Many commenters are saying that the video takes the concept too literally and saying "actually, the 15-minute city just means ...". But the video was a direct response to the book on the concept written by the person who created the concept. He really doesn't cover the distinction between generic and specialized amenities or the role of public transit in adequate detail. I would caution people against assuming what the concept "actually" means based on what they think makes more sense.
maybe it's because you are criticizing one very specific version of an idea and aren't being clear enough about that. maybe with so many comments it's not people being dumb, but a failure to get the point you intended across to them
While I understand it's unpleasant to get repeated comments where in people seem to have missed the point of the video, however it seems that the point wasn't made clearly enough. As I don't want to "Well actually" but I did want to point out that 15-min city needs public transit as an accelerator and that it's okay to spend like 10-15 minutes on the bus on top of the 15 minute walking being bisected by the bus ride.
The fact that scores or perhaps hundreds of these comments are all saying the same thing suggests you didn't explain your point well enough. Any sensible interpretation of a 15min city doesn't literally state every single thing any person ever wants to use has to be within 15mins, because that's silly. If you're going to assume it means that and then point out the obvious fact that that's silly, you have to state that.
@nicthedoor the one issue is that yes that is what it is but at the same time even in some of the wef articles they talk about putting cameras everywhere. The conspiracy theories are pretty out there but they are driven by people talking about the benefits of 15 minute cities that I don't totally trust either. I want a "dumb" 15 minute city like they traditionally were and not a "smart" 15 minute city where everything you do is being monitored.
Yup. It's just how cities were always built (and largely still are), just with a fancy new name. The fact that this is such an alien concept to Americans that they get full-blown conspiracy theories made up about them is just _wild_ .
That's way more literal than I'd imagined. Figured 15 minutes meant to the generalized needs like groceries, a job, mandatory schools, public transit stations, and a park / greenspace of some kind. Not 15 minutes to literally everything.
Yes, it’s pretty easy to understand: *most* essential services should be available within x minutes to make life more convenient. At the same time, no one wants to live solely in a pod with no access to any variety. But if you can access most of the services you need most of the time within a short walk or bike ride, life is easier. I have that (mostly) where I live and it’s great. For variety I go further afield whenever I want.
Obviously. Nobody who imagines neighborhoods based on 15 minutes to daily needs to have biomedical research centers everywhere. Or Arenas. Obviously it means being able to shop for your bread and butter and have a few restaurants and coffee shops within that range. Most things most of the time should be within 15 minutes. Not everything everybody ever needs or wants.
The fact that walking and cycling get lumped together bothers me. Cycling is on average around 3 times faster than walking (varies alot obvs), and because the area of a circle increases by radius squared. The area of a neighborhood that's within a 15 minute cycle is about 9 times larger than a neighborhood that's a 15 minute walk. That a huge, qualitative difference in the goal we're taking about, and it's not a fair discussion to lump them together.
@@Harteo3917 But which are they talking about, a 15 minute walkable neighborhood or 15 minute cyclable? You can fit ~9 walkable neightborhoods inside a cyclable one, yet they're discussed as if they're the same thing. That's my point. The unnecessary ambiguity bothers me.
@@Filly437 Both you can either walk there 15 mins walk either direction to fulfil most of your needs, or cycling will just make it faster to get there. Some things will even be 5 or 10 mins walk from you house depending where your house is, because they're starting to build stuff along the main roads and around us it's no longer going to be confined to town center areas anymore. Some things may be a 15 minute bus ride too so it's walk, cycle, or driving distance and the 15 min drive is more like a 45 minute walk so we wouldn't walk there which yes we already do in many towns so that part won't change. Not much has happened yet but i can imagine clothes stores and other things will start to show up too we've already got two convenience stores and a storeroom type of store with a whole bunch of things to buy from it near us. It's mainly for all the things we need in our day to day lives but for work, school and some other things we may have to travel further there. The big problem businesses are facing right now is people buying online all the time so they aren't going into the town centers much anymore so they've had to adapt to that, so that's why all the things we need will be around us close to us obviously they're stores we'll be paying money to along with other things like pet centers. However the aesthetic has to change too because how run down and grey towns look is part of what's driven people away and if customers aren't happy they won't buy lol. Half of the reason is because of money but the other half is well being, environmental impact, and how technology is going to start connecting everything using the internet and artificial intelligence. So making them like pocket neighborhoods makes it far easier to keep things organized it just happens to be far more convenient for us too.
@@Filly437 i agree! There should be reflexion about what it means exactly in terms of prioritising bike infrastructure and if slower transportation infrastructure is included or not in the "walking" distance
I understand it this way: things like grocery stores and public transit access that you need constantly are like a 15 minute walk tops and more specialized destinations are a 15 minute bike ride away. I actually feel like most European cities already work that way. For me my next supermarket is a 7 minute walk and I can reach public transit in 5 minutes from where I live. I live very centrally in one of the largest cities of my country, so this isn’t the norm, but even farther out and in poorer areas you can usually reach kindergarten and school, public transit and grocery stores/pharmacies in a 15 minute walk. Our residential areas have just always been planned that way.
I kind of always assumed that 15-minute cities only really include the essentials. If you need to go to a specific place in a city for work or school, you should be able to live nearby and have that 15 minute city in that area. So you can get a home near, say, the hospital if you work as a nurse, and then have close access to schools, groceries, restaurants, gyms etc. The basics should be accessible within 15 minutes from anywhere, not big specialized features
This is it. If you need to go to a business park, hospital or university, you have the OPTION to do it by high quality public transport or your own car. But having most everyday things within 15 minutes of your home or those specialized places will drastically reduce the DEPENDENCY on your personal car. This way, you get to walk or cycle to what's close instead of using your car for very short journeys. This video assumes everything needs to be within the goal, missing the point while praising the Netherlands for getting things right. I walk 20min to the station, ride a 35-45min train and then walk 5min to campus. I have a mall 20min walking from home, and a smaller cluster of shops 10min from me. If I had a bike, those times would go down to about a third. The town I live in would be considered a commuter town in US standards, and many people drive. There's wide roads for those who need to go beyond, and they connect to national highways.
Same. You can reach the stuff you need for daily life easily quickly and without a car. So your general practitioner doctor is close to you for your yearly checkup or when you get sick. But when you have to go to the hospital, which shouldn't really be that often, travelling is fine. You got options to pick up your daily/weekly shopping easily, but if you want to buy a new piece of furniture, travelling is fine. Your job is close to your home and requires minimal travelling, but if you find a new specialized job, moving is fine. And the new location should have all the basic needs met just like the old one.
This is that famous Motte and Bailey argument. A lot of people will reply with that, " oh, you're taking it too literally. They just mean neighborhood amenities" but when you actually read the literature, that's not what they're saying.
I honestly didn't realize that it was so literal. I assumed that 15 min cities was just an illustrative rule of thumb to encourage density and mixed use
I see it in a same way. I for me its more about direction towards more mixed and decentralized towns, where you have easy access to basic needs. And when you need something more specialized like university or hospital, is ok to make time to time longer trips. The "They want to hard lock you in 15 min radius" sound more like some fear-mongering coming from opponents.
This is a great video, I really think urban planning too often falls into orienting itself around trends or too simple "rules". A bit part of the benefit of a big city is literally at the margin when the number of something available goes from zero to one! For example, it's great that a big city can support many cafes so people can find a cafe in their local neighborhood (15 mins), or many hospitals so there is one in their local borough (30 mins), but I think people probably appreciate the super niche even more - like say a cool urbanism social group that there is only one of in a whole metro area - even if you need to travel very far to access it! Cities being able to support increasingly niche amenities because of raw numbers is super underrated!
I was going to post something eerily similar! There is no substitute for conscientious, skilled design -- it is an art-form that cannot be achieved with simple rules (which is why I believe many modern systems are so badly designed). Instead of a specification of "rules," a list of vague ideals can provide a framework that a designs can be measured against (eg. dense greenery, safe for children, etc) to determine if the criteria are adequately met -- the rest is up to the designer.
Ya this niche idea is a big one, and applies to business too. A city having more people working in a niche industry means better companies in that niche industry.
Et tu, RM? This is an absurd take on absolutism. Do you think Carlos Moreno is telling Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo to chop up every large university and have a different department in each neighborhood? Of course not. This video is a complete misrepresentation of Carlos Moreno's ideas, much the way they tried to shoot down Jan Gehl's ideas about urban design, by exaggerating them out of all proportion. I just unsubscribed from Oh! The Urbanity! It's more like Oh! The Inanity!
Restaurants, parks, a dentist, a grocery store, 2 pharmacies, a library, a bakery and a car shop. Living in car dependent city with an old car, the last one is something I'm really glad I have.
Growing up in Chicago, 5 minutes got me: supermarket, produce store, post office, bank, public library, metro station, thrift clothing store, laundromat, stationery store, Palestinian bakery, Korean Go club, a bunch of restaurants (that we cared about) and clothing stores (that we didn't), one elementary school, two high schools, fudge shop, and more.
@@Coccinelf hop on my Dutch bike I have 2 groceries a few 7-11s liquor mart Maccas and DQ plus a local "greasy spoon" a few Indian restaurants a pub and sports bar / few garages / small shops in OLD road front strip malls - stretch it a bit and have a major Hospital and have the downtown CBD within 30 minutes city of 800K in the prairies and absolutely car based and live in a detached single family home
For me (Berlin): A station with (Tram/ Subway / Trains 24h a day), schools, a museum, supermarkets, pharmacies, hospital, bakeries, restaurants, hairdresser, few bars, other shops. Sport and a proper park is kinda missing.
I think the problem with "15min cities" is people try to take the definitions as rigid and absolute. Great places to live (for me) have always been the ones where you can walk over to a small market to pick up a couple of things for dinner, or where places for casual dining are a short walk. Other things like a small hardware store or similar are nice too. No place will be able to supply the employment of everyone and considering how expensive some of these areas are to live in, they certainly wont provide everyone with the high paying job within 15 mins they need to live there.
This is probably the most level headed perspective on the subject. We often get our skivvies in a bunch over rigid definitions instead of following the spirit of the idea.
My biggest issue with the 15 minute city thing is how some people are pushing for this technologically driven city where basically everything is monitored. I like the idea of a traditional dumb 15 minute city. Tech has its place but they don't need to put cameras everywhere. I don't do anything illegal but I still prefer some privacy. That is where I see a lot of the conspiracy theories come from. People I don't really trust pushing ideas that sound more like what you'd see in countries like China.
I always pictured it as 15 minutes from your primary locations IE work OR HOME and those spots should offer the daily needs within a 15 minute zone so WORK should offer food options within 15 minute walk ETC and your HOME should have the daily stops like the grocery and recreational space within that time as there are a LOT of cases where a home -> work commute CAN NOT be 15 minutes pilot for example OR someone at a large chemicals plant / stockyards
@@pin65371 My biggest issue is you saying this is exactly like the people who think the 15 minute city is to keep you locked in. No one thinks a 15 minute city is some hyper monitored hellscale, that's the same idea as the other detractors. and your purposefully trying to derail the argument by replacing it with an equally outlandish argument
It was always clear to me that a "15 minutes by walk/bicycle" rule does not cover Commute to work, Hospitals, Universities, Sports Stadiums, etc. The 15 minutes area should include: Grocery shopping, pharmacy, elementary school, high school, clinic/doctors offices, park, cafes/restaurants, playground and very basic sports facilities (basketball/futsal/whatever)
I feel like this is a given in most European cities and it is also how I understood the concept. If you then take into account a person’s option to move to a place closer to work and thus have a shorter commute, you can even reach work in 15 minutes. Obviously that doesn’t go for every type of work (not an option if you work in a mine or a large chemistry plant etc.), plus if you are a couple and your jobs are very far away from each other, at least one of you will just have a longer commute, but for most jobs it might just be an option to live close to where they work.
if you need to go to university, you should be living near the university, that doesn't mean we build a university on every block, it means we build housing around the university so people can move where they need to be the most.
@Lildizzle420 What if the the person who works at the university has a spouse who works at a different specialized job(airline pilot). Perhaps this family has decided that the best option is to live somewhere in between the 2 jobs. So instead of a 15minute bike ride to one job and over an hour drive to the other the job the compromise solution is living in a location where the commute to the airport is a 30minute car ride and the commute to the university is a 45minute subway ride.
@@vegyesz89 a lot of urban cities around the world have maxed out the capacity of some lines with no plans of adding one more lane. Trains are incredibly efficient so adding one more track would actually provide huge congestion relief to Tokyo, Toronto etc, but planners would rather build new lines.
I think the spirit of the 15 minute city is what’s most important. That you can have access to most of your needs within a 15 min walk or bike. Like for myself, if I were to walk or bike from my home in Singapore, in 15 minutes I can access supermarkets, hair salon, a couple shopping malls, a nice waterfront park, swimming pool, a few restaurants, my local GP, local library, a couple of nice bars, local poly clinic (not quite a hospital but a health centre), community centre, two mcDonald’s, a cinema, and so on and so on. But if I want to catch a specific band playing in town, go to my client’s office in the business park across town, eat Lebanese food in the Arab quarter… I’d have to travel further out with public transit (or Drive) - and Singapore is currently (slowly) transitioning into a ‘Car Lite City’ - so far the improvements and things they’ve done so far have been underwhelming, but cautiously optimistic for the future.
Eh. Singapore is a good example of transit-oriented urbanism where you have conglomerations of housing and retail/services clustered around metro stations. But a 15-minute neighborhood implies more, I think. Walk 15 minutes from any MRT station outside the central core and after 2-3 minutes you're basically going to be walking along 6-lane stroads.
@@okaro6595It’s really not that bad to carry your groceries back. If the grocery store is a short walk you just make smaller trips more frequently. I find it keeps me from buying a bunch of unnecessary junk food and limits me to what I only need for the week. I bring a backpack for my groceries. Or you can get some kind of cart to push to more easily carry more groceries. You can also bike and get a couple panniers to carry your groceries more easily.
TL:DR for my comment below, a “15 minute neighborhood” is a better idea than a “15 minute city,” but there should be layers to the classification system to reflect how cities function. There definitely is an optics problem, so changing it from “15 minute cities” to “15 minute neighborhoods” where one can access most to all (it’s a sliding scale for some) of those generalized amenities, would probably be of benefit to the movement, and it is important we shift zoning, land use regulation, and urban planning to reflect this shift. It also would probably be harder for conspiracy nuts to say a pleasant, 15 minute neighborhood is a totalitarian nightmare designed to trap you forever in squalor. However, I would content that it should be a layered system. While it’s good to have a bunch of 15 minute neighborhoods, it is important to create larger overarching “30- or 45 minute regions/territories” to reflect the integration of transit and connecting those neighborhoods with larger, more specialized built up regions in a city. It’s good to have those 15 minute neighborhoods clustered and built up with a core around larger transit stops, and it’s probably good to zone most of the commercial and office space around those larger higher order transit stops (metro, LRT, regional rail). Alternatively, for smaller cities and larger towns, the idea of a “30 minute city” which incorporates transit into the time mix and mixing the generalized and specialized amenities would probably be good too, as they are organically and technically distinct from larger cities and built up areas.
Yeah, I had a Twitter thread defining "15 minute city" as "made up of 15 minute neighborhoods", in turn defining those as walking to generic amenities.
Call me dumb, or maybe not a conspiracy theorist, but when I first heard of the 15-minute concept, I assumed that it meant most things should be available within a close proximity of your home, not absolutely everything. Here in London, England, I consider most of the city to qualify. I have shopping, bars and cinemas nearby. But my workplace (when I have to go there) is a bit further. And I frequently travel further for some cultural events. Decreasing the need to travel unnecessarily is the thing. This is what I assumed. It puzzles me that people invent these crazy ideas about “ghettoes”. What’s happening here is that some local councils are improving infrastructure for cyclists, discouraging unnecessary driving, making the streets more attractive in which to be a pedestrian. Too many car drivers have a mindset very similar to American gun owners though.
Sure. Why the camera's and the bollards and the QR code and all the entrapments you find in a prison? Most will choose convenience and not frequently use stores and facilities outside the perimeter. Saving time and money. Why the bars and gates. Control. Mandatory limits. Social score. It's closer than you thought.
