Same here. When I left Japan to move back to the U.S., some of the things that seemed really odd to me were: 1) sweeter food, 2) obese people, 3) old cars driving around, 4) having to drive everywhere, even just to get to a small store, and 5) arriving via car at stores that sold things like electronics and office supplies that looked like throwbacks to a bygone era compared to what they had in Japan. As a small example of the latter, in 1997 I was using the Hi-Tec-C pen and I'm pretty sure I didn't see it for sale in the U.S. until 2007 or so.

> 4) having to drive everywhere

I can imagine that people who have grown up in walkable neighborhoods, would find a totally car-based lifestyle annoying. But how will those people feel who have made the move in the opposite direction? If someone moves from e.g. Texas to e.g. NYC or London, will they feel restricted or liberated when they walk, and use the metro? Or will they try to keep driving everywhere?

Good question. Speaking just for myself, I moved from a mainly-driving area to a small urban center residence some years back, and the walking aspect was great. I mean, walking to the library for the first time, I almost cried tears of joy.

At my previous residence going to the library meant a ten-minute drive, which wasn't so bad, and now it was a three-minute walk. (Interestingly I just realized that I usually lived about a ten-minute drive from the libraries near where I lived, back in Japan) I guess I could say I felt more liberated, almost like I was part-owner of the downtown space, and it was no longer a destination that I felt I had to plan to visit. The car no longer felt so necessary-though I still used it--and riding my bicycle felt like more of a natural fit.

I second that. I live in a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden & its a pretty walkable area. The library is litrally 2 minutes walk from my apartment. I had tears in my eyes when I walked it two years back for the first time in my life. My son's day care is 5 minutes walk. The nearest shop is 3 minutes walk. The bus/train station is 6 minutes walk. I take train to reach office which takes 35 minutes door to door. Guess what, I rarely take my car out. May be I switch my car on twice a week or sometimes once a week just to warm up the engine.

There is a lake with swimming beach in summer and a forest which is around 10 minutes walk. These are all the things which are truly priceless. And I wish everyone sometimes in their lives experience this, how much good it is to walk to do almost everything you want.

I grew up in regional Australia in an area where you needed a car to get anywhere or do anything. It was hell. I fled from there to the middle of a city the second I was old enough to do so and could not imagine going back.

P.S. based on the short amount of time I've spent in Texas I would rank it as one of the most horrible places I've visited on the face of this planet. I cannot comprehend how anyone would voluntarily live there. The same goes for anywhere (including suburban Australia) with vast expanses of low density housing. You have all of the bad parts of living in a city (low privacy, crime, lack of natural spaces) with none of the good (proximity to services, cultural density, high quality mass transit, entertainment etc).

I don't think anyone particularly likes public transport or car transport. It's just a matter of what's necessary, what's available, what's frictionless, what's affordable.

So in Texas where driving may be affordable, necessary because there is no alternative, frictionless because businesses buy huge plots for car parking and perhaps slightly cheaper and more ubiquitous gas stations, a car makes sense. Particularly in an environment where everyone has one and we tend to want to conform.

Then take Amsterdam (where I live). Most amenities are nearby, walking distance. Separate bike lanes on every single street. Everyone uses bikes. Parking is crap (canal parking is a nightmare) and expensive, as are cars and gas compared to rather ubiquitous tram, bus and metro service and a strong intercity train network. A car is more expensive, gives more friction, and wholly unnecessary.

The exception is if you work far outside the city. Train is fine but a personal car can be a bit more dependable and more flexible despite a nice train system.

In short, I think it makes a lot of sense to expect say a stereotypical Texan to be fine not having or needing a car in say a city like Amsterdam. He certainly wouldn't feel restricted to walk or use public transportation, rather my point is, that he'd feel restricted having to use a car in a city not designed for cars. I can't imagine anyone driving everywhere in Amsterdam. (the far suburbs are perhaps the exception, what we call 'outside the ring', but even then italian-style scooters are more popular than cars here)

Eh, I love NYC's subway. I only hate public transport that's poorly done (most busses, trains that don't run frequently enough) and so demand much larger time buffers to do anything.

