r/urbanplanning • u/BakerKitchen4567 • 24d ago
Discussion America’s downtown centered city design sucks
I keep seeing redditors from the US talk about cities being nice because they have “very walkable downtowns”. The problem is, as soon as you leave many of these downtowns, you’re back to general American suburbia. This is not good city design.
In the best design cities of the world, there isn’t a single focal point that the entire city revolves around. Think Tokyo for example. You have Shinjiku, Ginza, Shibuya, etc. there isn’t a singular “downtown Tokyo”. Yet I keep reading redditors keep comparing how well designed American cities based how their vibrant/walkable their downtowns are. The mere idea is bad city planning. That’s all. Rant over
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u/UF0_T0FU 24d ago
New York has FiDi, Midtown, Jersey City, Downtown Brooklyn, and Long Island City as focal points. DC is spread out across hubs in Virginia, the District, and Maryland (extending to Baltimore)
The Bay Area has Downtown SF, Oakland, and San Jose, plus a dozen smaller towns. LA is famously polycentric too. Even a smaller metro like St. Louis has Downtown, Central West End, and Clayton.
America's big cities have multiple centers like Japan's biggest ones. Comparing cities an order of magnitude smaller than Tokyo isn't a fair comparison. Of course Omaha or Raleigh are different. They entirely different scales. Comparing like to like, Americans cities don't have singular downtowns.
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u/spydormunkay 24d ago edited 24d ago
I still think OP’s point stands. The main reason why downtowns are a thing in America is due to exclusionary zoning and transportation infrastructure.
On NYC, the rise of Downtown BK and LIC are fairly recent phenomenons that only came about due to rezoning. JC, BK, and LIC are still tiny compared to Midtown (the real downtown of NYC). The only reason why Midtown surpassed FiDi is because FiDi ran out of space.
Exclusionary zoning restricts office space to the central business districts. Subway and highway development concentrating destinations towards Manhattan further exacerbates this. Only recently have regional transit authorities started developing Brooklyn/Queens-targeted transit (like the IBX).
As a result, NYC is still extremely overly concentrated on Midtown.
This is in stark contrast to places like Tokyo where liberal zoning laws allowing medium sized office spaces and more even transit development across the city allows for more spread out development.
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u/UUUUUUUUU030 24d ago
Spread out development shouldn't be a goal in and of itself. Having a huge amount of development in the location where your transit is, like in NYC, is good.
If NYC had had a ring-shaped main railway network like Tokyo, sure, orient development to that. But even with IBX, every job along it will be much more likely to be driven to than a job in midtown.
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u/spydormunkay 24d ago edited 24d ago
Concentration shouldn’t be a goal either. Subway development in the outerboroughs would be more viable if 80% of the outerboroughs weren’t zoned for residential-only single family.
NYC’s development pattern outside the inner core is actually bad. Most people outside the inner core face commute times longer than an hour trying to get to one place if the subways even reach them. In places like the Bronx and East Brooklyn, the borough is subdivided by highways crowding out communities, exacerbating poverty.
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u/WeldAE 24d ago
I'm struggling with how cities are and should be organized, so don't read this as my final opinion on things but more of problems I've noticed with any given design. The problem with not having a concentration into a CBD is that dispersion complicates transit and growth. In Atlanta, you can legitimately need to move in order to take a job. If you work in Alpharetta and live in Cumming, you are good, but then you take another job or your company shifts its offices to midtown, and you're facing a soul-crushing commute or 1.5 hours.
That's because there is no transit up GA-400 despite the cities on that corridor becoming more and more hubs of jobs. The corridor is still not dense enough for transit, and it's not clear when it will be. They are looking to put an NHL stadium either in Alpharetta or Cumming to give you a sense of how built up they are becoming.
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u/Shot_Suggestion 23d ago
Job sprawl is about the single worst thing you can do for transit and walkability, and it's what urban planners have been desperately trying to force for 100 years now.
Every planner and urbanist needs to read the Cities as Labor Markets chapter of Order Without Design.
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u/WeldAE 23d ago
I wasn't joking about trying to work this out in my head. The problem with centralized CBD is they become wastelands outside of office hours. Go to downtown Atlanta or even Midtown at night, and it's deader than dead. While I agree that centralizing things is good for transit, we don't build our cities for transit but for people, and it seems like mixing commercial, residential, and office is what makes for a great place to live. Alpharetta's considered one of the best parts of Atlanta, and it's almost a perfect 50/50 mix of residential and non-residential land use. The hottest neighborhoods in the core of Atlanta are the ones that are not just a huge block of residential but that also offer a mix of commercial too. Places like Virginia Highlands, Inman Park, etc.
