PM2.5 levels in Tokyo yesterday were like 6x WHO limits and absolutely no one on the local news was talking about it. Every morning I see pregnant and new mothers with infants or small children squeezing between belching diesel trucks, relentless car traffic, construction sites and smokers areas and wonder what the cost of all of this will be.
This is not a model for the future. It’s a relic.
What are you talking about? Localities sent a smog alert, made announcements on the speaker, and there was a whole thing. It was a particularly hot day as well.
I don’t have that many reference points to be fair, but almost every time I’ve checked general air quality (at least according to the first site that describes AQI) for Paris has always been worse than Tokyo.
Of course things can be massively improved. There is a lot of noise pollution. But the conversations are relative to other places. My reference points are limited but on points like air pollution or smoking other major cities fare worse IMO.
Though this is all super subjective, and even within a city various parts of it have a vastly different vibe.
Don’t really care what Paris is like, tbh. Shit air is shit air. Saying it’s shitter somewhere else isn’t super compelling.
The whole point of my original comment was that people elevate Japanese cities in ways they don’t deserve.
Yep I know - but did you check how many monitoring sites they use and where they’re placed? It’s not representative of the actual experience of living here. If you’re walking, or cycling, you’re constantly in extreme close proximity to tailpipe emissions from cars and diesel trucks. The city also famously has lots of construction activity, almost always also belching diesel.
I've witnessed the construction in Tokyo. I'm greatly impressed by the steps they take to monitor and reduce impact. I've seen many sites with noise monitors displaying in decibels the current noise inside and outside the construction site.
When a building across the street from my apartment was renovated I was sent detailed construction plans. The work was scheduled so that any noise would never interrupt sleep or evening relaxation. Also include was how the sunlight and shade from the new construction would change. Included was steps to take if one wished to protest the construction.
I think “Tokyo has better air than other metropolises” is a kinda verifiable thing, and if you grant that it’s kinda normal to consider that! There’s a reason lots of people end up here from other countries, and it’s not the pay!
There is loads of research showing a marked drop-off in the danger to humans from vehicle emissions as you move away from the kerbside. Even walking on the far side of a wide curb can significantly improve your prospects. My point here is that people are living in extreme proximity to tailpipe emissions, all day long.
It is a perfect candidate - perhaps the best candidate city in the world given how much else it gets staggeringly right on urban design - for strict tailpipe emissions regulations. Ban diesel trucks, introduce congestion charges, incentivise the adoption of EVs.
That is unlikely to happen, however, as Toyota in particular famously is one of the biggest global lobbyists for the internal combustion engine - a fact covered numerous times at length here on HN. That’s a fascinating political and economic story in its own right and one I’d encourage people to read up on.
Tokyo’s air quality is a story of corporate and political greed. Nobody does anything about it because no one talks about it.
Shitty is always relative, especially if you're comparing policy decisions.
Likely the same extended lifespan that's been prevalent in Japan over the past century of smoking, diesel and construction (along with the occasional nuclear catastrophe). Humans are apparently more ruggedized than they look on paper.
Shortness of breath is something doctors report as a more and more common symptom of city dwellers.
Not reported on the news because nobody -- apparently you included -- cares, but I've been to doctors lately, and they complained that the lung and heart doctors are overbooked lately while the others have a normal load.
Generally, it takes a lot of pollution to counter the positive health effects of active commuting. It was a while since I did the research, but someone estimated that you need to cycle for more than sixteen hours per day for the pollution to outweigh the cardio benefits in the 90th percentile of cities ordered by pollution. There was no city for which any mount of cycling would have made you worse off.
Granted, walking is probably slightly lower in intensity, but still.
So yeah we gave up and just go eat out. :|
So not only is the air bad, the walkable places are few and far between, strongly discouraging people to even go where the better air is or, as you said, just have the cardio from walking/cycling to improve your health.
It’s been 15 years I commute daily by bike and worry about the side effect on my lungs… sometimes the road stinks so much, especially when too much trafic jam. Trying to slow my pace to breathe « less deep » but not a fun things to do.
I used to live in NYC. Tokyo is a very quiet city. Not all parts for sure... you can have an apartment by a train crossing or they might build a highway outside your 6th floor window, but I would say that most of the parts where people live is pretty quiet.
Is it worse than SA, London or any other megacity of the world?
