In a city or county manager’s mind, the term resilience might trigger an immediate association with climate change or extreme weather. But resilience to social and demographic forces, including social aging, is equally important for local economic and social wellbeing.

In 2022, people over 60 made up 10% of the global population. That figure is projected to double by 2050, to 20%. Globally, lifespans are also increasing, although significant gaps remain between countries and even within cities. In 1900, average life expectancy was 32 years. In 2021, it was 71. In many countries, average life expectancy extends well beyond this average, creating multiple classes of older adults, sometimes referred to as young old, old-old, and oldest old, all with varying functional capabilities and needs.

Social aging will reshape how we work, move, care for one another, and design our cities. Demographic resilience emphasizes the impacts these changes will have on socioeconomic development and individual well-being, and to achieve demographic resilience, cities and counties need to plan for these shifts. For example, aging will raise fiscal pressures on pension and healthcare systems, result in shrinking workforces, and reshape patterns of housing demand. It will also generate deeply spatial pressures that are location-specific. How (and whether) older adults can move through their communities shapes their access to care, essential services, and social connection, which research shows are all critical for seniors’ health and well-being. As older populations continue to grow, their access to mobility will also influence community vitality and economic health.

In an aging world, demographic resilience is a shared goal across cities and countries, and learning through peer exchange is critical. Japan, which is facing more rapid and advanced social aging, can provide a useful point of reference for local governments worldwide facing similar challenges.

Japan is also widely regarded as one of the world’s leading countries for public transport. Its metropolises, some of them home to tens of millions of people, are structured around dense webs of trains, subways, and buses that make car-free daily life not only possible, but preferable. An extensive railway network connects Japanese cities, covering more than 15,500 miles across the country’s four main islands. The main high-speed Shinkansen (bullet train) line stretches 900 miles along the Pacific coast, from Hakodate on the northern island of Hokkaido to Kagoshima, at the southernmost tip of the southern island of Kyushu, via Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto, and Osaka, servicing more than 60 million people. Trains run on extremely reliable timetables, with only minimal average delays. They are also safe and clean.

Yet, step outside Japan’s large metropolises and transit options plummet. In Japan’s smaller cities and rural communities, infrequent, if not absent, trains and buses force people to rely on private cars. Combined with the country’s often mountainous topography, this can pose particular challenges for older people. Faced with this reality, local governments are rethinking their approach to mobility and urban design.

Mobility Challenges in Aging Societies

Population aging is already reshaping everyday local mobility needs and will do so for years to come. Older residents, however, are not a single user group: capacity to drive and functional abilities vary widely and change over time and often intersect with disability, income constraints, caregiving roles, and digital exclusion. In practice, inadequate services, difficult transfers and access to vehicles, unclear information, or cashless-only ticketing can hinder a door-to-door trip and compound isolation.

For an older person relying on public transit, going to the doctor or to a friend’s house isn’t always one easy trip, and a seemingly simple errand can quickly become an obstacle course of physical and logistical hurdles. Walking to a transit stop can be challenging if pavement is uneven, slopes are steep, or there are no places to rest. Public transport presents its own set of issues: services may be infrequent or crowded, while the stations and vehicles themselves often feature high steps, confusing cashless-only ticketing machines, and a lack of accessible restrooms. 

When these barriers compound, many older residents have no choice but to stay home, accelerating a cycle of social isolation and attendant physical and mental health impacts. In an aging society, therefore, cities and counties need to rethink how to address friction points of the entire door-to-door journey.

Private vehicles are not a panacea for transit gaps. For older people on average, age-related declines in vision, reduced physical flexibility, and slower cognitive processing speeds make driving more dangerous. This overall decline increases the chances of road accidents. Seniors’ crash fatality risk skyrockets after age 70, turning roads into unintended hazards, not only for them but also for other vehicles and pedestrians. In the end, lack of accessible transportation options forces many older people to choose between safety (giving up driving) and independence.