Yeah, organizations like the WEF have speakers that actively talk about 15 minute cities as a foundation for more authoritarian control models to outright limit traveling in the name of green policies. It’s a real conspiracy headed by real people using ideas hijacked from others to sell their ideas as more affable than what is intended to be implemented by the conspirators. The very idea of “conspiracy theory” as a derogatory pejorative was started by the CIA as a psyop to keep people from questioning the government and uncovering blackOps. What better stasi than getting your own countrymen to socially ostracize your critics? Governments have been using psyops and blackops against their citizens for forever. Not to mention the conspiracies of powerful business groups employed at different points for centuries. NGOs frequently publish propaganda as psyops to sway public opinion and manufacture consensus to push through their preferred policies, not to mention political donations.
because the super rich buy all the land, they have to keep the taxpayers in next level concentration camps, re-labled as "cities", easy to lockdown, no space to grow 1 potatoe or salade plant, dependency on everything: water, energy, pharma, food, food additives, multinational shop chains, community "fun", it creates another generation who does not know how a chicken looks like and a digital nonsense education, creativity will deteriorate and nobody knows history anymore, end of story, nobody knows his roots anymore, 15-minit cities are the start of the dead end of a failed system, illusionary ideas cooked in the kitchen of the castles in the air, within 20 years it will be half empty, in other words: the money system is dead and it has to be hidden from plain sight, a panic attempt
@@fnaaijkens69What are you talking about. What QR code. What bars and gates. Ive been in neigborhoods like this and i havent seen any of the things youre saying
I think a lot of people are missing the point. The idea is that everything you *need to have on a daily basis* is in a 15-minute radius. Like access to some kind of food, the post office, the pharmacy. If every place has that, then everyone is free to relocate close to their job and get that within 15 minutes as well if they can. Once that's happened, a person's daily needs generate zero vehicle trips, with their wants or their less frequent needs generating some trips sometimes. And of course some people living in a given neighborhood are going to have longer commutes, but the people actually providing the services within that neighborhood can live there and not. The point is that under the current system, people's daily needs generate multiple vehicle trips per day, and even if you're solving that with transit, that's a lot of waste if you can eliminate those trips. It's more achievable to meet everyone's wants if you can reduce the cost of meeting their needs.
you end up creating a new standard to follow, people will say "well my husband works right down the street and walks to work and I don't really want to pay for this car, why should i?
"a lot of people are missing the point" I mostly agree with you, but I think the video's point is that Moreno (the original guy) was vague about what is point really was, especially with stuff like "turn Paris into a 15 minute city". There's a reasonable interpretation (yours, mine) and an unrealistic utopian take ("EVERYONE should be within 15 minutes of their job")
I would generally agree, but you'll still find some exceptions with your job example and I think that's a blindspot from a lot of somewhat sheltered white collar workers. While it's probably fine to expect neighborhoods to be residential friendly around many service oriented businesses, I'm not sure we can say the same for more manufacturing jobs or industrial jobs that are rightfully a little bit separated. You will want high quality, frequent transit to those areas, but I'm not sure you want housing straight next door to a metal workshop. And those type of industries naturally take up more space due to machinery, etc. They can't just neatly be tucked away in a low square footage high tower. Trucks, trains, etc will need to access it
but the thing is, that is just not going to be possible for many people anyway. when i was a kid we lived in an area where we had the basics within a 15 minute radius, but my parents decided to prioritize moving close to my school. so my dad's work ended up being a 30 minute - 2 hour long commute (by car - the train didn't go all the way to his office) depending on the traffic. it's a nice goal to work towards but a lot of people are going to end up in this kind of situation where they live in a household with multiple people and everyone is going to have different work and school needs so someone is going to have to compromise on their commute regardless of where they live. then there's also the case of choosing your neighbourhood based on characteristics other than how close it is to your work or school. you may just like a particular neighbourhood more, for whatever reason. maybe you have friends or family there and want to stay close to them. maybe there's that one cafe you really like right next door or something. maybe the rent is just cheaper. maybe the apartment that's currently available in this neighbourhood that's a bit further away from your work is just more suited to your needs and preferences than apartments that are currently available nearer to your job. and so on. maybe you've lived in this neighbourhood forever and are paying off a mortgage but just got a job that's further away and you don't want to go through the hassle of relocating for work. there are a lot of reasons that someone would live further away from their work even in a "15 minute city". plus, a lot of people are not going to want to live next to their work in the first place. it's fine for someone who has an office job or someone who works at a shop or something, but a lot of people work manufacturing or other jobs that involve a lot of noise pollution and possibly air and water pollution too, and no one is going to want to live near these jobs. no one wants to live near a chemical plant. living near an office building or a restaurant is fine, but living near a pharmaceutical facility can literally be injurious to health. the solution to commutes generating vehicle trips for work and school on a daily basis is just better transit and bikeability because they're more efficient with land use and energy and physical resources like metal. for industrial jobs, they can be consolidated into industrial parks with good transit access.
Please consider doing a video on what levels of density is required to support small business like coffee shops, burger places, doctors offices and so on!
As a crude approach, you can look up how many of X a country like the US has, or a city, and divide by population. US and Japan both have about 2000 people per convenience store. US has 8500-12,000 people per supermarket, depending on which class of stores are included. About 6000 people per pharmacy. School size can vary a lot, but some say that around 600 student is optimal, or 100-150 students per grade. Also, around 600 seems to be 'average', despite many notable larger schools in big cities. Around 500 people per restaurant (itself a fuzzy category.) 1700 people per dentist. At 10,000 people/km2, 800 meters or a 10 minute walk covers around 1.3 square km2, and you have 13,000 people. So enough for a conventional supermarket, and around 160 students per grade level. Plus a couple pharmacies, some dentists, couple dozen restaurants. Some US planners talk about walkability taking off at 10-20 dwelling units per gross acre, which is roughly 6000-12000 people/km2.
@@mindstalka factor not considered in this minimum viable store approach is the quality of service. suburban stores and medical practices have less scale and as a result, worse product selection and service. If you've never traveled abroad, you might not know its possible to get both a big mac and chicken wings at mcdonalds. or seafood pizza at pizza hut. or a primary care office with more than 1 receptionist.
@@mindstalkI live in a place where alcohol stores and pharmacies are money printing machines even tho we have 1 per 600 and 1 per 400 inhabitants on average respectively (very common to see four different pharmacies in opposed corners of intersections). Also bear in mind that the legal limit for the former is allegedly 1 per 800... How many people is needed for a business to do well will vary A LOT from one place to another since some economies are less healthy than others and that some businesses thrive just on artificial scarcity.
@@eatmildew2062 Yeah, a small town in Scotland had 900 people (though more in surrounding islands) and a supermarket. In most cases I have no idea what the real minimum is (or what subsidies might have been involved.) But I figure that using large scale averages will be safe and conservative. And it makes sense that higher customer base leads to lower prices and more selection, with bigger delivery trucks and higher turnover of fresh food without spoilage.
The biggest flaw with the concept is around housing costs. You could live within 15 minutes of your work, but if your work is in a downtown/central office job, then you could be looking at rents/mortgage rates that are far too high for your own wages. This is something that's notorious in some cities like London or Dublin, where housing is so very expensive, that many people who work in the city are forced to commute 1-2 hours to even get to housing they can afford. No doubt the same is likely true for the likes of D.C. or New York, with commuters even living just out of state/territory. Desirable places to live are going to drive up demand, and prices along with it. Sure, rent controls of various flavours do exist, but even then, living centrally to everything, and living remotely to everything is going to have significant differences in cost. Transit Oriented Development is certainly the best solution to this kind of issue. I'd argue that you could live in a suburban town that has regular train service to the city centre can be just as great to live in, but of course, that still depends on factors like how late the trains run to, or their reliability.
The higher cost of living in walkable neighbourhoods isn't because of 15 minute cites. It's because we spent a century NOT building 15 minute cities. Not every downtown employee can afford to live a 15 minute walk from work. But they can afford to live in a 15 minute walkable neighbourhood within a 30 minute metro ride. The geometry of density makes that more than feasible even at mid-densities. If we had been building that way all along we wouldn't have the grotesque choice of absurdly high housing costs or absurdly high transportation costs. Drivers pay less than half the actual cost. Taxpayers cover most of it. Those in walkable neighbourhoods who don't drive much are subsidizing the rest. I should clarify what I mean that drivers are paying less than half. That includes their own personal costs. Whatever they are paying for the car, insurance, gas etc is less than what that car imposes on taxpayers in road construction, debt servicing and maintenance. What they claim to pay in fuel taxes is insignificant and doesn't even cover the interest on the debt of road construction.
"You could live within 15 minutes of your work" a) the more reasonable idea doesn't try to guarantee that b) in theory, if we build tall enough, the cost of housing should approach the marginal cost of adding new stories. In which case you should able to find something affordable even within 15 minutes of downtown, though it might be in a high-rise, and on the small size (since high-rises have inherently higher construction costs than 3-story apartments, say.)
@@mindstalk being unable to find affordable housing in downtown is entirely due to dysfunction. yeah you shouldn't expect a mansion but a small apartment for all members of household should be absolutely doable. The housing difficulties in major CBDs is entirely down to a refusal to be more mixed use, even when demand for commercial space has fallen. We also really have to be careful what we wish for regarding TOD. TOD is good when combined with mixed use, but we just do not have the political energy to add "one more lane" of transit, even in very urban cities. Tokyo would rather shove commuters in the train and Toronto is literally at 100% capacity on some lines, but no plans to add a parallel track for the same route.
That's a fair point, but also after a long commute you don't want to come home realize that you don't have anything to eat and then have to drive another hour just to buy groceries.
I work at the airport. That's not something you can plunk in a neighborhood. However it should have more transit options. Right now all it has is two bus routes. It should have multiple bus routes, at least one light rail (connection for two is planned. The first is soon, but the second is in limbo) It should have a connection to regional rail so smaller towns and cities have access to it for people who don't drive, or don't want to pay expensive parking fees
Depending on where you live, demand for intercity travel can be really low. So airports are more of a spur than a hub. Airports in smaller cities are best treated as an industrial area.
@@FullLengthInterstates I'm in a fairly large metro city with an international airport, we have a few smaller cities surrounding ours. Some are large enough that they could be served by an intercity train few times a day
They plan to use electric planes for short journeys and turn them into taxis that land at airports although it needs more work and to get a lot cheaper yet but there definitely needs to be dedicated services, i would love if there were bus or coach services going right into the airport. We do have a train going right to the nearest airport where i am but the problem is they don't put enough trains on and they stop at a certain time so we can't use the 24/7. In general there needs to be small trains put on frequently to deal with the huge population now but so far they've been squashing us in like sardines, that way we can use both bus and train services. There's a total inequality with everything really one town has something while the rest don't but there's a lot of things all towns don't have but should, those up top are well aware of this and they've talked about fixing at least some of it but as usual i doubt all of these problems will be fixed it would be nice if they did though.
Yeah important point having an airport without good transit options is difficult. Getting to work is super important and doing it without a car is key. Not that all they job at airports pay well many re close to minimum wage. Second hunderts of people work at a each shift on an airport
The destinations that a 15 minute city should have within it are things that you need (almost) every day, which means things like grocery stores, schools, churches, parks and so on, but things you only need occasionally are okay to not have one in every single 15 minute city, things like sports stadium, paint store, airport and so on. And on top of that you can't have every single amenity shrunk down to be able to have one within every 15 minute city, tings like Hospitals and University simply don't work as well when shrunk down to be able to fit fit within every 15 minute city. It's okay for there to be certain amenities that you need to go to a specific city for, just as long as it's not one of the basic "daily" amenities.
If you focus on daily amenities, work is the best example of a specialized destination that can't necessarily be within 15 minutes. Most people are willing to travel further for a better job.
If you have walkable density (6000+ people/km2) then you should be able to have a hospital within a slow 15 minute bike ride (72,000 people within a 2 km radius). Some people will need really specialized hospitals, and many people who need a hospital can't bike (though some could use a mobility cart, like an electric wheelchair, also using bike lanes), but still, pretty good.
@@OhTheUrbanityJust because work is specialized doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be within 15 min. If there was sufficient housing, you could move to be near work and that area could have all the normal amenities too. You make an excellent point about how that doesn’t really work for dual income families though.
@@ThirdWigginThis sounds nice in theory, but I don't think you understand the implications of what you're saying. Imagine a world where people lived within 15m of their specialized workplace, that would mean that every workplace/district is surrounded by people who fit the criteria of that industry. For instance, a high tech district full of high-skill IT jobs will be surrounded by highly educated workers and families, which won't be found in other parts of the city. End Result? Massive inequity in regards to QoL and class divides that make Chicago look like an egalitarian heaven. Now maybe we can spread these jobs around instead of having specialized districts? Well does that mean that swapping jobs now comes with the requirement of needing to move to a new house, potentially leaving friends and family behind. Never mind being laid off or fired, now you need to move to a new place in what would obviously be a turbulent time for your family and finances. So no, 15m workplaces for specialized industries will never work.
Anyone who thinks this is some kind of big conspiracy has never travelled - never seen, let alone considered, other ways of living, and urban planning that facilitates quality living. I didn't like the way the cities and towns in my area were developed, then I went to live in Spain. Now that I've returned, it's utterly depressing. Urbanised zones that are dead. Zero life, zero culture, zero community, zero interest, nothing unique. In any given area, there's zero reason to be there other than to either 1) consume, 2) work, 3) sleep, but not any combination of the 3. Go somewhere where people can live, work, shop, gather, all in the same neighbourhood - it's revelatory. Then add on high quality public transit that quickly takes you anywhere in the city - amazing.
I generally enjoy your videos, but I think this video is a little bit “captain obvious.” I agree with the general premise: there are lots of reasons why in a city you may need or want to travel beyond the 15-minute radii that Moreno advocates for. But I think this idea just needs to be a small qualifying statement, not a 10 minute video…it’s seems a little bit drawn out. Moreno’s work is centred around building neighbourhoods in a way that lets people meet *most* of their life needs without needing to walk more than 15 minutes; it’s pretty widely understood that this land-use planning concept should go hand in hand with stronger city & regional transit for the more specialized trips you reference. His ideas are intended as a building block for better land-use planning, not as the be-all-end-all. I think it's critical to not to let perfect be the enemy of great, especially given how far away we are in most parts of North America from enabling people to make even the most basic of daily trips outside of a car.
You can say it's all obvious but, as we mentioned at the end, we only decided to make the video after encountering people who did take the concept literally and thought that 15 minutes was a reasonable standard even for commuting. And immediately above your comment is another comment saying: "I realized I had been taking the concept pretty literally. Thanks for the nuance and reality check."
It's still wild to me that it's literally illegal to build a grocery store in a housing area in many places in the US. Here in Ghent, Belgium I have 3 small food stores and 2 grocery stores all within a 4 minute walk.
To your point about specialised locations, thats fine. It misses the point that if individuals want to go and find these places, then they can. And because the majority of general needs are facilitated, it indirectly creates the ease of travel to those other specific places, either by public transit or personal transport. Also making it easier those that cannot cycle etc.
Also in the case of "specialized work location" the idea is that the area surrounding said location is similarly capable of meeting the daily basic needs, so if you move there you still got access to basic services.
A city really is just a collection of neighbourhoods with neighbourhood amenities. Rural areas also have hospitals, universities, museums, theatres, transit, etcetera. Just less densely packed. A city is a dense collection of human environments. Outside the city it is less dense. There is nothing special about cities that doesn't apply to non-city places.
also imo they should start prioritizing the quality of the commute over the length. shorter commutes obviously are nicer, but what's also nice is having a commute you can enjoy. i know a lot of people who would prefer to bike through a nice neighbourhood or park or bike trail or something for 30 minutes to get to work over biking down a road next to cars going at 60 mph for 15 minutes. obviously an enjoyable short commute would be ideal but it's not going to be possible for most people, so the FOCUS should be on making the commute more pleasant.
