The 15-minute city (2020)
bloomberg.com
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Portland & Detroit comparison is a bit laughable. May be we'll see this one day, but I'll believe it when I see it.
A car centric 15 minute city is literally impossible. There will always be too much congestion to get anywhere in 15 minutes since cars take up too much space.
My work is ~13 minutes away. There is a Primary and Secondary School within 5 and 20 minutes walk. A supermarket is a 10 minute bike ride away. A hospital is 10 minutes drive away. A top 50 ranked University is 25 minutes drive away.
There is a good question from w-j-w that has been deleted here. Yes - it's a 15 minute car city at 8:30 AM. My commute goes to about 14 minutes...
This is on the days when I'm not WFH - which should also be factored in.
The guy has been dead for nearly one hundred years and the city still hasn't assigned a replacement urban planner...
Some commutes are more like 30 minutes (by car) or 40 at a bad time. But this is where someone has chosen to live at the opposite end of the city to their workplace, which is largely unnecessary.
I myself walk to and from work (when not WFH) and it takes around 20 minutes.
Can confirm it is a 20 minute city with your own car/motorbike/bicycle-enthusiasm (year round in 35 degree heat or -7 degree cold). The arterial roads are good and the bicycle pathways are pretty good in any area established before self government.
The new suburbs suck, and if you need public transport it is a tram line that services a single area and buses everywhere else. Live in a new suburb and have to rely on public transport? Sucks to be you...
Pretty good if you have a car/motorbike/bicycle-enthusiasm though. s/ Just choose not to be disabled or too old to drive.../s
The downtown in my city is by far the most dense and walkable area of town while still being far more accommodating for car drivers than any of the areas that have been newly revitalized for walkability. The main difference is the existence of ample parking shelters where the main (st)roads hit downtown, unlike the new areas that insist on only having street parking to intentionally limit the number of cars. Both approaches allow the area to be designed for walkability first. But the former does a better job at accommodating people who don't live within 15-minutes by walking or public transit, and does a better job at keeping cars from being a nuisance. Because the motorists have a convenient place to park and walk they do so, while street parking only forces the cars into the walkable streets(and surrounding neighborhoods) to circle endlessly looking for a place to park and increasing congestion.
I really like the strong-towns framing of delineating roads vs streets which are designed for cars and pedestrians respectively. I think too many people are quick to jump on the assumption that roads==bad and streets==good, when having good roads and parking structures can relieve the pressure and allow your streets to be streets. At least in the short-term, and in the long-term you are going to want to keeps some sort of arterial land strips for public transit use (in all but the most dense areas which can support subways). So making them roads now with a mix of buses and cars that gradually becomes more buses, and then possibly dedicated public transit makes for a good growth plan.
I think getting to places by car is often not the hardest part. Instead, the hard part (at least from a user's perspective!) is storing all the cars for all the inhabitants of the city, both at their origin and their destination. This creates ballooning space requirements, including duplication of space (much residential parking will remain largely unused during the day, and much business parking will remain largely unused at night). Then, even after devoting as much space to cars as US cities do, one winds up unable to plan simply to drive to one's destination, but having also to devote significant planning to parking.
The issue is that this will not scale. The space needed for cars scales at a different rate than the space needed for people, so does the infrastructure.
Today I live for a decade in one of the biggest cities in Germany (a still quite car centric nation by European standards). I never owned a car in that city and never missed it. If I need one for the hardware store I can just get a car sharing one. I spent maybe 100 Euros on car and gas every year.
Most of what I need for my daily life is within walking radius (grocery store across the street, hairdresser, 24/7 drinks and cigarettes, some restaurants and bars on the street, the rehearsal space for my band is a 5 min walk where I don't have to cross a single road). It is quite silent in my area and the air is good (no dust/grime on the balcony).
If my area was car centric I'd have to sacrifice all of that. But what would I gain in return? The ability to go to all the places I can already go to by subway, S-Bahn, bus or bicycle? No thanks, I'd rather have my city human-sized than car-sized.