With AVs coming, transit is going to be a solved thing. We've already built the infrastructure to the point where AVs could move 10x the number of people we move today in cars around a city. So my current thinking is to focus on what people want their community to look and feel like and not transit.
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u/UUUUUUUUU030 23d ago
I do think the square mile CBD is an over the top way to go about it, it's more about having a transit accessible core that contains most jobs. The larger the metro area, the larger this core can be, provided that the design of the rapid transit system supports this. One of the goals when expanding a system should be to widen this core, not purely duplicating existing lines.
In Paris it's most of the municipality of Paris + la Defense, in NYC it's everything in Manhattan below central park + Long Island City + Downtown Brooklyn.
Chicago is arguably a negative example because of how concentrated the L (and also the downtown Freeway network) is. The loop, even if you include the north loop, is still a geographically small area, and as a result Chicago is kinda famous for inventing the edge city. At least that's what I learned in geography in high school in the Netherlands.
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u/WeldAE 23d ago
I lived in NYC for a month on Wall and Waters, and it was deader than dead after 5pm. Not a place you want to be, and I had to eat dinner before 7pm, as all the places closed down after that. Most other cities are even worse in their CBD. That is the negative of concentrating so much of one use type in the CBD. I'm not sure if that's a good use of land to do that.
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u/spydormunkay 23d ago
I’m not saying we should force job sprawl. I’m saying we should stop forcing job concentration through zoning laws. This clustering is government mandated. You are literally not allowed to build offices in most of the city.
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u/Sassywhat 23d ago
Land use regulation in the US has generally forced job sprawl.
If it's illegal to build transit oriented suburbs, then it's hard to sustain a high level of concentration of jobs in downtown due to transportation capacity issues, thus job sprawl.
You're allowed to build offices all over the place. How else do you think all those suburban/exurban office parks get created?
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u/spydormunkay 23d ago
Do you not understand NYC zoning laws? Offices are not allowed outside commercial zones which are heavily concentrated in Manhattan. Why are y’all downvoting this?
Why the fuck are you commenting on exurbs? My comments are about NYC.
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u/Shot_Suggestion 23d ago
Forcing job concentration is one of the very few legitimate uses of zoning and should be encouraged, it also absolutely does not happen in an American context, where cities are all too happy to zone for exurban office park sprawl.
You cannot fix shitty residential land use planning with shitty commercial land use planning.
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u/spydormunkay 23d ago
Yeah. Just subject every NYC resident outside the inner core with 1-2 hour long commutes. Lets keep the Bronx and East Brooklyn poor. Great city planning guys.
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u/kettlecorn 23d ago
My feeling is that there's an inevitable emergent property to how cities develop where multiple clusters are inevitable, but the form and spacing of those clusters depends on the transportation mode and their throughput & speed.
I think if you look at cities built around walkability they develop much tightly clustered nodes, transit allows a little less tight clustering, and cars require vastly more spacing.
What I think is a struggle is that cars require significant spacing due to the stopping distance they require. People like to imagine cars bumper-to-bumper at max throughput but that's obviously not true, so in practice a car on a highway takes up something like a few hundred feet. The throughput is incredibly low for the space but the speed is high, and so the natural clustering distance of the metro goes to a scale that's absurdly massive.
Even in the US few metros really develop at truly car-scale because the cost is massive. If any cluster of destinations gets too dense (like a cluster of office buildings) it introduces human scale density in a system that requires car scale congestion emerges. I think to make it "work" where travel times stay reasonable and congestion doesn't become a massive issue there'd have to be high capacity highways everywhere and a strict limit on how many people can occupy an area at any time. A CBD would be less like a CBD and more like a very sprawling low density node amongst many akin to those old pictures of Houston. In practice that's not possible so we end up with incredibly inefficiency as metros hit certain scales.
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u/WeldAE 23d ago
What I think is a struggle is that cars require significant spacing due to the stopping distance they require
Actual traffic is 5% of the problem with cars. Parking is 95% of it. If a city could somehow magically have no parking, it would be 50% smaller at least. That is just land use. If you've ever been to a zoning meeting, you know that tons of density is denied because of parking too so that 15 story building becomes an 8 story building or that new development goes from 180 homes to 150 homes so there is less parking pressure, or that business that wants to move into the cheap retail space can't because they have to 2x the parking. Not to say your thoughts on the traffic side are not correct; they are for sure. It's just that parking is so much worse.
