Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk
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I live a in less walkable neighborhood on this map - but about a year ago a small (tiny really, ~700sqft) corner store opened up 2 blocks from me. It sells coffee, pastry, simple sandwiches, but also pantry staples (flour, sugar, milk etc.) and has a really good beer and wine selection.
I can't do my normal grocery shopping there, but being able to walk 2 minutes to get coffee or a quick breakfast or that missing stick of butter for a recipe has been such a wonderful change to the neighborhood. (btw this store is not reflected on the map for coffeeshops or groceries.) They also host food trucks several days a week so its almost like having a restaurant in the neighborhood too.
All it took was 1 little store, owned and operated by a couple who lives in the neighborhood, to turn a 20 minute neighborhood into a 5 minute neighborhood for several thousand people.
But of course that's just conspiracy theory thinking and only someone who hates grandma would say something like that.
This meme needs to die already.
A lot of those businesses shut down in 2020.
It's 2023 now, we haven't had any COVID restrictions for 2 years, and all the ones that have gone away... Have long since been replaced with equivalents. Some of whom have also shut down, and have been replaced with equivalents.
Restaurants and coffee shops die and open all the time. 2020 was rough, but in the long term, the net impact on my neighborhood has been ~zero.
You know where they have been dying and not re-opening? Downtown, because half their former patrons are now WFH and don't go into the office anymore. Unfortunately, that's a little harder to blame on COVID shutdowns.
We need zoning revamped, and you'd see a lot more of this.
Why not fix that? Submit it to OSM, Apple Maps, or Google Maps or all three.
It started as a British project, so "bodega" isn't one of them.
They aren’t as personalized or localized as the neighborhood place, but the use case you describe is exactly the market 7-11/CVS/Walgreens is going after.
In this case it wasn’t the size of the business but rather the size/location of the physical store that mattered.
Seattle has some of the most confounding civil engineering I’ve ever seen, and I’ve lived in five cities and visited dozens more. Here are some things that make a pedestrian life near impossible in my neighborhood:
- two high-traffic, multi-lane streets where people routinely run red lights and drive erratically, one dividing us from my child’s elementary school
- Many areas with no sidewalks and no area on the side of the road that’s safe to walk
- 5-way intersections with extremely confusing walk signals.
Street traffic is allowed through Pike Place Market.
Every weekend I have a grand old time in the market, watching tourists make the worst mistake of their visit, their rental car crawling at 1mph through probably the largest tourist attraction in the PNW.
How much damage can drivers do at 1 MPH, anyway?
>These three grid patterns (due north, 32 degrees west of north, and 49 degrees west of north) are the result of a disagreement between David Swinson "Doc" Maynard, whose land claim lay south of Yesler Way, and Arthur A. Denny and Carson D. Boren, whose land claims lay to the north (with Henry Yesler and his mill soon brought in between Denny and the others):[2] Denny and Boren preferred that their streets follow the Elliott Bay shoreline, while Maynard favored a grid based on the cardinal directions for his (mostly flat, mostly wet) claim. All three were competing to have the downtown built on their land.
The space saved could align the remaining roads into almost a 4-way stop, or a roundabout.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/2563+Queen+Anne+Dr,+Seattl...
Only self driving cars, or better licensing tests for drivers can save us from this. Every N years drivers probably should need to re-test, including a physical practical test in a standard unit (from the DMV) for parking and to see how the driver responds if driving a rental car that they aren't familiar with.
Australia has them everywhere so running a red light is almost never seen.
You can read the relevant state law here: https://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.63.170.
The cameras can't take pictures of the driver or occupants and court time is accrued when anyone other than the registered owner committed the infraction:
(f) Automated traffic safety cameras may only take pictures of the vehicle and vehicle license plate and only while an infraction is occurring. The picture must not reveal the face of the driver or of passengers in the vehicle. The primary purpose of camera placement is to take pictures of the vehicle and vehicle license plate when an infraction is occurring. Cities and counties shall consider installing cameras in a manner that minimizes the impact of camera flash on drivers.