Eh, your last line says we should prioritize pleasure over speed, and that's debatable. Pleasure is nice, but time is valuable, too. And your bike example isn't that spot on: the difference may well be about _safety_ as much as pleasure. At one point I made my own choice for pleasure: I started walking further to take a bus that was also slower, but less used (I could get a seat) and going through nice neighborhoods (good view) and different demographics (less chance of suffering someone's leaky headphones.) So I get it... but it was also turning a 30 minute commute to a 50 minute one. A lot of people don't have that freedom, and probably more people would have been better served by reducing the 30 minute commute (bus stuck in traffic, lots of potential there.)
I work for a construction company and DRIVE out of my city for work there are 2 routes to work and one is LONGER but NOT full of heavy trucks going to/from factories I take the LONGER route because it is a FAR MORE pleasant commute VS the shorter and a LITTLE quicker route
Why can't it be both? i'd rather have both really because i don't want to have to get up earlier because i have to spend 15 mins longer on transport personally i struggle enough and need my sleep.
1:24 it's not Moreno flipping the zoning concept on its head, it's the zoning concept being insane. I as a European still find it hard to comprehend how that madness was approved.
But I really saw the value of living in a neighbourhood with a rich variety of amenities within a 15-minute walk, when my dad had to give up driving in his late 80s. He turned on a dime from someone who drove most places - despite living in a streetcar suburb - to someone who strapped on his backpack every morning to walk up to the shopping street to pick up a newspaper, prescriptions, beer, daily groceries, etc, and it meant that for many of my parents' immediate day-to-day needs they could be quite self-sufficient. For other things they could get deliveries, or we might help with larger shops or getting to medical appointments. That kind of daily self-sufficiency without a car would be unimaginable in most parts of North America.
There seems to be this weird idea among some urban planners that high-speed, regional transit systems are some kind of capitalist perversion of more humble, local transit systems. I'm not even sure where it comes from. It's so profoundly stupid. One of the worst things about car dependency is its failed promises. Cars and highways were supposed to free people to zip all around town to whatever destination they wanted, whenever they wanted, with minimal consequences. Transit systems that manage to fulfill that promise should be celebrated, not opposed!
like all things "in the beginning" the car/motorway system did DELIVER on its promise but was NOT built to scale and BY DESIGN does NOT SCALE live in a SMALL town and the CAR still delivers on its promise but again scaling cars up to a major city and it all fails BUT "replacing" them with transit into a car based urban form and transit CAN NOT scale to replace the cars and that is the number one urban issue
I think, we in fact need to read Carlos Moreno in the context of Paris. Paris has a very high and evenly spread density - at probably any given spot of the city, you have more than a million people living within "bike distance" from your location. So yes, having _basic_ infrastructure within this radius is normal for vast parts of Europe and probably even for the city centers in the US and Canada. But in Paris you need to get *VERY* specialized, if you need to travel further.
I always assumed the concept meant "you should be able to access most necessary amenities for daily life within a 15 minutes walk or bike ride". I never thought it meant you should be able to access EVERYTHING within that span (not to even mention the ridiculous conspiracy that you'd HAVE to access things only within that span). But by taking it very literally, and engaging with it on those terms, you expose the inevitable misinterpretations of the concept that make it hard for many people to embrace. A clarification of the concept that explicitly engages with specialized amenities would help more people embrace this.
There seems to be this idea, unfortunately, that if a proposed change doesn't solve every problem, we shouldn't do it. The fact that I might still have to drive to work doesn't mean I wouldn't appreciate being able to walk or cycle more places. 🤷♂️
I don't think anyone is saying to have every single thing within 15 minutes, just the basics. Like, in the evening when you want to go out and see friends but don't want to make a huge trip, you should have something just in general to do, or if you want to get something quick for dinner. But a museum or a water park or the fancy grocery store can be weekend trips, which take longer
Thank you for covering the complexity of a couple with 2 jobs (which change and maybe in oposite directions in the city) and 2 kids with differing daycare or elementary schooling needs. It can be a very complex mesh of travel requirements. Great video.
Some of these criticisms are based on the false premise of a single-solution. It's unfortunate that this needs to be said, but just because something doesn't work for everyone doesn't mean that it doesn't benefit society on the whole. Imagine how silly it would be to suggest that, just because a capital works project such as a bridge is more beneficial to some than others, that it is a bad proposal. The 15-minute city was never meant to be a single, magic solution for all citizens. Rather it's a model that forces us to question whether we could operate more efficiently with our time and tax revenue/spending models. So, if our current car-based model provides society *as a whole* with X collective hours of free time, and Y amount of taxpayer-funded public services per dollar, while a more time, space, and revenue-efficient model would net X+n and Y+n of those same outcomes, it's worth further exploration to determine the "sweet spot" that maximizes the benefit from a cost-benefit perspective.
"The 15-minute city was never meant to be a single, magic solution for all citizens" Their point is that if you simply read Moreno, it's not clear what you claim is true.
@@frafraplanner9277 I didn't say that the video suggested 15 minute cities weren't beneficial. However, it repeated some REALLY poorly thought out critiques, and in doing so, it inadvertently gave them credibility.
I’ve always found the phrase “15 minute walk or bike ride” a bit vague, because cyclists travel about three times faster than pedestrians, so a 15 minute bike ride can be a 45 minute walk, which seems to defeat the whole purpose.
I would but it 10 minute walk or 30 minute transit. I would not put bike as a standard, for example most people do not use bikes at winter - if they do probably s because poor public transport.
Districts aren't always so bad. In NYC having neighborhoods dedicated for flowers, gowns, theatre, industrial warehouses etc. all developed naturally for competition, & makes business there easier for customers and workers
I would love it if you did a video about how something gets built in a city, like an apartment tower, the whole process. People are always complaining about the city building things they don’t want and have no idea how things work.
One of the biggest barriers to the “15-30 minute city” is that proximity to amenities and public transit tends to rocket up property values, which prices out the folks who would otherwise benefit the most from this increased access.
I never assumed that anyone promoting 15min citites would insist on everyone living near everything - only that everyone will near _something_. My neighbourhood where I am now has the best tacos in the city, but if I want a curry I would need to travel. But the point is that there are restaurants - in general - near me. I think only the biggest ding dongs assumed otherwise. Japan, with almost no zoning laws other (relative to Canada/US) are already almost exactly like a 15min city.
Most problems of the modern cities come from people who were lured into the city, only to end up working a lame job and a horrid daily commute. There is another way.
I made my own. I scrolled through real estate listings and found places that happen to be close to the specific amenities I cared about, and used google streetview to game out potential travel routes that met my risk tolerance. My home has a mid walk score and bike score which helped its affordability, but it is a 15 minute city to me
I was once stationed in a small German town, Budingen, that was virtually a 15 minute city. My and many residents' work was that close. There was a hardware store, big grocery store, a high school and several parks and a hospital that close. There was no college, but my family didn't have use for one. We still fondly remember living there. It was 'comfortable'. We generally left town only for weekend and holiday recreation. Now I am old and retired and I live in another virtual 15 minute city, Canon City, Colorado, a little larger, with all the amenities mentioned for Budingen plus a few more, again minus a college. Again, 'comfortable'.
Thank you so much for this video. You raised a lot of issues with the concept that I personally grappled with. It is important to recognize the challenges with an idea to temper expectations and strengthen the practicality of better urban planning.
If you live in a country where there is winter with -30 celsius, snow, ice....biking will not always be a good option in the winter months. You can walk the 15 minutes but need ice trekkers so you don't fall on the ice.
We live in Montreal, one of the coldest and snowiest major cities in the world (although -30 is rare). We know how to dress for winter. We know how to put boots on.
I feel another thing is that commuting at the moment in North America is a much bigger time waste than in other countries. The most one can do at the moment (legally) when commuting in North America is listening to a podcast, music, or being on a phone call since you're driving everywhere. This makes an hour long commute a slog of staying sat down and doing very little without risking a car crash. These same limitation don't apply for trains and other modes of transport for equally long commute times.
If you are under 15 years old, you shouldn’t have to bike for more than 15 min. Pediatrician, K-8 schools, dentist, basic needs, etc. Otherwise take the bus, train, etc.
Edit: Nevermind the below. I think they're talking about the Oxford law fining people for leaving their neighborhood too frequently I think the conspiracy theorists are not reacting to the concept of a 15-minute city by itself, but rather combining the concepts with the past overreach some cities committed during the early stages of covid. Those who were looking at the data understood that being outside was the safest, but people were literally told to stay indoors. Some cities were arresting people for going outside for a walk in the fresh air. This memory, plus the idea of greater density, is what's causing this convoluted theory of locking people in their homes.
I've always thought 15 minutes for non-motorized modes--walking, rolling--and 30 minutes-1 hour for everything else, excepting very unique amenities. This scales fairly well even to very large cities; see very-rapid regional rail systems like Seoul's GTX, Delhi's RRTS. Beyond an hour, most people aren't going to be making a trip regularly unless they have no choice, or as you say, a really good reason to make the trip. Significantly better job markets are particularly compelling; my dad would often sit in traffic up to 2 hours driving from southern New Hampshire to Boston, but really, he (and many others!) ought to have had the choice of a speedy train ride into the city, and providing equitable--i.e., non-car!--access to competitive job markets is essential.
9:13 These guys make a very interesting point about shaving travel times over longer distances. Taking that hour-long commute down to 45 minutes is an important win no matter what. Sometimes it's simply a matter of reducing bottlenecks and building fixed links between areas. The Fehmarnbelt tunnel being built between Copenhagen and Hamburg is a key example. Taking the travel times from 5 and a half hours to 2 and a half hours is a key win and wipes a whole detour completely off the map. Can we do similar things here across the pond?
I live in a semi-urban area (outside a major city) in Australia. I can walk to a huge pharmacy, restaurants and cafes, local grocery stores, thrift stores, etc. I couldn't do this when I lived in a major city. Australian cities have lost the plot. In a major Australian city, if you want to do any shopping at all, you need to drive through congested traffic to a monstrous concrete shopping mall, then spend 5-15 minutes finding a parking spot, then you need to walk for about 15 minutes from the car park to the shop you want to access within the shopping mall.
Some other things to consider with specialized jobs & businesses is that there’s usually a good reason why they aren’t in every neighbourhood and why your commute to that place will likely be longer than 15minutes. For example let’s say there’s a family that lives in Metro Vancouver. The mom is a heart surgeon & works at Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster and the dad is a pilot for Air Canada. For starters would you really want to live with in a 15minute walk or bike ride of an airport? I’m going guess that most people will say no. The other option in a 15minute city context is to live near the hospital. With this family raising multiple kids perhaps most of the homes near the hospital are too small & the homes that are big enough are too expensive for the family. Perhaps there are grandparents who live in a different part of Metro Vancouver. Perhaps in that other part of Metro Vancouver(close to the grandparents) you can live in a larger home at a more reasonable price. Perhaps that location is close to a Skytrain station(mother can use the Skytrain to the hospital) and close to the freeway(father can drive to the airport). There are numerous factors that determine where we live & work. Yes every neighbourhood should have the essentials for life, but for specialized businesses & larger businesses you will have to travel more than 15minutes to get to that destination.
using my old stomping ground / your example my mother worked for a company in Burnaby with the office in Metrotower I and we lived near there in a walk up that surprisingly is still standing and I got a job near Bridge studios in Burnaby my mother could WALK to work in 5 minutes I had to drive to work travelling 5 KM PER GOOGLE 11 minutes driving a car transit is 40 minutes with 2 transfers OR 2 zones required walking 90 minutes and biking on dense urban roads plugged with cars and NO BIKE infrastructure (back then) would be 18 minutes today WITH bike infrastructure
Same! I wish I could go to the grocery store by bike. I don't care how long it will take. I don't go everyday and it would be infinitely more enjoyable than going by car.
and indirectly comes back to this "idea" 3 transit jumps and 1 and 1/2 hours to get to the grocery is going to put a LOT of people back into cars maybe the time scale is WRONG but @ 15 minutes bike the grocery trip is an hour home to home and to double that time IE 45 minutes a direction for a 2 hour home to home your unlikely to do that trip "spur of the moment" once home from work because of a ingredient you don't have and want for dinner
@@frafraplanner9277Jason said if other non-car transportation is too long then people would just be incentived to drive a car instead. He said that if grocery stores are too far you can't drop by casually. (That driving is a planned chore.) He said that if grocery stores are too far it's not easy to just go back if you forgot an ingredient.
what I love about living in a small compact city (VIctoria) is that there's nowhere in the city I can't reach within a 10-20 min bike ride. I don't even need to think about transit because the distances are never long enough and transit is usually always slower than bike. I can be in the heart of downtown in under 10 min by bike or about 20min walking.
Thank you both for making this video, it really put 15 minute cities into context for me. I'm a civil engineering student in Texas and am very interested in urbanism and urban planning, and I think this video has changed my perspective on the essence of a city. When yall mention how urban planners should not be viewed as painters but rather as gardeners, nurturing and growing the city, it made me think about my role in shaping cities and what kind of influence I have, and should have, as a civil engineer. Thank you again, this video is really well crafted.
Very good points! If a city is a network of fifteen-minute neighbourhoods, people can choose to live in one near the specialized location that suits them (ie. their place of work or study) - the way I see it, the true power of a fifteen minute city is that it distributes living locations, allowing people to cut down on the physical (and temporal) length of their commute.
But that could mean up to 30 minutes of walking, plus the time of the transit trip itself. It's a goal, but it's a very different goal. And if you live in a city, you shouldn't _have_ to use public transit at all for groceries and elementary schools.
Where I'm from going to university usually means that you leave your parent's house as well. Learning to live by yourself is part of that growing up experience.
I like cycling, walking no so much, but I like/need need my car as well. Its tough (and dangerous) doing a Costco run on a bike in January after 20cm of snow fall.
@@paulcatarino2209thats the system failing, if Costco it’s too far and you don’t have a closer option then it’s the fault of the zoning laws, because thanks to them you want to do less travels to Costco and end up taking way more than you need
Throughout the decades, I made sure most of the time I could live at a reasonable distance of everything whether in Québec City, Montréal, Vancouver, Whitehorse without the use of a car, ever. I still achieve it nowadays in Sherbrooke with spendings of 725$ a month (every amenity included for a 2 bdrm apt) It's a choice to be a slave or not.
In order to reduce the time wasted on the way from one way to another it is a good idea to limit the daily work commute and grocery shopping to 15 minutes. At least it should be possible to choose a home close enough to your workplace. Primary schools should be within 15 minutes walking distance (1 km) for children, secondary schools within 15 minutes cycling (5 km). For universities it's a good idea to have student living facilities close to the campus (though some universities are so spread out it's difficult to get from one place to another within the same university within 15 minutes). I'm self-employed and my next home is 10 minutes walking from a long distance railway station, groceries, hairdresser, pharmacy, doctors ... advantage of a small town. The disadvantage? Some more specialized shops don't exist and you have to travel to another city to find them.
I think they're the same if you use the more reasonable definition. Suburbanites should be able to walk or at least bike to grocery stores, pharmacies, and standard schools as well.
I think the folks in the comments here seem to be missing the point that this is a critique of the original authors words on the idea of the 15 minute city. I think most people have taken his idea and filtered it through the general critique of enforced car culture more broadly. I’ve certainly met some people who have brought up the critiques mentioned in this video. Their point is that you shouldn’t take it too literally, if you already think that, then good for you. If not, then I don’t think the video is aimed at you.
I've alway thought it weird those arguments against 15 minute cities calling them prisons, when the car is effectively a prison you waste 10-20% of your waking hours in, and even paying 30%+ of your wage for the privlage of being your own warden. You can't even get out of your car whenever you like if you suddenly need to use the washroom, nor stop using a car without overhauling your entire life. And most people don't have the energy, will, or desire to use the car for anything but work. Not to mention that suburbia is a more complete prison for those that can't drive. How many kids are stuck at home with nothing they can do outside beyond their yards without bugging a parent to drive them an hour some place? 15 minute cities are vastly misunderstood even by their advocates, but the alternative is already a prison.
see the "same" argument made towards EV cars in a way "to control" people like the "government" has a secret goal of locking up everyone and controlling everything they can do and point out solar panels charge EVS and there is NO "home oil refinery" for gas cars i believe it is all an intentional push to confuse / overload people so they don't "trust" anything and "buy" into the status quo is the best/safest option they shovel illogical and sometimes dumbfounded ideas making it hard to know what is "real" and what is "fake"
I've mainly lived in Rural Ontario and I love it here but did spend a year in an Ottawa Suburb without a car and that was not nearly as good as living downtown Montreal where I could easily walk out my door and get to everything very quickly.