What key aspects should cities/counties consider when designing demographically resilient transport systems that also support and empower older residents? Focusing on variation in functional abilities, as opposed to chronological age or how to accommodate an ideal but elusive average user, requires paying special attention to the first and last mile, which frequently present significant hurdles. Every person starts and ends every journey as a pedestrian, which makes sidewalks core transit infrastructure. But this is still not enough if destinations, from home to essential services and amenities, are too far away. True accessibility relies on spatial planning to reduce trip lengths and concentrate facilities along transport networks.

Japan: Aging, Mobility, and Depopulation

In Japan, social aging is progressing more rapidly than in other countries. People aged 65 or older represented almost 30% of its population in 2024, a figure that is among the highest in the world and is continuing to rise annually. Compounding mobility challenges, many of these older people also live alone. By 2050, 10.8 million Japanese seniors are projected to live alone, of whom 65% will be 75 or older.

In many rural and peripheral areas, older adults now outnumber younger cohorts, and local mobility gaps are deepening. With an aging and smaller population comes a shrinking tax base, fewer transit users, and a severe labor shortage of bus and taxi drivers. Altogether, this leads private transit operators to cut unprofitable routes while local governments struggle to finance services: between fiscal years 2008 and 2023, more than 14,291 miles of bus lines and more than 372 miles of local railways were decommissioned in Japan.

Because of this lack of transit, driving becomes a last lifeline connecting older adults to essential services and social activities—even as age-related decline makes it dangerous. For example, more than half of Japan’s 2,678 traffic fatalities in 2023 involved senior drivers, the number of whom has increased by 250% from 2003 to 2023. Policy has attempted to respond in several ways. Since 1997, Japanese law has required drivers over 75 to display a designated elderly driver emblem on their car. (Drivers between 70 and 74 are encouraged to display it if a health condition could affect their driving.) Additional cognitive testing is required for drivers over 75 who are seeking license renewals. Even so, driving remains a risky endeavor for older drivers in Japan and around the world.

Japan’s mobility gap emerges from the confluence of demographic and economic factors. In shrinking rural areas, lower (and diminishing) population densities result in a more spatially dispersed pattern that is harder to serve, in part due to higher per capita costs of service. At the same time, transit tends to concentrate in larger population hubs, often farther away from rural and predominantly older households. 

This creates a vicious cycle in which fewer and more spread-out passengers result in lower fare revenues, triggering service reductions in frequency and span. This makes transit less useful, which only exacerbates further demand loss. Overall, these patterns accelerate car dependence at a time when many older residents need to or would prefer to be driving less.

Dr. Christopher Hood, professor at the University of Cardiff and an expert on Japanese transportation systems, notes that Japan is investing heavily in automated vehicles, in no small part due to demographic resilience concerns. In the future, transportation could look very different due to the advent of both AI and automated vehicles. “Going forward, if you have…50 driverless cars that can communicate with each other and drive literally just a few inches away from each other because of AI, all going in a line at 100 kilometers an hour, that’s a train without being a train, and they’re not restricted to being on a railway line or staying connected,” he reflects.

Technology, however, hasn’t reached this stage today. Local governments are left grappling with a daunting spatial challenge: how to provide essential mobility to an aging population that may be spread over large distances.

Compact City Development in Toyama

Toyama City realized that it is not possible to address the mobility needs of an aging and scattered population with better public transit alone. Instead, local officials decided to un-scatter the city.

With an area of more than 745 square miles and a population of 413,938 in 2020, where three in ten residents are over age 65, Toyama is the bringing together transport and land-use policy as the premier implementation example of the Japanese government’s compact city model. By concentrating housing, commerce, and public services along transit, the city is building dense central hubs and halting suburbanization. 

