Following delays out of Springfield and Chicago, we finally arrived in Tokyo and got on a shuttle to the hotel in our Sister City of Isesaki, Japan.  The ride from the airport to our hotel was very interesting for a couple of reasons. 

Obviously, I have never been to Japan and just seeing Tokyo, a city of 10 million, was fascinating in and of itself.  Secondly, it helped me solidify some of my thinking on issues that have recently been discussed in Springfield, notably population densities and mixed use zoning.

         Tokyo has to have one of the densest populations in the world.  Because we landed at rush hour, it took us several hours to get to the hotel, even though it was only about 80 kilometers.  Traffic never really eased up and we never obviously moved from one city to the next.  It was just all one large metro area.

         The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that density of population is more a function of geography, political boundaries, and historical narrative than it is a function of post-modernism or political correctness. People spread out because they can.

         I will be the first to agree that city services can be delivered more efficiently if the population is denser.  If you have 100,000 people in an area of Commercial to Glenstone to Sunshine to Kansas Expressway, you can deliver services better than if we are spread out from the airport to almost Strafford to Galloway to almost Battlefield.  However, that calls the question:  are we here to provide services to citizens wherever they decide to live or are we here to say:  services will be provided here and, if you live outside that area, tough.

         Government is supposed to be guided by the people, not the other way around.  We on Council serve at the pleasure of the voters.  That’s why I just don’t see it as my job as a Council member to tell our neighbors that they shouldn’t live on the outer edges of town if that is where they choose to live.   They elect us; they should tell us what they want and what they are willing to pay for. We are “hired” to carry out their wishes.

         Another lesson in density came from this trip and that is about mass transit.  We simply do not have the demand for mass transit that a city of 10 million can muster.  Therefore, our mass (such as it is) transit system is doomed to perpetual subsidies and an inability to pay for itself.  From what I’m told, there is not a single light-rail system or train system in the US that is covering its own costs. 

         I said earlier that density is more a function of geography than anything else.  We have always spread out (what the critics call sprawl) because we could.  There was always more room if we were to “Go west, young man.”  As such, our national narrative is one of independence, privacy, and our own plot of land.

         If our original settlers had landed on an island the size of Japan, our population patterns would be much different. We would probably be living more densely and depending more on mass transit.  But that didn’t happen.  Without getting into any kind of “manifest destiny” discussion, we had the good fortune for our forefathers to land on a large continent with a variety of resources.

         Let’s not pretend we’re a small island when, in fact, we’re a prairie town.  Let’s not cram all of us into densely packed apartment buildings just because of some romantic European ideal.  Our national narrative is less informed by Louis XIV than it is by Carl Sandburg’s historic poem about Chicago.  Those lines could apply to us in Springfield and to us as a nation:

              ”proud to be Hog
    

            Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with
Railroads and

Freight Handler to the Nation.”