I don’t see that problem. I think “15 minutes city” should be taken as a guideline and not a rigid rule. The more people can find more things that we need close to our houses, the best for everyone. Even for the ones that need more specialized travels to work or to go occasionally somewhere specific. Traffic would be better if we reduce the travels that are needed. I see another problem. If we take the approach of having all the public services closer to everyone we have the risk of having low density affluent neighborhoods with much better services than urban areas, at the expense of the poor, less crowded public schools and less crowded public hospitals would be available in those rich neighborhoods , making desirable to live in low density areas.
15 minute walk is way longer than I am willing to take. If I take a tram or a bus I do not care if it takes longer than 15 minutes. IMO the concept makes no sense. I would put it 10 minutes to a grocery store and a bus/tram stop. That is on a suburban area. On urban area more like 5 minutes. Also what does "15 minute walk or bike ride" even mean? I mean which does it mean? One should be more specific. I have actually heard people wanting to work further away so they do not meet the people they meet at work in their free time. The distance creates separation between the work and free time. While it is good to have grocery stores nearby small stores are more expensive than super and hypermarkets.
Local grocery stores are generally priced for convenience. It's a matter of competition. They are competing with groceries further away, so their value proposition is different.
Make Cities Great Again! Out of the last 35 years, I’ve worked close to home for nearly 20 years, and likewise, I had all my needs met in my neighbourhood…
I imagine if it would mean that a specific workplace or university would have places within 15 minutes where you can live and access all basic amenities, not that you never have to move throughout your whole life and still have access to everything.
Who was it who said (something like) "Mid-twentieth century urban planners all seem to be people who, as children, didn't like their peas to touch their carrots"?
Maybe you could do a video on how viewers can encourage change in their cities? I feel that there's more I could do besides contacting my mayor and councillor but I'm not sure what.
The great thing about 15 minute cities is that making "normal" stuff accessible without a car also makes *everything* more accessible by transit. If it's not safe/convenient for neighbours to walk to that specific amenity, then it's not going to be safe for me to bus across town to the nearest stop and then walk from there.
I guess you hear the concept and based on that you start to make your own assumptions. I thought it was transit in the 15min range, and your last stop should be within 15min of the destination, not a 15 minute travel from your house to wherever you need to go, that doesn't make sense, but I guess that its a literal take.
@@isimerias Do you think I'm complaining about the video? I'm talking about the cases they talked about where they fear people take it too literal. I didn't read the book and I thought it was a range as I explained above, so I think people make assumptions, sometimes wrongly, based on their expectations and knowledge.
I've dealt with too many people who take the metaphor literally. It was an exercise in branding that requires a certain degree of nuance and intelligence to appreciate. When a certain demographic can't immediately understand what's being presented to them, they will often associate it with something harmful. Most people who regularly walk or cycle can immediately see the benefits, and appreciate clever branding.
Well, not too long ago, we had lockdowns all around the world. You couldn't legally leave your neighbourhood, or couldn't go further than 5km from your house. People were fined for eating a pizza in their car out on the street. This happened what, 2 years ago? And now you're expecting people to just blindly trust some fantastic new invention? "Yeah, no worries, I couldn't go to an empty forest three years ago, or to the beach, even if I kept my distance from other people, if there were any people there, but no - you just couldn't go. But now, everyone will just jump on this and suddenly trust out governments". This sounds like something China would do - surveillance, rebuilding the neighbourhood - are they going to forcefully build a supermarket a church, a doctor's surgery, clothing stores etc etc in every neighbourhood? There is almost nothing 15 minutes from my house. I can get to the beach in that time, or there is a primary school. That’s it. No shop, no pub, no restaurant, no kiosk, no doctor, nothing. Are they going to build it now? Where? The green space? Cut the trees down? And why? If I wanted to live by a supermarket, or in a city centre, I would.
"The conspiracy theories about people being locked inside their homes and unable to travel are just so far out of left field that it’s hard to engage with them like any normal disagreement" technically, they were so far out of right field ...
I live in a "15 minute city" in Sweden and it's amazing. It's not even a fancy neighborhood but I can still get to numerous supermarkets, a variety of stores, restaurants and cafes, green areas, hairdressers, dentist clinics, a pool and numerous gyms, and a small hospital - all in less than TEN minutes of walking from my apartment. There's also a mechanic, a vet, schools and preschools, a pet daycare center... OF COURSE some things are further, but they're not places I need to visit regularly or need throughout my whole life (plus nowadays, many things can be handled online, e.g. I haven't _physically_ been to a government office or a bank in years). This "critique" doesn't really understand what 15 minute cities are about - it almost feels like you're baiting for comments like mine.
I'm really confused. Basically all large world cities' centers are around 30 minutes across, which means that you can get from their geographic center close to anywhere in 15 minutes already. By that logic, basically no city is not a 15 minute city.
@@elliotwilliams7421 well by that metric no city at all can ever be a 15 minute city. Good luck commuting from suburbs of Paris into Paris in under 1 hour
I work in the space industry and my partner works in the art industry. Our highly specialized professions means that it's unlikely a high tech manufacturing facility and a large art museum exists in the same 30min block...
I think it's also a micro solution to a macro problem. Reducing the cost of people's needs makes facilitating their deeper desires more feasible. Like a guy who lives in Hamburg that has a boss in Copenhagen. Let's say he needs to deliver an important document to his boss by hand. The current route is a detour through western, mainland Denmark well over 5 and a half hours that requires a night to be spent. What a big-scale project like the Fehmarnbelt does is cut travel times significantly between them. In this case, down to 2 and a half hours. Well within the margin of feasibility for a day trip.
For people in cities yeah, but for people in suburbs with single family houses, it is pretty fair. Even the suburbs of Tokyo (which are mostly high lot coverage single family houses) only manage to do 15 minute cities if 15 minutes is on bike as opposed to walking. (Most neighbourhood scale amenities (i.e. any non work essential stuff) are clustered around the train station, and the carchment for the train station is around a 15 minute bike ride) Either way, this is kinda beside the point of the video
15 minutes by foot is around 1km, maybe a bit more. Given that you cannot walk a straight line in cities, that is already pretty ambitious for all basic needs. For cycling this is different due to higher speed. I used to live in Konstanz, Germany which at ~85k takes around 15-20 minutes to cross from one end to the other by bike. In terms of size that was about the maximum of what I was able to tolerate. There really is not much benefit of living in a city when most trips take 45 minutes or an hour. Of course, for concerts and the like, I had to travel to Stuttgart which is 1,5-2h. But one does not visit those that often anyways...
I can walk to my dentist in about 15 minutes and I consider that incredibly reasonable. That being said, one big reason is that I walk through a dense community of other great amenities. The nice thing about the 15 minute city is that it's an average. Your dentist might be 15 minutes away, but your baker might be 5 minutes and your doctor 20 minutes. It creates a neighbourhood and community where there wasn't one because you walk and see familiar faces rather than getting into your metal box and teleporting for all intents and purposes to your next activity.
I live in Chicago and live within a 10 minute walk of around 8 grocery stores, 100+ restaurants and bars, and a 15 minute walk from the lakefront. This is what I've always dreamed of but some people hate the idea of walkability so much. You can see my apartment building ar 6:12 lmaoo
@XandateOfHeaven Mostly because Of the removal of spaces for parking and other installations such as bicycle paths on high traffic. Commercial arteries made it hard to go shop for things that used to be available nearby. For example, the mattress maker that we had moved out of town, shoe store and repair closed, the clothes store and even a great vegan goods shop, all within a small block, all gone because people couldn't access them due to no parking zones and areas. Only ones to thrive are coffees shops, eateries and junk foods chains. Meanwhile people resort to Amazon, big names.
@@reallythere Except we've already shown that parking minimums kill business by forcing them to dedicate valuable land space to non-productive land. Street parking is also inefficient because realistically you can only ever have one car parked in front of a small business, maybe two. Availability of parking does not correlate with business success, total traffic (foot, bike, and road) does. That's a myth started by NYMBYS to demonize bike lanes. The most successful franchises of any business are not the ones with the most parking, it's the ones with the most foot traffic, regardless of parking availability. There's not a single incident where removal of street parking killed a business, it just can't happen. Again, most businesses without their own lots are only one or two spaces wide, those one or two people are not enough to sustain the business, which means they were already relying on people parking in private lots, side streets, or foot traffic. It is quite literally not possible to kill a business by removing street parking. It's also not possible that chains are immune to these problems (if they existed) and small businesses aren't. What you've actually witnessed is gentrification caused by businesses not owning their property. Rents go up, small businesses leave, and the only places that can afford the rent are large corporations who can buy the land or rely on predictable incomes. Gentrification is caused by corporate landlords, not by bike lanes. You have been tricked.
@@XandateOfHeaven small business needed to be really attractive to people so they make the trip to get to you. Differentiating a small business is hard work. Having, for example, the best of something or unique handmade items it's required to convince people to come and see and purchase. You need more than the small local circle to pay those rents. I food it for 20 years. No way small business can deliver and ship like Amazon. Local delivery is very expensive and making 15 minute cities is really about blocking circulation, and that kills small business other than the basic coffee shops and eateries.
@@reallythere I disagree from a business theory perspective, and from empirical evidence. The value proposition of small businesses in walking distance is not that people are willing to commute to you, this is a car brained view of it, the value proposition is convenience. Amazon thrives because of car dependent culture. Being far away from everything means it's highly inconvenient and time consuming to get basic necessities. The only reason it's a viable business to ship people paper towels is because lots of people don't have a store with paper towels they can walk to easily. Walmart is the same principle. If you're far from everything, you're going to drive to the one store that has everything so you only have to make one trip, that can afford the lot size for a huge parking lot. There is not a single Walmart in New York City, not one. I don't think there's any in Boston either, and there is maybe one in downtown Philadelphia. Density means a few things. Firstly, it means the local community is larger. Secondly, it means you have a lot more foot traffic, so it's easier to coax people inside. Third, lot sizes are smaller so you're not competing with as many big box stores. If you're talking about small businesses that require a lot of land and doesn't need foot traffic like a lumber yard, a trucking business, a paving company, then yeah your probably better off in a more remote area where land is cheaper. But if you're talking about mom and pop retail, you're invariably better off in a walkable city. I used to work for a local chain of restaurants, most of which were in the outer suburbs, but our most profitable location buy a margin of 2:1 was downtown by the train station.
After 4 years of consuming urbanism thought and content, I’ve honestly come to the conclusion that if we just implement a Land Value Tax and dramatically reduce (or, if possible, completely eliminate) all other taxes, the North American issues of car-dependency will sort themselves out. The problems brought up whenever we talk about urbanism goals are so intractable and they often seem to contradict each other. The first one that comes to mind is densifying a suburb, which I love the idea of, but that also necessarily means that rent and other costs of living go up because densification necessarily means higher land values. An LVT (taxing land values, not land improvements like buildings etc.) would allow you to have both. An LVT will necessarily cause cities to densify, and I really believe that the ensuing and serious reduction in income inequality to the point where virtually no one worries about money anymore will make people more open-minded to new ideas and see the obvious benefits of those new ideas, such as imagining a world where they can easily live their everyday life without a car
I'm Murillo, a civil engineer based in Brazil. My typical walking pace is around 12 minutes per kilometer, and I can run at about 4 minutes per kilometer, while my bike commute usually takes 3-4 minutes per kilometer. However, even with these modes of transport, the 15-minute radius restricts accessibility to a limited area. My city spans 22 kilometers from one side to the other, and with a population of only 400,000, it's challenging to achieve the density and diversity required for a fully functional 15-minute city. While the concept encourages improved housing and mixed-use developments, it's unrealistic to expect all necessary amenities and services to be reachable within a 15-minute timeframe for all residents, considering the diverse needs and activities people engage in.
the point isnt 100% availability but having a grocery - some recreation and other frequented destinations like the druggist within a 5 KM radius (your bike speed)
Many commenters are saying that the video takes the concept too literally and saying "actually, the 15-minute city just means ...". But the video was a direct response to the book on the concept written by the person who created the concept. He really doesn't cover the distinction between generic and specialized amenities or the role of public transit in adequate detail. I would caution people against assuming what the concept "actually" means based on what they think makes more sense.
maybe it's because you are criticizing one very specific version of an idea and aren't being clear enough about that. maybe with so many comments it's not people being dumb, but a failure to get the point you intended across to them
While I understand it's unpleasant to get repeated comments where in people seem to have missed the point of the video, however it seems that the point wasn't made clearly enough. As I don't want to "Well actually" but I did want to point out that 15-min city needs public transit as an accelerator and that it's okay to spend like 10-15 minutes on the bus on top of the 15 minute walking being bisected by the bus ride.
The fact that scores or perhaps hundreds of these comments are all saying the same thing suggests you didn't explain your point well enough. Any sensible interpretation of a 15min city doesn't literally state every single thing any person ever wants to use has to be within 15mins, because that's silly. If you're going to assume it means that and then point out the obvious fact that that's silly, you have to state that.
@@Cammymoop "maybe with so many comments it's not people being dumb" are you new to the internet?
@@lomanic8573 yeah I was born yesterday
Your basic needs within 15 minutes, your specialized needs within 30 minutes to an hour...I mean, that just sounds like what cities used to be.
As some have said, a 15 minute city is just traditional development.
I would say that most European cities (from smaller to bigger ones) still follow this principle.
@nicthedoor the one issue is that yes that is what it is but at the same time even in some of the wef articles they talk about putting cameras everywhere. The conspiracy theories are pretty out there but they are driven by people talking about the benefits of 15 minute cities that I don't totally trust either. I want a "dumb" 15 minute city like they traditionally were and not a "smart" 15 minute city where everything you do is being monitored.
Yup. It's just how cities were always built (and largely still are), just with a fancy new name.
The fact that this is such an alien concept to Americans that they get full-blown conspiracy theories made up about them is just _wild_ .
@@nicthedoor I always state that "farm town from 1900" recreated in modern times
That's way more literal than I'd imagined.
Figured 15 minutes meant to the generalized needs like groceries, a job, mandatory schools, public transit stations, and a park / greenspace of some kind.
Not 15 minutes to literally everything.
Exactly.
yea... this "critique" sounds like ai wrote it. Didn't expect them to take the most obtuse interpretation of a 15 min city
Yes, it’s pretty easy to understand: *most* essential services should be available within x minutes to make life more convenient. At the same time, no one wants to live solely in a pod with no access to any variety. But if you can access most of the services you need most of the time within a short walk or bike ride, life is easier. I have that (mostly) where I live and it’s great. For variety I go further afield whenever I want.
@@ariesmry I think the critique comes because some people takes it literally ( or rejects it entirely because they think it's a preposterous idea )
Obviously.
Nobody who imagines neighborhoods based on 15 minutes to daily needs to have biomedical research centers everywhere. Or Arenas.
Obviously it means being able to shop for your bread and butter and have a few restaurants and coffee shops within that range. Most things most of the time should be within 15 minutes. Not everything everybody ever needs or wants.
The fact that walking and cycling get lumped together bothers me. Cycling is on average around 3 times faster than walking (varies alot obvs), and because the area of a circle increases by radius squared. The area of a neighborhood that's within a 15 minute cycle is about 9 times larger than a neighborhood that's a 15 minute walk. That a huge, qualitative difference in the goal we're taking about, and it's not a fair discussion to lump them together.
Then it won't take 15 mins to cycle there more like 5 to 10 mins while walking there will take 15 mins.
@@Harteo3917 But which are they talking about, a 15 minute walkable neighborhood or 15 minute cyclable? You can fit ~9 walkable neightborhoods inside a cyclable one, yet they're discussed as if they're the same thing. That's my point. The unnecessary ambiguity bothers me.