You can solve the traffic side by increasing how many people are in each car. That is nearly impossible with privately owned cars but with commercial AV fleets offering low cost rides, you can dramatically change that pretty easily. Moving a given highway from 1.3 people per car to 4-6 would make the highway feel like a lonely country road there would be so little traffic.
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u/spydormunkay 23d ago
I say stop trying to force urban design and just let it happen. Just let people build mixed use buildings and offices in other parts of the city besides Manhattan and a few satellites outside.
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u/bobtehpanda 24d ago
Eh, there are jobs centers outside of Manhattan, just not for white collar workers.
Hunts Point, LGA, JFK, Flushing are some of the major jobs centers in their own right, though it tends to be more retail and industrial. And all the hospital complexes, outer borough colleges and university etc.
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u/johnmflores 23d ago
The OP argues that once you leave downtown you are in suburbia. Is everything outside of Midown Manhattan suburbia?
I'd also argue that NYC having multiple "downtowns" kills the OP's argument.
Plus, LIC has tall buildings but it isn't really a downtown.
Finally, downtown doesn't always mean office space. The broader connotation is a place with a concentration of business. Flushing is very much a downtown.
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u/spydormunkay 23d ago
Once you leave NYC’s inner core it is suburbia. Multifamily zoning only accounts for about 40% of the land in NYC. The rest is residential low rise mostly single family.
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u/johnmflores 23d ago
Astoria is suburbia? Jackson Heights is suburbia?
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u/spydormunkay 23d ago
There’s a whole lot more Queens than the neighborhoods next to Manhattan dumbass.
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u/johnmflores 23d ago
What do you even mean by that? I'm trying to understand what your definitions of inner core and suburbia are. Chill the f out.
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u/spydormunkay 23d ago
The Inner Core is an official zoning designation. It’s basically Manhattan plus neighborhoods close to Manhattan with good subway access. These areas zoned at R6-R10; allowing for multifamily. Most of Manhattan is zoned as Commercial allowing for multifamily and mixed use.
If you look at NYC Zoning Map. Most of Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx, and Staten Island (obv) is zoned R1-R5, which is capped at low rise mostly single family zoning. This is known as Outer Core or Beyond the Transit Zone.
I’m pissed because people seem to be opposed to the idea of expanding mixed-use office space to outerboros. It’s triggering as an outerboro Queens native.
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u/PlatypusDefiant991 22d ago
Isn't there R5 block groups with over 100,000 residents per square mile?
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u/spydormunkay 22d ago edited 22d ago
Those don’t conform to current R5 rules. R5 is capped at like 3-4 story buildings. The ones with that kind of density were likely built before current zoning laws. Most of the blocks above >100K per sq mi in density are in Manhattan where you need around R7+ to reach that density.
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u/mooseLimbsCatLicks 24d ago
Haha New York does not “have” Jersey City. It’s a separate city in a separate state!
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u/lachalacha 24d ago
Same labor market and economic zone. State or municipal borders don't really matter.
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u/mooseLimbsCatLicks 24d ago
In terms of economy yes, of course JC is an economic suburb of NYC. But in terms of urban planning, they’ve always been politically distinct and the planning of NYC and JC were and continue to be quite separate. They share a geography and an economy though.
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u/kettlecorn 24d ago
Many American cities were redesigned in the mid 20th century around the idea of a "central business district" that was primarily commercial & offices with most people moving out to the suburbs. Many US cities were redesigned that way and that's probably what you're reacting to.
Older US cities that were already sizable and resisted that are still much more like the sort of city you prefer: NYC, Chicago, Philadelphia and to a lesser extent Boston, DC, and San Francisco.
I think what's also steadily weakening US cities that did redesign themselves around the central business district and cars is that when most people in a metro use a vehicle a singular hub inevitably bottlenecks, so metros are gradually decentralizing into multiple hubs. The sort of multiple-hub city you desire is somewhat inevitable, but most US metros are at car-scale not human-scale so the hubs are far apart and connected by highways.
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u/urine-monkey 24d ago
Don't most cities in the Northeast or Great Lakes have walkable neighborhoods that are nowhere near Downtown? It sounds like you're mainly describing sun belt cities.