Everybody wants clean air, they just live with the bad one because the big city pays well (though when you correct it for costs of living, it gets muddier).
The point of my original comment was that Tokyo gets a hall pass because y’all apparently loved Akira.
This is a political problem and as long as the Japanese auto lobby has the LDP in their pocket, we who live here live the consequences.
IMO, what other cities do (and the results they get) is relevant when discussing what’s good, bad, or practically possible.
Where’s the inconsistency?
The comment you responded to was about how this low noise experience is not unique to Europe, and saying Japan has similar experiences.
You came in with "Tokyo has shit air" as a response. Now you claim the others are "whataboutists" when they are merely continuing the original conversation topic comparing Europe with Japan.
Which non-Japanese cities are you comparing it to here?
While Tokyo does have no shortage of highways and cars they do have plenty of mixed zone medium density, walkable areas that are free from car noise. That is not a feature of any part of most US cities. It is also much more uncommon to find stroads in Japanese cities, while a stroad is the default for many western cities.
The neighbourhoods you’re referring to - walkable areas free from car noise - are open to the wealthy only. The absolute vast majority of people in Tokyo live with constant traffic noise and terrible air quality. Not to mention cramped living conditions.
Tourist areas are always by definition in nicer parts of the city because the tourists pay for it.
And if you have enough money most cities have nice parts. But how does the “average” working stiff live?
According to [1], yesterday's peak of PM2.5 (not the 24 hour average) in Tokyo was at 22 µg/m3, whereas according to [2], the WHO's (extremely strict) limit for 24 hour average is set at 15 22 µg/m3. Where did you get your data from?
[1] https://www.aqi.in/dashboard/Japan/tokyo
[2] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ambient-(ou...
https://www.accuweather.com/en/jp/tokyo/226396/air-quality-i...
Clicking on the Learn more from Plume Labs takes you to the air quality data source.
https://air.plumelabs.com/air-quality-in-Tokyo-7Lj5
You can see graphs with the tabs named Live, Week, Month, Year. We can check past data there. The weekly graph shows 72 AQI on May 18th. The yearly graph shows the annual average of 39 AQI.
Can you confirm that you see the same data?
As someone who moved to Japan it's always funny. I think people literally get their impression from Japan solely from neo-Tokyo sci-fi from the 80s. The country has taken some of the worst cues from the US.
Many cities like Tokyo are 75% suburban, single home, it's in fact the largest suburban region on the planet. The number of cars in the country is much higher than in the rest of Asia and many cities are extraordinarily sprawlish. From the air Tokyo literally just looks like a sort of denser LA (https://i.redd.it/mghcpc5xvt761.jpg)
> As someone who moved to Japan it's always funny. I think people literally get their impression from Japan solely from neo-Tokyo sci-fi from the 80s.
Yes, I have visited Japan several times, multiple cities. My wife is Japanese.
But don't let that stop you. Please, continue.
I’m sure the total absence of zero emissions vehicle options has absolutely nothing to do with the political influence of the Japanese automotive lobby.
It’s not NA-focused, by the way. The guy lives in the Netherlands. The reason NA cities come up for pillorying so often is because he’s originally from London, Canada, and because of the special historical circumstances that led to cleansheet design-by-car for a huge number of NA towns and cities.
Didn’t seem off-topic to me.
I love aerial photos of megacities like this. But I would say "a sort of denser LA" is understating it a little; each of the small buildings in the Tokyo aerial that are too tiny to make out are probably 5-6 stories at least.
Whereas, an aerial of LA (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/Los_Ange...) shows that very quickly out of the downtown area, the small buildings are in fact single-story single family homes.
Even where there are large roads, like near Shibuya station, there’s no street parking and cars are passing through, not driving across the sidewalk to every storefront. Pedestrians definitely come first. The parkades are often attended to direct traffic and pedestrians.
I can’t comment on yesterday but PM2.5 levels are often on the news.
Construction sites? Yeah, it’s a city. But most construction is fast. I now live in a small But growing European city and part of the sidewalk downtown has been closed down for three years for ongoing demolition of a building. Now it looks like construction is just starting. And this is for a 5 or 6 stores building.
Smoking areas outside of stations are gross in Japan but it’s rude or forbidden to smoke in crowded areas. In Europe people smoke on the train platform, at the bus stop and right outside of every restaurant.
