With a deep interest in urbanism, anarchist utopias, and cities, and having moved to France not least to find somewhere my dear wife and I can live functionally without a car, and having spent something approaching two months living in Tokyo, Kyoto, and the Cote D' Azur, I have a lot of thoughts and new experiences in how cities can work, and where they're still hopelessly stuck to their detriment. Maybe I will manage to delve into this subject more deeply, but today I am going to limit myself to a what will mostly be a few reflections on buses.
It might be a bit of a screed.
Kyoto was a city like nothing I've ever been to. It is jammed with people, commercially vibrant in a way I have never seen- where businesses genuinely exist in relation to where people live (in a way that I had long been wondering why the world wasn't more like. Even a place like Nice has blocks of eight story apartments in sections of town full of dead space and no commercial activity). Loads of people rode buses and trains in Kyoto even though the trains were a bit incoherent and incomplete, being operated by different lines and companies, and not really covering the city fully, and the buses, almost always packed full, and reasonably frequent, were jammed into the city's car traffic without much respect or care. It was a better system than possibly any place I've ever been to, and on a curve it gets top marks. But what a curve! We are so inured to cities slavishly devoted to the automobile that even cities like Tokyo or Kyoto, still assigning vast resources and privelege to cars and roads for cars, come off by comparison like they're fucking Venice!
Not that Venice doesn't have a few problems.
But the streets aren't one of them.
But I promised just a couple things about the buses, though it applies to trains as well, and it can really just be this one thing, a simple measure with which to understand at least an aspect of any city:
If your city buses (or trains) are jam packed, you aren't running them often enough.
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