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Ever since ditching car culture and joining the urbanist cause (on the internet at least but that has to change), I've noticed that some countries always top the list when it comes to good urbanism. The first and most oblivious one tends to be The Netherlands but Germany and Japan also come pretty close. But that's strange considering that both countries have huge car industries. Germany is (arguably) the birthplace of the car (Benz Patent-Motorwagen) and is home to Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and BMW. Japan is home to Toyota, Honda, Nissan and among others. How is it that these countries have been able to keep the auto lobby at bay and continue investing in their infrastructure?

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[-] FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

In the popular perception sure. Having lived in Japan, reality is far different. Anywhere outside of cities has no sidewalk, in places where there would be some in europe. Train stations that are rural have no bus connections at all (having grown up in switzerland, this was hard to get used to). Cars are seen very highly, to the point where they have priority over everything else in planning.

And for tourists, sure the shinkanzen is cheap, because the tourism tickets are affordable, but the average person can barley afford it. And most use planes to get around where could be covered by shinkanzen.

Japan is similar to France, excellent tranit in between cities (fast trains; but expensive), cities have a robust network. But the rest of the country is unlivable without a car.

Switzerland is very car centric too, and we’re less good at high speed trains and comprehensive urban transit. But man, the rural trains + buses means you can get literally anywhere without a car. Japan doesn’t have that at all, despite being extremely dense like switzerland.

[-] Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 2 months ago

Switzerland is very car centric too, and we’re less good at high speed trains and comprehensive urban transit.

Maybe, but Switzerland has the most rail usage per capita making it arguably the most rail centric country in the world.

we do. But still everything is built for cars and train is a second thought. We have great infrastructure, because in the past this was different. But currently, we’re barely investing in the train system, the infrastructure is starting to bottleneck (the Geneva - Lausanne axis is a disaster already), whilst we are adding more and more highway lanes. The far right party has had control over the transport ministry for a while now, and it is showing.

[-] JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch 1 points 2 months ago

Well, cars are certainly important everywhere in the world and still too important in Switzerland. But relatively speaking compared to other countries they're really not that important.

Right now there's a vote coming up to build more highways, it'll be interesting to see how that turns out.

To put some numbers on things, we spend 4-5 billion per year on rail, we spend 8.8billion over the next 3 years on road maintenance plus total another 11 billion until 2030 for new road infrastructure. I wouldn't call that 'barely investing', it seems roughly equal to me.

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this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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