The Nikkei [via Business Week] reports Japanese Domestic Market (JDM) new car sales have improved slightly in the first quarter of 2008. But the number of automobiles on Japanese roads has fallen for three months straight (down 0.2 percent last quarter). That's the largest cumulative dip since record-keeping began in 1963. The Japanese government predicts traffic will peak by… 2010. Japan's population is slowly declining. More importantly, the cost and hassle of car ownership in the densely-populated island nation is driving people to alternatives. Imagine paying $400 per month on a Tokyo parking spot, and you're beginning to get the picture. As world governments milk the four-wheeled cash cow in the name of planet saving, expect more lower and middle-class motorists to be priced right off the roads. Japanese consumers bought some 282,600 Electric bicycles last year, up some 40 percent in the last five years. sts priced off the roads. In one of the worst first quarters for auto sales in recent memory, the U.S. scooter market jumped 23 percent, according to the L.A. Times. The times, they are a-changing.
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See de Lorenzo’s current Autoextremist rant about how stupid scooter-buying is. And he’s right.
I would gladly ride on if I didn’t have to mix with the traffic here. Good way to get killed. What we need is a bike path right through the center of town.
I have no idea how they would handle all of the driveways and cross streets though.
My parking spot was 300 a month in Tokyo 10 years ago. Gas was 5 dollars a gallon when we were paying .90 a jug. Parking tickets started at 300.00 and they towed the car for minor infractions. The toll roads on Tokyo started at 7.00 and a 2 hour trip was over 110.00 in tolls one way.
Busbodger,
Lightweight bridges over the principal roads would be nice. Useful for the pedestrians, too.
Minneapolis has what amounts to an “expressway” for bicycles, a converted rail line:
Minneapolis Greenway
which cuts across the city. There are actually ramps on and off the central section.
There are other trails about. A fair number of people use the “Southwest LRT” trail to get from the southwestern suburbs to the Greenway and then downtown by bike.
If you work in St. Paul and live North/East of downtown, you may be able to use the Gateway or Bruce Vento Trails for much of the ride. From the South/East there are a few options.
Along my route to work, which is suburb-to-suburb, there’s no trails and plenty of shoulder-less roads and dangerous intersections.
Wow, just read DeLorenzo’s rant, and… it came across a bit “Yates-y” to me. Obviously conditions across America vary pretty wildly. What might not work in the frozen tundra of Detroit might be a smart choice in more… dense, temperate cities. I do say this from a city with a thriving bicycle culture, so I’m used to hearing scooters scorned for entirely different reasons.
Well, I’m an ex-motorcyclist, accent on the ex, and I wouldn’t get on a two-wheeler for all the tits in Vegas. I don’t remember whether you (Edward Niedermeyer) live in the U. S. or Europe, but I don’t know of a single U.S. city that’s truly safe for bikes and sickles, even Portland. My wife and daughter are both serious, Serotta-riding road bikers, and it’s the most dangerous thing they do. (For me, it’s using a chainsaw…)
I used to love motorcycles. Logged some 20K miles on a bike. But then I started to fear death. And the two (bikes and fear of death) don’t really mix well together.
People who think riding bikes is really dangerous either have very little experience with it, or are doing it the wrong way. Accident stats actually show that for adult cyclists that don’t do anything incredibly stupid (ride the wrong way, ride at night without lights, ride drunk); safety is roughly comparable to riding in a motor vehicle.
Yes, you heard me. Even without helmets (which don’t do a hell of a lot anyways other than convince people who don’t know any better that cycling must be dangerous).
Oh, c’mon. The problem is that 91 percent of all U.S. motorcyclists are self-taught and don’t even know what countersteering is. (I just took the Harley “Rider’s Edge” course in order to write about it, and that was the number they provided, I believe from the Motorcycle Industry Council.) Most serious motorcycle accidents are the result of riders simply not being able to complete–i.e. go around–corners.
You’re probably right about helmets, though. As an EMS volunteer, I can assure you that the donorcycle crashes we shovel up every summer weekend are horrific enough that the helmets live up to their “brain bucket” sobriquet.
Have fun out there, and forgodsakes don’t muss your do-rag with a helmet. Wouldn’t be cool.
Japan’s major cities are unimaginably densely populated. When I traveled to Tokyo on business I found that almost nobody uses their personal car for going to work. Many professionals don’t own a car, and those who did only used it for special occasions like going to the country on a weekend adventure.
Manhattan is the closest thing to it in the US, but Tokyo is far larger and far denser than Manhattan. Tokyo and Osaka were laid out around 1900 around a network of train stations and trains remain the primary means of transportation.
Things are going to get strange in Japan though, as the population peaked in about 2005 and is expected to continue trending down for the foreseeable future. Only a really dramatic event like merging with China would change the trend.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#Population_density
“Accident stats actually show that for adult cyclists that don’t do anything incredibly stupid (ride the wrong way, ride at night without lights, ride drunk); safety is roughly comparable to riding in a motor vehicle.”
Apples and oranges, eh? If you take all the stupid things out of automobile accident statistics those numbers would drop like a rock as well. Take away alcohol, drugs, excessive speed and driver inattention/driver error and you have eliminated nearly all automobile accidents as well. Looking at real data, motorcycle fatalities are about 34 times higher than for passenger cars. 34X is a damn big multiplier.
From the NHTSA’s report:
2004 Occupant Fatalities per 100 Million Miles
Motorcycles: 40.09
Passenger Cars: 1.18
Light Trucks: 1.16
Source:
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/810620.PDF
I’m a bit baffled as to how the japanese aftermarket parts industry continues to exist in the face of all that. Not only is gas and parking expensive, but don’t forget about those biannual inspections that essentially require a car to be in perfect running order to receive registration. I hear that even something like a torn CV boot must be replaced to pass.
Stephan Wilkinson :
It’s really disturbing how many “squids” have the mentality of buying a 1 liter sport bike because 250, 500s and 600s are “too small” for them and a 1000cc bike will give them space to learn on. It’s almost the equivalent of going mountaineering on Everest with no climbing experience. My significant other was an EMT for about a year and saw his share of gruesome motorcycle accidents. In fact, after his first one involving brain-out-of-skull, the EMT team treated him to spaghetti.
Didn’t TTAC post a news story a while back about how Japanese youths aren’t even bothering to get drivers licenses any more? It is like they gave up on the idea that they will need to drive a car.