Not when you account for congestion. Let's pretend that the average driver can accept sitting in traffic for one hour daily, or 30 minutes one way. What happens then is that more and more people will take the car until it's just congested enough to take 30 minutes to go somewhere -- even if the distance at full speed is just 15 minutes.
If you increase capacity more people will take the car until the trip takes 30 minutes again.
This just doesn't happen with less massive modes of transport because accommodating practically infinite amounts of foot traffic requires, comparatively speaking, very little area. Distances have to be shorter, yes, but scaling at a lower rate.
If anyone is interested here is great video on [Autoluw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlXNVnftaNs). This is what US needs, but I dont see this happening due america's car-centric culture.
In a comparatively-suburban "city", it's absolutely possible and probably fairly common. Of course, you'll likely have to leave the city far more frequently, and those trips may take longer than 15 minutes. By contrast, you could easily spend your entire life in New York without ever leaving city limits.
I live in a suburban area in a town of 30k.
I think it's one of the better options in N/A outside of NYC, Boston and places in Canada (especially Quebec City and Montreal) - Boulder also often comes up in discussion though I've never been.
Comparing these to European cities which weren't leveled in WW2 is insane though - when pedestrians are first class citizens cities are absolutely wonderful to live in.
It's not like the south is a lost cause, improvement can still be made.
Heck, there is a subartic city in Finland with 12% cycling share, which is a lot higher than pretty much any city in North America. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/amp/2021/01/22/meet-the-b...
Once you eliminate the sun you just need to make sure that wind alleys are set up to keep air moving through the city and have regular green spaces with water to help reduce air temperature. This can be done quite sustainably - Las Vegas is actually a great example of (rather) sustainable water use from a city built in the middle of a desert.
- the large amount of bike culture in Minneapolis, people ride all year long (once you're moving you'll stay pretty warm with the right gear) https://gearjunkie.com/biking/minneapolis-bike-capital
- the bike culture in Finland where it's even colder: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2020/feb/0...
the difference in most of the US that it's not prioritized by local government, bike lanes don't get plowed and fill up with gravel, there's not sufficient bike infrastructure to being with etc
(Yes, it's too hot to enjoy biking during the day. But public transport is great, and has aircon.)
I imagine they'll drastically reduce parking needs, opening space for traffic lanes (reduce congestion) and commercial/services areas (make things closer to home).
I'm not even sure it is possible to satisfy this demand in a city. Houston has 26-lane highways and they are still building more roads to handle traffic. LA uses 14% of all land for car parking and is still building more parking spots. I suppose there must be a theoretical upper bound past which building more space for cars does not eventually induce more driving, but I know of no city that has reached that limit.
One thing I’ve noticed is I tend to see small businesses in walkable areas more often. Not sure why that is, but its another benefit I haven’t seen discussed quite as much.
Large stores can work in walkable cities and they do have a place - but they are usually for relatively rare needs (so more likely to be focused on clothes or specialty groceries).
1. https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/aerial-view-of-barcelon...
When you’re driving somewhere, you typically have a destination in mind. You’re often moving too fast to spot smaller businesses that probably don’t have enormous signs, and it’s probably not convenient to just suddenly stop and park your car if you do happen to see something interesting. And everyone already knows about the big chains, but not so much about small businesses, so they’re less likely to be your initial destination.
By contrast, when you’re on foot, you’re moving slowly enough that you can take in anything around you, so you’ll spot small places more easily. And if you do decide to stop in, you’re right there.
(Cycling is somewhere in between, but I’d say closer to walking than driving in these respects.)
Splitting up the errands while walking or biking will result in either multiple trips to a big box store, or every time you leave the house, you knock off a few items on the list from the nearest store. The nearest store probably isn't a big box store since they have so much parking, so they aren't really around walkable areas as much.
Portland looks good by comparison to other cities in the US that are doing literally nothing, or actively trying to maintain the existing car centric planning methods.
The greenways in Portland are really nice compared to other places, but it still requires a lot of bravery from cyclists which limits the appeal of biking for a lot of people. Haven't been hit by a car since moving out of SF though so that's something.
