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?
It may not be as bad as the US, but Car culture in Germany has left it’s impact on german citys as well. Both Munich and Berlin for example have massiv highways going right through them. And keeping that at bay or even reversing it is an ongoing struggle.
Source: lived in both citys
I thought Munich was bad (lived there and in its suburbs for most of my life) but I recently moved to Leipzig. Jesus Christ.
Lol, have you been to Germany? It’s not a concrete hellscape like some of the US, but it’s very car centric if you compare it to e.g. Denmark or Netherlands.
Edit: also, German car lobby is powerful, that’s why their highways are free to use and constantly maintained and kept at a high quality. Trains on the other hand are constantly being delayed and have to slow down due to bad rail quality
Dunno… Maybe because the companies are not in charge of running the country?
And on top of that, i believe most of those cars are sold in the US…
But they are. Lobbyism is literally the problem why nothing is happening to further prevent climate change.
So having been to Japan and ridden the trains there I genuinely can’t imagine Tokyo where everyone drives. And once you have that and the Shinkansen you may as well build out a strong train network. But also, in bumfuck Japan everyone drives. Just because you can take a train to the middle of nowhere doesn’t mean you don’t need to drive when you get there
“The auto lobby at bay” sounds weird in the ears of a German whose city is being flooded with cars and whose life is being endangered by reckless drivers every day…
It’s not as bad as the US but it’s far from good. Germany is car brain country, and it shows in ugly ways.
Generally i agree, is far from good. Where is it good though other than the Netherlands and a few select cities?
You got that right: The point is that it’s good in only a very few places. The people complaining are not whining or so - car brainism really is a big, big problem all over the world.
So you’re focused on withstanding road brain.
After WW2 everyone was broke. In Germany there was no money to build new massive freeway projects. No one had money to buy cars anyway. You can watch the movie “Judgment at Nuremberg”, it’s fiction but one thing that stuck out to me was people riding bicycles. They also had a lot of things to focus on. It took a long time to get things back on track.
Japan also had no money, though they did try the car thing for a while afaik. There were many problems. First was there was not much room for the cars and car parks. Land is tight there. Second was there was no massive domestic gasoline production. I think they finally realized that if everyone drove like Americans, that they would be sending a ton of money outside the country for oil.
As for how Japan became home to massive car companies. First the lack of resources led to the Japanese car companies making a new production technique called Just It Time manufacturing. Instead of lots of inventory of parts to assemble, they timed everything to arrive just in time. Sometimes called lean manufacturing. It may not sound like much but it leads to much cheaper production. And they committed to high quality with “Andon” which was a pull cord workers could pull to stop the line and call management over to quality or production issues. They really got the manufacturing process down because of necessity. Finally they really needed things to export, cars were one of them. Cars are high value and relatively easy to export.
The German domestic market was still big enough on its own to keep their companies aloft. I’m not sure how those expanded.
I think for Germany it’s simply the fact that our infrastructure grew in large parts before the invention of the car, plus it’s, compared to the US, very densely populated. So it’s easier to create a useful rail system, there isn’t enough space in the cities for to many cars, even though there are way to many for my taste.
Large export markets.
They’re not violent empires who can massively exploit people and the planet in order to afford a grossly wasteful and inefficient lifestyle.
anymore *
Infrastructure funding for other transportation modes combined with less subsidizing of gasoline.
I reckon being bombed to oblivion during World War 2 gave opportunity for re-designing their cities.
The opposite was the case in Germany, sadly. Partly because of the destruction in WW2, the city planners in the late 50s went a bit nuts with their concept of the „autogerechte Stadt“, the car-centric city. Many cities still suffer from that period of planning madness, but it gets better. At least there, where conservative shits like the CDU aren’t ruling.
Japan focuses on overall health and how a building fits into its environment rather than focusing solely on urban development and expansion as a means unto itself, its urban planning is very environment and people- focused.
their priorities are better, so they plan and execute cities, factories and planned environments that fit into an existijg system and are better for people.
it doesn’t mean that capitalism and development doesn’t have a place in their society, but it does mean that it has a specific place.
Anime and Manga and a one week trip which I spent in Akihabara is my only source of Japan knowledge moment
Well they basically started again in the late 40s…
Prior to that, Hitler saw the rise of the car and made Volkswagen and the Autobahn.
When you purposely build for pedestrianisation as well as motor vehicles, you get good results. Japan and Germany and majority of other nations didn’t sacrifice one for the other but built them up holistically together.
Neither Hitler the shitstain himself, nor the NSDAP invented the Autobahn. That was propaganda and is well known as a myth, today.
Sadly german planners post-war were influenced by the stupidity that was called Athens Charta. Many cities were built as “autogerechte Städte” with the car in mind first. Yes, pedestrians and cyclists were considered, but as an afterthought. Bike lanes and sidewalks were crammed together, they built tunnels under the roads to cross them without danger (you can imagine how safe those are considered, especially at night). By US american standard, that seems kind of okayish, but from from a present german perspective, the car-centric city was a big mistake, that is dismantled in many places, but sadly not everywhere.
Ah ok. My apologies.
No need to, but thanks for being nice. :)
They don’t shit where they eat chasing the last couple of points on a quarterly report. Export to the US and others is enough.