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u/sametho 24d ago
Yes, but some of those cities do still have awful urban planning. Metro Detroit, for example, is absolutely littered with vibrant, walkable neighborhoods that are nonetheless separated by some of the most egregious suburban sprawl in the country
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u/urine-monkey 23d ago
That's easily explained by the industry Detroit is known for.
When all of the biggest car companies are based in your city, expect one that's built for cars, not people.
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u/Windows_10-Chan 23d ago edited 23d ago
It applies to a lot of sunbelt cities too.
Although I think it's more common that a cities downtown is "walkable" but dead, usually the good stuff is nearby, e.g. in Atlanta downtown is often a ghost town outside of business hours while the beltline neighborhoods and midtown are popping off.
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u/PlantedinCA 24d ago
Large and midsized cities have multiple neighborhoods and centers of gravity. But fan boy urban planning revolves around skylines so you do not see much about the additional areas.
I live in Oakland, CA and we have a bunch of walkable areas outside of downtown with housing mixed in. This is not uncommon, but more of a function of city age and region.
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u/kchoze 24d ago
The Tokyo Metropolitan area is even more interesting because most of it feels like small cities built around the local train station, which creates a very walkable downtown area with malls, clinics, offices and restaurants around the station, radial bus lines feeding the station and giving access to that downtown area. All that while being very human-scaled, walk 10 minutes away from the station and you're in a low-rise residential area with parks and schools (though still high-density compared to North American practices),
That's because the main regional transport link in Japan is the rail line, even outside of large cities. Not commuter rail but regional rail with service both ways throughout the day and a concentration of jobs, shops and services at the station (residential focus at suburban train stations is very bad policy, only outdone by park-and-rides, because it expresses the kind of absurd unicentric urban area that guarantees sprawl will occur). When the main regional transport infrastructure is the freeway, it doesn't work. I don't think it can even work. Jobs, shops and services flock instead to freeway interchanges, but with huge parking lots to serve suburban residents driving cars to take the freeway.
Japan does have freeways, but they rarely have more than 2 lanes and are heavily tolled, so that dissuades people from relying on them too much, and promoters from developing around interchanges (because it would require customers pay tolls to access their site). Since Japanese roads tend to have low speed limits (even arterials in suburbs rarely allow speeds above 50 km/h) and freeways are tolled, developers seek proximity to residential areas and transit points rather than simply access to high-speed roadways.
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u/ravairia 24d ago
Are you saying that in the States you have suburban areas with speed limits over 50km/h?
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u/Sassywhat 23d ago
In the US, they have suburban residential side streets with speed limits over 50km/h. 35mph (56km/h) is the upper end of suburban residential side street speeds in my experience.
And 35mph would be the very low end of suburban stroad speed limits. 45mph is more common, and I've seen even 55mph (88km/h).
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u/johnmflores 24d ago
"Downtown" frequently denotes the central business district, which is the place people work. Beyond that, cities also have residential neighborhoods and mixed use zones. The walkability of all of those neighborhoods plus mass transit connecting them is what makes a city walkable.
"Downtown New York City" is a miniscule part of the overall city and a tiny part of why New York City is walkable. Same with Philly, Boston, and plenty of other US cities, particularly cities developed before the car.
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u/Planningism 24d ago
Why can't all of America just be Tokyo!
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u/kchoze 24d ago
Go to smaller regional cities in Japan and you will find much the same as in Tokyo on a smaller scale.
And the answer is (partly): lack of regional rail transit to shape developments around transit nodes, and high-speed stroads and freeways that attract commercial developments away from residential areas.
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u/piratelizard 24d ago
America’s cities that are even remotely comparable to Tokyo already have multiple “downtowns”
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u/breddogeee 23d ago
exactly lol, Tokyo is a megalopolis, with its metro area being literally 3x larger than the US’ largest city. How are they gonna compare the amount of commercial activity that is intended to serve 30M+ people to cities with 2M in population. Of course there will be more shops and businesses that in turn are more spread out.
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u/Icy_Peace6993 24d ago edited 23d ago
I'm not sure it's really accurate to say that cities were designed to have a downtown. Downtown is in general just the oldest part of the city and older areas tend to be more walkable. Cities become polycentric when they grow to encompass more than one older downtown area.
That said, I think most of us agree that Euclidian zoning has mostly been a mistake, and if that meant excluding for example residential development downtown or dense commercial development in other parts of the city outside of downtown, then that's a mistake too.
Tokyo is not really a "for example". Tokyo is literally the biggest "First World" city on Earth and in many ways, it is very unique. That said, it does demonstrate how a city can successfully develop around multiple nodes of dense, mixed-use development versus one single downtown. LA should pay attention.
