Nobody imagined large tourist buses would be used for shopping in central Tokyo, leading to a battle for parking spaces. We should make better use of land by allotting spaces for parking and to pick u

This is typical of Japanese bureaucrats.

"We added an expressway exit on 2-lane Road X, but nobody could have imagined that it would increase the traffic on Road X and cause traffic jams."

"We built the subway line so that it ends at an inconvenient location, because we wanted to support the shops in the area. Nobody could have imagined that people would choose to take the faster, cheaper and more direct bus instead."

"Tsunamis only happen every 100 years or so, and we haven't even seen one in this century, so nobody could have imagined a tsunami hitting that power plant."

Apparently a complete lack of imagination and foresight is a requirement for a good government job here.

@Reckless, I meant "we humans", not "we Japanese".

We can send men to the moon. Surely we can coordinate tourist bus traffic. How about using that computer that beats professional Go players to coordinate bus traffic flow and parking.

This quote is a bit oversimplified without the context, but it's true. Most traffic infrastructure in my US town wasn't built for the load it experiences now. When was Ginza laid out, for example? Wikipedia, for lack of a better quick source, says the late 1800s. People back then would certainly have trouble imagining ~54,000 tourists a day flying into Japan (the MEXT figure for 2015 was 19.74 million), or vehicles that weren't horse drawn or steam powered. Even urban design of the 1950s didn't take into account the number of individuals who would own cars, or the concentration of people in urban population centers.

Part of Prof. Furuya's job is to figure out how to take an outdated design and make it work with the new reality. Most of his job, in reality, involves negotiation and getting politicians and local stakeholders to agree to some give and take. If a study finds that designating a certain cross street for bus drop-off and pick-up largely solves the traffic problem, no matter how simple the fix is, the businesses on that street will fight to block the change because it would decimate their business. If it involves setting aside land for bus parking, what developer would give up land in a high rent area to do that?

Japan's public servants/government in a nutshell; "We wanted but didn't plan for ."

So how did this genius expect tourist to flock to touristy areas? Parachute down with an umbrella like Mary Poppins? Of course tourists are going to require transportation. Want tourists- the whole yokoso BS? Well then, at least make sure their buses are accomodated. These people are bringing much needed money into this struggling economy.

I have seen tourist buses for years....where has this dude been?

"We want lots of tourist (shhh actually we just want their money), but don't want to have to actually plan or accommodate anything that is different"

Nobody imagined large tourist buses would be used for shopping in central Tokyo

No Japanese tourist buses had been disrupting traffic for years overseas, after all.

Toyo University Prof. Hideki Furuya, a tourism traffic planning specialist

Indeed.