Backyard Coffee and Jazz in Kyoto

Japan is full of licenses and regulations, it is almost the exact opposite of the free market utopia you're imagining. You're not even allowed to buy a car without a permit that proves you have a parking space for it.

What Japan does different is that it has sensible zoning laws that are designed around foot traffic rather than car traffic. Why don't you have small shops like this in the U.S.? Because of minimum parking space requirements for cars.

And that running businesses out of homes is frequently illegal, another casualty of zoning.

> You're not even allowed to buy a car without a permit that proves you have a parking space for it.

I would cross out "even" in that sentence, and then step back and admire it. This is one of the best things about Japan. For some bizarre reason there is an implicit assumption (at least in many places in Europe, especially Central Europe) that 12m2 of public shared city space should be reserved for your metal box on wheels and that it's somehow a right.

It is insanity. In Amsterdam, houses go for €9,000 per square meter. So a parking space should cost around ~ €9,000 × 12m2 = €108,000. Meanwhile parking permits for inhabitants go for €500-€750 per year. It's the cheapest real estate available.

> You're not even allowed to buy a car without a permit that proves you have a parking space for it.

And this is how you end up with excellent public transport, no SUVs, and like the lowest traffic death rate in the world.

Full of licenses and regulations doesn't mean that the licensing requirements for bars in particular are onerous.

An example is where I'm from, in Canada. Licensing for cars is easy. Business licenses are easy enough, if they're non-physical.

But opening a bar means at least $50k of licenses/compliance costs. To have a bar, you need to serve food. To serve food, there's minimum requirements for all sorts of things from electrical to ventilation to plumbing. So you need to apply to the city to do a study and plebiscite in the neighborhood to determine no one objects to your bar. You need to have an engineer sign off on your design and the fire department to sign off on that. Liquor license is $$$.

And that's before even bringing up the cost of the lease (1 year rent as deposit) or the actual construction costs (last I checked, over $400 per square foot).

Do houses and land cost more, or less, there than the US?

It would help if traveling into the city for work would take also 45m, instead of 2h jumping across train, tram and bus connections, and this on a good day, when they aren't missed by "pick random DB excuse of the day".

Requiring proof that you have a parking spot should not be an issue. If you have a car, you need to put it somewhere right? Parking is generally private in Japan, so it comes at a premium. In western countries people expect that the government provide sufficient parking spots, but that's not necessary the most efficient allocation of valuable land.

That’s the whole point of zoning

It's the difference between drivers paying for their own parking or having it subsidised by non-drivers, along with the various issues caused by motornormativity (when you design around cars, you exclude walking/cycling etc).

Texas alone is twice the size of Japan with 1/4 of the population.

There’s little need for efficient allocation of essentially infinite space outside of urban areas constrained by geological features. And in those places parking comes at a premium too even in Western countries.

But why?

(semi-rhetorical, but that's exactly the discussion we're having here, whether people should be allowed a backyard coffee shop)

> There’s little need for efficient allocation of essentially infinite space outside of urban areas constrained by geological features.

Is that why highways that are 26 lanes wide are needed?

* https://roadstotravel.net/usa-katy-freeway/

Ah, yes, DB: I am aware of their reputation and, sadly, they also run some services in the UK where reliability and timeliness of service is also already shaky enough without their further assistance.

You have my sympathy.

I favour public transport when possible, but until goverments create reliable infrastructures that go beyond the lucky ones able to afford rents in city centers within the radius of good transport connections, or not having to go by bycicle to work while collecting km/miles as training for The Tour, most folks will go with the car option.

> Because of minimum parking space requirements for cars.

This is not true. In a big city there are plenty of locations without parking or rely on public street parking. The issues are the onerous zoning, licensing and insurance requirements.

It also helps that apparently in general street parking is banned (possibly at least in big cities) due to disaster considerations - eq. for easy access for rescue personnel after a major earthquake or Typhoon. Not to mention tightly parkiong cars potentially being a fire spreading hazard in such a scenario.

In comparison, even here in Europe there are tight rows of cars in almost every street, reducing space for greenery, eating up sidewalks, making street crossing dangerous and sometimes even making the street hard to navigate for the cars themselves, not to mention making quick stops for taxi drivers or food & grocery delivery cars almost impossible.

Land rights conversion. I believe if 2/3 of homeowners (living in a low-density area) agree to a proposed readjustment, then the rights of the land belonging to all homeowners are thusly converted. Oddly makes sense as the end-product, in turn, allows for greater density whilst retaining much of the aesthetic of said-land.

They might not be saying it's perfect in all cases, maybe just giving the line of thinking that landed us at Katy highway :-)

Externalities. But I'm not a fan of the neighborhoods that have nothing but houses for miles. Gotta balance it a little more.