Traversity
The transport system in Japan is superb. The subway trains are very frequent, very punctual, and very heavily used. The few times I’ve caught a train so far, I’ve not waited more than 4 minutes; and these were not peak-hour times. Getting a ticket is fast and simple too, at least once you realize how it works.
There is a map above the ticket machines with a price next to each station, so you just look at your destination, and then throw some coins in the machine and select the price. The coin input on the machine is not a standard coin slot, it’s kind of just a hole that you just dump your coins into and it sorts and calculates the value. This is so much faster and easier, since you just grab a handful of change and chuck it in there instead of counting out money. It’s the little things like this that take the pain out of public transport.
Pretty much everywhere you go there are hundreds of bicycles parked. Almost everyone, of every age, seems to ride a bicycle around here. Every bicycle has a basket on the front and often on the back too, so people use it for shopping and general transportation of goods. Anyone that isn’t riding a bike seems to just walk around, and use public transport.
Despite the main streets being quite large, there are not often that many cars on them. About 10% of the vehicles on the road seem to be actual personal vehicles, and it’s usually business-men — the cars seem rarely to have only one person in them — or people visiting the area. Most of the traffic is small vans and trucks, delivering goods around. Even with that, alot of small-scale transport of goods is done by bicycle or scooter. Often you will see people with a couple of crates of beer stacked on a bicycle delivering it to some small shop.
Most of the side streets are typically one lane, and mostly used for bicycles/walking. Occasionally a car passes through (more likely a small delivery van), but it’s rather uncommon. With all the side-streets not being heavily used for vehicles, footpaths are not required, which is alot more space saved.
Since even the traffic on main streets is generally a bit low, they seem to be fairly available for temporary parking for deliveries; abating the need for extra space for parking. Without the mass of personal-use cars around, there is very little parking space around, since people generally need to park their cars for fairly long times at various destinations. Think about how much extra space there would be if you suddenly took away all the shopping center carparks. Quite alot!
Alot of the major shopping stores are often 10-floors or so high around here. The larger ones are all clustered on subway stations. You can catch a train right to your big shopping center, and just catch an elevator to the floor you want. This is very convenient compared to what I’ve seen in Australia, where typically train stations are sort of out on their own away from everything. Train stations here are just enormous, with shops and food and information facilities everywhere.
The system just all ties together to be very convenient and efficient. Given the population and land-space constraints here, there was no real alternative but to make something that worked well, I suppose.