@@Filly437 Both you can either walk there 15 mins walk either direction to fulfil most of your needs, or cycling will just make it faster to get there. Some things will even be 5 or 10 mins walk from you house depending where your house is, because they're starting to build stuff along the main roads and around us it's no longer going to be confined to town center areas anymore. Some things may be a 15 minute bus ride too so it's walk, cycle, or driving distance and the 15 min drive is more like a 45 minute walk so we wouldn't walk there which yes we already do in many towns so that part won't change.
Not much has happened yet but i can imagine clothes stores and other things will start to show up too we've already got two convenience stores and a storeroom type of store with a whole bunch of things to buy from it near us.
It's mainly for all the things we need in our day to day lives but for work, school and some other things we may have to travel further there. The big problem businesses are facing right now is people buying online all the time so they aren't going into the town centers much anymore so they've had to adapt to that, so that's why all the things we need will be around us close to us obviously they're stores we'll be paying money to along with other things like pet centers.
However the aesthetic has to change too because how run down and grey towns look is part of what's driven people away and if customers aren't happy they won't buy lol. Half of the reason is because of money but the other half is well being, environmental impact, and how technology is going to start connecting everything using the internet and artificial intelligence. So making them like pocket neighborhoods makes it far easier to keep things organized it just happens to be far more convenient for us too.
@@Filly437 i agree! There should be reflexion about what it means exactly in terms of prioritising bike infrastructure and if slower transportation infrastructure is included or not in the "walking" distance
I understand it this way: things like grocery stores and public transit access that you need constantly are like a 15 minute walk tops and more specialized destinations are a 15 minute bike ride away. I actually feel like most European cities already work that way. For me my next supermarket is a 7 minute walk and I can reach public transit in 5 minutes from where I live. I live very centrally in one of the largest cities of my country, so this isn’t the norm, but even farther out and in poorer areas you can usually reach kindergarten and school, public transit and grocery stores/pharmacies in a 15 minute walk. Our residential areas have just always been planned that way.
I kind of always assumed that 15-minute cities only really include the essentials. If you need to go to a specific place in a city for work or school, you should be able to live nearby and have that 15 minute city in that area. So you can get a home near, say, the hospital if you work as a nurse, and then have close access to schools, groceries, restaurants, gyms etc. The basics should be accessible within 15 minutes from anywhere, not big specialized features
you're correct
This is it. If you need to go to a business park, hospital or university, you have the OPTION to do it by high quality public transport or your own car. But having most everyday things within 15 minutes of your home or those specialized places will drastically reduce the DEPENDENCY on your personal car. This way, you get to walk or cycle to what's close instead of using your car for very short journeys. This video assumes everything needs to be within the goal, missing the point while praising the Netherlands for getting things right.
I walk 20min to the station, ride a 35-45min train and then walk 5min to campus. I have a mall 20min walking from home, and a smaller cluster of shops 10min from me. If I had a bike, those times would go down to about a third. The town I live in would be considered a commuter town in US standards, and many people drive. There's wide roads for those who need to go beyond, and they connect to national highways.
Same. You can reach the stuff you need for daily life easily quickly and without a car.
So your general practitioner doctor is close to you for your yearly checkup or when you get sick. But when you have to go to the hospital, which shouldn't really be that often, travelling is fine.
You got options to pick up your daily/weekly shopping easily, but if you want to buy a new piece of furniture, travelling is fine.
Your job is close to your home and requires minimal travelling, but if you find a new specialized job, moving is fine. And the new location should have all the basic needs met just like the old one.
This is that famous Motte and Bailey argument. A lot of people will reply with that, " oh, you're taking it too literally. They just mean neighborhood amenities" but when you actually read the literature, that's not what they're saying.
Also, the 15mins should be thought of in terms of layers: walking -> bike -> bus/tram -> train/metro.
I honestly didn't realize that it was so literal. I assumed that 15 min cities was just an illustrative rule of thumb to encourage density and mixed use
That's what it's supposed to be. Idk who takes something like that so literally
Yep I'm pulling my hairs out, this was such a hard watch. I feel like they are playing devil's advocat but this is just incredibly silly.
I think you guys are misunderstanding the video, tbh, rather than the channel misunderstanding the book.
I see it in a same way. I for me its more about direction towards more mixed and decentralized towns, where you have easy access to basic needs. And when you need something more specialized like university or hospital, is ok to make time to time longer trips.
The "They want to hard lock you in 15 min radius" sound more like some fear-mongering coming from opponents.
@@tymak_czcheck out Oxfordshire
This is a great video, I really think urban planning too often falls into orienting itself around trends or too simple "rules". A bit part of the benefit of a big city is literally at the margin when the number of something available goes from zero to one!
For example, it's great that a big city can support many cafes so people can find a cafe in their local neighborhood (15 mins), or many hospitals so there is one in their local borough (30 mins), but I think people probably appreciate the super niche even more - like say a cool urbanism social group that there is only one of in a whole metro area - even if you need to travel very far to access it!
Cities being able to support increasingly niche amenities because of raw numbers is super underrated!
I was going to post something eerily similar!
There is no substitute for conscientious, skilled design -- it is an art-form that cannot be achieved with simple rules (which is why I believe many modern systems are so badly designed). Instead of a specification of "rules," a list of vague ideals can provide a framework that a designs can be measured against (eg. dense greenery, safe for children, etc) to determine if the criteria are adequately met -- the rest is up to the designer.
That is why we say urban life is morden. Cities are places to provide convenient "meetings" of people and services, they represent efficiency.
I've been saying: great idea, but we don't live in cities to pretend we are in a mediaeval town.
Ya this niche idea is a big one, and applies to business too. A city having more people working in a niche industry means better companies in that niche industry.
Et tu, RM? This is an absurd take on absolutism. Do you think Carlos Moreno is telling Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo to chop up every large university and have a different department in each neighborhood? Of course not.
This video is a complete misrepresentation of Carlos Moreno's ideas, much the way they tried to shoot down Jan Gehl's ideas about urban design, by exaggerating them out of all proportion.
I just unsubscribed from Oh! The Urbanity! It's more like Oh! The Inanity!
The name 15 minute city is a misnomer. 15 minute neighborhood is more apt. What can you do in a 15 minute walk from your front door?
Restaurants, parks, a dentist, a grocery store, 2 pharmacies, a library, a bakery and a car shop. Living in car dependent city with an old car, the last one is something I'm really glad I have.
Growing up in Chicago, 5 minutes got me: supermarket, produce store, post office, bank, public library, metro station, thrift clothing store, laundromat, stationery store, Palestinian bakery, Korean Go club, a bunch of restaurants (that we cared about) and clothing stores (that we didn't), one elementary school, two high schools, fudge shop, and more.
@@Coccinelf hop on my Dutch bike I have 2 groceries a few 7-11s liquor mart Maccas and DQ plus a local "greasy spoon" a few Indian restaurants
a pub and sports bar / few garages / small shops in OLD road front strip malls - stretch it a bit and have a major Hospital and have the downtown CBD within 30 minutes
city of 800K in the prairies and absolutely car based and live in a detached single family home
For me (Berlin): A station with (Tram/ Subway / Trains 24h a day), schools, a museum, supermarkets, pharmacies, hospital, bakeries, restaurants, hairdresser, few bars, other shops. Sport and a proper park is kinda missing.
Here in Brooklyn: groceries, Chinese food, Pizza, dentist, pharmacy, hospital, church, park, public and private schools, bus stop, subway station.
I think the problem with "15min cities" is people try to take the definitions as rigid and absolute. Great places to live (for me) have always been the ones where you can walk over to a small market to pick up a couple of things for dinner, or where places for casual dining are a short walk. Other things like a small hardware store or similar are nice too. No place will be able to supply the employment of everyone and considering how expensive some of these areas are to live in, they certainly wont provide everyone with the high paying job within 15 mins they need to live there.
This is probably the most level headed perspective on the subject.
We often get our skivvies in a bunch over rigid definitions instead of following the spirit of the idea.
My biggest issue with the 15 minute city thing is how some people are pushing for this technologically driven city where basically everything is monitored. I like the idea of a traditional dumb 15 minute city. Tech has its place but they don't need to put cameras everywhere. I don't do anything illegal but I still prefer some privacy. That is where I see a lot of the conspiracy theories come from. People I don't really trust pushing ideas that sound more like what you'd see in countries like China.
@@pin65371I’ve literally never heard anyone eagerly talk about using 15 minute cites to push a surveillance state. Where are you getting this?
I always pictured it as 15 minutes from your primary locations IE work OR HOME and those spots should offer the daily needs within a 15 minute zone so WORK should offer food options within 15 minute walk ETC and your HOME should have the daily stops like the grocery and recreational space within that time
as there are a LOT of cases where a home -> work commute CAN NOT be 15 minutes
pilot for example OR someone at a large chemicals plant / stockyards
@@pin65371 My biggest issue is you saying this is exactly like the people who think the 15 minute city is to keep you locked in. No one thinks a 15 minute city is some hyper monitored hellscale, that's the same idea as the other detractors. and your purposefully trying to derail the argument by replacing it with an equally outlandish argument
It was always clear to me that a "15 minutes by walk/bicycle" rule does not cover Commute to work, Hospitals, Universities, Sports Stadiums, etc.
The 15 minutes area should include:
Grocery shopping, pharmacy, elementary school, high school, clinic/doctors offices, park, cafes/restaurants, playground and very basic sports facilities (basketball/futsal/whatever)
... You mean the community will have houses and businesses? Interesting.
Yup
I feel like this is a given in most European cities and it is also how I understood the concept. If you then take into account a person’s option to move to a place closer to work and thus have a shorter commute, you can even reach work in 15 minutes. Obviously that doesn’t go for every type of work (not an option if you work in a mine or a large chemistry plant etc.), plus if you are a couple and your jobs are very far away from each other, at least one of you will just have a longer commute, but for most jobs it might just be an option to live close to where they work.
Not even WORK? That's a pretty watered down version.
It might include work at least in some urban areas even im rural settings.
if you need to go to university, you should be living near the university, that doesn't mean we build a university on every block, it means we build housing around the university so people can move where they need to be the most.
Facts. Areas around a university should be full of housing, shops, etc
"if you need to go to university, you should be living near the university"
Better idea: Let there be a good public transport system in the city.
@Lildizzle420 What if the the person who works at the university has a spouse who works at a different specialized job(airline pilot). Perhaps this family has decided that the best option is to live somewhere in between the 2 jobs. So instead of a 15minute bike ride to one job and over an hour drive to the other the job the compromise solution is living in a location where the commute to the airport is a 30minute car ride and the commute to the university is a 45minute subway ride.
@@vegyesz89 a lot of urban cities around the world have maxed out the capacity of some lines with no plans of adding one more lane. Trains are incredibly efficient so adding one more track would actually provide huge congestion relief to Tokyo, Toronto etc, but planners would rather build new lines.
one can do both
I think the spirit of the 15 minute city is what’s most important. That you can have access to most of your needs within a 15 min walk or bike.
Like for myself, if I were to walk or bike from my home in Singapore, in 15 minutes I can access supermarkets, hair salon, a couple shopping malls, a nice waterfront park, swimming pool, a few restaurants, my local GP, local library, a couple of nice bars, local poly clinic (not quite a hospital but a health centre), community centre, two mcDonald’s, a cinema, and so on and so on.
But if I want to catch a specific band playing in town, go to my client’s office in the business park across town, eat Lebanese food in the Arab quarter… I’d have to travel further out with public transit (or Drive) - and Singapore is currently (slowly) transitioning into a ‘Car Lite City’ - so far the improvements and things they’ve done so far have been underwhelming, but cautiously optimistic for the future.
Eh. Singapore is a good example of transit-oriented urbanism where you have conglomerations of housing and retail/services clustered around metro stations. But a 15-minute neighborhood implies more, I think. Walk 15 minutes from any MRT station outside the central core and after 2-3 minutes you're basically going to be walking along 6-lane stroads.
Which one? It makes absolutely no sense to combine them. Also if I walk 15 minutes to a store, I have to carry the groceries back 15 minutes.
@@okaro6595It’s really not that bad to carry your groceries back. If the grocery store is a short walk you just make smaller trips more frequently. I find it keeps me from buying a bunch of unnecessary junk food and limits me to what I only need for the week. I bring a backpack for my groceries. Or you can get some kind of cart to push to more easily carry more groceries. You can also bike and get a couple panniers to carry your groceries more easily.
@@okaro6595ye that's common sense
TL:DR for my comment below, a “15 minute neighborhood” is a better idea than a “15 minute city,” but there should be layers to the classification system to reflect how cities function.
There definitely is an optics problem, so changing it from “15 minute cities” to “15 minute neighborhoods” where one can access most to all (it’s a sliding scale for some) of those generalized amenities, would probably be of benefit to the movement, and it is important we shift zoning, land use regulation, and urban planning to reflect this shift. It also would probably be harder for conspiracy nuts to say a pleasant, 15 minute neighborhood is a totalitarian nightmare designed to trap you forever in squalor.
However, I would content that it should be a layered system. While it’s good to have a bunch of 15 minute neighborhoods, it is important to create larger overarching “30- or 45 minute regions/territories” to reflect the integration of transit and connecting those neighborhoods with larger, more specialized built up regions in a city. It’s good to have those 15 minute neighborhoods clustered and built up with a core around larger transit stops, and it’s probably good to zone most of the commercial and office space around those larger higher order transit stops (metro, LRT, regional rail).
Alternatively, for smaller cities and larger towns, the idea of a “30 minute city” which incorporates transit into the time mix and mixing the generalized and specialized amenities would probably be good too, as they are organically and technically distinct from larger cities and built up areas.
Yeah, I had a Twitter thread defining "15 minute city" as "made up of 15 minute neighborhoods", in turn defining those as walking to generic amenities.
I love your use of different times for layers.
Call me dumb, or maybe not a conspiracy theorist, but when I first heard of the 15-minute concept, I assumed that it meant most things should be available within a close proximity of your home, not absolutely everything. Here in London, England, I consider most of the city to qualify. I have shopping, bars and cinemas nearby. But my workplace (when I have to go there) is a bit further. And I frequently travel further for some cultural events. Decreasing the need to travel unnecessarily is the thing. This is what I assumed. It puzzles me that people invent these crazy ideas about “ghettoes”. What’s happening here is that some local councils are improving infrastructure for cyclists, discouraging unnecessary driving, making the streets more attractive in which to be a pedestrian. Too many car drivers have a mindset very similar to American gun owners though.
Sure. Why the camera's and the bollards and the QR code and all the entrapments you find in a prison?
Most will choose convenience and not frequently use stores and facilities outside the perimeter. Saving time and money. Why the bars and gates. Control. Mandatory limits. Social score. It's closer than you thought.
Yeah, organizations like the WEF have speakers that actively talk about 15 minute cities as a foundation for more authoritarian control models to outright limit traveling in the name of green policies.
It’s a real conspiracy headed by real people using ideas hijacked from others to sell their ideas as more affable than what is intended to be implemented by the conspirators.
The very idea of “conspiracy theory” as a derogatory pejorative was started by the CIA as a psyop to keep people from questioning the government and uncovering blackOps. What better stasi than getting your own countrymen to socially ostracize your critics? Governments have been using psyops and blackops against their citizens for forever. Not to mention the conspiracies of powerful business groups employed at different points for centuries. NGOs frequently publish propaganda as psyops to sway public opinion and manufacture consensus to push through their preferred policies, not to mention political donations.
because the super rich buy all the land, they have to keep the taxpayers in next level concentration camps, re-labled as "cities", easy to lockdown, no space to grow 1 potatoe or salade plant, dependency on everything: water, energy, pharma, food, food additives, multinational shop chains, community "fun",
it creates another generation who does not know how a chicken looks like and a digital nonsense education, creativity will deteriorate and nobody knows history anymore, end of story, nobody knows his roots anymore,
15-minit cities are the start of the dead end of a failed system, illusionary ideas cooked in the kitchen of the castles in the air,
within 20 years it will be half empty,
in other words: the money system is dead and it has to be hidden from plain sight, a panic attempt
@@fnaaijkens69What are you talking about. What QR code. What bars and gates. Ive been in neigborhoods like this and i havent seen any of the things youre saying
I think a lot of people are missing the point. The idea is that everything you *need to have on a daily basis* is in a 15-minute radius. Like access to some kind of food, the post office, the pharmacy. If every place has that, then everyone is free to relocate close to their job and get that within 15 minutes as well if they can. Once that's happened, a person's daily needs generate zero vehicle trips, with their wants or their less frequent needs generating some trips sometimes. And of course some people living in a given neighborhood are going to have longer commutes, but the people actually providing the services within that neighborhood can live there and not.
