I'm dreaming of the day when US cities start adopting car-light (if not car-free), walkable & bikeable urban designs. I have no interest in car centric 15-min cities. They are hard to scale and even when you achieve that goal with cars, the standard living is poor.
Portland & Detroit comparison is a bit laughable. May be we'll see this one day, but I'll believe it when I see it.
I live in one of the "complete neighborhoods" in Portland and it's really nice. I can walk to the grocery store to buy fresh food for each day, and I'm less than fifteen minutes by foot from three public parks (and a tiny one that I don't really count). This is far from representative of the city itself, but I would never want to give this lifestyle up.
This really gave me pause. I know the US is car-centric, but walking to the grocery store and at most 15 minutes to a real park sounds like the bare minimum for a livable location in my mind. Is the implication that regular US cities don't even fulfill that requirement?
When I first visited the US I was pretty appalled. Silicon Valley towns are huge stretches of residential areas where you can't even get a coffee on foot, you might be ok by cycling if they're not too large. In inland non-ancient cities, even the city centre is built for cars --- you can go around and get things by foot in the centre, but the roads are still made for cars, so you're constantly crossing 4-lane roads and walking across huge parking lots.
For reference: The nearest grocery store to me is 3 km away, down a hill and across an interstate that does not have a method for pedestrians to cross it, other than playing Frogger, if you know what I mean. And that store is overpriced and doesn't have a good selection. The next-closest store is 8 km away.
> I have no interest in car centric 15-min cities.
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.
It's not clear what you mean by that. It is easy to build a city where you can reach everything you need within 15 minutes by car. What is hard is to build a city like that where you can also reach everything you need by foot within 15 minutes. I don't think it is as impossible as some urbanists make it though.
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.
Having some urban structure where everything is within 15 car minutes is easy. It is just not a metropolitan city. My (central european) 9000 inhabitant village/city was like that and there are many like it.
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.
> It is easy to build a city where you can reach everything you need within 15 minutes by car.
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.
> It is easy to build a city where you can reach everything you need within 15 minutes by car.
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.
Depends on the size of the city, I suppose. A 15 minute car city like New York or London is almost certainly impossible.
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 think car oriented cities come with a lot of issues, but I don't think this is really a fair statement. Small towns can easily exist with <15min commutes and the city scalable version of this (which I hate, but does work) is basically a continuous field of suburbs dotted with occasional clumps of box stores stretching out into the horizon.
I live in an exurban town near a couple of small cities. I work remotely but am within 30 minutes of my office by car. And I'm within a 10-15 minute drive of grocery stores, (some) restaurants, and various big box stores like Walmart. It's not like I have quick access to big city amenities but I'm a reasonable pretty uncongested drive from most of the things I need day-to-day. (And I can walk but just for a fairly lengthy walk in the woods.)
The trouble comes when sprawl catches up to your exurban city. Now, one of two things happens: either your 15 minute city becomes a 30 minute city due to traffic congestion or zoning laws limit new construction and the cost of living there increases dramatically. If you managed to buy a home there, you'll be fine but renters soon have to seek either the next exurban spot or an older, decaying area closer to the central city.
We're talking an almost 500 year old farm town near a 80,000 person (twin) city so there isn't really a "central city" in the sense you're thinking of. They're old mill cities but there hasn't been a whole lot of sprawl over the past decades. It's pretty far out from the nearest major city.
A car-centric 15-minute city is actually quite possible. Something like Urbana-Champaign could well qualify. It's basically a stretch of suburbia centered around a university, which ends up being inherently pretty walkable to boot too.
It is possible, just not scalable. It is ready for a small city to be a car centric 15 minute city, but once population reaches the 6 digits problems start to arise, and ~500k is the rough upper limit where it becomes impossible.
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.
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
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.
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.
Burlington VT was a lovely city to live in though the fact that it's Vermont means you'd need a car to get practically anywhere the downtown core is dense enough to allow you to walk, eat, shop and dine[1]. But, honestly, the city has pretty weak public transit infrastructure due to its size and the grocery options available by foot are extremely limited and pricey.
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.
I imagine they'll drastically reduce parking needs, opening space for traffic lanes (reduce congestion) and commercial/services areas (make things closer to home).
