Your challenge is to make any American city seem like Tokyo, with its omnipresent rail and subway lines, good underground connections, and high population density. Bonus points if you manage to let it also have a cool elevated expressway system.
Your challenge is to make any American city seem like Tokyo, with its omnipresent rail and subway lines, good underground connections, and high population density. Bonus points if you manage to let it also have a cool elevated expressway system.
New York City fits those categories as is though, right down to being an immense megalopolis..?
WI the Los Angeles tram system weren't bought out and torn apart by Big Auto?
I can remember watching a video about that – the way the financial organisation of the system is split between the governor, state legislature, and mayor is just a complete mess. Shame really as the couple of times I visited back in 1998 and then a few years later the system still seemed–at least from what I recall–to be in good running order, it got us around the city to wherever we wanted to get to well.What if New York actually bothered to upgrade its subway system.
Except that they didn't.What if the Los Angeles tram system weren't bought out and torn apart by Big Auto?
The challenge here is similar to that any US mass transit and or anti sprawl thread. The US has to much land. Thus we can spread out.
Let’s be honest you will NEVER get people in the US to WANT to create a city with the density and traffic of Tokyo. Tinny tinny apertments and rediculus bad commutes are not something that people typically want. Heck I don’t think Japan WANTS Tokyo the way it is. I am sure if you gave them the opritunity they would glad spread out a bit.
So I don’t see how you get this in the US we just sprawl out and or move elsewhere.
The greater San Francisco area could be a good candidate for this. High density residence combined with a highly educated, car-averse population that has an obsession with new fangled gadgets and technology.
The greater San Francisco area could be a good candidate for this. High density residence combined with a highly educated, car-averse population that has an obsession with new fangled gadgets and technology.
Not to mention high liberalism, presence of minorities like the LGBT community, and strong Japanese communities could contribute to SF uniting the Bay Area and building transit.
As a native of San Jose, I've aways wondered--is there a way to mold the mostly urban Western ad South Western Bay Area (say, from Mountain View/Cupertino/Santa Clara up to SF) into a NY-esque burrow system for the sake of creating an overarching authority? Admittedly, this would be a novel concept in competition with the County system, but the Bay Area already has precent for that, what with SF existing concurrently as both city and county.You'd need consolidation between multiple political jurisdictions to effectively run the desired transportation infrastructure. I lived in Mountain View, Palo Alto, and San Jose for years, and the existing BART infrastructure is lackluster compared to NYC, or even to DC.
Most of the region was fairly rural and underdeveloped until quite recently, but it's grown tremendously since the 1950s. So fast that it's hard to see how to make it grow faster, given the existing geographic constraints on building and the difficulty in rapidly expanding the water supply. Therefore, achieving Tokyo levels of density would require the Bay area to have an earlier population boom. One way would be to have CA admitted as two states, North California with a capital in San Fran and South California with a capital in LA. That will draw additional people to the region in the 19th century to become part of the state government, while Sacramento remains a sleepy town who serves as the seat of an agricultural/rural county. If the region can still become a major center of DoD research facilities (I see no reason why it wouldn't), then it can still become Silicon Valley and get that additional in-migration population boom as it draws engineers and scientists. Asian immigration is likely the same as OTL.
That kind of growth still would face severe water constraints and space constraints for housing, and would also be an ecological disaster for the wetlands in the Bay even worse than OTL.
San Fran was quite conservative until the hippy migration of the 1960s and then the explosion of tech companies since the 1970s. If the Bay area grows to Tokyo level population, more of the growth comes earlier. With a higher base population, that domestic in-migration will change the regional composition less, though more population in government means it will be left leaning. It's probably not going to develop quite as radical a reputation, but rather be more akin to NYC.
As a native of San Jose, I've aways wondered--is there a way to mold the mostly urban Western ad South Western Bay Area (say, from Mountain View/Cupertino/Santa Clara up to SF) into a NY-esque burrow system for the sake of creating an overarching authority? Admittedly, this would be a novel concept in competition with the County system, but the Bay Area already has precent for that, what with SF existing concurrently as both city and county.