Comment by delackner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by delackner | Hacker News Reader

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If you live in a commuter suburb of Tokyo and ride the train at rush hour, yes you will not be happy. But why commute? I live 8 minutes' walk from Shibuya station and during the day perhaps 1 or two people walk by every few minutes. At night even fewer. Cars drive so slowly on my side-street that you cannot hear them at all.

As for taking two hours to "actual green stuff" man are you ever exaggerating. Even without LEAVING the city I know of 3 different nature preserves that range from 20 to 30 minutes away DOOR TO DOOR. If you hop on a train for 30 minutes, you hit Tamagawa, a breathtaking open expanse of river and low brush. Want forest? How about Takao-san, a breathtaking natural space with tons of hiking trails and a mountain you can climb easily in an afternoon. 44 minutes west of Shinjuku.

If you hate crowds, just avoid them. "Living in Tokyo is not fun" says more about your unhappiness with the rhythm of life you have created for yourself than it says about the city.

Well, the point is, to get to a green space, you need to get in a crowd in the first place. You cannot avoid them that easily. It's like you get double-punishment before the reward.

Tokyo is simply a city that is OVER-capacity, not by a factor of 1 or 2, but 10 or maybe more. If the train is 10 minutes late for any reason, any station would be filled with people on the platforms you can cross through it anymore. That says a lot. I feel New York is way more livable, from what I can compare.

Its funny you mention the train being late, and crowds. When I lived in NYC, traveling on the train during non-peak times was so stressful I avoided it like the plague. Always late. Noisy as hell. Smells like a cesspool. During rush-hour the train might stop in the middle of a tunnel, and the lights go out, the whole time it is not even air conditioned. I visited NYC 2 months ago after a few years away, and the floating filth in the tracks was still there of course. My Japanese travel companion who had never been in NYC before took only two train rides (at non-peak hours) to declare a strong negative impression of the NYC subway.

Maybe you live in another NYC where there are no trains? Or you just drive everywhere, but you don't mind that it takes an hour stuck in traffic to get out of Manhattan on a friday evening. In Tokyo it takes about the same amount of time to travel any distance whether it is 9am or 3pm, since the trains actually work.

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