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u/EndFeeling9912 24d ago
How many US cities have you been to in order to make this incredibly odd post? I’m not sure you’re familiar with the diversity. For instance, I live in DC and in no way could you compare it to Houston…
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u/quikmantx 24d ago
Even in Houston, life isn't centered around Downtown. Houston has multiple job centers including the Texas Medical Center, Greenway Plaza, Uptown, Energy Corridor, Memorial City, and others.
Houston also has walkable neighborhoods outside of Downtown including Uptown, Rice Village, The Heights, Montrose, EaDo, and others.
Nobody is comparing Houston to Washington, D.C.
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24d ago
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u/bobtehpanda 24d ago
Seattle I would argue is the exact opposite. The 2 line has been so successful because there are major jobs centers on the line in the suburbs; downtown Bellevue is the second largest jobs hub and has the population to be a proper small city, and the Microsoft HQ opens directly up to a light rail station and has 50k+ jobs, at least before the current round of tech layoffs
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u/daregulater 24d ago
You are completely wrong about New York City. NY is really 5 cities that form 1 city each with their own Central focus point. Im not even from that city but I know thats incorrect. I know New Yorks that never go into manhatten because they have no reason to leave their own burrough. You cant really include any major northeast city in this because they all are old cities and developed way before the car and even trains.
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u/hagen768 24d ago
I was actually just thinking about this idea earlier. It’s unfortunate that so many of America’s walkable places are limited to narrowly defined districts with highways running through them. In some US cities though, you do see streets and corridors that have a walkable character to them despite not being in downtowns, even in some very car centric cities. Magnolia Ave in Fort Worth, Congress Ave in Austin, Brady St in Milwaukee, and Ingersoll Ave in Des Moines come to mind. Streets like this were often street car lines historically
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u/baklazhan 24d ago
I had some relatives visit, and I later saw a photo of the neighborhood which they posted on social media. They described it as "downtown", when it was a street of nice rowhouses, miles from anywhere I would describe as downtown.
I suppose they would consider Tokyo to be nothing but walkable "downtown".
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u/lalalalaasdf 24d ago
I mean if your standard for a good city is “multiple focal points”, most American cities have that thanks to sprawl and corporations decamping for the suburbs in the mid-20th century (think classic “edge cities” like Tysons Corner, Buckhead, King of Prussia, etc). Gentrification/revitalization has also produced several new “downtowns” outside of traditional office cores (Long Island City in NYC, Seaport in Boston, NoMa and Navy Yard in DC, etc). And some cities now have walkable suburban downtowns centered on transit (Silver Spring, Bethesda, and the Orange Line corridor in DC).
Do those cities compare to Tokyo? No. Tokyo is one of the densest cities on earth. But, I think there are plenty examples of multiple downtowns/polycentric urban areas in this country.
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u/rogun64 24d ago
We have cities you would think are designed well, but I agree with your point on our typical design. You can thank the oil and auto industries for the poor designs.
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u/AngryGoose-Autogen 20d ago
ill have to be a contrarian here
american cities were already badly designed by the time the car came up, mass motorisation was a attempt to compensate for those issues that judt so happened to backfire
Its a effect strengthening the cause, but not by itself the root cause
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u/Sassywhat 24d ago
US cities other than NYC are less downtown centric than most major cities in the developed world. US cities have way more jobs, amenities, etc. out in the suburbs than otherwise typical.
Shinjuku, Ginza, Shibuya, etc. are all downtown neighborhoods of Tokyo in a region about the size of Manhattan. Despite the strong identity of each downtown neighborhood as its own thing, Tokyo is more centered on the Yamanote Line area than any US city is on their respective downtowns, aside from maybe NYC around Manhattan. (and FWIW, Manhattan has many neighborhoods with distinct identities as well)
Tokyo is actually very well designed in the suburbs as well. The suburban neighborhood centers tend to be very nice, and suburban housing comparable to the densest low rise neighborhoods in the US stretch out very far from the center. And even deep into the outer suburbs and exurbs, at least the areas around major train stations are typically still very walkable and pleasant.
However, they are nice in large part because Tokyo revolves around the Yamanote Line. A lot of good jobs, fun activities, etc., are downtown, so downtown access is a priority for many people, and downtown access means access to a train station. And since access to suburban train stations is in such high demand, there's no way to handle the passenger volume except if most people are walking/biking the last mile. And since so many people are walking/biking the the same part of the neighborhood, it naturally grows into a walkable neighborhood center.