Walkability is the first preference, though, because of how nice it is, and how predictable it is in terms of timing.

I moved downtown last month from the suburbs and I've found that in the city, the problem of getting to your destination is vastly more complicated. I'm completely bewildered by the changing bus/train schedules and don't understand how anyone can juggle all of those routes and times in their head to construct a path to their destination. Walk 3 blocks to A stop (absolutely not the stop closest to you, that's very important), wait B minutes for the bus but make sure not to get on the C bus, only get on the D, and make sure not to miss the stop at E or you'll go clear across the bay, and then walk a block to the station at F, take the G train to H; there's no public transport there so you're going to have to walk. Don't stay too late because the lines don't run all night. Oh, and you'd better go now because all of those directions will be useless tomorrow because it's Saturday.

It's insane. I want to leave any time I want, pull up in a vast parking lot less than a hundred yards from my destination, my GPS guiding me every turn of the way, and get there in air conditioned comfort without getting all sweaty from walking everywhere. I want to be able to go to any restaurant or shop within a 20 mile radius without thinking twice about it, instead of being constrained to a few places within walking distance. I want to be able to drive home a car overflowing with groceries from any store I care to visit instead of having to spread my shopping across every day of the week so that I can carry it home on the bus/train.

On the restricted/liberated spectrum, I feel strongly on the restricted side. You can't get anywhere in this city without paying, either for parking or public transport or an uber/lyft/taxi ride. I feel imprisoned within walking distance, unless I have a specific errand that justifies the price of a ride.

As some others have mentioned, I think smartphones are helping to solve this as they get more common and the transit planning gets fast/good. But another way is just to have stable and frequent service, instead of trying to microoptimize different on-peak/off-peak/night or weekday/weekend schedules. That way people just learn that this is the service, and it always runs, problem solved.

Copenhagen has mostly converged on that: the metro, trains, and trunk bus routes now mostly run 24/7, with the same route all the time, and high enough frequency that you don't have to worry about when they'll come and how to time connections (typically 2-7 minute headways during the day, 15-20 minutes at night, 30 at night for some buses). Works well, though of course it isn't cheap to operate such a level of service. I definitely find it easier to take night buses now in particular, as they've been moving more of them to this schedule. It's something I do only occasionally so I'd never remember what the "N" night-bus routes were, but now it's easy, because the answer is that it's just the same "A" bus routes as always, not special night buses.

> I'm completely bewildered by the changing bus/train schedules and don't understand how anyone can juggle all of those routes and times in their head to construct a path to their destination.

Two words: Google Maps.

This is pretty much it. There's literally no need to memorize schedules, just plug in point A and point B.

> I'm completely bewildered by the changing bus/train schedules and don't understand how anyone can juggle all of those routes and times in their head

I think bigger cities have a journey planner website and a mobile app to go with it. For example, here's the one for London: http://tfl.gov.uk/

Also, the trunk transport lines (they can be metro, train or buses) should go every 10 minutes, or every 5 minutes, so one does not need a timetable to use them.

I grew up in a very rural, car based environment. The nearest place to eat out was a gas station that happened to make great (if unorthodox) pizza and bbq. It was about 30 minutes by car at a steady ~100kph to get there. My wife grew up in a dense urban environment with tons of public transit options. When we were first dating and visiting my parents' home, she'd get confused when everybody started talking about where to go get dinner when clearly nobody was even remotely hungry. A few visits later she finally figured it out, it took 30 minutes to an hour to get wherever we decided so you had to anticipate your hunger by that much.

Later on, I moved into the city, and though I loved some aspects of it, there were others I hated. Walking everywhere within a few blocks was great for example. We could actually think about where we wanted to eat while we were in the process of walking out the door and after we started feeling hungry! (mindblowing)

But other aspects simply sucked. Mass transit, in general, is terrible in most of the U.S. To get to the local subway (so I could get to work) from our apartment, I had 3 choices:

1) A 5 minute drive

2) A 30+ minute walk over sometimes unsafe walking areas (overpass with no sidewalk, couple other muddy/dirty no-sidewalk areas)

3) An hour long bus ride with two transfers. The buses never kept to schedule so a 20 minute wait to get on and at each transfer wasn't uncommon.

