For these jobs you have industrial areas outside of the city skirts and good public transportation to/from the city neighbourhoods, good as in: accessible, fast and ubiquitous.
That's how The Netherlands do and I really like their cities.
>> For these jobs you have industrial areas outside of the city skirts and good public transportation to/from the city neighbourhoods
So... zoning. How is that any different than cities today? How then is the "20-minute city" any different than a city today + better public transport?
My point is that people calling for integrated cities with services all within walking distances need also to accommodate the dirty/loud/dangerous jobs. Outsourcing such things to beyond the city limits is simply a repeat of current zoning policies using different names. The "20-minute city" concept boils down to just another call for better public transportation options. Ok. Cool. Do that. Just don't pretend you are doing anything revolutionary.
Meat plants are not placed near customers. They are placed near employees. The goods are then shipped wide and far. "Natural" zoning did indeed see slaughterhouses inside major cities, right in the middle of residential areas. Zoning and health codes then pushed such industries outside cities. They are now placed wherever labor is cheap.
"Two thousand men worked directly for the Union Stock Yard & Transit Co., and the rest worked for companies such as meatpackers, which had plants in the stockyards.[24] By 1900, the 475-acre (1.92 km2) stockyard contained 50 miles (80 km) of road, and had 130 miles (210 km) of track along its perimeter.[20] At its largest area, The Yards covered nearly 1 square mile (3 km2) of land, from Halsted Street to Ashland Avenue and from 39th (now Pershing Rd.) to 47th Streets."
Is it helpful or relevant for me to add that the slaughterhouses in my city used to be right in the middle of town? They're still there actually, just on a smaller scale and the city has grown so much that that's not the middle of town anymore.
Yes zoning, but only for some things. You don't need to have all office spaces in downtown. You don't need only big supermarkets that are in just a few neighbourhoods.
If less people have to move over long distances, it makes easier for the ones that need to.
So...a car dependent city then. They tend to have their office buildings distributed fairly evenly throughout the metro area and have a supermarket in pretty much every neighborhood. Every daily need and lots of non-daily needs are less than 20 minutes away.
Just admit that you want public transit and high density and stop trying to weasel around saying so. All of the benefits professed about dense living already exist in most car dependent cities, with the only difference being the mode of transportation used. In a car dependent area, industrial areas are also part of the 20-minute neighborhood without the downsides of having to live a 20 minutes walk from them.
Outside of a handful of cities (mostly on the West Coast) that failed to expand their infrastructure when their populations grew, people in car dependent areas already live in 20 minute neighborhoods. You just disagree with their lifestyle and transportation choices. If someone comes along and builds lots of 100 story skyscrapers when the transit system can only support 10 story buildings, the same issue will befall your beloved dense public transit dependent city.
No. It's about not needing a car. Also, as many mentioned here: in Europe and U.K. you have less dense areas or small towns where you have everything you need there. While in some places in US you might only get groceries in a 30 min drive to Walmart. Changing a 30 min car drive to a 45 min bus ride doesn't solve the problem.
Someone who is driving 30 minutes to a store lives in an area so rural they don't even live in a town or in a town so small no business could be profitable. A person living in a similar area in the UK would also have to drive. A 30 minute drive on the highway is over 30 miles - more than the diameter of most cities. Subtract a little time for parking and time spent on city streets and you can still get pretty much anywhere in an entire city in less than half an hour door to door. Most people in the US already live in a 20 minute (or less) city.
You also just made my point - "it's about not needing a car". Why do you care that someone uses a car? The person living in the suburbs spends around the same amount of time transiting to their daily destinations as someone in a dense area does. So for someone who doesn't mind driving (i.e. most people), your proposed solution to their "problem" (which they don't have) offers little benefit but comes with downsides like smaller (or no) houses.
I don't care if they use a car, I care if they need a car to do basic things such as: grocery shopping, going to a café, to a restaurant, to a park, to meet friends and so on. I really care if a car is a basic necessity for life, it's stupid, I came from such a country and it's just stressful, stressful to drive in traffic, stressful to maintain a car's upkeep, taxes, parking spot. All of that eats your money so you can have a care idling 95-99% of the time, it's a waste of resources, both financial and mental.
> So for someone who doesn't mind driving (i.e. most people)
How can you state that? Do you have data to corroborate this statement? What culture are you talking about?
I believe you see all of this too much with a US-centric myopic approach, the kinds of cities being discussed already exist in other parts of Earth, have you lived in one of them?
What I’m trying to tell you is that in most of the US, none of the things in your first paragraph are issues.
Traffic is only an issue in big cities, and even then in most of them it is only an issue in rush hour (i.e. not when running errands). Most small and medium sized cities never have traffic. Same is true for parking; that’s only an issue in big cities that have underbuilt parking. Most people in the US do not struggle to find parking during regular errands.
Modern cars require very little upkeep - a few hours once a year for a regular checkup is all that’s required.
Taxes is unfair, that’s an artificial government action that has little to do with how a mode of transportation works. I could just as easily say that you’d never use transit if the fares were raised to cover 100% of operating and capital expenses.
You accuse me of being biased towards the US, and I admit that I am, but you are biased towards your city, and I’m trying to tell you that your issues aren’t really issues for most people in the US. HN is dominated by Bay Area residents, where the local government hasn’t built anywhere close to the amount of new infrastructure of any mode required, so it’s only logical they hate traffic and therefore cars, but the Bay Area does not reflect the typical American city.
I hope you try to learn more about what life is like in large parts of America and to not assume that everything is like a handful of areas popular in the tech industry.
To your final point asking if I have personally experienced transit oriented development, the answer is yes. I have lived in cities in the US that heavily fund transit and have made it illegal to build new roads or low density housing. I found that when I lived in such an area I spent just as much time traveling to destinations as I did in a much larger car dependent city, but the things to do were much more limited. There were lots of restaurants and bars and nightlife, but any actual errand like a hardware store or anything else that couldn’t fit in a small first floor retail space required traveling to either the sketchy industrial area or the suburbs. I also paid hundreds of dollars in taxes earmarked to the transit system and my employer was forced to pay hundreds more on my behalf for an unlimited use transit pass, which is significantly more than the operating expenses I paid for my car. Since moving, I now pay less for transportation and spend less time traveling. It is rare I spend more than 20 minutes in transit time to go anywhere, so I by definition live in a 20 minute neighborhood. The same was not true in my prior transit oriented area unless you don’t count time spent walking to and from a bus stop and time spent waiting for the bus to come.
> My point is that people calling for integrated cities with services all within walking distances need also to accommodate the dirty/loud/dangerous jobs. Outsourcing such things to beyond the city limits is simply a repeat of current zoning policies using different names.
No, it is not current zoning policy. It is literally different policy, the one in which you dont make undisturbing business illegal and push only dirty/loud/dangerous businesses further away. Those two are different policies with different outcomes.
I don't know what it is with tendency to abstract away all differences between very different policies and talk about all of them as if they were the same as extreme.
> The "20-minute city" concept boils down to just another call for better public transportation options.
People actually want to walk, skateboard or bike to services they need for their daily lives.
>> People actually want to walk, skateboard or bike to services they need for their daily lives.
It was -13 outside my place this morning. Icy. Dark. I haven't seen a bicycle on the roads for at least five months. I have absolutely no desire to skateboard anywhere.
That's how The Netherlands do and I really like their cities.