An officer has to actually review the photos:
(g) A notice of infraction must be mailed to the registered owner of the vehicle within 14 days of the violation, or to the renter of a vehicle within 14 days of establishing the renter's name and address under subsection (3)(a) of this section. The law enforcement officer issuing the notice of infraction shall include with it a certificate or facsimile thereof, based upon inspection of photographs, microphotographs, or electronic images produced by an automated traffic safety camera, stating the facts supporting the notice of infraction. This certificate or facsimile is prima facie evidence of the facts contained in it and is admissible in a proceeding charging a violation under this chapter. The photographs, microphotographs, or electronic images evidencing the violation must be available for inspection and admission into evidence in a proceeding to adjudicate the liability for the infraction. A person receiving a notice of infraction based on evidence detected by an automated traffic safety camera may respond to the notice by mail.
So automated cameras don't scale and are only deployed where they are most needed.
https://www.portland.gov/police/divisions/photo-enforcement makes it sound like a business can pay the fine on behalf of the driver without having to reveal who the driver was.
The Arizona laws seem similar. There was a man who got 37 tickets, all while wearing a gorilla mask: https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix-traffic/2...
In Oregon, all photos had to be reviewed by law enforcement until less than a year ago. https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2022/03/10/legislators-scrap...
Mobile speed cameras still have to be manned by a uniformed police officer. https://www.portland.gov/transportation/vision-zero/speed-ca... I have a bit of sympathy for that since I can imagine a person being threatened to remove the evidence.
That may be one of the reasons. If you're in Kent and you want to sell strawberries to Everett you basically have to go through Seattle. The other is that Seattle originally was going to be founded in West Seattle, but the weather was so bad they moved off the peninsula but in the lee of it. The Port of Seattle is built into a river delta that was probably only traversible in the mid 1900's so just moving to the lee side would have not helped with access.
But here we are 150 years later with a city built like a corset.
The reason the city picked that spot is because it had the best deep water access on Elliott Bay.
I put a lot of thought into the house I bought in Ballard, my kid won’t have to cross a four lane road (15th) till he hits high-school.
Sure, but again, those streets by and large did not feel unsafe to me (on foot).
> There were 271 pedestrian injuries in Seattle last year, 17 were fatal.
This datapoint is just not responsive to the discussion, unless you're saying those injuries happened specifically on non-sidewalked streets in north Seattle? I suspect most were in the street or crosswalks in busier parts of town.
The other thing about Seattle is that you can have a grocery store nearby, but still not really have access to it if you're lower income. We have a lot of premium stores, especially in walkable neighborhoods. When I was a student I lived in Wedgwood, and I had 2 grocery stores within a 5-minute walk: the PCC, and the Metropolitan Market, both places where a week's groceries were about 2-3x as expensive as they were at the nearest Safeway, which was more than 15 minutes away.
Not faulting the creator of this article, as it's an okay rule of thumb, and it's hard to include details like that in a model.
Why not? As long as it's truly a 15m walk? The metric should take into account that the speed is going to be reduced when walking on a steep incline, otherwise it's a bad metric...
A 15 min walk down and up stairs in a skyscraper would count but few would want to do it on the regular (and those who did wouldn’t need to worry about leg day).
And then there is the socio-economic history of elevations in Seattle. tl;dr Historically poor people (and minorities) lived at the bottom of hills, rich people at the top. To this day, you can literally see houses get nicer as you go up hills.
There are also neighborhoods with a hill in the middle where one side of the hill was historically poor, and the other side well to do. My dad used to tell me that when he was a kid, him and all his friends knew not to go to up the hill where they didn't belong.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shopli...
What I take away is that retail theft 1) is technically on the rise, mostly due to the ability to then sell those goods online, including on Amazon 2) It doesn't impact major retail chains by much, basically they do what they've always done and just adjust prices. It actually helps amazon on some other online sellers. BUT 3) it definitely contributes to how shitty it is to actually work retail 4) AND it will influence where places like Walgreens set up shop (I'm neutral on this, I would rather have a bunch of local corner stores than walgreens)
what does this mean? Isn't that the whole point of security?
So no, I don't think theft is the major factor.
Otherwise if the local shops are more expensive (in any meaningful way), consumers would simply drive the additional N miles to the Walmart Supercenter as things kind of are as is
Yes, along with the least healthy food. Food poverty (in the sense of being unable to afford or access healthy food) is a very serious problem in America that contributes to the high numbers of unhealthy people and obesity rates. It's one of those things that isn't talked about enough, and certainly I don't read much about efforts to fix it.
[1] https://www.zeit.de/community/2023-02/einkommen-deutsche-sta...
are there plans to secede to Canada? ;)
Both are not trashed up by cars. That's the relationship.
