Democratic in the Streets
The Collective Intelligence of Japanese Street Design
Shibuya crossing in Tokyo is the busiest pedestrian crossing on the planet. Up to 3000 people cross simultaneously during the 47 second long pedestrian scramble in an elegant public choreography. The ebb and flow, the rushing and meandering, the pivots and turns are as beautiful as synchronized walking (a sport that is also, unsurprisingly, Japanese). But, very much unlike synchronized walking, the dance isn’t practiced and the movements are not predetermined. The beauty of Shibuya crossing is that each of those 3000 people have to navigate the crowd entirely independently. No one is coordinating for them. And yet, nearly every time, everyone makes it to the other side unscathed, and without collision.
Busy pedestrian crossings like Shibuya exemplify something amazing about human behavior: our ability to coordinate without a coordinator. Imagine if one person had to determine the movements of all 3000 people and only had 47 seconds to get them across. Collisions would be commonplace. But with no one telling us what to do, we can do it almost effortlessly. Each person just makes small adjustments in response to the movements of the people around them. Political scientist Charles Lindblom calls this, “decentralized coordination through mutual adjustment.”
To Lindblom, rational analysis is prone to mistakes when things get too complicated. Decentralized coordination can help avoid those mistakes (no one running into each other), and mutual adjustment helps us to learn from those mistakes when they happen. So in a sense, the outcomes of decentralized coordination through mutual adjustment are often more intelligent than when a single coordinator uses rational analysis to make decisions.
Lindblom goes on to show how the success of markets and democracy can also be attributed to this principle. We can enjoy a hot cup of coffee in the morning pretty much everywhere in the United States because growers, shippers, roasters, wholesalers, and retailers are all coordinated through markets. Democratic states are so stable because political parties must make platforms that appeal to enough people to get elected. Politicians must adjust their own ideas and desires to meet the needs of their constituents, at least enough to get elected. Just like Shibuya, no one is telling each of these actors what to do. Decisions are decentralized, made by responding and adjusting to what the other actors are doing. They don’t have to get it right the first time, but those adjustments eventually lead to the desired outcome.
Like in most other places, the intersections in Drachten, Netherlands were dangerous for anyone who was outside of a car. One way of solving the problem is technical: design intersections to be inherently safer. Daylighting, bump outs, reducing speed, or adding pedestrian and cycling protections are all common solutions. But that isn’t what Drachten did. Instead, Drachten got rid of their signs, lights, and other intersection controls and replaced them with attentiveness.
Drachten’s intersections can seem chaotic. But that chaos is exactly what makes their intersections so safe. To successfully navigate them, everyone, drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians alike, have to pay attention, notice, and respond to the actions of everyone around them. Drivers go slowly not because the speed limit is low, but because they can’t possibly pay adequate attention if they don’t. Each traveler makes small adjustments in response to the people around them and everyone navigates the intersection safely. What Shibuya crossing is for pedestrians, Drachten’s intersections are for all forms of transportation (although with many fewer people!).
Japan takes this principle to a whole other level. Despite lacking many of the technical elements of safe streets that we might advocate for in the United States, Japan’s streets are extremely safe. In 2022 Japan had 2.6 traffic fatalities per 100k residents, 0.4 per 10k vehicles, or 4.9 per 1 billion vehicle-kilometers traveled. In any measure you can think of, Japan does better than the U.S., and by a large margin.
Of course part of the reason is because Japan de-emphasizes driving as a mode of transportation. Dense, walkable cities, good transit options, and rules making car ownership more costly all work to ensure that people drive less in Japan than the U.S. But Japan actually still has surprisingly high car ownership. About 80% of households still own a car, and Japan has 660 cars per 1000 residents. A far cry fewer than the U.S., but far more than most European nations. So Japan’s safety must not come solely from getting cars off the streets.
Even though Japan doesn’t use the principles of inherently safe road design that we are familiar with, their road design still contributes to safety. They take a similar approach to Drachten. Japanese streets are designed to make people drive more slowly and carefully so they can make adjustments in response to changes in their situation.