- bad signage & route marking
- bad navigation instructions (Apple maps and sometimes google maps sending people down streets they shouldn't be on as a inexperienced bike rider)
- longer routes around (Thinking of Sandy here where cars get to drive the hypotenuse while bikes are supposed to bike at right angles to the city grid)
- lack of completely separated bike roads (if these existed I would almost never want to mix it up with cars)
- lack of options for connecting between bikeways can end up with someone being in a bad spot pretty quickly through accident or intention.
I live out a bit closer to the airport and agree it's still a lot better than most cities but still end up biking around and on Sandy which is always unpleasant in its current state.
Also even on the bike streets you end up with frustrated drivers who are trying to use it as a shortcut or find it unacceptable to travel a couple of MPH less when they're behind a bike for a few blocks. Specifically not allowing non-local traffic would make the bike/slow streets a lot more welcoming to people in my life who don't want to drive but feel trapped by having to own a car.
Now, admittedly there's a huge difference between a new planned neighborhood and updating existing ones, and I'm not saying I want to live in the planned one ... but a cap of 500m to some amenities is a much higher bar to reach for.
One thing I wish urban planners internalized is that you don't have to create an incredibly dense human pile-up to have walkability.
It's actually worse like that because even if few people have cars, the vehicles will still be a nuisance. Also the 5% that is in the habit of littering will be that more of a problem.
My neighbourhood consisted of buildings with an average total of 4 floors (including ground level) and a few higher ones dotted here and there with squares and playgrounds in between and this is what I consider an ideal population density.
No, I'm not talking about 'study x showed people like walkable cities', I'm talking about efforts like making connections between the correlated explosion in mental and physical health issues and the rise of large, dense cities.
Portland covers 145 square miles, is geographically diverse, and has a profoundly hollowed out middle class that comes in part from pandering to failed ideas like those of Richard Florida (who has himself admitted being wrong). Now, 1 in 5 Portland kids live in poverty, Californians and foreign investors buy entire neighborhoods and build block upon block of condo boxes, and the cost of living is through the roof. There is no 'Portlandia' here, just caricatures and deepening poverty and a bizarrely out of touch municipal government elected based on pet ideas.
And the average age of Portland residents? ~37 and rising. The percent of the population that are children (<19 years) has declined over 30% in the last two decades. It's a city for tourists, real estate speculation and arbitrage, and amenities pandering to an ever-older base.
Apartment life simply wasn't for me. Being subject to my neighbors noisiness was a huge drain! I understand that being a home owner doesn't automatically shield you from bad neighbors, but it hits much different when they are on top of you. It just felt like a discounted way of living. Having things like a yard (where you can do whatever you want with) are huge quality of life boosters. Having a house on some land I think is ideal. Although that goes against the current narrative. I am very worried about this new push for 'optimizing living spaces'. Where companies are buying up land en masse and constructing condos/apartments. It's not the way to live!
I think being in close quarters to each other goes against our nature. Humans need space. How much? More than you may think.
It's important to remember that different people have different preferences. Having a yard to my partner and I has always been yet another maintenance burden, another one of life's incessant worries to upkeep. My favorite part of our local parks is the ability to go to them and not mow the lawn, not make sure the grass is upkept, not make sure the wind blew something over or whatnot. I have a friend with a large suburban home who is constantly fixing some thing or the other and seems to be forever living in a state of partial brokenness. He loves it, every day is a project for him, but this would drive my partner and I insane. Our neighbors are families and while they can be noisy at times the kids go silent around 9 PM and everything is quiet. My sleep is never disturbed.
It's good that you realized space is helpful for your mental health. But not for everyone. Living in an SFH neighborhood made my partner deeply depressed. The sound of neighbors' conversations gave her a sense of connectedness which improved her mental health drastically. When my grandparents from an urban area in a developing country first visited my parents SFH in the US, they found the area to be incredibly isolating and had a hard time sleeping without the background hum of people around them.
People are different. It's important for us to build housing of all types, so those who desire space have their space and for those who desire close connectedness have it as well. Right now the US has a severe lack in dense housing. Hopefully with time we'll have a more even mix.