I think that's the main reason why the escape-to-the-woods fantasy is so strong in the US. It's an escape from car dependent drab. You don't have to flee to the woods for serenity; urban environments can feel spacious and verdant. But those will always be walkable, have calm traffic, or no cars at all.
Would much rather be near a decent small or midsize grocery with no or limited off-street parking, and which receives its deliveries on the street in the early morning (no loading dock)
I live in a walkable Seattle neighborhood. Accordingly, the "supermarkets" are not quite the mega-large stores they are in other parts of the city, and they have smaller parking lots accordingly.
This is a generalization, but as a rule, Seattle is laid out on a grid system, and every 5 blocks there is a larger 2 lane road where the speed is 25 MPH instead of 20MPH. Grocery stores are generally on the corner of those larger blocks.
> Would much rather be near a decent small or midsize grocery
In my experience, prices are higher and the selection is very limited, so living near one of those doesn't present much benefit to me.
Which is my next point, despite living walking distance to 3 grocery stores, I still typically drive a mile away to a larger store because prices there are 2/3rds to 1/2 what they are at any of the stores close to me.
A mobile consumer base, people with cars that can travel to potentially hundreds of retail options, is a backbone of American competition. Like cars or not, they empower consumers to defeat local monopolies. The next stage, pickup trucks, then empowers retailers to sell large products (appliances) to an enormous consumer base from a central location without dealing with transport companies and/or teamsters for local delivery.
Most people buy appliance at most once a decade. There’s a reason the bed of trucks have shrunk while cabs have grow over the years: most people don’t need trucks. The harm pickup trucks cause society has to be worse than this empowerment.
Pickups are way more dangerous in an accident, way more likely to get in an accident, and require way more fuel to power. You’d have to empower a lot of appliance sales before this can even come close to balancing out.
America is just not denselly populated enough to really make it worth your while to build a supermarket ever 3 miles. Too much empty space so people refuse to live efficiently.
I think supermarkets becoming 4-over-1 buildings with living places above them would be fantastic. Walk down to the first floor to get your groceries, walk them up to your home.
edit: this is in a U.S. context, I don't know how these terms are used in other English-speaking countries
This is what a pre-supermarket grocery store looked like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grocery_store#/media/File:1909...
I live in brooklyn, exactly the kind of city described. I'm within a 10 minute walk of at least 4 grocery stores, none of which have a parking lot at all.
Just my personal observations of course.
You see this idea everywhere, it's not "corn is one America's staple crops and the use of corn syrup which is sweeter and more abundant than cane sugar gave Americans a preference for the very sweet" but "Americans with their unrefined pallets, unhealthy diets, and obesity crisis put heaps of sugar in everything."
Cultural things Americans themselves have more agreement over are often more respected abroad: cinema, music, American fast food, American sports, etc.
Sometimes I think people that grew up in, and live in a big city forget that not everyone in the USA lives like that.
There are still a tremendous amount of beautiful places in all 50 states.
I've lived in a few US cities since then; of them, NYC was the only place that didn't feel built for cars more than humans. But NYC still feels like humans have been pushed "out of the way" in favor of car traffic in many places, especially outside of lower Manhattan.
I currently live in a small New England town that does an OK job at "human" infrastructure because it was originally built for walking and there just aren't enough cars to ruin things for pedestrians. But I would love to hear suggestions of other not-cities in the USA that are walkable, bikeable, and not car-dominated. I've been considering buying a home to combat out-of-control rising rent prices and walkability is a requirement for me, so I love adding new areas to my list.
A Whole Foods moved in down the street a few years back and they do have a parking garage under the building, but I'd guess most customers aren't using that. I wouldn't be mad if it went away tomorrow though.
We're of course a very different city than pretty much all other cities in the US, as we're not at all car dependent in most parts of the city.
My favorite grocery store is about 1/4 to 1/5 of the typical supermarket like a Safeway, because it has all the same products without all the fluff. And an actual real butcher counter with plenty of on staff butchers, instead of row upon row of prepackaged cuts.
In a walkable neighbourhood, they'd just be a store front:
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/197+Roncesvalles+Ave,+Toro...
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/1435+King+St+West+Toronto,...
Or at the very least, much smaller:
* https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6395232,-79.4172267,3a,75y,3...
Whole foods has plenty of them in all big cities.
It's just a cultural reason why some cities lack them--probably because people don't cook at home as much in NYC, for example.