Self-driving cars make driving easier so they will increase the demand for private vehicle travel and make it even less likely that we can satisfy demand.
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.
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
I think there are steps that could help reduce the affects of heat. Things such as more street trees, less asphalt (reduce the heat island effect), heat reflecting building roofs, etc.
It's not like the south is a lost cause, improvement can still be made.
Chicago can (and in some areas has - along with Boston) fixed that issue with pedestrian tunnels that allow easy movement during cold weather. A similar fix is available for southern cities but I think a more reasonable approach is just tighter pedestrian alleys that prevent full sun from ever bathing the walking surface (and reduce sun exposure to buildings) along with lots and lots of trees. Trees are seriously amazing and dissipating heat from the sun.
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.
I lived car-free in Chicago for 7 years. I now live in an inner-ring suburb (Oak Park), car-light (my wife and I share a car that I drive as little as possible). If we define 15 minutes as ¾ mile walking distance, I have within that range, two supermarkets, a library, health clubs, coffee shops, two drug stores, dry cleaners, banks, doctors, dentists, schools, daycare and a number of restaurants not to mention a stop on the “L” and at least half a dozen bus routes within my 15-minute zone. If I didn’t prefer Trader Joe’s to a mainstream super, I wouldn’t drive to go grocery shopping (and TJs is just over a mile away). If I expand my range a bit more, I add in even more of all the above plus a book store and movie theater.
Its really incredible the ways in which living in a walkable neighbourhood can improve your life. More activity from walking around, less pollution, better views etc.
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.
Here’s my suspicion, from having lived in both car-centric suburbs and a dense city:
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.)
All that, in addition to having the need to shop for as much stuff as possible during a single trip. People will fill up their entire car at costco, but if you're walking or cycling, you don't typically have as much cargo carrying capacity. So a massive costco, walmart, or target trip doesn't always make sense.
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.
Car-dependent areas need a lot of requirements to thrive. They need large setbacks, minimum parking allotments, throughput requirements on entrances and exits, etc. Walkable areas have minimal setbacks and can have no minimum parking allotments. This lends itself to smaller building footprints and correspondingly lower building and maintenance rents. Smaller, lower-revenue businesses can afford to rent these smaller locations out. Correspondingly small businesses in walkable locations need to spend less money on signage (as only those on foot will need to see it) and marketing as foot traffic naturally leads to serendipitous shopping.
In particular less cars means paths that are more suitable to walking in all weather - having a treed foot path instead of a boulevard outside your house makes a big difference in heat exposure to pedestrians and buildings. If you look at old Iberian (especially Portugal) you'll see very aggressive tree placement coupled with narrow alleys to try and keep paths walkable when things get really hot. It's night and day comparing the tight shady paths in Porto to the sun blasted avenues common in Florida - while the temperatures are pretty close the experience is entirely different.
Regarding small businesses in walkable areas, I think maybe the flip side of the same phenomena is a partial explanation. Big box stores, large corporate office parks, etc, don't work in walkable areas; they need a large footprint and wrap themselves in a lot of parking and they want people to get in and out of those parking lots easily so they do best on an arterial. If the big businesses are structurally pushed away from walkable areas, small businesses will naturally be over-represented there. Plus they can benefit from serendipitous discovery in those locations, since their marketing budgets may be nil.
It's interesting but that isn't actually always the case - a lot of cities use oversized blocks (blocks that are both taller and wider than a row of buildings - see Barcelona[1]) if this is the case then large department stores can expand into the courtyard or gardenspace interior of the block and, of course, in a lot of European cities a lot of malls are built vertically and underground - sometimes lying underneath a road with entrances on both sides.
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).
In Tokyo usually the large stores have small footprints but many floors, like the new Ikea in Shibuya (formerly Forever 21) - 7+ floors but each floor is maybe the size of 2-3 boutiques.
> “We’re often mixed up with Paris,” jokes Chris Warner, director of the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT).
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.
As someone who lives in Portland in what I’d consider to be a 5-minute neighborhood (NE 28th), the bike infrastructure is pretty good, but limited to certain streets. Biking on Burnside, Sandy, and much of 28th itself is quite dangerous, and there’s often no bike lane at all. However, there are many nearby streets (SE Ankeny, 30th) which are safe and actually designated as bike streets. But I often see clueless cyclists biking on the major streets instead. I’m not sure what we need to do to educate, because as a daily cyclist it’s really frustrating to see.
