I mean damn just look at the difference in road widths--granted Boston Road is a major arterial, but there's still the parking lot access road etc...
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Replying to @380kmh
Funny how (to me) Tokyo looks way worse from above, but way better from street-level. Obvious which one you should prioritize, but I could see how city planners would get fooled, looking down at a map.
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Replying to @ded_ruckus @380kmh
To be fair, the only way Springfield would ever look good from street level again will require some sort of thermonuclear weapon. For a better comparison, look at somewhere more comparable to Japan's average prosperity level like Somerville, Arlington, Brookline, or Cambridge.
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Replying to @W4nk_3ngine @ded_ruckus
sure, I was just struck by how many houses could fit on that vacant lot when I was out inspecting bus stops in the area--that's what prompted the tweet
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Replying to @380kmh @ded_ruckus
All snarking aside, what's fascinating to me is the utterly insane volume of wasted/underutilized space in the hundreds of large cities here that have been left behind by the new urbanism boom, particularly in light of the skyrocketing real estate costs in the ones that haven't.
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Replying to @W4nk_3ngine @ded_ruckus
the wasted space (and its contribution to overall impoverishment) in our stagnant cities is definitely on my mind a lot--but it's not surprising that high real estate costs in other cities haven't changed things for them...
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Replying to @380kmh @ded_ruckus
I think the higher costs ARE changing things for them, but just that it's a highly uneven and fairly slow process. Just look at Boston --> Quincy/Malden/Worcester/Salem/Portsmouth/Nashua/Portland, and even that's a poor example just because Boston has so many satellites.
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But yeah, it's all about proximity, and small cities that are more than 1-1.5 hours from their regional hub but aren't big enough to sustain urban renewal on their own are fucked.
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But that doesn't mean it's not happening. Just look at DC spilling over into Baltimore and Richmond, or Chicago spilling over into Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and Grand Rapids, or the gentrification of the small cities in the Texas triangle, and you'll see what I mean.
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sure--some cities can still benefit, but those are usually the ones close enough to "orbit" the regional hub
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