Cheap apartments with no sound insulation are not good it's true, more modern, or even much older ones than the ones built in the 60s & 70s are much better. But good thick walls is something I would check first before moving to any apartment.
On the plus side of denser living, I can walk into town, there's plenty of places to socialise, (I was very much surprised at how lively it all is), I have 2 bus routes into town with buses at max 10 mins apart, the main station gives me access to much of the rest of the country.
I don't need a car, haven't owned one for 15 years now, there's a car sharing scheme that has many cars nearby. I use one once or twice a year.
I would think those health issues correlate a lot more closely with the "white flight" to the suburbs, where city density actually reduced a lot.
Living somewhere that you can meet your daily needs without a car is lifechanging. But just having a shorter commute only makes things slightly more convenient.
The goal they're describing is the one you're proposing.
Basically build an arcology and set a transit goal of 15 minutes across the radius of it. Repeat this pattern whenever the transit gets too long, which is usually about a subway stop or two across -- creating many "town" centers. Pubic transit needs to include buses, trams, and maybe subways each feeding into each other from slow and low density (buses) to faster modes at higher density.
I think the best city I've ever been in that featured this was Tokyo. It looks like a giant megalopolis, and it is and acts that way for a part of the population, but for many people it's a bunch of small neighborhoods and towns. Even then, the average commute time is about 40 minutes each way.
Even relatively small European cities seem to hit about 40 minutes plus/minus 5-10 minutes.
In the U.S., you might experience <40 minute commutes maybe in either very small car centric towns, or close to the core of a few cities like Portland, or maybe Chicago. Even within NYC, you can easily hit over 1 hr each direction.
One place I've been to and know folks from near Washington D.C., Reston VA seems to offer consistent under <30 min door to door commutes, and that's without major public transit in place yet. It's growing, but toss in a tram-line and it'll be as good as any U.S. city can get to a European core. It's not without accident, it was apparently originally build and modeled off of European towns.
It can totally be achieved. In fact, there already are working examples everywhere. Most inhabitants of European capitals (and a lot of metropolitan cities) don’t even own a car. You can live totally car free in Stockholm, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and in mostly the entire Switzerland.
Working examples are in fact everywhere, the only thing that is needed is political will to invest in really heavy transport infrastructure but boy how could you even like driving a car in any city when you have a great metro/train system and bikeable cities.
I know most people don’t even know it’s possible but solutions already exists and are just waiting to be copied.
If anyone is interested in the topic, I recommend the YouTube channel « Not Just Bikes ».
Just remember that 30-40 years ago, Amsterdam was an horrible unlivable car centric city and that it became a fantastic livable city with just political will in a really short period of time.
In a totally different design, there is also the (pretty unique, I think) Switzerland example (Not Just Bike recently made a video about it) where you have basically no real « big » city but where every little town is reachable by trains that stop everywhere every 30min even in hundreds inhabitants towns. Switzerland example is really hard to replicate, imho, but it is a masterpiece and it deserves to be inspiring of what should be a civilized country.
Plus a lot of companies like to congregate together in sorts of business districts (I don’t really get why? Maybe those places are more attractive. Or maybe proximity helps foster business relationships). That makes it hard to get a low commute time unless you live in/close to one of those business districts
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...
There is a depressing "sameness" to American cities and their amenities that's oft remarked-upon but I remain convinced that the single biggest contributor to that is real estate. When real estate costs that much the level of business to break even is astronomical, and only businesses with the broadest possible (and correspondingly, blandest possible) reach survive.
The thing I love most about the Tokyo is the absolutely off-the-walls level of tiny businesses catering to incredibly niche interests. A great majority of these businesses would be totally unviable in the US - real estate in major cities is too expensive, and real estate outside the major cities have too small of a market.
When I moved here I got rid of my car and don't even use my bike for transport, I just walk everywhere. A side effect was I stopped eating at drive through takeaway places and started going out to eat at healthier options since they are now just as accessible as the junk food.
I used to live in Paris and believed that this sort of transformation would be impossible.