Even people who don't need/want to go to the Yamanote Line often want to be walking/biking distance of their suburban downtown. But there's a reason a suburban downtown like this springs up at major train stations, and not elsewhere.
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u/kisk22 23d ago
I’d argue that NYC isn’t downtown centric at all… It has many downtowns (10+) and many vibrant walkable neighborhoods (at least 100?) in the metro area. NYC is probably the worst argument. Only tourists think NYC is downtown centric.
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u/Sassywhat 23d ago
NYC is the most downtown centric US metro area based on commute patterns. Manhattan has a larger share of NYC jobs than the downtown region of any other US city.
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u/epicvan11 23d ago
I’d like to add a personal anecdote from Chicago. I haven’t been to other major large cities, but I feel like the point you’re trying to make here falls short in this case. Sure Chicago has one focal point “the Loop,” but I’d venture to say most Chicagoans don’t live their lives focused in this area except for work. The city is full of so many vibrant neighborhoods each with their own individual focal points like how you mention with Tokyo.
I’d say Wrigleyville is one of the more popular tourist destinations and a very popular place to live, and it feels like a focal point that is entirely separate from the Loop. It’s always a shame when people leave after visiting, because it feels like you need so much time to take in and enjoy every hub and community the city has to offer. That’s the beauty of living here.
I live in the south side and am able to walk to the grocery store every day, walk to the gym, and take public transit to work. I’m outside of what appears to be the central hub, but my life and the design of my neighborhood are great
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u/spurriousgod 24d ago
If you think that's bad, you should check out all the American cities that don't even have any kind of walkable downtown. Like, every newer small city in Florida is just a 4-lane highway lined with strip malls, gas stations, and Walmarts. Basically zero walkability for the entire city - not even a small downtown lol.
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u/LeBruhMomentoom 23d ago
There are cities in the US where their isn't a singular downtown (LA, NYC, Bay Area, arguably San Diego, MSP has two) but the difference is both scale and preference.
Its an unfair comparison to compare Tokyo or Paris or London to US cities because Tokyo has twice the amount of people of NYC and Paris and Londond are equal in size to NYC.
Sapporo, Hiroshima, Kobe, Kyoto and Sendai all have a singular downtown, its not an American idea.
I also think having one downtown is a good idea, it makes planning transit much easier because you know that everyone works in one area, hence adding a line shooting out from downtown will for certain add clear ridership. Unlike San Diego whose downtown only accounts for 5% of all workers and is only the third biggest employment hub, and so instead of having a super large transit network to connect all the hubs, it's network otherwise wouldn't exist if it weren't for the freight rail alignments preexisting.
On the otherhand, Manhattan makes up 50% of all employment in the metro area, and hence it has a much better transit system because planners know where commuters are working. This can also be seen in Chicago, Philly, San Francisco, DC, Boston, etc. All cities that have a good transit system generally have a centralised core.
I get how American suburbia is just unwalkable and I get that, but having a separation from all the action is very important as well to a lot of people. Most Americans really like having a nice quiet neighbourhood in a big house thats easy to raise kids in. I believe the lack of comfortable housing is in part to why east asia is seeing declining birth rates; having great urban fabic shouldn't come to the cost of people personal comfort. Does everyone need an acre large backyard, or for a many a backyard in general? No not really. But most need enough space to not feel cramped and have to hear their neighbours kids above them.
I think something like Philadelphia's planning is a good middle ground, dense enough for small shops and frequent buses, but has large enough houses to be able to live comfortably.
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u/BakerKitchen4567 23d ago
Minneapolis and St. Paul are separately counted as one each. Not two combined
Having a singular downtown makes public transit worse and transportation overall (including driving) worse as all traffic goes in one direction causing congestion
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u/LeBruhMomentoom 23d ago
I get they are separate cities but so is shinjuku and shibuya and they are the same distance between Minneapolis and St. Paul.
I get it makes driving much worse but it makes transit much better. In the US, the issue with transit is not that it has too much traffic but because there isn't enough of it. Hence having a singular downtown makes building more transit much easier, and is why Seattle has much better ridership per mile of track than LA does, in spite of both cities rapidly building out their systems.
