Another awesome time-lapse video – this time of Tokyo, Japan (worth watching in full screen).
I find the huge volume of pedestrians particularly fascinating to watch when sped up – a simply massive wave of humanity. Tokyo is an interesting case study about just how big a city can get while still functioning pretty effectively.
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Another case of “Don’t mention the war”. I think Queen St is far too busy!
Depends on your general attitude towards cities I guess. Tokyo is perhaps urbanism in its most pure form – so not for everyone’s taste.
Not a true time lose thou, the footage of the shibuya 109 pedestrian crossings are reused, watch for the blue bus on the bottom right crossing both lanes, it is in both loops.. Still fairly stunning none the less,
Tokyo is an amazing city, although one annoying thing is that the trains stop running around midnight
Yeah there’s an interesting debate to be had around whether rail systems should be operated 24/7 like New York’s subway is. The down side of the New York approach is that it’s more difficult to maintain the system and you end up with hugely disruptive closures of parts of the network most evenings and weekends anyway.
London is perhaps a good model, with its extensive night-bus network.
Hmm,
Looks like a riff on one of the great timelapse montages, those being the one in the movie Koyaanisqatsi (especially the second half of the movie). I saw it in 1984 at the Auckland film Festival if my memory is correct.
Those scenes around the Tokyo train station and street scenes are very similarly done, and yes, it is a tide of humanity.
In the original movie, the tide of humanity queueing and sweeping up the escalators is very impressive, and other scenes show how urban transport systems work remarkably like how the human body pumps blood around.
The trains only stop running for around 4 hours, and that time is pretty much the only chance they get to do heavy maintenance. You could probably run the network 24hrs but would need more tracks. The big difference I always notice and remember about Tokyo, is how it has a much more pervasive pedestrian culture, i.e there are dramatically more people walking to get to where they need to go, so more small walk-up shops, and the shopping districts all seem to be much healthier (without the enormous car parks we tend to put around everything, Albany Mall is a perfect example for this).
greater Tokyo has about 33 million people. biggest connurbation on Earth.
most people don’t use private cars on weekdays. there is just no point.
Tokyo is mostly flat so walking and cycling for short trips without bulky luggage is what most people do. anything over a couple of km, people get the train or subway or bus. lived in Tokyo 15 years, never owned a car.
I’m here at the moment. The transport system is the eighth wonder of the world, just extraordinary. Half of it is elevated rail, of course, but then Tokyo is flat not like that slightly mad plan for an L in place of the CRL that was discussed the other day.
The thing that bugs me most is how our highly Americanised western culture has chosen to read Tokyo as sci-fi dystopia – most of the time anyway, like in Bladerunner. This place is fantastic, every city should be like it. If they were there’d only be about 200 on the whole planet and we could leave the rest of the world in peace and only go visit from time to time…
[Yeah, I know that’s not how it works and that Tokyo’s ecological footprint is probably 5 times NZ’s – but then again, it’s got 7 times as many people…]