Ex: in Europe many public bathrooms require payment, in the US you can't even allow stores to require a purchase to use the restroom due to public pressure (not laws, yet).
Do you have any evidence to back up the claims about safety? Every time I've encountered a sentiment like this, even people who live in this city, it's just mere supposition -- an expression of anxiety veiled as fact, like the justifications given for the Boudin recall campaign, or else an extremely subjective (if traumatic) experience that doesn't extend readily to the general public.
Remember, violent crime and property crime are different things, and neither anecdotes nor anxiety count as data.
I vote my values too, by the way.
Ditto for public transit, when public transit is sparsely utilized it tends to be less safe while as dense public transit will certainly have incidents but the increased ridership leads to increased safety funding and just more witnesses making crime less attractive in terms of expected gain.
It is a hard problem even before we get into NIMBYism and other socio-political complications. I definitely disagree with you but I think your comment was quite fair and reasonable.
Paid public toilets are all over California and businesses do typically restrict bathroom use to paying customers, yes, in SF too.
Without SF’s tolerance for weirdos due to the gold rush we wouldn’t have had the rule breakers of the valley.
SF has always had a much higher tolerance for weird behavior. Back when the city was a bedroom community for the Valley, people lived there (I did too) for its weirdness and culture. What happened with the dot com boom is that people who didn't appreciate the weirdness showed up, moved to SF, and then complained about it.
Honestly SF is a lot cleaner and safer now. Those whiners would not have tolerated the true weirdness.
I'm also super skeptical of the transit maps ... b/c even if a route is going where you need it to go, the 15 min should also include waiting times. In some cases, 15 min takes you 0.0 miles on muni buses.
A lot of people can’t bike (I am forbidden from biking for another six months, for instance, due to an injury). Plus biking in SF isn’t the same as biking in Manhattan.
I would hasten to point out that not everyone walks or can take all public transit (BART elevators frequently being broken is an issue for wheelchair users, for example).
> Plus biking in SF isn’t the same as biking in Manhattan.
It's true SF has more hills. But why should Manhattan be the baseline? Wrt getting to necessities within 15m, I still think almost all of the city qualifies. We don't mostly put our grocery stores on hilltops, for example.
I'll refine my point: even though SF does have a bunch neighborhoods which are set up to be residential, the city's small footprint means that without trying all that hard, people end up being close in absolute distances to the necessities of life anyway.
I do think it's worth pointing out that Tokyo and Moscow each have literally >10x the population of SF. It's kind of an apples-and-oranges comparison; of _course_ they have more rapid public transit.
Madrid for example is a city of about 3 million in a metro area of 6 million. Trains come every few minutes throughout the day.
> I would hasten to point out that not everyone walks or can take all public transit (BART elevators frequently being broken is an issue for wheelchair users, for example).
That is a BART problem, not a “public transit is inaccessible” problem.
At very low usage hours (at night, or early morning), it can get longer, but it hardly ever gets to 15min
Progress and equality (of outcome) are almost always in opposition. You can't have Tesla model 3s without much wealthier people having bought Roadsters to prove the concept in low scale.
Tesla leveraged existing inequality to get the funding to bring the advantages of quality electric cars to more people (i.e. reducing inequality of options).
This can be contrasted with dysfunctional dynamics that maintain or expand the differences between rich and poor options.
My country has been actually slowly de-urbanizing for the past 20 years or so:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locat...
It's an exception to the rule in the region, but a significant one.
Affluent people, who could afford cars, moved out to have more living space in exchange for having to drive everywhere. A more recent version of this is just not being able to afford an apartment in the city - those people opted for what must be the weirdest type of housing there is - an apartment in the middle of nowhere.
Statistics say that indeed it's still the rich who drive.
An embarrassing case of "oh yeah we forgot low-wage people" which shows where his priorities are and who these cities are actually designed for.
In the Anglosphere, these neighbourhoods have typically been expensive because they are so uncommon, and the laws of supply and demand push up the prices. However, as more neighbourhoods move to a more walkable model, they become more affordable.
In the meantime, those who need to travel for work (tradespeople, delivery drivers) benefit from vastly decreased traffic.