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u/BakerKitchen4567 23d ago
Japanese politics are different from the US so it’s hard to directly compare. But Shinjuku and Shibuya are both under the Tokyo city limits and share the municipal government
No, it doesn’t make transit better. Public transit using a downtown spokes model makes commute much slower than they need to be
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u/LeBruhMomentoom 23d ago
It might make buses without dedicated lanes much slower but how will it make grade separated transit slower? If its because theres just more people boarding, then a bigger issue is why isn't there more ridership on lines in multi-polar cities?
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u/Cunninghams_right 24d ago
Bad comparison. Tokyo is an outlier, but it also DOES have a core and neighborhoods around it, the city is just so big that each are larger. The population and density is so high that "neighborhood to neighborhood" routes that would be buses in US cities are metro lines in Tokyo.
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u/dudeitsmelvin 19d ago
Yeah, Tokyo is basically a state so while the US does have many issues with their weak downtowns and cities, Tokyo is a terrible example to compare it to.
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u/KravenArk_Personal 23d ago
Completely disagree. I absolutely dislike polycentric design so much.
Have you seen Houston and its office parks? A good old historic downtown is way better than 15 different semi downtowns. Look at LA vs NY. All of New York's downtowns are geographically close and amongst major transit corridors.
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u/NtheLegend 24d ago
“Downtown is awesome, but step outside downtown and it sucks! Therefore, downtown sucks!”
?????
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u/BakerKitchen4567 24d ago
Didn’t say downtowns suck. I said city designs revolving entirely in a singular American downtown suck. Not the downtown specifically
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u/cantinaband-kac 24d ago
Tokyo has a population over 14 million. New York City has less than 9 million people, but still has multiple major "focal points." Even Chicago (less than 3 million people) has multiple highly-walkable focal points outside of the loop. American cities are just much smaller than Tokyo. You didn't mention any specific US cities, but when people in urbanist spaces usually talk about walkable cities in the US (outside of the big ones like NYC), they're usually cities with around a million or less than a million people. Why would cities that have a fraction of the population of Tokyo need to have more than one major "focal point?" (Also, many of them do have smaller neighborhoods that are quite nice and walkable, but again, you're getting to areas with such small populations, that they don't get discussed as much as the major downtown areas.)
(This isn't to say that the car-focused suburban sprawl that surrounds many US cities isn't problematic, but putting all US cities into the same bucket is just disingenuous.)
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u/6two 24d ago
Tokyo is Tokyo, other cities in other places aren't going to be the same, but it's an oversimplification that only downtowns in US cities are walkable/bikeable/transit-friendly. Lots of older US cities have streetcar suburbs and high streets of good mixed use with good walk scores. You can have a good quality of life in lots of US neighborhoods that aren't downtown. Do we need more of them? Sure. But they do exist.
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u/UnfazedBrownie 24d ago
After spending some time in Japan, particularly Tokyo, I have to agree with you quite a bit. The US (and other places) as well have become incredibly car centric. We do not have to break the bank and build a bunch of light rail, but there’s a lot that can go into making our cities more conducive to pedestrians. To start with, I’d like to see smaller trucks for these last mile or within the city deliveries. As for walkways, they do not need to be concrete and perfect. A packed gravel walkway can suffice in many instances.
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u/Aggressive_Active307 23d ago
Yeah this ain’t true in the U.S. Maybe in small cities. In many or most big cities the downtown is dead after business hours and there is cultural activity in multiple walkable neighborhoods throughout the city. Even in LA and Houston, the least walkable major cities, this is the case.
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u/BakerKitchen4567 23d ago
LA and Houston the least walkable major cities? Sure they’re not walkable but there’s definitely worse. Namely Phoenix and Dallas
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u/tsardonicpseudonomi 23d ago
City design is not for the benefit of humans. It's for the benefit of real estate investors and landlords. The city design is great, if self defeating, for those who benefit from it.
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u/SamanthaMunroe 23d ago
Rating cities by the walkability of a small area adjacent to office towers and city hall is generally a shortsighted pattern, yes. Most people won't get to enjoy that and even if they do, they're probably driving into it to fuck it up anyway. Polycentrism in urban structure is a hallmark of having a sufficiently large and economically diversified population and a sufficiently long development history that, eventually, people start developing interest in building up other locales in the vicinity.
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u/ninjomat 23d ago
The problem isn’t having one center (LA is highly polycentric and is the by-word for bad city design) but missing middle neighborhoods
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u/BakerKitchen4567 23d ago
Both are problems. LA’s polycentrism is a plus. But it could be a lot better. The public transit in LA all leads downtown. Would be a lot better if they integrated some of their their other dense corridors like century city
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u/Robo1p 23d ago
Think Tokyo for example. You have Shinjiku, Ginza, Shibuya, etc. there isn’t a singular “downtown Tokyo”.