There is also very heavy competition from more traditional markets, like those found in Chinatown with very cheap meat and produce prices.
But man when I think of the costs involved in making sure there is a High School (in the US they tend to be large and draw from a distance) within 15 minutes of everywhere (no small cost to drop in a high school somewhere), or plop down a grocery store in a neighborhood ... that sounds both super expensive and politically difficult, and for some good reasons.
Heck I'd be annoyed if someone decides "Sorry we're rezoning / creating an incentive to build a restaurant in the plot next to you, not enough restaurants nearby. Good luck..."
Still, I'd guess you'd be right that it would be enormously expensive and difficult to bring this back.
But it was once this way, and it was human decisions that made it not this way. If we want it to be this way again and start, it can be eventually.
We have a real opportunity to fix this by removing one of them[2], but we're too terrified of change to improve our own lives. So the concrete canyon called I-94 will remain, poisoning the heart of our cities, for at least another four generations. Sigh.
[1] Comparison of the Twin Cities before & after the freeways were built: https://twitter.com/SegByDesign/status/1623376761722490881
Millennials followed the boomers right into the suburbs as they got older and that was before there was a path to killing the commute.
When Gen Z can get by without a commute and live in social media, where is their push for cities going to come from?
I've moved into and out of downtown Boston over the past 20+ years, and it's been interesting to see this trend actually happen. In the neighborhoods I've lived in, there are usually 1-2 smaller markets that offer convenience at a price, and then a more "traditional" grocery store within 5-10 minutes of walking.
Over the years, a few new grocery stores have been built in the urban core, and they've actually been of the "larger traditional" variety. In most cases, they're part and parcel of new development, so the space, loading, and (reduced) parking requirements can be accommodated as part of the build.
The key is that the stores are being built concurrently with more housing being developed as well, so the stores are effectively meeting new demand. In my most recent "city phase", I actually had 3 "large format" grocery stores, 2-3 smaller markets, plus the assortment of convenience stores within a 15 minute walk.
I'm one of the latter and I enjoy having no yard and neighbors.
So high schools within 15 min walk/bike in Europe is much more doable than in the U.S.
Caveat: this is how it was when I was growing up in France; it may have changed since then, though I looked up my old high school and it's the same.
Figure high schools have 4x the number of students that elementary schools do, and we'd need 2x the elementary schools to make them all walkable, that means Seattle would have to have 8x the number of students in high school than it currently does to justify building enough high schools to make them all walkable.
Not to mention Seattle couldn't really afford to build that many schools, as the city can't even maintain the current schools to basic levels of safety (ongoing lead water pipe issues...)
That's a good point too.
The local urban schools near me have had to close high schools, not open new ones.
But Seattle and Washington are attracting people from the world and the rest of the nation. Both Seattle and Washington have been experience positive population growth for decades now.
(This is going to sound like we're playing Sim City 2000) but don't forget to add a hospital (a proper one, with an emergency room), a fire station, a police station...
> a grocery store
Are there many neighbourhoods which don't already have some kind of grocery store?
That's probably part of a shift over time. In general, we probably have more relatively large but spread out businesses than little mom and pop places on every corner.
(This is sort of a US comment. There seem to be more serviceable smallish grocery stores in Europe that are in between a supermarket and a convenience store. That's less common in the US other than one-off markets and sometimes downsized chain grocery stores.)
While on a business trip I stopped at a petrol (gas) station in the UK a couple of weeks ago, the sort on the side of a major road outside a city, and with a mini-supermarket attached, and was literally speechless when I realised they had a whole shelf rack containing gluten-free products.
I have coeliac disease, and had been assuming I'd have to travel specially to some large supermarket to get the stuff I can eat, but thanks to this place I grabbed loaf of gluten-free bread and a pack of gluten-free cornflakes, and I was good to go.
I'm discovering that coeliac and mid-range hotels don't always mix :/
I wonder what "chain convenience stores" are...are they more geared towards snacks? Mid-sized supermarkets are all over the cities in europe I would say. You usually visit a bigger supermarket once a week, but you can get everything in the smaller ones, from fruits and vegetables to pasta. They are really there to fulfil your everyday needs and you don't strictly need to visit a bigger one. Many don't because it's so convenient, but they tend to be a bit more expensive.
Mid-sized supermarkets are part of my everyday life and I wonder why they are not more common in the US.
https://www.aecf.org/blog/exploring-americas-food-deserts covers the research (and links to the paper).