I feel/understand the bit about "clueless cyclists biking on the major streets" but that feels like a failure of infrastructure to me (sort of like how rust is a improvement over c). Anything from:
- 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.
I get that. I even have to study a map before every trip I go on to make sure I’m staying on more bike-friendly streets. Thankfully, in my neighborhood they’re adding more road blocks for cars (that still allow bikes through).
I was struck by the level of ambition in this article vs the bar being set decades ago in some Soviet planned cities: (timestamped link) https://youtu.be/JGVBv7svKLo?t=420s
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.
I'm waiting eagerly for the day when people in the west can grow up enough to learn from Soviet city and housing policies. Too many people just turn their minds off when they hear that godless commies did it.
I grew up in a 16 hectare commie superblock - every common errand could be done via walking - that includes medical services.
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.
Nobody seems to stop and ask "are super high density cities what's best for human health?", and that seems rather odd.
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.
I've thought a lot about this and I think the answer is no. I lived in Paris for almost a decade and my mental health would deteriorate if I didn't make it point to leave the city periodically. Sure, there are many benefits to living in a city...quality of life is not one of them.
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.
> 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!
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.
I agree to a certain extent, but think I would go crazy living in the suburbs on my own, although I'm not in a city like Paris, I'm in one of the major cities of Switzerland.
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'm fine if people think they need space, I just don't think that cities should outlaw other options, and sprawling infrastructure should have its costs tied more closely to the users. It's very expensive and unfortunately it's people living in denser areas that foot a large part of the bill.
People do wonder whether low-density, un-walkable, cites are _bad_ for human health, and studies show that they typically are bad health. I recall some studies on urban form and it's relationship to life expectancy, crime, happiness at certain socioeconomic statuses. Poor people in much of Montreal are able to live in walkable cities with low housing cost and decent transit, and it turns out they live longer, are more economically mobile, and are happier than equivalent SES populations in large cities with car-centric design.
I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that density itself is the cause of higher rates of mental illness. Density is more likely to correlate with exposure to car exhaust, for instance, and programs to care for mentally ill people tend to be located in denser areas. The crushing economic pressures of modern life regardless of location, combined with continued urbanization, seem to me more likely to be the cause than dense urban spaces.
> 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.
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.
Fifteen minutes might as well be 20 or 30. As soon as I have to get in my car, it doesn’t make much difference.
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.
> but as mosaics of neighborhoods in which almost all residents’ needs can be met within 15 minutes of their homes on foot, by bike, or on public transit.
The goal they're describing is the one you're proposing.
I don't know that it can be universally achieved car or no car, great public transit or no. But it's important to try for it. The key of course is to provide plentiful housing in varieties that support people at a variety of incomes and at every life stage, places to shop for everything from daily consumables to appliances, public services, and most importantly a large center of offices and places of employment.
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.
> I don't know that it can be universally achieved car or no car, great public transit or no.
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.
Problem with commute times, is that you can’t easily change your job to get one that is closer (compared to changing your gym / grocery store…).
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
Extra bonus to tall buildings having enormous amounts of space: rent is cheaper, and as a result more businesses are viable!
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.
I feel like you can get this in most cities if you pick the right spot. I live in Adelaide, Australia which is one of the smaller cities and I virtually never have to leave about a 1.5km radius from home because everything I need exists within it.
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.
Singapore has been this way for a long time - living essentials are localised, public transport is great. Car congestion is still a problem though, even in a city with such a good public transport system. Better bike paths is still something that needs to be addressed though - here bike paths are called - 'footpaths' ...
I think a better term would be a 15m neighborhood, rather than city. I live in Stuttgart in Germany and there is no way that you can walk this city in 15m, however my neighborhood has everything I need (store, bank, pharmacy, doctors, dentists, hair cut places, kindergarten, school, metro station, train station, etc) within 10m walking from my house (the food shop is 700m away - the furthest of all). This becomes even more apparent in a city like Paris, it has its own quarters where everything is locally available - you don't need to cross the city to reach anything because its all already available in your quarter.