This approach yields environmental, economic, and social dividends. Environmentally, it preserves natural landscapes by curbing sprawl, reduces energy consumption, and curtails car dependency. Economically, shrinking the city’s functional footprint controls the increasing costs of infrastructure and service delivery, ensuring a fiscally sound future even as the local tax base declines. Finally, on a social level, this model allows older adults to age safely in place, surrounded by walkable amenities, accessible medical care, and easy mobility.

Toyama uses Japan’s traditional kushi-dango —a sweet made of small round rice dumplings (dango) skewered on a wooden stick ( kushi )—as a metaphor for the urban structure developed under the compact city plan. The kushi are the high-frequency public transit corridors while the dango are residential and commercial zones clustered around transit stops.

Translating this metaphor into an actionable strategy required reconfiguring both the transport network and land-use regulations. The backbone of the compact city approach is the multi-modal transport network, combining rail, tram, and high-frequency bus corridors—the skewers. This included repurposing a declining railway line into a light rail transit (LRT) system and upgrading infrastructure to reduce friction points, such as connecting the south-north tram lines under the main station viaduct.

The dango are defined as walkable catchment areas extending 500 meters from rail stations and 300 meters from bus stops. To populate these multi-nuclear hubs, the city relies on inducement rather than strict anti-sprawl regulations. Land-use policy naturally pulls development inward by offering housing subsidies and upgraded service levels. Importantly, placing essential services in the dango reduces the travel burden for elderly residents, making it easier for them to maintain their independence without relying on cars. By physically clustering activities, this model has the added benefit of fostering community formation and, therefore, mutual support networks among residents.

Toyama offers the Odekake (loosely translated, “going out”) pass to residents aged 65 and over to encourage outings at a highly discounted flat rate of 100 yen ($0.65) per ride. The Odekake pass can be used for trips from residential areas to the city center on participating services within a defined area and outside peak hours to avoid crowding regular commuter routes. The city emphasizes that the pass functions less as a simple transit subsidy and more as a public health intervention, simultaneously sustaining downtown vitality while keeping older adults active and out of their cars.

For those living outside the kushi-dango focus area, Toyama is introducing AI-optimized on-demand transportation. In peripheral districts, the city is replacing rigid underused community buses with fleets of multi-passenger vans that have no fixed timetables or routes. Residents can now request a ride via a smartphone app or phone call, and an AI algorithm calculates the most efficient real-time routing to pick them up. To maintain equitable access, the cost structure reflects the city’s broader social goals: general rides cost 200 yen ($1.30), but in pilot areas, the fare is subsidized to 100 yen ($0.65) for residents aged 65 and older.

The case of Toyama illustrates how cities can approach demographic resilience by first acknowledging community development challenges that are intensifying with aging and population decline. Based on this reality, the city started by considering what kind of urban structure is realistically achievable, formulated basic policies, and then proceeded with rebuilding infrastructure, proving that infrastructure follows demographic reality, not the other way around.

To do so, Toyama positioned its compact city development within its top-level plan, including the comprehensive plan and welfare-related policies. Because spatial planning, transport, and welfare departments share the same top-level comprehensive plan, the city broke traditional bureaucratic silos. Ultimately, Toyama highlights that demographic resilience isn’t achieved by buying better transit equipment, but by aligning the entire government to reshape the city’s hard and soft infrastructure around the realities of its aging residents.

In Pursuit of Demographic Resilience

Other countries will eventually follow Japan’s demographic trajectory. Many goals and best practices are already clear, such as designing mobility systems to keep older people connected with family, friends, healthcare, and services. While specific transit modes—from LRTs to buses, or AI-powered on-demand services—might change as technology evolves, the underlying strategy remains the same: holistic thinking bringing together spatial, transport, and welfare planning.

Demographic resilience requires proactive alignment between different departments to reshape the city, including its physical footprint, infrastructure, and service delivery, to ensure residents can age with dignity and independence.

FERNANDO ORTIZ-MOYA, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Studies, Waseda University in Japan.

SARAH SIELOFF, AICP, is an urban planner at Haley & Aldrich in Bellingham, Washington.