Once I got on the train, it was a pretty easy 45 minute ride with 1 transfer and then an easy 15 minute walk from the station to my office.

So say I wanted to take mass transit to get to work. I'm looking at up to ~3 hours 1 way. If everything clicks into place, it's still a minimum ~2 hour ride 1 way. These days we have google to help us find a route, and a quick check of my old route shows an approximately 1.5-2 hour commute via mass transit.

If I cut the trip to the subway down by driving, I'd either have to pay for parking (~$10/day) or get a ride from my wife.

If I walked, I'd probably get my work clothes (suit) dirty and endanger myself.

The alternative, to just drive into the office was a 1 hour drive with a $20/day parking fee.

The public transit experience sucked so bad, and consumed so much of my day, that I eventually just opted to drive myself in. I at least had the flexibility during the day to go places I couldn't walk to for lunch.

This wasn't NYC however. I've spent a few weeks here and there in NYC for work and pleasure, and almost always I just take the subway. I don't go to the outer boroughs much, and when I do I've never strayed far from a subway station -- I'm sure If I bothered to integrate the bus system into my life I'd be even happier. When I was in London, I did exactly that and the integrated system worked great (even if it was expensive). edit btw, does anybody else think it's weird NYC hasn't integrated either airport into the subway system?

I find the experience in NYC generally really good. I've done the same in London, Seoul, Barcelona and Paris and the only times I wish I had a car was when I was shopping and had to haul a bunch of groceries home on the local subway. In other cities more like where I live, with similar levels of service, I usually just use a car.

I was recently in Orlando and we decided to use the local bus system instead of a car. It was...okay. But bus service was so infrequent that if you missed your transfer you'd easily wait another 30-45 minutes for the next bus.

So to me there's kind of an uncanny valley mass transit falls into. If it's hyper dense like NYC, I think it's fantastic. The need for a car just isn't there most of the time, and it's cheap enough and the service is frequent enough that you don't end up standing around doing nothing for 30 minutes and hopefully don't have to make a half dozen transfers. There's a few cases where I really want a car, but you usually end up rethinking how your life functions and end up getting rid of lots of those (more frequent shopping and smaller groceries), but some are a still a pain (big packages). Fortunately, services like Zipcar (or just calling a cab) usually fills in those gaps.

However, most places are not ultra-large, ultra-dense first world cities and building a comparable system in those smaller cities just isn't economically feasible in general. Bus systems are too complicated compared to trams or trains, and without knowing your entire route and schedule ahead of time are hard to impossible to figure out off the cuff, and frequent stops means it takes forever to get anywhere. So even if they have the appearance of a robust mass transit system, practically they don't function in the same way a Tokyo or NYC or Paris does.

So I found it cool that was possible to live where I live, and do it without a car, but it's also possible in the sens that L.A. and NYC are within "walkable" distance from each other if you don't mind walking for 38 days nonstop.

note

today I live in a new style suburb. My house is an easy 5-10 minute walk to a pretty large array of shopping, restaurants, entertainment and services. Comparable to what you'd likely find within an easy 5-10 minute walk in most urban environments. I haven't taken my car shopping at my local grocery in about 2 months. My doctor, a movie theater, etc. are all walkable. There's a commuter bus lot in my neighborhood as well and for not too much money, I can take it into the city, it takes special lanes much of the way and turns a 2 hour drive into a 45 minute bus ride with a 20 minute easy walk.

I'm also a 20 minute drive from the nearest subway stop and the line is expanding in my direction. Hopefully in a few years it'll be a 5-10 minute drive, giving me tons of transit options.

So I kind of get the best of both worlds.

> btw, does anybody else think it's weird NYC hasn't integrated either airport into the subway system?