Are we talking about neighbourhoods not having a store selling fresh fruit and vegetables, or not having a grocery store of any kind?
They are not the same as a food dessert.
Wiki (sorry) appears to define that as "an area that has limited access to affordable and nutritious food"
I appreciate their point, but "no grocery store" really isn't the same as "limited access to affordable and nutritious food".
Tons. They're called food deserts.
IMO a well-designed city could easily keep all necessary amenities in that range.
A high school I understand (where I live in the UK it's common for high school kids to catch the bus to school if they don't live close - as long as you live within a 15 minute walk of the bus stop that seems fine). But a grocery store? What's difficult about that? Just convert a house.
I feel that the American view of a grocery store is one of those mega-Walmartesque stores with infinite aisles of stuff, rather than the more common small-scale grocery stores we are used to here in Europe.
At least on my trips to the US I don't recall seeing many small-scale grocers in neighbourhoods, it was either stores like CVS or going to a mega-grocer.
There are pros and cons to the above. Do not claim what you are used to is better: it is different, not better or worse. Odds are you have not spent enough time using both to make a real claim. even if you have, odds are your stage of life is different enough that you cannot compare.
In many places there is a miserable quantity of political and legal infrastructure to prevent that from happening. Undoing that is a necessary part of 15-minute cities, but it may be weirdly unpopular.
(also, people expect a wider range of things than will fit in an old style corner shop, and you need to have HGV parking..)
I don't agree that it's how it should be, but even in an already urban area (Somerville) getting things built is like pulling teeth. There's a literal hole in the ground from a fire a decade ago that people have been fighting development on for years, because they argue it will bring more people to the area and make it harder to street park. As if there's a guaranteed right to have public space dedicated to your private vehicle.
Parking regulations are written to accommodate this. The pedestrian streets in the centre of Copenhagen allow deliveries from 4am to 11am, but I think there may be additional restrictions on large trucks as they seem to be out before 8am. Rubbish collection is also at these times.
The difficultly is making the typical residential dwelling compliant comply with existing regulations like the Americans with Disabilities act and complying with things like commercial insurance policy requirements.
Heck even suburban schools around me are trying to stop everyone from dropping off their kid with their car in person. It's just a hassle / traffic.
Ergo, massive traffic jams of parents individually driving kids to school.
> Heck I'd be annoyed if someone decides "Sorry we're rezoning / creating an incentive to build a restaurant in the plot next to you, not enough restaurants nearby. Good luck..."
I don't get this. Isn't a restaurant at the corner great? Why would you be annoyed? I like living next to a restaurants. It increases your quality of live I think, you can literally just swing by if you feel like it and after a while you get to know the owner and develop a personal relationship. It really makes this place more my home I think, I always greet them and have a quick chat, and brings some life to the street. Of course, there's a question of the size but that can be dealt with. A grocery store is another thing because often they tend to be really big, but I think often suitable places can be found. But I think the supermarkets in mind are small, not a giant supermarket. Something where you can get most of your stuff but don't really have a variety to choose from, something where you swing by because you forgot your eggs.
I don't live in the US so I am really unsure why that's so bad. I don't think living 15 minutes to a Walmart (I picture them to be massive) is meant.
I assume, of course, that you're living somewhere somewhat suitable. But we're talking about living in seattle, so I assume it's ok.
Not absolutely everything needs to be walkable in 15 minutes. Once kids are teenagers having go to school on transit or bicycle would be fine.
Perhaps focus on elementary schools being walkable.
The closest high school is 2.5 miles away and the high school my child attended was 6.5 miles away due to a quirk in the boundaries and which schools feed into which higher level school.
Why?
> I like the idea of walking 15 minutes to get all the things.
But
>Heck I'd be annoyed if someone decides "Sorry we're rezoning / creating an incentive to build a restaurant in the plot next to you, not enough restaurants nearby. Good luck..."
>But man when I think of the costs involved in making sure there is a High School (in the US they tend to be large and draw from a distance) within 15 minutes of everywhere (no small cost to drop in a high school somewhere), or plop down a grocery store in a neighborhood ... that sounds both super expensive and politically difficult, and for some good reasons.
Even has the weak "what about the costs" argument.
I speak from experience as I lived in a house near a guy who decided to do just that... broken down cars parked everywhere (leaking all sorts of stuff), noise at all hours.
