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Americans who go to Tokyo or Paris or Seoul or London are often wowed by the efficient train systems, dense housing, and walkable city streets lined with shops and restaurants. And yet in these countries, many secondary cities also have these attractive features. Go to Nagoya or Fukuoka, and the trains will be almost as convenient, the houses almost as dense, and the streets almost as attractive as in Tokyo.
The U.S. is very different. We have New York City, and that’s about it. People from Chicago or Boston may protest that their own cities are also walkable, but transit use statistics show just how big the gap is between NYC and everybody else:
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Chicago, Boston, and the rest have their old urban cores with a few train lines and some shopping streets. But for the most part, even these cities are car-centric sprawl. You can also see this in the population density numbers; New York simply towers over all the rest:¹
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There’s simply no other town in America that looks and feels like NYC.
Some of the reasons for this are historical. NYC became a big city before the rise of the mass-market passenger car, so it had to use transit to move people around; many cities, like L.A., Houston, and Phoenix, saw their growth happen later. America’s car-friendly policies, abundant land, and desire for suburban living created the car-centric development pattern that we see in many cities in the West and South today.
But many older cities don’t have this excuse. For example, take Philadelphia. In 1910, NYC was only three times bigger than Philly; by 1960 it was almost four times as big, and by 2010 it was five times as big. In other words, Philadelphia had its big growth spurt earlier than NYC did, but its outcome in terms of walkability and transit is just much weaker, with fewer than 20% of Philadelphians using transit for their commute. Very little of downtown Philly looks like Manhattan.
The reason NYC is so much bigger than every other city in America is partly mathematical — every country tends to have one city that towers over the rest in terms of total population. And it’s partly economic — Ed Glaeser has a great essay on the industrial history of NYC. But those reasons can’t explain why NYC is so much denser than other cities. In fact, because NYC includes such an unusually large percent of its metropolitan area (44%, compared to less than 33% for other major cities), you might naively expect it to be less dense — San Francisco is just the tiny metropolitan core of the Bay Area, while NYC includes Staten Island and other outlying areas. Yet NYC is still far denser than SF or any other large American city.
The reason NYC is America’s only truly dense large city is due to policy. Other cities have restrictive zoning codes that limit floor-area ratios, impose citywide height limits, impose parking minimums, and restrict certain areas to single-family homes.² For example, here’s a map showing just how much of San Francisco’s land (in pink) is zoned to allow only single-family homes:
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Keep in mind that this is America’s second-densest big city. New York City really stands alone, in terms of allowing tall buildings.
New York City is also unique in having an extensive subway system. In terms of miles of rail, NYC has more than other cities, but just as important is the shape of the network. NYC’s subway is a dense grid that covers all of Manhattan and much of Brooklyn; other cities tend to have commuter rail systems that connect the city center directly to outlying areas but which aren’t as useful for getting around within the central city. For example, here are train maps for NYC, San Francisco, and Boston:
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