I did think of one thing that is loud and annoying in Tokyo though: 50cc scooters. Making those quiet ought to be low hanging fruit.
In practice, when combined with the high density, it means that people are spending a lot of time outside, unprotected, in very close proximity to the tailpipe emissions from large volumes (often 4 or 6-lanes) of gasoline and diesel-burning trucks and cars. Often with narrow sidewalks or no sidewalks at all. They shop along the main road, their kids’ school is on the main road, their workplaces, gyms, dry cleaners, station, etc.
Lol at the people in this thread chiming in from their 3rd floor balconies in Moto-Azabu Hills. The absolute vast majority of people living in Tokyo are breathing trash air day in day out.
It’s reprehensible. They need to ban diesel trucks immediately, and they need to actively encourage people to switch to EVs.
If you still think, in 2023, that humans can skate by with no consequences from relentless exposure to the by-products of fossil fuel combustion, I’d invite you to crack a book.
I actually like the no sidewalk small streets, they have no parking and while some are sketchy they are more often like a mixed use path where pedestrians clearly have the right of way.
This is less common than you think. There are 8500 or so malls in Europe[0]. I happen to live near an (expensive) shop, which I use because I like walking places, but I also know I have a tech salary that lets me buy a place that's in walking distance of a shop, and afford to shop in it regularly.
Also, plenty of people don't live near where they work. Not very hot take: while for any new cities it's a good idea to try and take emissions into account, the best driver for lower emissions and more convenience isn't large-scale city planning. It's Zoom.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/11-biggest-malls-europe-23271...
Which was the original idea for them:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_mall#Downtown_pedestr...
But then car-centric urban design happened.
In America we only have mega malls with giant square footage and the only way to get to them is by driving.
When I have been in Europe I’ve noticed very little in the way of American style malls within any city (let’s take Amsterdam as an example). I do find “malls” that might just be a few offices with street level retail selling Jack Wolfskin products and maybe a Starbucks but they aren’t all that distinguishable from most of the rest of the city.
In Columbus where I live the metro has a population of around 2.2 million (all drivers) and we have two malls that are still operating (I think we’ve had maybe 5 at one point?) and one is Polaris Fashion Place at 1.2 million square feet and the other is Easton Town Center which is 1.6 million square feet. That’s probably average for a city in America.
So for an average city in America I’ve got 0 walking or transit to the mall - 100% only drivers, and I’m at nearly 3 million square feet which is like top 10 easy on that list too.
Europe has malls. Sure. The question is does Europe have malls in the same way America does, and I’m not convinced the answer is yes, which is what really matters. Well, not me being convinced so much as all the associated driving.
The two larger ones have commuter rail, metro, bus and cycle access, and parking for cars.
I'm sure the others have some parking, but it's not obvious as I've never used a car to visit one.
But, this city is the 'perfect' one, and there is a lot of range in-between. There are certainly large shopping malls in Europe with only road access, though they are almost certain to have bus services. Bluewater Shopping Centre just outside London is the first example that comes to mind.
However, the number of shopping malls is irrelevant; most shops are not in malls. In cities, there's generally shopping streets that have a wide variety of all sorts of shops. In suburban areas, there's often a small shopping center with one or two supermarkets, a Chinese restaurant, a snackbar, and a couple of other shops. Big American-style malls are rare here.
And supermarkets are very common. Just Netherland alone has over 6000 of them, and at least 6 of those are within 1.5 km from my home. There's a shopping center 500 m from my house, and a major shopping steet 1 km in the other direction. Stuff is dense, exactly because it doesn't focus on massive malls.
And for anything they don't have in my neighbourhood, I take my bike.
Of course this is a city; in small villages you'll probably still need a car for anything beyond bread and basic groceries.
it would take more than changing zoning laws for that, as I understand changing jobs and such is not as common in these locations as well. If you are changing jobs every couple of years having to find a home in the same neighborhood as your new job may be a challenge.
Also I prefer not be limited in my shopping choices just to the single shop that happens to be in my building or on my block...
And I prefer not living with constant traffic noise and at risk of being run over every time I step outside. I prefer biking with my kid to his school, but we can't because the traffic makes it a suicidal idea. I also prefer to listen to birds when I walk to the shops nearby, but the traffic noise drowns them.
Yet, here we are.
I have no problems if people want to create something voluntarily that is walkable, I have massive problems with using government to do it.