The point is that under the current system, people's daily needs generate multiple vehicle trips per day, and even if you're solving that with transit, that's a lot of waste if you can eliminate those trips. It's more achievable to meet everyone's wants if you can reduce the cost of meeting their needs.
you end up creating a new standard to follow, people will say "well my husband works right down the street and walks to work and I don't really want to pay for this car, why should i?
"a lot of people are missing the point"
I mostly agree with you, but I think the video's point is that Moreno (the original guy) was vague about what is point really was, especially with stuff like "turn Paris into a 15 minute city". There's a reasonable interpretation (yours, mine) and an unrealistic utopian take ("EVERYONE should be within 15 minutes of their job")
@@mindstalkThe opposition to “15 minute cities” is that “NO ONE should be within 15 minutes of their job BY ANY MEANS OF TRANSPORTATION”. It’s absurd.
I would generally agree, but you'll still find some exceptions with your job example and I think that's a blindspot from a lot of somewhat sheltered white collar workers.
While it's probably fine to expect neighborhoods to be residential friendly around many service oriented businesses, I'm not sure we can say the same for more manufacturing jobs or industrial jobs that are rightfully a little bit separated.
You will want high quality, frequent transit to those areas, but I'm not sure you want housing straight next door to a metal workshop. And those type of industries naturally take up more space due to machinery, etc. They can't just neatly be tucked away in a low square footage high tower. Trucks, trains, etc will need to access it
but the thing is, that is just not going to be possible for many people anyway. when i was a kid we lived in an area where we had the basics within a 15 minute radius, but my parents decided to prioritize moving close to my school. so my dad's work ended up being a 30 minute - 2 hour long commute (by car - the train didn't go all the way to his office) depending on the traffic. it's a nice goal to work towards but a lot of people are going to end up in this kind of situation where they live in a household with multiple people and everyone is going to have different work and school needs so someone is going to have to compromise on their commute regardless of where they live.
then there's also the case of choosing your neighbourhood based on characteristics other than how close it is to your work or school. you may just like a particular neighbourhood more, for whatever reason. maybe you have friends or family there and want to stay close to them. maybe there's that one cafe you really like right next door or something. maybe the rent is just cheaper. maybe the apartment that's currently available in this neighbourhood that's a bit further away from your work is just more suited to your needs and preferences than apartments that are currently available nearer to your job. and so on. maybe you've lived in this neighbourhood forever and are paying off a mortgage but just got a job that's further away and you don't want to go through the hassle of relocating for work. there are a lot of reasons that someone would live further away from their work even in a "15 minute city".
plus, a lot of people are not going to want to live next to their work in the first place. it's fine for someone who has an office job or someone who works at a shop or something, but a lot of people work manufacturing or other jobs that involve a lot of noise pollution and possibly air and water pollution too, and no one is going to want to live near these jobs. no one wants to live near a chemical plant. living near an office building or a restaurant is fine, but living near a pharmaceutical facility can literally be injurious to health.
the solution to commutes generating vehicle trips for work and school on a daily basis is just better transit and bikeability because they're more efficient with land use and energy and physical resources like metal. for industrial jobs, they can be consolidated into industrial parks with good transit access.
This video is too short.
It isn't 15 minutes long.
That's my only complaint.
You didn't account for comment reading after the watch which would complete your 15 minute time slot.
Please consider doing a video on what levels of density is required to support small business like coffee shops, burger places, doctors offices and so on!
As a crude approach, you can look up how many of X a country like the US has, or a city, and divide by population.
US and Japan both have about 2000 people per convenience store.
US has 8500-12,000 people per supermarket, depending on which class of stores are included.
About 6000 people per pharmacy.
School size can vary a lot, but some say that around 600 student is optimal, or 100-150 students per grade. Also, around 600 seems to be 'average', despite many notable larger schools in big cities.
Around 500 people per restaurant (itself a fuzzy category.)
1700 people per dentist.
At 10,000 people/km2, 800 meters or a 10 minute walk covers around 1.3 square km2, and you have 13,000 people. So enough for a conventional supermarket, and around 160 students per grade level. Plus a couple pharmacies, some dentists, couple dozen restaurants.
Some US planners talk about walkability taking off at 10-20 dwelling units per gross acre, which is roughly 6000-12000 people/km2.
@@mindstalka factor not considered in this minimum viable store approach is the quality of service. suburban stores and medical practices have less scale and as a result, worse product selection and service.
If you've never traveled abroad, you might not know its possible to get both a big mac and chicken wings at mcdonalds. or seafood pizza at pizza hut. or a primary care office with more than 1 receptionist.
@@mindstalkI live in a place where alcohol stores and pharmacies are money printing machines even tho we have 1 per 600 and 1 per 400 inhabitants on average respectively (very common to see four different pharmacies in opposed corners of intersections). Also bear in mind that the legal limit for the former is allegedly 1 per 800...
How many people is needed for a business to do well will vary A LOT from one place to another since some economies are less healthy than others and that some businesses thrive just on artificial scarcity.
@@mindstalk wow, my small-ish town has a major supermarket for every ~2,500 people! (Ireland) And a convenience/grocery store per ~750
@@eatmildew2062 Yeah, a small town in Scotland had 900 people (though more in surrounding islands) and a supermarket. In most cases I have no idea what the real minimum is (or what subsidies might have been involved.) But I figure that using large scale averages will be safe and conservative. And it makes sense that higher customer base leads to lower prices and more selection, with bigger delivery trucks and higher turnover of fresh food without spoilage.
The biggest flaw with the concept is around housing costs.
You could live within 15 minutes of your work, but if your work is in a downtown/central office job, then you could be looking at rents/mortgage rates that are far too high for your own wages.
This is something that's notorious in some cities like London or Dublin, where housing is so very expensive, that many people who work in the city are forced to commute 1-2 hours to even get to housing they can afford. No doubt the same is likely true for the likes of D.C. or New York, with commuters even living just out of state/territory.
Desirable places to live are going to drive up demand, and prices along with it. Sure, rent controls of various flavours do exist, but even then, living centrally to everything, and living remotely to everything is going to have significant differences in cost.
Transit Oriented Development is certainly the best solution to this kind of issue. I'd argue that you could live in a suburban town that has regular train service to the city centre can be just as great to live in, but of course, that still depends on factors like how late the trains run to, or their reliability.
Nailed it!
The higher cost of living in walkable neighbourhoods isn't because of 15 minute cites. It's because we spent a century NOT building 15 minute cities. Not every downtown employee can afford to live a 15 minute walk from work. But they can afford to live in a 15 minute walkable neighbourhood within a 30 minute metro ride. The geometry of density makes that more than feasible even at mid-densities. If we had been building that way all along we wouldn't have the grotesque choice of absurdly high housing costs or absurdly high transportation costs. Drivers pay less than half the actual cost. Taxpayers cover most of it. Those in walkable neighbourhoods who don't drive much are subsidizing the rest.
I should clarify what I mean that drivers are paying less than half. That includes their own personal costs. Whatever they are paying for the car, insurance, gas etc is less than what that car imposes on taxpayers in road construction, debt servicing and maintenance. What they claim to pay in fuel taxes is insignificant and doesn't even cover the interest on the debt of road construction.
"You could live within 15 minutes of your work"
a) the more reasonable idea doesn't try to guarantee that
b) in theory, if we build tall enough, the cost of housing should approach the marginal cost of adding new stories. In which case you should able to find something affordable even within 15 minutes of downtown, though it might be in a high-rise, and on the small size (since high-rises have inherently higher construction costs than 3-story apartments, say.)
@@mindstalk being unable to find affordable housing in downtown is entirely due to dysfunction. yeah you shouldn't expect a mansion but a small apartment for all members of household should be absolutely doable. The housing difficulties in major CBDs is entirely down to a refusal to be more mixed use, even when demand for commercial space has fallen.
We also really have to be careful what we wish for regarding TOD. TOD is good when combined with mixed use, but we just do not have the political energy to add "one more lane" of transit, even in very urban cities. Tokyo would rather shove commuters in the train and Toronto is literally at 100% capacity on some lines, but no plans to add a parallel track for the same route.
That's a fair point, but also after a long commute you don't want to come home realize that you don't have anything to eat and then have to drive another hour just to buy groceries.
I work at the airport. That's not something you can plunk in a neighborhood.
However it should have more transit options. Right now all it has is two bus routes. It should have multiple bus routes, at least one light rail (connection for two is planned. The first is soon, but the second is in limbo)
It should have a connection to regional rail so smaller towns and cities have access to it for people who don't drive, or don't want to pay expensive parking fees
Depending on where you live, demand for intercity travel can be really low. So airports are more of a spur than a hub. Airports in smaller cities are best treated as an industrial area.
@@FullLengthInterstates I'm in a fairly large metro city with an international airport, we have a few smaller cities surrounding ours. Some are large enough that they could be served by an intercity train few times a day
They plan to use electric planes for short journeys and turn them into taxis that land at airports although it needs more work and to get a lot cheaper yet but there definitely needs to be dedicated services, i would love if there were bus or coach services going right into the airport. We do have a train going right to the nearest airport where i am but the problem is they don't put enough trains on and they stop at a certain time so we can't use the 24/7.
In general there needs to be small trains put on frequently to deal with the huge population now but so far they've been squashing us in like sardines, that way we can use both bus and train services. There's a total inequality with everything really one town has something while the rest don't but there's a lot of things all towns don't have but should, those up top are well aware of this and they've talked about fixing at least some of it but as usual i doubt all of these problems will be fixed it would be nice if they did though.
Yeah important point having an airport without good transit options is difficult.
Getting to work is super important and doing it without a car is key.
Not that all they job at airports pay well many re close to minimum wage.
Second hunderts of people work at a each shift on an airport
The destinations that a 15 minute city should have within it are things that you need (almost) every day, which means things like grocery stores, schools, churches, parks and so on, but things you only need occasionally are okay to not have one in every single 15 minute city, things like sports stadium, paint store, airport and so on. And on top of that you can't have every single amenity shrunk down to be able to have one within every 15 minute city, tings like Hospitals and University simply don't work as well when shrunk down to be able to fit fit within every 15 minute city. It's okay for there to be certain amenities that you need to go to a specific city for, just as long as it's not one of the basic "daily" amenities.
If you focus on daily amenities, work is the best example of a specialized destination that can't necessarily be within 15 minutes. Most people are willing to travel further for a better job.
If you have walkable density (6000+ people/km2) then you should be able to have a hospital within a slow 15 minute bike ride (72,000 people within a 2 km radius). Some people will need really specialized hospitals, and many people who need a hospital can't bike (though some could use a mobility cart, like an electric wheelchair, also using bike lanes), but still, pretty good.
@@OhTheUrbanityJust because work is specialized doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be within 15 min. If there was sufficient housing, you could move to be near work and that area could have all the normal amenities too. You make an excellent point about how that doesn’t really work for dual income families though.
@@ThirdWiggin Dual income, or a teen going to a specialized high school, or an older kid wanting to go to college while living at home...
@@ThirdWigginThis sounds nice in theory, but I don't think you understand the implications of what you're saying. Imagine a world where people lived within 15m of their specialized workplace, that would mean that every workplace/district is surrounded by people who fit the criteria of that industry. For instance, a high tech district full of high-skill IT jobs will be surrounded by highly educated workers and families, which won't be found in other parts of the city. End Result? Massive inequity in regards to QoL and class divides that make Chicago look like an egalitarian heaven.
Now maybe we can spread these jobs around instead of having specialized districts? Well does that mean that swapping jobs now comes with the requirement of needing to move to a new house, potentially leaving friends and family behind. Never mind being laid off or fired, now you need to move to a new place in what would obviously be a turbulent time for your family and finances.
So no, 15m workplaces for specialized industries will never work.
Anyone who thinks this is some kind of big conspiracy has never travelled - never seen, let alone considered, other ways of living, and urban planning that facilitates quality living.
I didn't like the way the cities and towns in my area were developed, then I went to live in Spain. Now that I've returned, it's utterly depressing. Urbanised zones that are dead. Zero life, zero culture, zero community, zero interest, nothing unique. In any given area, there's zero reason to be there other than to either 1) consume, 2) work, 3) sleep, but not any combination of the 3. Go somewhere where people can live, work, shop, gather, all in the same neighbourhood - it's revelatory. Then add on high quality public transit that quickly takes you anywhere in the city - amazing.
Isn't that just New York
@@racool911 can you elaborate?
@@racool911yeah but better
I generally enjoy your videos, but I think this video is a little bit “captain obvious.” I agree with the general premise: there are lots of reasons why in a city you may need or want to travel beyond the 15-minute radii that Moreno advocates for. But I think this idea just needs to be a small qualifying statement, not a 10 minute video…it’s seems a little bit drawn out. Moreno’s work is centred around building neighbourhoods in a way that lets people meet *most* of their life needs without needing to walk more than 15 minutes; it’s pretty widely understood that this land-use planning concept should go hand in hand with stronger city & regional transit for the more specialized trips you reference. His ideas are intended as a building block for better land-use planning, not as the be-all-end-all.
I think it's critical to not to let perfect be the enemy of great, especially given how far away we are in most parts of North America from enabling people to make even the most basic of daily trips outside of a car.
You can say it's all obvious but, as we mentioned at the end, we only decided to make the video after encountering people who did take the concept literally and thought that 15 minutes was a reasonable standard even for commuting. And immediately above your comment is another comment saying: "I realized I had been taking the concept pretty literally. Thanks for the nuance and reality check."
@@OhTheUrbanity Fair enough, perhaps we have not encountered the same people...
It's still wild to me that it's literally illegal to build a grocery store in a housing area in many places in the US. Here in Ghent, Belgium I have 3 small food stores and 2 grocery stores all within a 4 minute walk.
That's what happens when your city planners are bought by the automobile industry
To your point about specialised locations, thats fine.
It misses the point that if individuals want to go and find these places, then they can. And because the majority of general needs are facilitated, it indirectly creates the ease of travel to those other specific places, either by public transit or personal transport. Also making it easier those that cannot cycle etc.
Also in the case of "specialized work location" the idea is that the area surrounding said location is similarly capable of meeting the daily basic needs, so if you move there you still got access to basic services.
A city really is just a collection of neighbourhoods with neighbourhood amenities. Rural areas also have hospitals, universities, museums, theatres, transit, etcetera. Just less densely packed. A city is a dense collection of human environments. Outside the city it is less dense. There is nothing special about cities that doesn't apply to non-city places.
Having grown up in a rural area, "just not as densely packed" is doing a lot of work in your sentence.
@OhTheUrbanity I grew up in a rural area too.
also imo they should start prioritizing the quality of the commute over the length. shorter commutes obviously are nicer, but what's also nice is having a commute you can enjoy. i know a lot of people who would prefer to bike through a nice neighbourhood or park or bike trail or something for 30 minutes to get to work over biking down a road next to cars going at 60 mph for 15 minutes. obviously an enjoyable short commute would be ideal but it's not going to be possible for most people, so the FOCUS should be on making the commute more pleasant.
Eh, your last line says we should prioritize pleasure over speed, and that's debatable. Pleasure is nice, but time is valuable, too. And your bike example isn't that spot on: the difference may well be about _safety_ as much as pleasure.
At one point I made my own choice for pleasure: I started walking further to take a bus that was also slower, but less used (I could get a seat) and going through nice neighborhoods (good view) and different demographics (less chance of suffering someone's leaky headphones.) So I get it... but it was also turning a 30 minute commute to a 50 minute one. A lot of people don't have that freedom, and probably more people would have been better served by reducing the 30 minute commute (bus stuck in traffic, lots of potential there.)
