So with a big enough stick and very little carrot anything is possible? Is that a win? Aren't we hearing that actual residents really don't like these "15 minute" cities?
Yep, so all those complaining that nothing is being done or can be done about climate change are wrong. There are tools, they just need to be used.
> Aren't we hearing that actual residents really don't like these "15 minute" cities?
We're also hearing that Zuckerberg is a lizard and the Earth is flat, so fucking what? London is a major metropolis, rather dense, and with very relaxed and mixed zoning (you can have a 13th century "Church of X Girls School" next to a Tesco store in a glass skyscraper. It already does everything a "15th minute city" is about, apart from being "15 minutes big" - commute times are usually bigger, and somewhat concentrated to City and Canary Wharf, but there's work, leisure, shopping, housing to be found all around. Idiots who rage against a concept they couldn't begin to comprehend because toilet paper quality "journalists" make money that way aren't concerned residents of London, they have nothing to do with the city, and their opinion is best ignored.
In neighborhoods with a traditional urban form (or "15 minute cities"), you wouldn't usually take mass transit to the grocery store, it's within a short walking distance. With groceries close by, it's natural to make frequent, smaller trips.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYHTzqHIngk
what self-proclaimed "15 minute city" are you living in where this is hard? genuinely curious. wondering if the phrase is getting diluted for marketing reasons. I've lived in totally ordinary neighbourhoods of English cities where all this was possible and easy, I never heard them flaunting their "15 minute city"ness, even though they met and exceeded the technical definition.
like I'm just confused that people are calling "utopian" the rather unremarkable reality I've lived for 25+ years. it makes me suspect ppl are using the same words to mean very different things.
In the last place I lived, there were at least six I could walk to conveniently. And that wasn't a big bustling world-class metropolis either, it was a fairly unspectacular inner suburb of Sheffield[1], a city of 550,000, solidly middle of the pack on most social/economic rankings compared to other UK cities. The closest to "mass transit" was a tram that came three times an hour, but I never took the tram to get food.
I've linked the Streetview of the main high street[2] near where I lived, don't want to dox my exact address but I lived somewhere within a 1 km radius of this point[3]. I could get 98% of my monthly needs from this one street. You can explore the different directions on Streetview to see what I'm talking about. Look at the amenities nearby: cafes, coffee shops, greengrocers, hairdressers, newsagents, liquor shops, nurseries, daycare, schools, a gym, churches, pubs, a bus station, furniture shops, banks, a park, a dentist, pharmacies, several GP practices, a supermarket, hardware store, drycleaners, fast food, probably more that I've forgot, all within a short walk of this point. There's even the start of a pleasant walking trail through the Rivelin valley a bit further to the southwest (a godsend during the lockdowns). And this kind of high street isn't unique, there are plenty such high streets dotted around in the adjoining neighbourhoods: Middlewood, Crookes, Kelham Island, the lot. Most people in the city can walk to one. In fairness it may not meet the "15 minute city" definition since most workplaces are in the city centre so a walking commute takes more than 15 minutes. But hey, the tram is about that quick, and biking doesn't take much longer, 20 minutes maybe. And of course you can drive too; plenty of cars about.
Another example: when I was a student my house was in a 1 km radius of this point[4]. It's clearly suburban, but look at all the amenities. Easy, no "mass transit" needed to buy milk. And now I live within 1 km of this[5] point, exact same thing. It's not even the only such high street I can walk to; there's another about the same distance in the opposite direction from my house. British high streets have overlapping walking-distance radii that jointly cover almost all the suburban parts of a city, on top of the big central shopping district of the city-proper.