The main definition set in the article seems to be neighborhoods in "which almost all residents’ needs can be met within 15 minutes of their homes on foot, by bike, or on public transit." The maps in the center of the article ignore biking and only show walking and transit, but the difference is pretty big. If you work from home, or live near work, what parts of the city are more than a 15-min bike ride from "needs"? In a city that we pretend is 7 miles a side, 15 min of biking can take you to a very different neighborhood.
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.
Transit in modern cities like Paris, Tokyo, or Moscow is very rapid and frequent. Don’t be deceived by old fashioned places like SF.
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 guess, you've claimed that "SF should reinvent itself along these lines" in response to an article that specifically includes biking as part of its 15-min definition. I've suggested that in SF we probably largely already meet that definition, relying heavily on the "or" in "on foot, by bike, or on public transit". It sounds like you're now discounting a whole mode of transit that was repeatedly discussed in the article, on the basis of not being universally accessible.
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.
Rapid and frequent transit is a matter of planning, investment and demand. You don’t need to have a particularly large population to sustain it.
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.
In Paris (and other European cities too I guess), wait time for the metro is 2-5min between 2 trains during the day (depending on how busy the line is, and whether you’re at peak hours).
At very low usage hours (at night, or early morning), it can get longer, but it hardly ever gets to 15min
This would never happen in SF. The local store block would be instantly taken over by homeless druggies [1]. To have this sort of transformation, the local culture needs to have little tolerance for disruptive behaviors and peoples.
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).
Funnily enough, this sort of behavior is not tolerated in the actual Valley, where things were actually started. You don't see it happening in Mountain View and Cupertino.
The Valley is all suburbs, where people don't like that sort of thing. That being said, Palo Alto used to have a lot more homeless people, and more weirdness too. I can't imagine the Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane starting there any more. Yet still I live in PA.
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 think you would have a different opinion when your property was stolen, your partner assaulted, and your sense of safety destroyed by such behavior. You can't promote the use of bikes if your bike is going to be stolen and chopped up the second you take your eye off it.
It really is a hard problem and a hard policy to advance. I'm pro-pedestrianization but can really understand the concerns of car folks in terms of service availability and business health. There have been plenty of times where car restrictions have been done wrong and ended up killing off city centers - but in terms of safety the availability of safe and secure bike storage seems to require an almost autocratic initial effort. Forcing safe storage and monitoring, along with safe bike lanes, to be rolled out so that the demand can grow - it's very hard for demand to grow organically while bike theft and car-bike accidents are so common that they'll discourage usage.
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.
Not sure how you can claim that since "correct" only applies to factual claims and above is purely hypothetical. Or do you always assume ideology can stand in place of reality?
I live in a major US city that has expansive "outdoor camping" w homeless who harasse and terrorize(rob) the locals. The progressives live in fear of the homeless AND saying anything about the problem because they don't want to be the bad-guy. It's very interesting. From what I can tell people have become extremely hyper-socialized and are willing to put their safety at risk.
I also live in a major US city with encampments constructed by the unhoused. My experience does not mirror your anxieties at all, and usually I am at street level, on a bicycle, and not a measly gawker staring from inside a metal box or a cafe.
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.
> It’s a utopian vision in an era of deep social distress—but one that might, if carried out piecemeal, without an eye to equality, exacerbate existing inequities.
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.
I know why they did it, but it meant that to start with, rich people got electric cars. Progress is often made by lifting the top of what's possible before raising the floor of what's acceptable. It must happen that way almost by definition.
The problem with converting cities to walkable paradises is that a portion of the highest profit margin customers for any large business (rich people) will always drive cars. Creating a walking only city limits the option for these people to separate themselves from the masses.
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.
>Moreno recognizes that large segments of the population might never enjoy the slower-paced, localized life he envisions. “Of course we need to adapt this concept for different realities,” he says. “Not all people have the possibility of having jobs within 15 minutes.” But he emphasizes that many people’s circumstances could be profoundly changed—something he believes we’re already seeing because of the pandemic’s canceled commutes. In his view, centralized corporate offices are a thing of the past; telework and constellations of coworking hubs are the future.
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.
Which low wage people? Super low wage people can't afford cars, and benefit from the improved low cost transit provided by public transit and walkable neighbourhoods.
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.
Portland & Detroit comparison is a bit laughable. May be we'll see this one day, but I'll believe it when I see it.