Name: Cycling Tokyo is NOT For Everyone... ⚠️
Uploaded: 2025-06-18T10:30:29.000Z
Duration: 17 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Gerund

Nearly 50% of all traffic accidents in Japan involve bicycles, and that number keeps growing every single year.

To-infinitive

There are some serious threats that you need to watch out for, but if you're careful, it's safe for the most part.

I cycle somewhere around 20 kilometers a day, 5 to 7 days a week.

That's about 400 kilometers a month, and I've only ever had one bicycle accident.

I will tell you about that in a second, but let's go check out what it's like to cycle the world's most populated city.

So a bit of a fun fact. How fast it looks like I'm going is directly proportionate to how wide the shot is.

Right now, super wide. I'm barely moving, but it feels like I'm going really quick.

Whereas if I punch in like this, it really slows things down, but we don't really get to enjoy the scenery.

So we'll try to hang out somewhere in the middle today.

But rest assured that I'm nowhere near as close to the objects around me as I look.

Trust me, there's plenty of distance there.

There's actually a case of somebody getting stopped by Japanese police for riding one of those lately, because they can be considered a motor vehicle. Japan just doesn't like new stuff.

So since we're kind of talking about safety today, you may have noticed this already, but my hat here is actually a helmet.

There's a certified helmet insert that I got for my hat, which is fantastic.

Amazingly, you'll see this today. A lot of Japanese people just don't wear helmets in the city.

Also, and this one's fun, because I want to remain entirely hands-free today and don't want to think about cameras, where I'm going to put them.

I'm shooting most of this video on my Insta360 X4.

Not only does the pole magically disappear, but it's shooting in full 360 at 8K, so I can just reframe all of this later and forget about the camera for today.

Forgive me for nerding out. I just love the technology we have access to right now.

But there are going to be two main things that you need to watch out for in Tokyo.

The first is going to be the Japanese approach to red lights.

They take them as more of a suggestion, especially in the first couple of seconds.

If it's only been red for two or three seconds, don't trust it.

Japanese people will blow through them all the time.

Taxis take out more cyclists, pedestrians and even children per year than you can imagine in Tokyo.

In fact, this intersection is a perfect example.

The stop line is way back there. There's a bike lane right here.

I watched a mother with two kids on her bike get smoked by a taxi who blew past the stop.

Now, if we come back to this stop line, which bicycles also need to obey, you can see it's kind of hard to see around the corner, but he blew clear past this line to a woman who is crossing in this bike area.

Now, most drivers in Japan are very courteous, so I still feel like it's going to be safer than cycling some places like New York City.

But as passive aggression is Japan's national pastime, it's a pretty good idea for a few reasons to follow the rules.

So I'll walk you through, not all of them, just some of the main ones.

Now, as a general rule, bicycles need to use the street except for elderly and children.

And one more situation, which is actually right in front of us here, where there's a dedicated bike lane and pedestrian zone on the sidewalk.

And as you can see, you kind of keep to the left as a rule of thumb.

Now, you're not going to find a lot of these dedicated bike lanes on the sidewalk.

So a lot of people will still come up onto the sidewalks.

But you've got to do so at a reduced speed.

Even police officers will use the sidewalk.

Now, most of these laws are only ever enforced if there's an accident or if it's on one of their ticket-giving, money-making campaigns that they do a few times a year.

But sticking to the left side of the road, always, always stick to the left side of the road.

And when it comes to one-way streets like this one up here, this is one-way for cars, but has this thing that says except for bicycles.

So if I wanted to go down this one-way street, I can do that in the complete opposite direction, but again, sticking to the left.

I feel like a lot of this is common sense.

Actually, something that might not be common sense, especially when you're going the opposite way on a one-way road, this one's kind of worn out, but there are also stop signs for bicycles going in that opposite direction.

So I can't just blow through this because, well, I'll die.

And yes, Japanese stop signs are a triangle of all things.

I know it feels like yield, but that's a stop sign.

Smartphone use is also an obvious no-no, and all of these things do come with tickets, by the way.

But there's one that I don't know if they have in other countries because I've lived in Japan too long that I want to show you.

And I've got a police box right over there, so if I don't do this right, they will stop me.

I cannot just turn right at a light in Japan.

I need to first wait for the light in front of me to turn green like this, then go forward and turn my bike to face in that direction.

Now, I'm pretty sure if I'm doing this 100% correctly,

I've got to find some way to get myself behind that line, but I've never actually seen anybody do that or get stopped for it.

So at that point, we're kind of splitting hairs, but that is the 二段階右折.

You have to do the exact same thing on a genski or a moped, which, while are limited to 30 kilometers an hour, amazingly, bicycles don't have a speed limit imposed on them for the road.

And yet I've been pulled over for speeding once.

Now, in all fairness, during this time, I got pulled over a lot just because of probably two things.

Number one, I kind of looked like I should be pulled over.

I had spiky hair and loud clothing. It was terrible.

You see, I was riding a bike because I couldn't afford the train at the time.

It was too broke, which means I couldn't even afford my own bike.

Therefore, one of my friend's retired dads gave me an old, broken down mamachari, not too dissimilar to the ones behind us, but in just much, much worse condition.

And I was booking down a hill at night and they pulled me over and literally asked, where did you steal the bike from?

Also, these delivery guys just carting all of that around on bicycle. I love it.

It was super nice. There's no bicycle exception on that one-way street, so we'll go this way.

But because of how much bike theft there is in Japan, they usually recommend that you register your bike.

That way they can tie it to you. And they used to check those registrations all the time.

But I really, really love some of these older buildings.

And you cannot survive in the stamachi or these kind of backstreet areas in Tokyo without a bicycle.

Well, you can, but it's just, it's not a good life.

There are many, many more rules, much of which even Japanese people don't follow to the T.

And I still have that story to tell you, actually, of the time that I got hit.

But I kind of want to get across Tokyo a bit first, so let's do that.

Dog's cute. Pretty sure that's not legal, but cute dog.

See, now we're on a big open road. We get to pick up little speed.

We still actually have to be careful of pedestrians, though, because they'll just walk right across.

But while we're heading across the city, why don't we give some love to our sponsor, NordVPN.

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I love the trains. Also, just a reminder that nothing is as close as it looks.