Having lots of groceries in walking distance is not a high a bar to clear. The examples I gave are all second- or third-rate cities, unimpressive in most respects; they're not the ones urbanists always talk about like Amsterdam or Copenhagen or Tokyo or anything fancy like that. It takes no particular conscious government policy to make this happen, it just happens on its own, because there's more than enough market demand. Look at the houses, they're almost all 2 storeys, only a few apartments in the 3-4 storey range, and hardly anything taller than that; the places I showed are not very densely populated, yet they support all this business. If your city is big and dense enough to have "mass transit" (I'm assuming a subway or high-frequency surface rail?), it ought to have grocery shops even more densely distributed than where I've lived. If not, it sounds like something has gone very wrong! That just shouldn't happen. What land-use regulations/laws are preventing it?
This is what I meant when I said people use the same words to mean different things ... all kinds of confusion. Best to use Streetview and give examples.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough,_Sheffield
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Street
[3] https://goo.gl/maps/6h6qSdFcn2thifM9A
A rucksack will easily carry around 5-6 days of food. Other than that, I would simply pop by the shop on my commute home from work. It would be a 5-10 minute detour max.
Remember that the shops in such cities are directly accessible (no need to walk through a massive shopping centre), there's no time wasted on finding a parking space, there's so many shops that it's extremely likely that there's at least one between your home and the bus/tube stop and they're mostly exclusively filled with food so you're not walking past dozens of aisles filled with non-groceries.
The big bonus of course is that if you wake up in the morning and realise you're out of milk, it's a usually a <5min walk to the closest shop to pick some up and no one will bat an eyelid if you're still wearing your bathing gown. :)
There's also generally less food waste (as you shop for fewer days and can plan better) and you can opt into buying your fruit, veg, meat and fish fresh every day instead of having to hope that your 'big shop' at the megastore will still be fresh at the end of the week.
I just bring a bag or two and ride my bike to the store. Or if I'm downtown, which is a 10 minute train ride away, I'll stop by the grocery store next to the station before hopping on the train and just carry my groceries in a bag or put em in my backpack.
The only times I choose to drive are when I want to get a large quantity of something lightweight, like toilet paper or paper towels.
I typically don't buy a lot at once, I'll plan my meals for the next few days and only buy what I know will definitely get eaten to reduce waste.
Smaller stores within neighborhoods allow for quick trips without much hassle.
But the main benefit is it enables me to not own a car, if I couldn’t get things delivered I might buy a car and then use it for other things I don’t strictly have to but since I’m paying for one anyway.
Second, how else are cities meant to do this? The fundamental problem is that there is a huge and rising level of driving demand[1], and limited supply. There is a scarcity of road space in London and you can't really add more. Basic economics tells you that you can manage that scarcity through some combination of prices, queues, and lotteries. Throughout most of the 20th century, we defaulted to queues, in the form of traffic jams. You can use the road at zero cost, but you'll have to wait a long time. But that became increasingly untenable as car ownership rose -- the number of cars in Britain has doubled over the last few decades. And traffic jams are themselves unpleasant: they're noisy, ugly, emit pollution, etc. So now cities are using prices too, in the form of congestion charges, taxes, and so on. That's not some punitive "stick" done for its own sake, it's just a tool used to cope with an inescapable economic reality. When you have more cars and the same amount of road, you need to deter an increasing fraction of those cars from using those roads. The "carrot" is providing alternate, more space-efficient ways to get around: bike infrastructure, public transport.
[1] "driving demand" is itself a weaselly, meaningless phrase, because "demand" only makes sense in reference to a specific price level. motorists have been conditioned by a century of car-friendly policy to expect to drive and park for free, but there's no real justification for that. just because the roads are publicly owned doesn't give them the right to use them for free, any more than state-owned railways should have free fares.
Reducing motor traffic makes for safer, more aesthetically pleasant streets. You can expand the pavement, have flowers, landscaping, public art, outdoor dining, etc. The air quality is better, the surroundings are quieter, people don't get run over and maimed in collisions.
And when you really want or need to drive, there's less traffic around. Nobody likes sitting in traffic jams! See this video for how these kinds of policies benefit drivers directly[1].