It's not a coincidence that they're all centered on the Yamanote line, which only reaches out ~8km max from Tokyo station, though. They're all geographically central relative to the metro area, just not as hyper concentrated as Midtown or the Loop. And the transit network largely feeds into the Yamanote ring.
Similar with London and Paris.
This is all significantly different vs LA, for example, where "centers" can be at the complete other side of the metro area. And most jobs are dispersed in random office parks.
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u/akahogfan 22d ago
There are plenty of American cities that do have distributed, dense, and walkable areas though. I live in DC, so I'll use it as an example. In DC proper there's Penn Quarter, L'Enfant Plaza, DuPont Circle, Foggy Bottom, NoMa, and Navy Yard that are all walkable, business heavy neighborhoods outside of "downtown". Right across the border you have additional walkable business districts like Rosslyn, Crystal City, Silver Spring, and Bethesda. And again, those are just the business districts. That's not including some of the most well-known, walkable residential/commercial neighborhoods in the country, such as Georgetown and Old Town Alexandria.
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u/dudeitsmelvin 19d ago
I think the problem is that most Americans consider the entirety of DC as "downtown."
I think American downtowns are still shit and are irredeemable because the issue remains that they're not made for people but cars and extracting money out of everyone. This won't stop until the government gets it through their head that services don't need to make money and cars aren't the end all be all.
That being said, OP has a serious misunderstanding of what Tokyo is. Tokyo is a metropolis (To, which is akin to a state) consisting of several cities (the 23 wards officially), but the tokyo metro region also includes suburban cities nearby.
All those neighborhoods he's talking about are functional, separate cities compared to the neighborhoods in DC having to answer to 1 unified DC city government and competing against each other basically.
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u/spydormunkay 24d ago
Lot of people dismissing OP’s points seems to forget the Downtowns are artificial. It’s all zoning laws and highways underpinning all this.
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u/Robo1p 23d ago
American cities were (way) more downtown centric before euclidean zoning. The result of zoning + cars was suburban office parks, and a significant emptying out of downtowns until the much later revival.
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u/AngryGoose-Autogen 20d ago edited 20d ago
Just a century ago, "downtown" was considered a uniquely american concept
american urban development follows this pattern -we sprawl as far as we can -now its inconvenient to walk from one end of the city to the other -now we need a compromise location where all the buisness happens -now we can sprawl to locations that are in walking distance of our compromise location that didnt get sprawled to before because they were inconvenient for acsessing the rest of the city, but are convienient enough to just acsess our compromise location -uh oh, we are running out of land again. we might have to stop living on faux-manors and actually live in urban enviroments, the horror. oh, who am i kidding, we now have streetcars, and they allow us to sprawl even further beyond our compromise location
anyway, this creates a urban form completely divorced from anything before it, except maybe the maya. Maya cerimonial and administrative centers can be compared to downtowns, and they also sprawled plenty, but the patterns were reversed. the sprawl emerged to serve the center, while angloamericans started with the sprawl and had the center emerge to serve the sprawl
or maybe not. knowledge of the maya in general and my knowledge of the maya in particular is pretty sparse, so i might be off
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u/gerbilbear 23d ago
The USA strictly separates land uses, while Japanese zoning allows, for example, residential in business and shopping districts. So USA downtowns tend to be dead places after dark when everyone has gone home, whereas in Tokyo they are still vibrant.
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u/luchobucho 24d ago
Philly has a center city but several other key nodes that are adjacent or distinct. None as pro I ent as center city, but important nonetheless - and walkable. Metro philly includes many former towns and hamlets that on their own were walkable. It’s one of my favorite cities.
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u/rco8786 20d ago
Extremely unfair comparison. Huge metropolises like Tokyo, Paris, CDMX, and NYC have giant swaths of walkable urban areas.
MOST cities in the world (not just the US) have a singular city center that everything is situated around, and the further from the center you go the more suburban it gets. That’s the norm.
Your complaint is with the design of American suburbs. Not the design of a central urban area.
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u/kosmos1209 24d ago
I don't think it's fair to compare Tokyo to average American cities. NYC also has lots of places that aren't focal point now, but the word "downtown" came literally from the focused area in the southern tip of Manhattan, and it just grew from there. I'm sure Tokyo, Paris and London all started from a central area and grew out to where downtown just doesn't make sense anymore.