MetroRiderLA

Yesterday, Mayor Villaraigosa gave his State of the City address, and although the majority of the speech was about gang crime, he did touch on transit.  The Mayor plans on encouraging Metro to look for private funding sources to “build and operate an expanded transit system in Los Angeles.”  I don’t know if all that is possible,  but there are certainly avenues to get private money into our system, advertising being the most obvious.

In Japan, a monorail train in Kobe has been taken over by Ikea to promote the opening of a new retail store.  And when I say taken over, I mean it.  The exterior of the train is painted in bright patterns found on Ikea fabrics and the inside of the train has been converted into a mobile Ikea showroom.  The seats have been reupholstered with Ikea fabrics and colorful Ikea curtains adorn the windows.  It sends an unmissable message, both inside and out.

Could something as wild as this work in Los Angeles?

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Image courtesy of bruceley.

The headline is my impression what a Valley Girl might say if the youth of America felt the same way about cars as the young people in Japan. According to a recent article in Newsweek, in Japan the car has lost its cool.

Last year car sales in Japan fell 6.7 percent and since 1990 sales have fallen over 30 percent. The reason? According to the article, demographics play a part, but there’s another factor as well: kuruma banare, or demotorization. To the young people of Japan, cars are just another gadget, and in a country of a million gadgets, cars are low on the “must-have” list. Status is defined by the coolest cell phone or gaming device, not your mode of transport. An increasing number of people in Japan live in urban areas, and the urban areas are served by extensive mass transit, making the expensive prospect of car ownership unnecessary. Why spend so much money on cars when you can get around just fine with out one? That money can be spent on cool gadgets, as is evidenced by the increase in spending on internet and mobile phone subscriptions (up to $1,500 since 2000 according to Newsweek) and the decrease in spending on automobile expenses (down to $600 since 2000).

The article opens with a quote from a young Tokyo-based businessman who no longer owns a car, and gets around instead using mass transit: “It’s not inconvenient at all…having a car is so 20th century.”

Like sushi, karaoke, and anime, it’s time for Americans to embrace the newest Japanese trend: kuruma banare.