The carrot is having a more pleasant city. Everyone wins from that.
barriers/bollards: they're meant to stop cars from hitting people or driving in bike lanes or parking where they shouldn't. I like having them around. as for cameras, they're to catch people speeding, they mostly wouldn't be necessary if people didn't speed. and people speed mostly because the design of the road doesn't match the legal speed limit. see e.g. this[1]. so if you don't like cameras, you should welcome these redesigns.
but more importantly than any of that, could you please think about the other side of the ledger for a minute? "restrictions" on mobility are novel or hypothetical to you, but they're not for me.
traffic calming, restricted access roads, low-traffic neighourhoods, you think of these small things as restrictions on you because you can't go places quite as fast or quite as directly as you want, but for me they're lifelines. they let me get some places reliably and safely at all. on a road with 40+mph traffic, I can't use it unless there's a protected bike lane, and junctions designed with cyclists in mind (i.e. some degree of physical separation). and if that road is the only connection between A and B, then I can't get from A to B! pedestrians need barriers and refuges and controlled crossings and slowed vehicle speeds to safely get across busy roads. these things aren't luxuries, they're necessities for people who do not drive.
I've told you about getting around without a car in my city is fairly doable, because the local council has improved the infrastructure quite a bit recently. but that doesn't yet extend outside of the city's boundaries, even though there's no practical reason why it couldn't. so here's a story about those difficulties:
the city next to mine is close enough that cycling to it would be, in theory, a completely reasonable journey. a direct-ish route would take about 40 minutes; perfectly doable as a commute. but it's impossible because there is no such route. trust me, I've looked high and low for one, it simply doesn't exist. I've spent hours scouring Google Maps and Streetview, even doing reconnaissance trips to gauge the safety of certain parts myself, taking photographs, testing whether traffic lights detect me, etc. every route has many absolute showstopper segments where I'm exposed to high speed traffic with no physical protection whatsoever, and/or have to risk my life at enormous junctions whose design is completely hostile to my presence. I managed to get all the way there once, on a tangled indirect mess of side streets and unpaved tracks, taking over 3x longer than it had any right to. it was like finding the Northwest Passage. getting there by bus or rail is not quite as hard, but still far more awkward and unpredictable than it should be.
then I heard about govt proposals to alter one of the several motorway routes between the two cities: of the five lanes, make one into a protected bidirectional bikeway, and two others into a dedicated bus lanes. this isn't expensive, it's just paint and concrete barriers, and some alterations to the traffic lights and signage. but predictably, the comments on the news article were full of uproar about this imposition, a "war on motorists", it would supposedly increase congestion, and my favourite, "why would you build a bike lane? who even cycles there anyway?".
pity the poor motorist! I doubt any of them have ever agonized for hours over whether a trip of less than ten miles between two cities was even practically possible. such a failure of transport connectivity would be inconceivable in a modern Western country. yet situations like this are considered normal for non-drivers. we're expected to put up with not being able to practically reach places nearby, and be grateful for the smallest improvements, while billions are spent on motorways each year. and then I see conspiracizing about 15-minute cities, "restrictions on movement", "geofencing" and so on, and I just have to laugh. I've been de-facto "geofenced" by car-first planning for years, and so has everyone else who can't or doesn't drive (and there are a lot of us).
so if you want to halt these reforms, or think things should go back to how they were, what that really means is, you're happy with people like me living with harsh and pointless restrictions on mobility, far worse than cameras and bollards and congestion pricing are for motorists. for my part, I think motorists have simply gotten used to an unwarranted level of convenience, public subsidy, and politician's attention. the mild restrictions for motorists are enormously liberating for everyone else. and they are mild. you might have to take a slightly longer route, or walk the last hundred yards instead of parking exactly at your destination, or pay to use scarce road space that a huge number of other people want to use ... it's not that big a deal. a fairer balance between drivers' convenience and the welfare of other road users shouldn't feel like an attack on you.
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/7/18/how-street-des...