living in the time before the widespread use of seatbelts. It seems dumb that we let ourselves get so close, with no protection whatsoever, to oncoming trains.

But there’s more to this.

When a New York City Subway train comes down the tracks, I instinctively look over my shoulder and take a few steps back. It’s a few seconds of heightened stress I could go without. As we all step back, we lose our good spot to board. It’s another reason why we could never have assigned standing areas.

As I sat on a Kyoto metro, I googled the benefits of platform doors and read them aloud to Shylin, who (almost) always patiently listens to me talk about urban planning.

They’re not only safer, but they lead to faster boarding because people can stand right up to the platform before the train comes. Faster boarding means faster trains.

New York is about to spend $7.7 billion to build the next phase of the Second Avenue Subway. It should… probably have platform doors.

3) U.S. Bikeshare Apps Are Terrible

This is coming from one of Citi Bike’s biggest fans.

I used three different bikeshare apps between Kyoto and Tokyo.

I’d like to formally lodge my request for Luup, Tokyo’s biggest e-bike share, to attempt to break up Citi Bike’s monopoly in New York.

Unlike the Citi Bikes, the Luup bikes are light and easy to maneuver. You get a little electric kick, but they don’t “jump” out of the gate as a Citi Bike does.

Just like cars in Japan vs the U.S., these e-bikes in Japan are lighter, more nimble, more efficient, and safer.

I prefer Luup’s bike design for a rented e-bike. But even Lime, with more or less the same design as we have in the U.S, and which is owned by Uber, a U.S. company, was better than the U.S. version.

There are three obvious features U.S. bike and scooter share systems need that the ones in Japan I used all had.

A Place to Hold Your Phone for Directions

As well as I know New York City, when I’m riding Citi Bikes around, I often have to pull over and take my phone out to check directions.

All bike shares I used in Japan had a phone holder attached.

In-App Directions

In addition to that, when you start a ride on Luup, you can select the parking area where you plan on going. (You can change it at any time.) Then, Luup will give you live directions.

It’s so obvious, and yet, we don’t have these features. How come Lyft can figure out how to tell us where to turn in a car, but not where to turn on a bike with the same app? (Remember, Lyft owns Citi Bike and many other major U.S. bikeshare systems.)

Designated Parking and a Required Picture

A common critique of scooter and bike shares in the U.S. is that people leave the bikes and scooters, in puddles, on sidewalks, and in ditches.

In Japan, they had designated parking spots. The apps all told you if the nearby parking was full before you got there. Once you parked, you had to take a photo of your parked bike.

It seems these types of things are just common sense.

4) Cyclists Are On the Side Streets

Throughout my trip, from place to place, I saw dozens or hundreds of parked bicycles all over the place. I saw them in big cities and small cities and towns.

Yet, I also didn’t see a ton of cyclists on the streets at first.

I also noticed that the main thoroughfares in cities seemed just as unfriendly to bikes as any in New York City. In fact, I don’t think I saw a single protected bike lane.

That’s when, while wandering on a side street in the small city of Takayama, away from the touristy area, it hit me. People bike on the side streets. These are the types of streets with light traffic and no sidewalks. Therefore, pedestrians walk in the street too. When cars come, they go slow.

In New York, we take the bike lane fights to the major streets and avenues. Maybe we’d have more luck designating side streets as low-traffic areas and priority corridors for bikes. Maybe we wouldn’t.

5) Irrigation Systems and Rice Farming

One thing I loved about walking through the center of a small city, Takayama, was hearing water rush underneath my feet. Are these tiny rivers everywhere? Not exactly. They go in straight lines and are surrounded by stone. They are manmade and managed.

Here are a few of my favorites. From small towns to be cities, like small streams and entire rivers, water surrounds you in Japan.

It feels like bringing some nature into ordinary city blocks. There is something about water rushing over rocks, whether humans or glaciers put them there, that draws us in and calms us down.

There’s something there that urban planners would do well to listen to.

I noticed, though, that these streams always surround a bright green grass-looking crop: rice.

When I looked further at a plot of rice, I noticed that the rice sat in a swamp of this water. I looked this up and learned that the excess water in the rice crop drowns weeds that otherwise compete against the rice and keeps pests out. No pesticides needed.

In Takayama, we toured an “Edo period” (Samurai military rule) building turned into a museum. The Samurai bureaucrats had a whole room to store rice.

The museum explained that they dug up many of these water channels in the 17th century. The Samurai maintained power with this. They managed and taxed rice with an iron fist.

These irrigation streams sitll bring water to cities and village, and even provide hydroelectric power. It’s infrastructure that does three or four or five things. At the same time, it makes the cities feel and sound calmer.

As a community gardener in New York, of course, I also reflected on where these rice farms were. They weren’t these massive stretches like the corn farms in the U.S. Midwest. They were right between houses, in small towns and big cities.

They grow food, but these rice areas are also stormwater reservoir. A city with rice floods less than a city with pavement. And you can’t eat pavement.

6) No Concept of a Lawn

Even from my very first morning, when I went on a jet-lagged early morning walk near Mt. Fuji, I noticed that the concept of a lawn didn’t seem to exist. If vacant space wasn’t filled with rice, it was filled with backyard gardens.

Every house, it seemed to me, had their own garden. Sometimes it was a food garden, as onions and tomatoes in neat rows formed the space of the “backyard.”

Other times, I noticed an appeal to an aesthetic garden that our Western imagination may think of as a “Japanese garden.” It may have manicured shrubs and colorful flowers and lined walking paths.

Whatever the case, Japan seems to have (wisely) rejected the expensive and resource-intensive waste that is the American Lawn.

7) Sign Me Up for 7am Town-Wide Stretches

I woke up in a hostel right outside the small town of Shirakawago.

It was a small mountain village, but dense and walkable. The hostel had a little patio, and I made a green tea and sat outside. It was just past 7am when loudspeakers around the village sounded in unison. Of course, I have no idea what it said, but then I saw dozens of people exit their homes, most of them with children. Out in the streets, they started doing a series of stretches, changing every few seconds as the loudspeaker announced a brief message.

Another woman at the hostel, who I assume was Japanese, stood up to do it it with them. So I joined in. I mimicked the same stretches, twisting, and leaning as they did.

8) Tiny Cars

Japan’s cars are small and cute. I mean, check out this pickup truck.

They cost less and use less gas. They’re easier to park and operate.

Do they even hold less stuff? I don’t think so.

Contrast that with the U.S, where cars are getting bigger and more dangerous. The problem of enlarging U.S. cars first was an urbanism topic, which City Nerd covered back in 2023. He explained that pickup trucks and SUVs for sale in the U.S. are getting bigger. They cost more. Their raised eyesight level for drivers means more blindspots, and it means they kill more often when they strike pedestrians and drivers.

This problem is now getting more attention. This year, the New York Times covered it in The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and SUVs.

Maybe we should just, like the Japanese, get smaller cars and drive them less.

That’s all I got. For a previous installement, check out city planning lessons from Medellin.