I work for a construction company and DRIVE out of my city for work there are 2 routes to work and one is LONGER but NOT full of heavy trucks going to/from factories I take the LONGER route because it is a FAR MORE pleasant commute VS the shorter and a LITTLE quicker route
Why can't it be both? i'd rather have both really because i don't want to have to get up earlier because i have to spend 15 mins longer on transport personally i struggle enough and need my sleep.
1:24 it's not Moreno flipping the zoning concept on its head, it's the zoning concept being insane. I as a European still find it hard to comprehend how that madness was approved.
But I really saw the value of living in a neighbourhood with a rich variety of amenities within a 15-minute walk, when my dad had to give up driving in his late 80s. He turned on a dime from someone who drove most places - despite living in a streetcar suburb - to someone who strapped on his backpack every morning to walk up to the shopping street to pick up a newspaper, prescriptions, beer, daily groceries, etc, and it meant that for many of my parents' immediate day-to-day needs they could be quite self-sufficient. For other things they could get deliveries, or we might help with larger shops or getting to medical appointments. That kind of daily self-sufficiency without a car would be unimaginable in most parts of North America.
Yep!
I realized I had been taking the concept pretty literally. Thanks for the nuance and reality check.
There seems to be this weird idea among some urban planners that high-speed, regional transit systems are some kind of capitalist perversion of more humble, local transit systems. I'm not even sure where it comes from. It's so profoundly stupid.
One of the worst things about car dependency is its failed promises. Cars and highways were supposed to free people to zip all around town to whatever destination they wanted, whenever they wanted, with minimal consequences. Transit systems that manage to fulfill that promise should be celebrated, not opposed!
like all things "in the beginning" the car/motorway system did DELIVER on its promise but was NOT built to scale and BY DESIGN does NOT SCALE
live in a SMALL town and the CAR still delivers on its promise but again scaling cars up to a major city and it all fails BUT "replacing" them with transit into a car based urban form and transit CAN NOT scale to replace the cars and that is the number one urban issue
Public transit ridership is never going to increase until planners realize how important high speed and cleanliness are.
0:06 Being unable to write the capital of my country right, despite it has a simplified English name.
I think, we in fact need to read Carlos Moreno in the context of Paris. Paris has a very high and evenly spread density - at probably any given spot of the city, you have more than a million people living within "bike distance" from your location. So yes, having _basic_ infrastructure within this radius is normal for vast parts of Europe and probably even for the city centers in the US and Canada. But in Paris you need to get *VERY* specialized, if you need to travel further.
I always assumed the concept meant "you should be able to access most necessary amenities for daily life within a 15 minutes walk or bike ride". I never thought it meant you should be able to access EVERYTHING within that span (not to even mention the ridiculous conspiracy that you'd HAVE to access things only within that span). But by taking it very literally, and engaging with it on those terms, you expose the inevitable misinterpretations of the concept that make it hard for many people to embrace. A clarification of the concept that explicitly engages with specialized amenities would help more people embrace this.
Also, totally agree with you about transit!
You speak like a robot. Speak English!!
There seems to be this idea, unfortunately, that if a proposed change doesn't solve every problem, we shouldn't do it. The fact that I might still have to drive to work doesn't mean I wouldn't appreciate being able to walk or cycle more places. 🤷♂️
I believe that the book downplays or doesn't adequately recognize the value of specialized amenities.
I don't think anyone is saying to have every single thing within 15 minutes, just the basics. Like, in the evening when you want to go out and see friends but don't want to make a huge trip, you should have something just in general to do, or if you want to get something quick for dinner. But a museum or a water park or the fancy grocery store can be weekend trips, which take longer
Thank you for covering the complexity of a couple with 2 jobs (which change and maybe in oposite directions in the city) and 2 kids with differing daycare or elementary schooling needs. It can be a very complex mesh of travel requirements. Great video.
I think the 15min should include the basics: grocery store, pharmacy, restaurants, higher order transit station.
Some of these criticisms are based on the false premise of a single-solution. It's unfortunate that this needs to be said, but just because something doesn't work for everyone doesn't mean that it doesn't benefit society on the whole.
Imagine how silly it would be to suggest that, just because a capital works project such as a bridge is more beneficial to some than others, that it is a bad proposal.
The 15-minute city was never meant to be a single, magic solution for all citizens. Rather it's a model that forces us to question whether we could operate more efficiently with our time and tax revenue/spending models. So, if our current car-based model provides society *as a whole* with X collective hours of free time, and Y amount of taxpayer-funded public services per dollar, while a more time, space, and revenue-efficient model would net X+n and Y+n of those same outcomes, it's worth further exploration to determine the "sweet spot" that maximizes the benefit from a cost-benefit perspective.
"The 15-minute city was never meant to be a single, magic solution for all citizens"
Their point is that if you simply read Moreno, it's not clear what you claim is true.
The video never said that 15-minute cities aren't beneficial. You missed the point.
@@frafraplanner9277 I didn't say that the video suggested 15 minute cities weren't beneficial. However, it repeated some REALLY poorly thought out critiques, and in doing so, it inadvertently gave them credibility.
I’ve always found the phrase “15 minute walk or bike ride” a bit vague, because cyclists travel about three times faster than pedestrians, so a 15 minute bike ride can be a 45 minute walk, which seems to defeat the whole purpose.
I would but it 10 minute walk or 30 minute transit. I would not put bike as a standard, for example most people do not use bikes at winter - if they do probably s because poor public transport.
My city, Toronto has always been a collection of neighbourhoods. I live in Greek Town, and everything that I need is within a 15 minute walk.
One of my best memories of visiting Toronto was the food in Greek Town
Cote des Neiges is a great in MTL.
Yeah older neighbourhoods have it but younger ones don't
Districts aren't always so bad. In NYC having neighborhoods dedicated for flowers, gowns, theatre, industrial warehouses etc. all developed naturally for competition, & makes business there easier for customers and workers
I would love it if you did a video about how something gets built in a city, like an apartment tower, the whole process.
People are always complaining about the city building things they don’t want and have no idea how things work.
One of the biggest barriers to the “15-30 minute city” is that proximity to amenities and public transit tends to rocket up property values, which prices out the folks who would otherwise benefit the most from this increased access.
I never assumed that anyone promoting 15min citites would insist on everyone living near everything - only that everyone will near _something_.
My neighbourhood where I am now has the best tacos in the city, but if I want a curry I would need to travel. But the point is that there are restaurants - in general - near me. I think only the biggest ding dongs assumed otherwise.
Japan, with almost no zoning laws other (relative to Canada/US) are already almost exactly like a 15min city.
Most problems of the modern cities come from people who were lured into the city, only to end up working a lame job and a horrid daily commute. There is another way.
The biggest problem with 15 minute cities is I can't afford to live in one.
That is probably because there are way too few walkable neighbourhoods/towns around.. . Scarcity drivesprices up
I made my own. I scrolled through real estate listings and found places that happen to be close to the specific amenities I cared about, and used google streetview to game out potential travel routes that met my risk tolerance. My home has a mid walk score and bike score which helped its affordability, but it is a 15 minute city to me
Move to Europe.
@@houssamalucad753 Yeah, because that's so cheap.
@@MrBirdnose cheaper than staying in the US long term for most people
I was once stationed in a small German town, Budingen, that was virtually a 15 minute city. My and many residents' work was that close. There was a hardware store, big grocery store, a high school and several parks and a hospital that close. There was no college, but my family didn't have use for one. We still fondly remember living there. It was 'comfortable'. We generally left town only for weekend and holiday recreation. Now I am old and retired and I live in another virtual 15 minute city, Canon City, Colorado, a little larger, with all the amenities mentioned for Budingen plus a few more, again minus a college. Again, 'comfortable'.
Thank you so much for this video. You raised a lot of issues with the concept that I personally grappled with. It is important to recognize the challenges with an idea to temper expectations and strengthen the practicality of better urban planning.
If you live in a country where there is winter with -30 celsius, snow, ice....biking will not always be a good option in the winter months. You can walk the 15 minutes but need ice trekkers so you don't fall on the ice.
We live in Montreal, one of the coldest and snowiest major cities in the world (although -30 is rare). We know how to dress for winter. We know how to put boots on.
Public transit connecting 15 minute “places” 🗣️
I would make basic needs walkable in 15 minutes. Then for people to bike if they want to travel further.
I feel another thing is that commuting at the moment in North America is a much bigger time waste than in other countries. The most one can do at the moment (legally) when commuting in North America is listening to a podcast, music, or being on a phone call since you're driving everywhere. This makes an hour long commute a slog of staying sat down and doing very little without risking a car crash. These same limitation don't apply for trains and other modes of transport for equally long commute times.
If you are under 15 years old, you shouldn’t have to bike for more than 15 min. Pediatrician, K-8 schools, dentist, basic needs, etc. Otherwise take the bus, train, etc.
Edit: Nevermind the below. I think they're talking about the Oxford law fining people for leaving their neighborhood too frequently
I think the conspiracy theorists are not reacting to the concept of a 15-minute city by itself, but rather combining the concepts with the past overreach some cities committed during the early stages of covid.
Those who were looking at the data understood that being outside was the safest, but people were literally told to stay indoors. Some cities were arresting people for going outside for a walk in the fresh air.
This memory, plus the idea of greater density, is what's causing this convoluted theory of locking people in their homes.
I've always thought 15 minutes for non-motorized modes--walking, rolling--and 30 minutes-1 hour for everything else, excepting very unique amenities. This scales fairly well even to very large cities; see very-rapid regional rail systems like Seoul's GTX, Delhi's RRTS. Beyond an hour, most people aren't going to be making a trip regularly unless they have no choice, or as you say, a really good reason to make the trip. Significantly better job markets are particularly compelling; my dad would often sit in traffic up to 2 hours driving from southern New Hampshire to Boston, but really, he (and many others!) ought to have had the choice of a speedy train ride into the city, and providing equitable--i.e., non-car!--access to competitive job markets is essential.
Tell that to the car lobbyists who had/have a firm grip on North America.
9:13 These guys make a very interesting point about shaving travel times over longer distances. Taking that hour-long commute down to 45 minutes is an important win no matter what. Sometimes it's simply a matter of reducing bottlenecks and building fixed links between areas. The Fehmarnbelt tunnel being built between Copenhagen and Hamburg is a key example. Taking the travel times from 5 and a half hours to 2 and a half hours is a key win and wipes a whole detour completely off the map. Can we do similar things here across the pond?
I live in a semi-urban area (outside a major city) in Australia. I can walk to a huge pharmacy, restaurants and cafes, local grocery stores, thrift stores, etc. I couldn't do this when I lived in a major city. Australian cities have lost the plot. In a major Australian city, if you want to do any shopping at all, you need to drive through congested traffic to a monstrous concrete shopping mall, then spend 5-15 minutes finding a parking spot, then you need to walk for about 15 minutes from the car park to the shop you want to access within the shopping mall.
Some other things to consider with specialized jobs & businesses is that there’s usually a good reason why they aren’t in every neighbourhood and why your commute to that place will likely be longer than 15minutes. For example let’s say there’s a family that lives in Metro Vancouver. The mom is a heart surgeon & works at Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster and the dad is a pilot for Air Canada.
For starters would you really want to live with in a 15minute walk or bike ride of an airport? I’m going guess that most people will say no. The other option in a 15minute city context is to live near the hospital. With this family raising multiple kids perhaps most of the homes near the hospital are too small & the homes that are big enough are too expensive for the family. Perhaps there are grandparents who live in a different part of Metro Vancouver. Perhaps in that other part of Metro Vancouver(close to the grandparents) you can live in a larger home at a more reasonable price. Perhaps that location is close to a Skytrain station(mother can use the Skytrain to the hospital) and close to the freeway(father can drive to the airport).
There are numerous factors that determine where we live & work. Yes every neighbourhood should have the essentials for life, but for specialized businesses & larger businesses you will have to travel more than 15minutes to get to that destination.
using my old stomping ground / your example
my mother worked for a company in Burnaby with the office in Metrotower I and we lived near there in a walk up that surprisingly is still standing and I got a job near Bridge studios in Burnaby my mother could WALK to work in 5 minutes I had to drive to work travelling 5 KM PER GOOGLE
11 minutes driving a car transit is 40 minutes with 2 transfers OR 2 zones required walking 90 minutes and biking on dense urban roads plugged with cars and NO BIKE infrastructure (back then) would be 18 minutes today WITH bike infrastructure
For me it’s not having the amenities nearby that’s important, it’s that I could get anywhere in the city comfortably without a car
Same! I wish I could go to the grocery store by bike. I don't care how long it will take. I don't go everyday and it would be infinitely more enjoyable than going by car.
and indirectly comes back to this "idea" 3 transit jumps and 1 and 1/2 hours to get to the grocery is going to put a LOT of people back into cars
maybe the time scale is WRONG but @ 15 minutes bike the grocery trip is an hour home to home and to double that time IE 45 minutes a direction for a 2 hour home to home your unlikely to do that trip "spur of the moment" once home from work because of a ingredient you don't have and want for dinner
@@jasonriddell What?
@@frafraplanner9277Jason said if other non-car transportation is too long then people would just be incentived to drive a car instead.
He said that if grocery stores are too far you can't drop by casually.
(That driving is a planned chore.)
He said that if grocery stores are too far it's not easy to just go back if you forgot an ingredient.
@@Coccinelf I don't know, that a tough sell to get a family of four on their bikes to do a grocery store run in January when its -15c.
what I love about living in a small compact city (VIctoria) is that there's nowhere in the city I can't reach within a 10-20 min bike ride. I don't even need to think about transit because the distances are never long enough and transit is usually always slower than bike. I can be in the heart of downtown in under 10 min by bike or about 20min walking.
Thank you both for making this video, it really put 15 minute cities into context for me. I'm a civil engineering student in Texas and am very interested in urbanism and urban planning, and I think this video has changed my perspective on the essence of a city. When yall mention how urban planners should not be viewed as painters but rather as gardeners, nurturing and growing the city, it made me think about my role in shaping cities and what kind of influence I have, and should have, as a civil engineer. Thank you again, this video is really well crafted.
Very good points!
If a city is a network of fifteen-minute neighbourhoods, people can choose to live in one near the specialized location that suits them (ie. their place of work or study) - the way I see it, the true power of a fifteen minute city is that it distributes living locations, allowing people to cut down on the physical (and temporal) length of their commute.
instead of being a 15 minute walk from homes, it should be a 15 minute walk from an efficient public transport station
But that could mean up to 30 minutes of walking, plus the time of the transit trip itself. It's a goal, but it's a very different goal. And if you live in a city, you shouldn't _have_ to use public transit at all for groceries and elementary schools.
Where I'm from going to university usually means that you leave your parent's house as well. Learning to live by yourself is part of that growing up experience.
All I care about is having viable public transit, walking and cycling options. No more car-centric design!
Exactly!
I like cycling, walking no so much, but I like/need need my car as well. Its tough (and dangerous) doing a Costco run on a bike in January after 20cm of snow fall.
@@paulcatarino2209 then your city is failing you by not clearing cycling paths of snow appropriately.
@@paulcatarino2209thats the system failing, if Costco it’s too far and you don’t have a closer option then it’s the fault of the zoning laws, because thanks to them you want to do less travels to Costco and end up taking way more than you need
Not every N.American winter city can be Oulu. What one culture does is not easily transferable to any other.
Throughout the decades, I made sure most of the time I could live at a reasonable distance of everything whether in Québec City, Montréal, Vancouver, Whitehorse without the use of a car, ever. I still achieve it nowadays in Sherbrooke with spendings of 725$ a month (every amenity included for a 2 bdrm apt) It's a choice to be a slave or not.
This also extends to things like doctors. I moved to Queens, but that doesn’t mean I want to see the doctor closest to me now.
You wouldn’t have to in a fifteen minute neighbourhood, but it might be nice for most people to have the option.
In order to reduce the time wasted on the way from one way to another it is a good idea to limit the daily work commute and grocery shopping to 15 minutes. At least it should be possible to choose a home close enough to your workplace.
Primary schools should be within 15 minutes walking distance (1 km) for children, secondary schools within 15 minutes cycling (5 km).
For universities it's a good idea to have student living facilities close to the campus (though some universities are so spread out it's difficult to get from one place to another within the same university within 15 minutes).