Many roads in Japan have fully mixed traffic. Cyclists share the road with cars and with pedestrians alike. Rather than cordon off different parts of the road for different modes of transportation, Japanese streets filter by speed. On large stroads where vehicles travel faster (yes, Japan still has these) pedestrians use wide, accommodating sidewalks. But the backbone of most Japanese cities are slow speed streets where the speed limit is 20 kph. While in the U.S., most slow speed streets are still built to allow for cars to go much faster than the speed limit, Japanese streets force drivers to go slowly by mixing traffic. A car can always go faster than the speed limit, but they can’t go faster than the speed of the person in front of them.
This works, in large part, because Japanese streets are also very narrow. What would, to Americans, look like a single lane, one way street is often a slow speed two way street in Japan. The last time I cycled in mixed traffic in my neighborhood in Albuquerque, cars would move to the wrong side of the road and gun it to pass me, even if I wasn’t going much slower than the 25mph speed limit. But narrow streets make that maneuver either impossible or uncomfortable for the driver. Oncoming cyclists, pedestrians, and other drivers force drivers to slow down, and actively consider, “when is the right time to safely pass?”
In the United States complete streets use daylighting at intersections to ensure that drivers can see approaching pedestrians and thus not hit them. Japan takes the opposite approach. How often do you see drivers only slow down for a stop sign rather than actually stop? If you were to ask them why they did it, they would probably say something similar to, “I could see no one was there so why do I need to stop?” Japanese intersections often take that excuse away.
Japanese intersections often include blind corners. A driver cannot see who is coming, whether a pedestrian, cyclist, or driver, until they have reached the intersection itself. In fact, some intersections have such poor sight lines that drivers rely on mirrors placed on building corners in order to see intersecting traffic. The result is that drivers come to a complete stop at nearly all intersections. Since drivers must stop anyway just to see, intersections between slow speed streets are often only controlled by a yield sign indicating general right of way. Sometimes they aren’t controlled at all! Drivers must actively pay attention to every other street user and, again, actively decide what to do based on what other street users are doing. Intersections aren’t controlled by signed coordinating drivers. They are controlled by the negotiations between road users, who can do so safely because they must drive so slowly.
Streets in Japan are also very complex. Driveways are frequent, store fronts extend right up to the side of the road, road signs are on the street, and parked cars and delivery trucks extend into the street space as well. Many stroads in the United States are complex as well (in fact, thats part of what makes them stroads). Speed continues to be the key. In the United States stroads are riddled with unmarked driveways into parking lots, left turn lanes at frequent intersections with smaller streets, mid-block zebra crossings, and other points of conflict. But they make driving more dangerous rather than safer because the speed limit typically ranges from 35-45 mph. The lanes are wide, the roads are straight, and the distances between controls (lights or stop signs) is long so drivers often go even faster. It isn’t unusual for me to see drivers going 55 mph on these stroads in Albuquerque. Drivers in such stroads don’t have time to assess the complexity, so they ignore it, and crashes are thus an inevitable feature.
But complexity in Japanese streets works in tandem with other speed-reducing designs. It feels extremely uncomfortable to speed on Japanese streets. Having to watch for obstacles resulting from complexity ensures that drivers go slowly and are always attentive. Thus, rather than crash when the street gets complex, that complexity lends itself to more thoughtful driving. Drivers drive slow enough in Japan to see and consider complex hazards, thinking about what the appropriate action is to avoid them while also keeping other road users in mind. This further primes enhances coordination through mutual adjustment.
One particular design element common in Japan that adds to complexity are edge lane roads. The road consists of a single lane for cars in the center, with a cycle lane on each side of the street. Although there is only one car lane, the street is usually two ways. When an oncoming car approaches, both cars move into the cycle lanes. But bicyclists have right of way, so if two cars are approaching one another and need to pass, if a car is behind a cyclist the driver must wait until the other car passes, and then can drive freely in the center lane to pass the cyclist. This adds complexity to the road that forces drivers to slow down and be more attentive. Furthermore, it forces road users to cooperate and adjust to one another. A driver must consider what both drivers and cyclists are doing and react accordingly.
Of course not all Japanese streets everywhere in the country are like this. Japan also has freeways that prohibit pedestrian and cyclist traffic altogether. They have boulevards with wide, straight lanes where traffic also moves quickly. Pedestrians and cyclists don’t generally use these roads. Instead they have wide sidewalks, often protected by metal guard rails. In more rural parts of the country, even some small, low speed, local roads often have sidewalks since there is more room for them. What makes these slow, narrow, complex streets so effective is not necessarily their ubiquity (although they are still present even in rural towns), but rather their importance and centrality to city design.