The thing that frustrates me most about libertarians is how everything they don’t want is regulation or government spending, but everything they do want is provided by the grace of god or something.
Not everyone who lives the "way you prefer" wants it.
It's just the only place that decent-or-better public schools are, in a lot of US cities.
Everything else about the 'burbs sucks. Worst parts of country and city living, none of the benefits of either. Terrible.
We are on the same page, then. In most of American and Canadian cities municipal zoning bylaws force the construction of single-family homes and disallow the construction of mixed-use moderate density buildings.
With that in mind, one may begin to wonder if the reason we don't see more walkable neighborhoods is because they are currently illegal to build, not because there is no demand for them. And, indeed, there is plenty of demand for them.
I live in a mid-sized European city, and I have literally dozens of shops within 10-minute walking distance of home, as well as several banks, primary and high school, health center, several playgrounds, parks, gyms, plenty of bars and restaurants, etc.
Do they all sell the same goods, or do you have "dozens of shops" that all specialize in a few things, like you have a bakery, coffee shop, produce shop, butcher,hardware store, etc all as independent shops
Or do you have a Kroger, Mejier, Walmart, HEB, Lowes, and HomeDepot style shopping all with in walking distance...
I have never ever seen a soviet-era suburb which didn't have 4 to 12 story buildings with parks and aisles all around them and all kind of services being at a 5 minutes walking distance top (church, shops, post office, elementary and middle school, etc).[1]
Literally under every building you would find people quietly enjoying their evening on the benches while watching their kids play all around in safety and green. All of those neighborhoods would be perfectly connected with city centers by public transport. Can't think of any of those places where from suburbs to downtown would take you more than 15/25 minutes top.
You could literally fit tens and tens of thousands of people in relatively small but very livable neighborhoods.
But cars have long ruined these kind of neighborhoods by reclaiming those places for parkings [2] (imagery is from 2017, in 2023 it is at least twice as dense in cars). People don't really enjoy their evenings chatting to each other because benches have been removed and kid playgrounds have been moved blocks away and everyone is sitting in their bunkers, uhm, homes, isolated from each other.
Maybe I might be romanticizing but honestly economical progress is such an overblown metric and progress does nothing but make people more and more lonely, anti social and unhappy. It was miles better when I was a kid in Poland.
[1] https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/urban-area-style-soviet-peri...
[2]https://www.google.it/maps/place/Osiedle+Kopernika/@49.81612...
> People don't really enjoy their evenings chatting to each other because benches have been removed and kid playgrounds have been moved blocks away and everyone is sitting in their bunkers
There's nothing about economic growth and material wealth that requires this to happen. Something else must have changed.
> It was miles better when I was a kid in Poland.
Most things are better as a kid, without the worries of adulthood, let alone parenthood. I'd imagine the outlook for your parents raising you in the People's Republic may have been different.
City planning looks to be better for children and perhaps average families for the reasons given. Similar projects were also built in the west, e.g. in the UK, but since they were only for poor people they suffered from inadequate maintenance, security and so on. Those either get demolished, or the green space filled in with more buildings.
> Something else must have changed.
Cars, that was the point. A one-lane access road was originally enough for deliveries, maintenance and waste removal; it would later be widened, then cars parked (legally or not) along the sides of the road or sidewalks. No one wants to sit on a bench and stare at a parked car, and the cars (parked and moving) make it more dangerous for children to play unsupervised.
Agreed. When I was a kid we used to just roam outside (let alone walking to school and extracurriculars by ourselves).
That's no longer normal at exactly the same places even if objectively it is safer now. The perception of risk must be one thing that has changed but I think there's more to it...
Safer in terms of having less crime, perhaps?
What about the danger of being run over by a car on the way to those places? Nowadays we typically have more cars, with lower visibility, driving faster than before because the roads are wider, straighter and with more lanes. It is an environment that is plainly hostile to pedestrians and children in particular.
On the other hand, biking would be definitely less pleasurable and more dangerous for smaller kids now. Even as adult I don't enjoy biking with many cars around.
I think people especially in the US are quick to dismiss the Soviet Republics while ignoring what they did get right and the alienating parts of their own culture.
