I returned to my home country and home town for the first time after 7 years and the place is barely recognizable.
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It is more crowded than ever. I hardly saw a traffic jam in the past, but now the main streets are consistently clogged between 4 and 5 pm, and every single car park is full during the day.
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There is no free parking anymore anywhere. Everywhere I used to park previously there are now parking meters.
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Many of the shops I used to frequent are either gone or relocated far outside the city, and they are replaced by yet another Chanel boutique or some cookie cutter tourist trap.
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The all-inclusive unlimited public transport ticket I used to have is being discontinued, and the city’s public transport monopoly now charges based on distance travelled, meaning that cost of public transport doubles for most regular commuters.
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We also had a chocolate factory nearby that used to do public tours, to which I was looking forward to, but turns out they don’t do that anymore because of “public health concerns”.
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There used to be exactly one homeless guy in our city, whom everybody knew by name, now there is one at every corner, and there are organized groups of beggars from a different country
I’ve been in North America, Europe and South Asia this year and I can’t shake the feeling that quality of life is gradually deteriorating everywhere.
Please tell me I am wrong. Where have you been lately where things overall are actually getting better rather than worse?
I completely agree with your sentiment about Tokyo, but I also feel it’s literally the only megapolis on thr planet that’s like that
I don’t think Tokyo is unique or impossible to reproduce though. Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Hong Kong, are all great cities. I think Tokyo is better, but Tokyo is also bigger, so that’s almost to be expected.
The only infrastructure that is a real pain point for modern rich cities as population increases is transportation, and I don’t think any modern city is actually anywhere near the limit. Trains in Tokyo in 2019 were significantly less crowded than they were in 1990 despite continued population growth, and with telework becoming more common, crowding today is barely a problem at all.
Housing is a big pain point for a lot of cities, but that’s because regulations make it too difficult to build new housing, especially when it replaces existing buildings with something taller. Despite an increase in population and stagnant economy, residential floor space per person in Tokyo is up like 50% since 1990, because people are actually allowed to build more housing to fit all the new people, and then some.
If you commit to building the homes for everyone to live in, and the railways for everyone to get around in, I think modern technology would allow for cities in the much larger than Tokyo pretty comfortably. One of the sad things about population decline in Japan is that I probably won’t get to see a Tokyo with 60 million people.
Maybe I’m pretty jaded with my experience in the SF Bay Area where both problems were very bad, but most of the problems with modern cities can be summarized as entrenched anti-transit and anti-housing interests.
I am sure those cities are great too, although I haven’t been anywhere aside from Osaka (which is basically mini-Tokyo), but they are also nowhere as big as Tokyo, varying from 6 to 10 mil, although obviously that is still a giant city (compared to say Paris, which is just about ~3 mil with suburbs).
I live in Montreal currently, that’s 10 times smaller than Tokyo, but the infrastructure is already crumbling, and it’s not just transportation and housing (which are very problematic, especially the latter), but it’s also hospitals, leisure, goods and services - everything is more expensive and either is unaffordable or unattainable - 5 hospitals in Montreal hit over 200% capacity yesterday, meaning the chance of actually getting medical help in time is close to 0. If it were the size of Tokyo I can’t imagine the mayhem that would be.