Gotta be a balance between things.
Banning automotive repair might be ok by itself but there's another idiot who wants to ban X, and Y and Z and their complaints are just as valid as yours and the status quo is what you get when you try and accommodate all of them.
Want to prioritize walkability to shops? Zoning is a great way to make that happen.
Want to prioritize keeping noisy things away from residential areas? Zoning is great for that too!
Want to make a socially segregated city? You can absolutely do that with zoning!
Zoning is a super great tool, it's just that the things it optimizes for are sometimes misguided (or in some cases straight-up harmful).
I'd love to see the median rent in those nine compared to elsewhere in the city. Can any Seattle residents here provide some insight?
Outside of the urban villages, Seattle is comprised of neighborhoods of single-family homes. Those areas can't all be 15-minute walkable because catchement areas don't have the population needed to support those amenities.
But it's also certainly a class issue. The people walking to the grocery store are mainly the poor, students, and a small core of idealists who go out of their way to live a "city lifestyle". Everybody else drives everywhere. Which has a strange effect that wealthier neighborhoods are less likely to have things like a pharmacy, because the wealthier are in the habit of driving everywhere. I get my prescriptions filled at Costco, five miles from my house, even though the closest pharmacy is one mile.
[1] https://i.pinimg.com/736x/87/cd/9f/87cd9ffd44c33154445747de3...
International District: Euphemism for Chinatown, not expensive
Pioneer Square: It varies, but fairly expensive despite the rampant homelessness
Pike Place Market: Very expensive
Ballard: Expensive new buildings, more affordable older ones
Capitol Hill: Expensive, generally
South Lake Union: Expensive
Madrona: Expensive
It’s not a euphemism. Euphemism refers to a word that conceals something unpleasant or embarrassing. It is anything but. It is working class yes but nothing wrong with that.
The full name (since 1999) is Chinatown-ID. The majority of the inhabitants are Chinese but it encompasses Little Saigon and the less prominent but still existing Japantown (Uwajimaya and several Japanese businesses still have a presence).
If you can think of a word with different, or fewer connotations I'll gladly swap it in. Mea culpa for the hasty pasting, though.
And also extremely on the other side - Market housing can be very low-cost. A number of my friends are paying < $300/month for some nice/decent apartments with a very long wait-list.
Cf: the apartments under the Market and Stewart House.
Other neighborhoods missing:
Fremont
Wallingford
Georgetown
Columbia City
Rainer Beach
Northgate
W. Seattle
Queen Anne
Belltown
Magnolia
S. Seattle
Ravenna
Beacon Hill
South Park
Leschi
Madison Park
Northlake
Greenwood
And a bunch more places that non-transplants know about...
Aside, the conspiracy-theory right has decided that "15 minute city" is another "agenda 21" conspiracy to force all westerners to live in tiny urban walled ghettos, and traveling outside of your "15-minute-city" will be illegal. And of course, the mainstream right media has been feeding this monster by treating walkability as some nefarious conspiracy but without explicitly mentioning the most insane tinfoil-hat parts of it.
Montlake had a small grocery store that was torn down precisely because of the 520 construction. (I can't speak for Eastlake).
520 is a highway after all, and highways are hostile to walkability for a multitude or reasons. (this fact still remains, even though efforts are being made to improve the situation in Montlake).
Currently I'd guess the grocery options are Monts, Little Lago, Eastlake market, and Petes. But I doubt many people do all their shopping at any of those they are closer to convenience stores than grocery stores.
[1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattles-... (using this for the nice map image because Seattle insists on publishing hulking PDFs)
Asking as a NYer who would consider living there if the car-free life wouldn't be too painful
It's more realistic to think of Seattle as a city where you can be "car-light": it's entirely possible to go without driving during the week, assuming you commute by bus and have a small supermarket nearby to pick up dinner/essentials. Then, on the weekend, a vehicle can be super useful to fill in the gaps, whether that's going to the larger supermarket for bulkier goods, getting out of the city into nature, or going over to a distant neighborhood to check it out.
Part of this is because of the city's geography- I might not mind (for instance) living in West Seattle and commuting by bus to downtown, but if I'm trying to go visit the Woodland Park Zoo up, I'd probably want to drive there because it would be a considerably longer trip involving a transfer in Downtown.