What do you think bloc countries and Soviet union were? Some kind of communist utopias? They appear to "didn't have dire poverty" because "social parasitism"[0] was a criminal offense for a long time. Like, police (sorry, "militia"!) could stop you on the street during work hours and arrest you if you didn't have a document from your boss or from a doctor allowing you to skip work. In later times "undesirables" were just forcibly relocated from "nicer" places [1]. Unfortunately description of these in English are quite lacking, but as a person born in USSR I can assure you that all the nostalgia for that times is either coming from old people who actually just nostalgic for their youth (old joke on the subject: - Gradpa, why are you keep saying it was much better under Stalin? - Because I could still get an erection back then!), or intentional political propaganda.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_parasitism_(offense)
The people who live in St. Petersburg and Moscow today are there because none of their families/ancestors were purged.
The ones who did are in Siberia, or dead.
Not knowing they worked for the stasi…
Cramped living conditions but ample communal space, so a lot of time is spent in full view of the neighbor (so they can report anti-communist behaviors to the local police). No individuality, identical buildings with the same layout for identical cogs in the machine.
And yet when the west does this, we celebrate it as "economies of scale": https://www.istockphoto.com/photos/subdivision-aerial
(well, as long as your tiny piece of lawn stays green, your house is one of the five approved paint colors, and your HOA dues/conformity-fines are paid)
I guess to the average worker in the East, these North American housing developments must have been seen as somewhat evil and not desirable at all.
My stomach tingled just reading that, and then when I clicked the picture I felt real, panicked claustrophobia. If I believed in hell it would look like this. Maybe lots of people like living this way, but for me, no way. I'm a human. I'm not meant to be a bee living in a giant concrete honeycomb next to tens of thousands of bee neighbors buzzing around. I can't even imagine myself living that densely without having a mental break.
While Dutch highways tend to have speed limits of 100-130 kph, the A-10 ring highway around Amsterdam has one section that's limited to 80 kph because it passed through a densely populated area of the city. There's big apartment blocks right next to the highway (and one offramp passes straight through a building), so traffic has to go slower to keep noise levels down.
If the US doesn't even do that, I think that tells you something about how much cars are prioritised over people.
Although of course noise barriers are just one of many tools. Less cars and having cars drive more slowly probably accomplish a lot more.
People like both the dense urban core and the suburb single family home life style. They are very different modes of life. A lot of Europeans I know really like one or the other because they don’t really get them back home.
The solution to road noise doesn’t have to be a dramatic rezoning and a reversion to Europe everywhere. It could be to make cars and trucks quieter.
(N.b., I’m specifically not addressing SFH and housing shortages in this, hopefully that’s for a different thread)
Engine noise only dominates up to roughly 20mph, at higher speeds the tire noise is the dominating component until roughly 100mph where wind becomes the dominant.
So this:
> The solution to road noise doesn’t have to be a dramatic rezoning and a reversion to Europe everywhere. It could be to make cars and trucks quieter.
Would mean both switching to electric cars and reducing speeds significantly to less than 20mph.
But even at average speed you’d see no noise reduction from electric cars since 20mph is the point where tires are as loud as the engine. So the average would need tk go down.
On the other hand, cities do not have the ability to redesign cars. A city can’t just choose to invent a quieter car!
I would love it if we can engineer cars and trucks to be quieter; I think though that a more feasible path for any city is to work on zoning and land use changes.
Most of the noise comes from the tire friction and aerodynamics.
So they have quiet bars were people quietly get wasted and quietly walk home? Quiet trucks quietly unloading goods for the shops every morning? Quiet dumpster trucks quietly picking up commercial dumpsters and quietly flipping them over every night?
If we had these in the US I'd be fine with mixed zoning too. As of now I don't hear any noise from the two lane arterial street behind my backyard but I used to live in an apartment with a window roughly 500' away from a small bar (just a local watering hole in a strip mall, completely inside, not trendy at all) in a direct line of sight and I had to sleep with a white noise machine because of all the screaming the patrons produced walking out (or in?).
This didn't happen in the places where I lived back in Europe because zoning laws were different. Instead of the sprawl of freehold single family homes separate from a dense urban core, these much quieter towns had a preponderance of moderate-density areas with mixed use buildings. This means people can live within walking distance to where they work and where they shop, so they do just that: walk through quiet streets, often surrounded with trees. This moderate density also translates into frequent and fast public transit.
Overall it is a much more pleasant day-to-day living experience. And it is not unique to Europe, you get the same experience in Japan, for example. I hope we can learn from them.