For LaGuardia, it's basically NIMBYism.

JFK has the AirTrain connections to the subway and LIRR. Why that, why not just an actual subway? Bureaucratic turf expansion - the airports are owned by the Port Authority who has deep pockets and wanted to build a system under its own control.

Being a NYC lifer, I always forget that's not normal - in other cities I'm always surprised to realize when the airport is smoothly integrated into the transit system.

At least if going from JFK to Manhattan, is there any point taking the subway, when the LIRR goes so much faster?

Depends on where you're going from, but the LIRR is rarely appreciably faster: express subway + AirTrain, vs. LIRR + AirTrain, both take around 60-75 minutes total from most parts of Manhattan. The only real exception is that the LIRR is faster if your starting point is right next to Penn Station; if you have to take a subway to get to the LIRR first you lose most of the advantage vs. just taking the subway the whole way. (Also, the LIRR is both less frequent and more expensive.)

And yet there are plenty of mid sized towns (even in not particularly wealthy or dense areas) with good transit in Europe (I'm sure there are in other parts of the world such as south east Asia but I am mostly familiar with Europe).

I am pretty sure Brno, Czech Republic or Brandenburg, Germany are not wealthier per capita than Orlando and somehow they managed to build a decent transit system despite being much smaller towns.

EDIT: I just checked on wikipedia and Brandenburg an der Havel has a bit over 1/3 the population density of Orlando so it's definitely not a density issue. Wiki doesn't have density figures for Brno but it seemed comparable to Orlando.

Those who feel alienated by big cities penalizing can usually get a small bike or a bycicle to still got fast and painlessly to wherever they want to go (they are still "free"), so most people should be OK with the change. It doesn't work the other way round.

I found it liberating, like a weight I didn't even know I'd been carrying had been lifted. I can't even ride transit regularly due to a disability but I felt lighter being able to walk and bike and able use transit on my (fairly common) good days to go anywhere.

As far as (4) and (5), that probably speaks to where you were in Japan. Outside of the major cities there is plenty of driving going on. Like in Hokkaido, where Sapporo has a nice transit system but outside that is a vast expanse of roads. (1) is fun, because to someone with an American sweet tooth it was easy to just suck on their candy nonstop.

One downside I've noticed in Japan is that when the owners get older, even after stopping work on the shop they might still want to continue living in the space above, but reluctant to let anyone else use it as it is directly connected to their living space. This can result in shopping streets with many small stores that are permanently shut down.

I always assumed those closed stores were just a sign of bad economy or dwindling population and I am not completely convinced that that is the real reason, but this was explained to me as one major reason according to someone working in a project where they try to convince these building owners to let younger people use the space for their small business.

If they own the shops and/or the dwellings above then I guess it's their right to retain the property even after they retire. If those younger people want to use those spaces, it's on them to make a compelling offer to acquire or rent or lease or however they want to structure a deal. Creative negotiation!

Yep. I really, really dislike cities in the US (where I'm from), but now I live in Shinjuku, and it's great! Being able to just stroll down any alley and find an incredible amount of varied restaurants and shopped stacked on top of each other is brilliant. Definitely one of the reasons I like it here.

I live in Europe, and love the bakeries within walking distance. I can walk to the movies or the opera house in a city of 300k.

Indeed. Small business is literally woven into Japanese culture :)

It's in contrast to modern development trends you're seeing in NA - seems like almost all new commercial development is in the form of large parking lots + big box brands & international franchises in the same layout configurations give or take a liquor store or restaurant or two.

I was thinking about this the other day, how wasteful these mega-lot developments are - given all the other existing areas of a city that could be utilized & improved. Instead, you rarely see new commercial investment in older areas and slowly and surely parts of a city become ignored and deteriorate. If a neighborhood is lucky, investment may someday return - but usually in the form of an artificially incentivized (ie- tax/political) effort. Things might just naturally balance out and be less wasteful if small business was as pervasive as it is in Japan; thanks in large part to their zoning system.