The one gap is that Seattle is surrounded by very popular nature and outdoorsy activities up in the mountains or out on the islands. It is one of the major perks of living in Seattle. If you want to spend a lot of time wandering around the Cascades, you'll need a car. Some people that have a car use it almost exclusively for outdoors activities, not day to day living.
Biking is not great. I did it a lot, but I'm comfortable riding through heavy traffic on steep hills, if you're not, probably would be hard to rely on.
Finally, I'm big into climbing/mountaineering and lack of a car was never a big problem. I'd rent one the few times I had too (way cheaper than parking and insurance), but otherwise could usually carpool with someone else who was going. Sorta' puts you on someone else's schedule, but if you need a belay partner anyway...
However they all own cars as well to go to the outdoors on the weekend. Feel like that’s half the reason of living in Seattle.
If nature is not high on your priorities, I dunno why one would trade NYC for Seattle. State income tax?
Public transportation is decent compared to most of the US (but worse than NYC obviously.) There are also lots of other ways to get around like Uber, scooters, bikes, and Gig cars (rental car you pick up and drop in public parking spots.)
The biggest problem is getting to the mountains if that's your thing. That's the main reason I have a car.
Sure, if you want to go out to the mountains every weekend you need a car, but with a light rain-proof jacket, it's not too bad to walk or bike through much of the city. The grey weather is either depressing or not, but I don't find it to be much more depressing out of a car than in it.
Strangely, I live with my wife and daughter in Boise, Idaho and we don't own a car. The high school, my work, grocery stores, etc. are all within a short walk.
It bums me out that we had that taken from us. I'm glad you found one of the places where you can still make it work!
I highly recommend playing around with some of the datasets and visualization tools.
Seattle doesn't make the top 133 for densest census designated places in the US*
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
honestly surprised that SF is more walkable than NYC with this criteria
I’ve lived in both and if you’re sort of near the core then NYC is much, much more walkable than SF.
At least it isn't like San Jose or Newark, where sidewalks just aren't there along some roads, in residential area, or suddenly cut short in the middle of a block where you have to walk back to the previous crossing for an alternative route. And there are _so many_ dead ends without warning. So many.
I wonder if NYC will rank higher if Staten Island is excluded. Not that I have anything against it, just that judging from the heat map it is less walkable than the rest.
It's similar in Canada too. Toronto is the megacity (1998 amalgamation) including some suburbs; Vancouver does not include Richmond; Montreal has weird holes like Westmount.
...starts to question list.
I live in West Seattle and tbh the maps for West Seattle look pretty solid, especially when you factor in the significant reduction in housing costs. I remain more people don't live here!
Still, this 15-minute city is an initiative created by the WEF which should be ignored and not implemented. If the WEF is so concerned about the "carbon footprint" of regular citizens driving to work and to the store, a much more effective solution would be to ban private jets. Bill Gates' flight to Davos on a private jet (to urge people to eat fake meat) exhausts more carbon in one trip than my family's entire car usage.
Good point. There is very little motivation to make cities more 'walkable', if your walk requires stepping in or over human feces and discarded needles and homeless people camped out on the sidewalk. That problem needs to be fixed first before there is going to be widespread support for proposals like this.
And having more livable cities in America are exactly what we need to help solve the problem.
When we talk about 15 minute cities here, do we mean zoning changes to build things differently? Or are we talking about authoritarian enforcement?
Edit: Okay maybe what I read was overblown. Seems this is being trialed in Oxford as "traffic filters" but the ubiquitous camera surveillance is certainly part of it. There is also talk of this expanding to other cities in the UK. Though not specifically talked about as apart of the 15 minute city plan, this seems to go along nicely with that concept.
Edit: A source: https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2023/01/25/15-minute-city-plan...
https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/23073992.traffic-filters-w...
"People can drive freely around their own neighbourhood and can apply for a permit to drive through the filters, and into other neighbourhoods, for up to 100 days per year. This equates to an average of two days per week."
This is enforced with surveillance cameras.
As I said in another comment: it does seem to me that enforcing movement like this and adding bureaucracy to drive through certain places is a solid step in the direction of authoritarianism.
The article is titled "Traffic filters will divide city into "15 minute" neighbourhoods"
It's definitely non-locals using small resident roads as short cuts who are now slightly inconvenienced performing mental gymnastics.
(And yes, surveillance is real in London, but not the other things. You can also camera surveil sprawling, car oriented areas, and technology makes it cheaper every year.)