You see, Japan didn’t design roadways and build cities around them. They made rules for the development of their cities, road design emerged around that. Allowing density and mixed use meant that the places where people live, work, shop, and have fun are all very close together. The street a Japanese salaryman walks down to get to the train station is the same street a delivery truck must drive down to stock the convenience store where the salaryman grabs his breakfast. It is also the same one that children walk down to get to school, or college student bikes down to meet her friends for the weekend.
Much of Japanese city life is dependent on these roads. Wide roads designed for cars won’t take you everywhere the way they do in most American cities. Such roads block out large sections of the city, not dissimilar from the super blocks in Barcelona. But to get anywhere within these wide areas requires going down the kinds of local streets I’ve just described. This is why you tend to see a wide variety of traffic on these streets. Residents use them to drive home, cabs take their passengers down them, and delivery vans and trucks of sometimes surprising size drop off shipments to the shops and restaurants that do business along them. By making these streets central to transportation networks, they also set a baseline for the mindset of Japanese drivers. Driving there requires negotiating, and drivers are thus more likely to accommodate other road users, even when on bigger, faster roads as well. It contributes to the culture of “generous driving”.
The emergent properties of Japanese roads is evidenced in other aspects of their design as well. Japanese zoning mostly lacks setback rules and has no parking minimums. So developers often build to within centimeters of the edge of the lot. This contributes to the blind corners and intersections. It also means there is no room in the setback to put road signs. Mixed use zoning means that storefronts directly abut the street, leading to increased complexity. Allowed density leaves little room for expansive streets, forcing them to narrow and therefore slow speed. In this way, zoning and street design work hand in hand.
Japan’s street designs, therefore, are not the grand plan of some technocrat. Looking at Japan’s design standards and street ordinances, they don’t mention any of these features of local streets. Just like the safety of these streets is the result of negotiation between road users, the streets themselves are designed that way as a result of a kind of negotiation as well. It comes from the interactions between road design standards, zoning laws, developers, and the citizens using the streets for their everyday lives. Japan didn’t try, per se, to have safe streets (in fact, traffic violence used to be much worse in Japan). Instead, Japan made rules about what would make a good city, and safe streets emerged from that as a result of impromptu negotiations between their users - citizens themselves. This is part of why Lindblom characterizes decentralized coordination through mutual adjustment as democratic, and why I claim that Japan’s safe streets are the result, in part, of democratic principles.
Unlike Japan’s zoning laws, which I think are worth emulating more directly, I also don’t mean to argue that we should directly adopt Japan’s chaotic, small, local roads. Instead we should consider trying to use the social forces that led to their creation.
I absolutely think that most complete street design standards would make American streets better and safer (shoot, we might actually be able to call more of them “streets” rather than stroads too). But we should consider the limits of implementing such designs as technocratic, top down, standards to follow. These aren’t some kind of scientifically infallible street design, and we might find that streets become safer when we do other things to make them better. For example, in Albuquerque, the construction of a bus rapid transit route improved pedestrian safety along one of the city’s most dangerous roads. Small steps towards better transit, better land use, and better street safety are likely to improve cities overall. U.S. cities could also benefit from fewer codes, fewer design standards, and more democratic negotiations that make our cities more emergent as well.
We may not even be able to replicate Japan’s street design. Streets in the U.S. are often very wide to accommodate multiple lanes of traffic and parking. Even if attitudes magically changed, and American cities all made design changes to make our streets safer, they probably still wouldn’t look like Japan’s. I suspect more democratically safe streets would, in fact, look more like complete street designs, where parking and wide, plentiful lanes transform into protected cycle lanes, wide sidewalks, and lush trees.
The lesson here isn’t necessarily about design codes or regulations. Rather than ask ourselves which design features we can adapt, we should instead ask how we can better utilize the intelligence of decentralization and mutual adjustment. It doesn’t take more town halls, more NIMBYs opposing every improvement, to democratize our urban environment. Japan has some of the lowest traffic violence in the world, and they did it by making their citizens more involved in creating safe streets, by putting them in the driver seat, so to speak. I think the important question is: How can our own citizens play a more active role in their own safety? Can our cities be more emergent too?
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