I'm self-employed and my next home is 10 minutes walking from a long distance railway station, groceries, hairdresser, pharmacy, doctors ... advantage of a small town. The disadvantage? Some more specialized shops don't exist and you have to travel to another city to find them.
Are 15 minute cities and 15 minute suburbs the same? I do not think so in my opinion.
I think they're the same if you use the more reasonable definition. Suburbanites should be able to walk or at least bike to grocery stores, pharmacies, and standard schools as well.
I think the folks in the comments here seem to be missing the point that this is a critique of the original authors words on the idea of the 15 minute city. I think most people have taken his idea and filtered it through the general critique of enforced car culture more broadly. I’ve certainly met some people who have brought up the critiques mentioned in this video. Their point is that you shouldn’t take it too literally, if you already think that, then good for you. If not, then I don’t think the video is aimed at you.
I've alway thought it weird those arguments against 15 minute cities calling them prisons, when the car is effectively a prison you waste 10-20% of your waking hours in, and even paying 30%+ of your wage for the privlage of being your own warden.
You can't even get out of your car whenever you like if you suddenly need to use the washroom, nor stop using a car without overhauling your entire life. And most people don't have the energy, will, or desire to use the car for anything but work.
Not to mention that suburbia is a more complete prison for those that can't drive. How many kids are stuck at home with nothing they can do outside beyond their yards without bugging a parent to drive them an hour some place?
15 minute cities are vastly misunderstood even by their advocates, but the alternative is already a prison.
Plus, if you're afraid of government control, suburban cul-de-sacs are very easy to trap someone in.
see the "same" argument made towards EV cars in a way "to control" people like the "government" has a secret goal of locking up everyone and controlling everything they can do and point out solar panels charge EVS and there is NO "home oil refinery" for gas cars
i believe it is all an intentional push to confuse / overload people so they don't "trust" anything and "buy" into the status quo is the best/safest option
they shovel illogical and sometimes dumbfounded ideas making it hard to know what is "real" and what is "fake"
I've mainly lived in Rural Ontario and I love it here but did spend a year in an Ottawa Suburb without a car and that was not nearly as good as living downtown Montreal where I could easily walk out my door and get to everything very quickly.
It isn't forbidden to travel far in 5 and 15 min cities 😂 just that you don't need to for small mundane daily activities
I don’t see that problem. I think “15 minutes city” should be taken as a guideline and not a rigid rule. The more people can find more things that we need close to our houses, the best for everyone. Even for the ones that need more specialized travels to work or to go occasionally somewhere specific. Traffic would be better if we reduce the travels that are needed.
I see another problem. If we take the approach of having all the public services closer to everyone we have the risk of having low density affluent neighborhoods with much better services than urban areas, at the expense of the poor, less crowded public schools and less crowded public hospitals would be available in those rich neighborhoods , making desirable to live in low density areas.
15 minute walk is way longer than I am willing to take. If I take a tram or a bus I do not care if it takes longer than 15 minutes. IMO the concept makes no sense. I would put it 10 minutes to a grocery store and a bus/tram stop. That is on a suburban area. On urban area more like 5 minutes. Also what does "15 minute walk or bike ride" even mean? I mean which does it mean? One should be more specific.
I have actually heard people wanting to work further away so they do not meet the people they meet at work in their free time. The distance creates separation between the work and free time.
While it is good to have grocery stores nearby small stores are more expensive than super and hypermarkets.
Local grocery stores are generally priced for convenience. It's a matter of competition. They are competing with groceries further away, so their value proposition is different.
Make Cities Great Again!
Out of the last 35 years, I’ve worked close to home for nearly 20 years, and likewise, I had all my needs met in my neighbourhood…
urbanplanadvisor AI fixes this. Urban myths fuel 15-minute cities.
I really like your effort to take a balanced position that’s pragmatic and not ideological
Certified banger of a video. Good job
I imagine if it would mean that a specific workplace or university would have places within 15 minutes where you can live and access all basic amenities, not that you never have to move throughout your whole life and still have access to everything.
I live in Zermatt. 15 min walk. No cars. Everyone is on an eBike. Works a million times better than life in a car.
Why the hell does that list of things to reach in 15min not include Nature?
Who was it who said (something like) "Mid-twentieth century urban planners all seem to be people who, as children, didn't like their peas to touch their carrots"?
I feel so sorry for the poor Bio-medical research giga-chad
for 95% of other mortals its amazing
Love your channel! Been sending lots of letters to my mayor about your ideas!
Maybe you could do a video on how viewers can encourage change in their cities? I feel that there's more I could do besides contacting my mayor and councillor but I'm not sure what.
The great thing about 15 minute cities is that making "normal" stuff accessible without a car also makes *everything* more accessible by transit. If it's not safe/convenient for neighbours to walk to that specific amenity, then it's not going to be safe for me to bus across town to the nearest stop and then walk from there.
I guess you hear the concept and based on that you start to make your own assumptions. I thought it was transit in the 15min range, and your last stop should be within 15min of the destination, not a 15 minute travel from your house to wherever you need to go, that doesn't make sense, but I guess that its a literal take.
I mean they literally say in the video that they read the book written by the person that came up with the term. What more do you want from them?
@@isimerias Do you think I'm complaining about the video?
I'm talking about the cases they talked about where they fear people take it too literal. I didn't read the book and I thought it was a range as I explained above, so I think people make assumptions, sometimes wrongly, based on their expectations and knowledge.
15 minutes on bike, with proper infrastructure, can mean as much as 5 kilometers. Thats a *huge* area that basically covers smaller cities completely!
15 mins in car is much further.
I've dealt with too many people who take the metaphor literally.
It was an exercise in branding that requires a certain degree of nuance and intelligence to appreciate.
When a certain demographic can't immediately understand what's being presented to them, they will often associate it with something harmful.
Most people who regularly walk or cycle can immediately see the benefits, and appreciate clever branding.
Well, not too long ago, we had lockdowns all around the world. You couldn't legally leave your neighbourhood, or couldn't go further than 5km from your house. People were fined for eating a pizza in their car out on the street. This happened what, 2 years ago? And now you're expecting people to just blindly trust some fantastic new invention? "Yeah, no worries, I couldn't go to an empty forest three years ago, or to the beach, even if I kept my distance from other people, if there were any people there, but no - you just couldn't go. But now, everyone will just jump on this and suddenly trust out governments".
This sounds like something China would do - surveillance, rebuilding the neighbourhood - are they going to forcefully build a supermarket a church, a doctor's surgery, clothing stores etc etc in every neighbourhood?
There is almost nothing 15 minutes from my house. I can get to the beach in that time, or there is a primary school. That’s it.
No shop, no pub, no restaurant, no kiosk, no doctor, nothing. Are they going to build it now? Where? The green space? Cut the trees down? And why? If I wanted to live by a supermarket, or in a city centre, I would.
@@petegallows5494 Wasn't like that here at all
We already have a design concept that locks you into your home with no way out.
Its called the suburbs.
"The conspiracy theories about people being locked inside their homes and unable to travel are just so far out of left field that it’s hard to engage with them like any normal disagreement"
technically, they were so far out of right field ...
I always thought that saying came from baseball, not politics.
@@AubreyBarnard it does it was just a play on words
@@sankarchaya And mine was a double entendre. (Acknowledging your reference while playing dumb.) So, I guess we're even, then?
I live in a "15 minute city" in Sweden and it's amazing. It's not even a fancy neighborhood but I can still get to numerous supermarkets, a variety of stores, restaurants and cafes, green areas, hairdressers, dentist clinics, a pool and numerous gyms, and a small hospital - all in less than TEN minutes of walking from my apartment. There's also a mechanic, a vet, schools and preschools, a pet daycare center... OF COURSE some things are further, but they're not places I need to visit regularly or need throughout my whole life (plus nowadays, many things can be handled online, e.g. I haven't _physically_ been to a government office or a bank in years). This "critique" doesn't really understand what 15 minute cities are about - it almost feels like you're baiting for comments like mine.
I'm really confused. Basically all large world cities' centers are around 30 minutes across, which means that you can get from their geographic center close to anywhere in 15 minutes already. By that logic, basically no city is not a 15 minute city.
Your confused as you are focusing on city centres, not cities.
@@elliotwilliams7421 well by that metric no city at all can ever be a 15 minute city. Good luck commuting from suburbs of Paris into Paris in under 1 hour
@@smorcrux426 exactly, 15 min cities are a conspiracy theory
@@smorcrux426 exactly, the whole thing is a conspiracy theory
Not everyone lives in a city center. I live in an urban area some 4 km from the center of Helsinki.
I work in the space industry and my partner works in the art industry. Our highly specialized professions means that it's unlikely a high tech manufacturing facility and a large art museum exists in the same 30min block...
I think it's also a micro solution to a macro problem. Reducing the cost of people's needs makes facilitating their deeper desires more feasible. Like a guy who lives in Hamburg that has a boss in Copenhagen. Let's say he needs to deliver an important document to his boss by hand. The current route is a detour through western, mainland Denmark well over 5 and a half hours that requires a night to be spent. What a big-scale project like the Fehmarnbelt does is cut travel times significantly between them. In this case, down to 2 and a half hours. Well within the margin of feasibility for a day trip.
I Want a 20 min City i need the Exercise.
Sadly it’s not real it’s just a conspiracy theory. I was hoping it was an actual thing.
15 minutes is not ambitious enough.
For people in cities yeah, but for people in suburbs with single family houses, it is pretty fair.
Even the suburbs of Tokyo (which are mostly high lot coverage single family houses) only manage to do 15 minute cities if 15 minutes is on bike as opposed to walking. (Most neighbourhood scale amenities (i.e. any non work essential stuff) are clustered around the train station, and the carchment for the train station is around a 15 minute bike ride)
Either way, this is kinda beside the point of the video
15 min is fine.
Only plan conceivably achievable targets. This comment only proves you don’t understand the limits we exist within (environmental, economic, social).
15 minutes by foot is around 1km, maybe a bit more. Given that you cannot walk a straight line in cities, that is already pretty ambitious for all basic needs. For cycling this is different due to higher speed. I used to live in Konstanz, Germany which at ~85k takes around 15-20 minutes to cross from one end to the other by bike. In terms of size that was about the maximum of what I was able to tolerate. There really is not much benefit of living in a city when most trips take 45 minutes or an hour. Of course, for concerts and the like, I had to travel to Stuttgart which is 1,5-2h. But one does not visit those that often anyways...
I can walk to my dentist in about 15 minutes and I consider that incredibly reasonable. That being said, one big reason is that I walk through a dense community of other great amenities. The nice thing about the 15 minute city is that it's an average. Your dentist might be 15 minutes away, but your baker might be 5 minutes and your doctor 20 minutes. It creates a neighbourhood and community where there wasn't one because you walk and see familiar faces rather than getting into your metal box and teleporting for all intents and purposes to your next activity.
Thanks!
Idk why but you guys have really nice voices.
I live in Chicago and live within a 10 minute walk of around 8 grocery stores, 100+ restaurants and bars, and a 15 minute walk from the lakefront. This is what I've always dreamed of but some people hate the idea of walkability so much. You can see my apartment building ar 6:12 lmaoo
Maybe dont dox yourself
Forget all the minutes, the end is a truck delivery from Amazon. Small business is dying and 15 minute concept only helped
How did the 15 minute concept help kill small business?
@XandateOfHeaven Mostly because Of the removal of spaces for parking and other installations such as bicycle paths on high traffic. Commercial arteries made it hard to go shop for things that used to be available nearby. For example, the mattress maker that we had moved out of town, shoe store and repair closed, the clothes store and even a great vegan goods shop, all within a small block, all gone because people couldn't access them due to no parking zones and areas. Only ones to thrive are coffees shops, eateries and junk foods chains. Meanwhile people resort to Amazon, big names.
@@reallythere Except we've already shown that parking minimums kill business by forcing them to dedicate valuable land space to non-productive land. Street parking is also inefficient because realistically you can only ever have one car parked in front of a small business, maybe two. Availability of parking does not correlate with business success, total traffic (foot, bike, and road) does. That's a myth started by NYMBYS to demonize bike lanes. The most successful franchises of any business are not the ones with the most parking, it's the ones with the most foot traffic, regardless of parking availability.
There's not a single incident where removal of street parking killed a business, it just can't happen. Again, most businesses without their own lots are only one or two spaces wide, those one or two people are not enough to sustain the business, which means they were already relying on people parking in private lots, side streets, or foot traffic. It is quite literally not possible to kill a business by removing street parking.
It's also not possible that chains are immune to these problems (if they existed) and small businesses aren't. What you've actually witnessed is gentrification caused by businesses not owning their property. Rents go up, small businesses leave, and the only places that can afford the rent are large corporations who can buy the land or rely on predictable incomes. Gentrification is caused by corporate landlords, not by bike lanes. You have been tricked.
@@XandateOfHeaven small business needed to be really attractive to people so they make the trip to get to you. Differentiating a small business is hard work. Having, for example, the best of something or unique handmade items it's required to convince people to come and see and purchase. You need more than the small local circle to pay those rents. I food it for 20 years. No way small business can deliver and ship like Amazon. Local delivery is very expensive and making 15 minute cities is really about blocking circulation, and that kills small business other than the basic coffee shops and eateries.
@@reallythere I disagree from a business theory perspective, and from empirical evidence. The value proposition of small businesses in walking distance is not that people are willing to commute to you, this is a car brained view of it, the value proposition is convenience. Amazon thrives because of car dependent culture. Being far away from everything means it's highly inconvenient and time consuming to get basic necessities. The only reason it's a viable business to ship people paper towels is because lots of people don't have a store with paper towels they can walk to easily.
Walmart is the same principle. If you're far from everything, you're going to drive to the one store that has everything so you only have to make one trip, that can afford the lot size for a huge parking lot. There is not a single Walmart in New York City, not one. I don't think there's any in Boston either, and there is maybe one in downtown Philadelphia.
Density means a few things. Firstly, it means the local community is larger. Secondly, it means you have a lot more foot traffic, so it's easier to coax people inside. Third, lot sizes are smaller so you're not competing with as many big box stores.
If you're talking about small businesses that require a lot of land and doesn't need foot traffic like a lumber yard, a trucking business, a paving company, then yeah your probably better off in a more remote area where land is cheaper. But if you're talking about mom and pop retail, you're invariably better off in a walkable city. I used to work for a local chain of restaurants, most of which were in the outer suburbs, but our most profitable location buy a margin of 2:1 was downtown by the train station.
After 4 years of consuming urbanism thought and content, I’ve honestly come to the conclusion that if we just implement a Land Value Tax and dramatically reduce (or, if possible, completely eliminate) all other taxes, the North American issues of car-dependency will sort themselves out. The problems brought up whenever we talk about urbanism goals are so intractable and they often seem to contradict each other. The first one that comes to mind is densifying a suburb, which I love the idea of, but that also necessarily means that rent and other costs of living go up because densification necessarily means higher land values. An LVT (taxing land values, not land improvements like buildings etc.) would allow you to have both. An LVT will necessarily cause cities to densify, and I really believe that the ensuing and serious reduction in income inequality to the point where virtually no one worries about money anymore will make people more open-minded to new ideas and see the obvious benefits of those new ideas, such as imagining a world where they can easily live their everyday life without a car
Only works if the LVT is linked with or quickly followed by radical zoning reform.
@@mindstalk Not necessarily, there would be still numerous benefits of LVT, but zoning reform should happen as well of course
I'm Murillo, a civil engineer based in Brazil. My typical walking pace is around 12 minutes per kilometer, and I can run at about 4 minutes per kilometer, while my bike commute usually takes 3-4 minutes per kilometer. However, even with these modes of transport, the 15-minute radius restricts accessibility to a limited area. My city spans 22 kilometers from one side to the other, and with a population of only 400,000, it's challenging to achieve the density and diversity required for a fully functional 15-minute city. While the concept encourages improved housing and mixed-use developments, it's unrealistic to expect all necessary amenities and services to be reachable within a 15-minute timeframe for all residents, considering the diverse needs and activities people engage in.
the point isnt 100% availability
but having a grocery - some recreation and other frequented destinations like the druggist within a 5 KM radius (your bike speed)