[HN Gopher] The 15-minute city (2020)
___________________________________________________________________
The 15-minute city (2020)
Author : nephanth
Score : 68 points
Date : 2022-07-24 13:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| BurningFrog wrote:
| In Tokyo most everything is nearby, because tall buildings have
| enormous amounts of space.
| potatolicious wrote:
| Extra bonus to tall buildings having enormous amounts of space:
| rent is cheaper, and as a result more businesses are viable!
|
| There is a depressing "sameness" to American cities and their
| amenities that's oft remarked-upon but I remain convinced that
| the single biggest contributor to that is real estate. When
| real estate costs _that much_ the level of business to break
| even is astronomical, and only businesses with the broadest
| possible (and correspondingly, blandest possible) reach
| survive.
|
| The thing I love most about the Tokyo is the absolutely off-
| the-walls level of tiny businesses catering to incredibly niche
| interests. A great majority of these businesses would be
| totally unviable in the US - real estate in major cities is too
| expensive, and real estate outside the major cities have too
| small of a market.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| > "We're often mixed up with Paris," jokes Chris Warner, director
| of the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT).
|
| Portland looks good by comparison to other cities in the US that
| are doing literally nothing, or actively trying to maintain the
| existing car centric planning methods.
|
| The greenways in Portland are really nice compared to other
| places, but it still requires a lot of bravery from cyclists
| which limits the appeal of biking for a lot of people. Haven't
| been hit by a car since moving out of SF though so that's
| something.
| cammikebrown wrote:
| As someone who lives in Portland in what I'd consider to be a
| 5-minute neighborhood (NE 28th), the bike infrastructure is
| pretty good, but limited to certain streets. Biking on
| Burnside, Sandy, and much of 28th itself is quite dangerous,
| and there's often no bike lane at all. However, there are many
| nearby streets (SE Ankeny, 30th) which are safe and actually
| designated as bike streets. But I often see clueless cyclists
| biking on the major streets instead. I'm not sure what we need
| to do to educate, because as a daily cyclist it's really
| frustrating to see.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| I feel/understand the bit about "clueless cyclists biking on
| the major streets" but that feels like a failure of
| infrastructure to me (sort of like how rust is a improvement
| over c). Anything from: - bad signage & route marking - bad
| navigation instructions (Apple maps and sometimes google maps
| sending people down streets they shouldn't be on as a
| inexperienced bike rider) - longer routes around (Thinking of
| Sandy here where cars get to drive the hypotenuse while bikes
| are supposed to bike at right angles to the city grid) - lack
| of completely separated bike roads (if these existed I would
| almost never want to mix it up with cars) - lack of options
| for connecting between bikeways can end up with someone being
| in a bad spot pretty quickly through accident or intention.
|
| I live out a bit closer to the airport and agree it's still a
| lot better than most cities but still end up biking around
| and on Sandy which is always unpleasant in its current state.
|
| Also even on the bike streets you end up with frustrated
| drivers who are trying to use it as a shortcut or find it
| unacceptable to travel a couple of MPH less when they're
| behind a bike for a few blocks. Specifically not allowing
| non-local traffic would make the bike/slow streets a lot more
| welcoming to people in my life who don't want to drive but
| feel trapped by having to own a car.
| abeppu wrote:
| I was struck by the level of ambition in this article vs the bar
| being set decades ago in some Soviet planned cities: (timestamped
| link) https://youtu.be/JGVBv7svKLo?t=420s
|
| Now, admittedly there's a huge difference between a new planned
| neighborhood and updating existing ones, and I'm not saying I
| want to live in the planned one ... but a cap of 500m to some
| amenities is a much higher bar to reach for.
| kieselguhr_kid wrote:
| I'm waiting eagerly for the day when people in the west can
| grow up enough to learn from Soviet city and housing policies.
| Too many people just turn their minds off when they hear that
| godless commies did it.
| kuldeep_kap wrote:
| I'm dreaming of the day when US cities start adopting car-light
| (if not car-free), walkable & bikeable urban designs. I have no
| interest in car centric 15-min cities. They are hard to scale and
| even when you achieve that goal with cars, the standard living is
| poor.
|
| Portland & Detroit comparison is a bit laughable. May be we'll
| see this one day, but I'll believe it when I see it.
| kieselguhr_kid wrote:
| I live in one of the "complete neighborhoods" in Portland and
| it's really nice. I can walk to the grocery store to buy fresh
| food for each day, and I'm less than fifteen minutes by foot
| from three public parks (and a tiny one that I don't really
| count). This is far from representative of the city itself, but
| I would never want to give this lifestyle up.
| munk-a wrote:
| Burlington VT was a lovely city to live in though the fact that
| it's Vermont means you'd need a car to get practically anywhere
| the downtown core is dense enough to allow you to walk, eat,
| shop and dine[1]. But, honestly, the city has pretty weak
| public transit infrastructure due to its size and the grocery
| options available by foot are extremely limited and pricey.
|
| I think it's one of the better options in N/A outside of NYC,
| Boston and places in Canada (especially Quebec City and
| Montreal) - Boulder also often comes up in discussion though
| I've never been.
|
| Comparing these to European cities which weren't leveled in WW2
| is insane though - when pedestrians are first class citizens
| cities are absolutely wonderful to live in.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Street_Marketplace
| pharmakom wrote:
| > I have no interest in car centric 15-min cities.
|
| A car centric 15 minute city is literally impossible. There
| will always be too much congestion to get anywhere in 15
| minutes since cars take up too much space.
| replygirl wrote:
| tell me you live in a busier part of a global city without
| telling me you live in a busier part of a global city
| munk-a wrote:
| I think car oriented cities come with a lot of issues, but I
| don't think this is really a fair statement. Small towns can
| easily exist with <15min commutes and the city scalable
| version of this (which I hate, but does work) is basically a
| continuous field of suburbs dotted with occasional clumps of
| box stores stretching out into the horizon.
| SkeuomorphicBee wrote:
| It is possible, just not scalable. It is ready for a small
| city to be a car centric 15 minute city, but once population
| reaches the 6 digits problems start to arise, and ~500k is
| the rough upper limit where it becomes impossible.
| asdff wrote:
| Cleveland is a car centric 15 minute city. But only because
| it has enough highway infrastructure to contend with cities
| 10x its size and it currently sits at about half its peak
| population. Once you infill that it falls apart and you get
| your chicagoland traffic going 12mph anywhere at all.
| pavon wrote:
| It's not clear what you mean by that. It is easy to build a
| city where you can reach everything you need within 15
| minutes by car. What is hard is to build a city like that
| where you can also reach everything you need by foot within
| 15 minutes. I don't think it is as impossible as some
| urbanists make it though.
|
| The downtown in my city is by far the most dense and walkable
| area of town while still being far more accommodating for car
| drivers than any of the areas that have been newly
| revitalized for walkability. The main difference is the
| existence of ample parking shelters where the main (st)roads
| hit downtown, unlike the new areas that insist on only having
| street parking to intentionally limit the number of cars.
| Both approaches allow the area to be designed for walkability
| first. But the former does a better job at accommodating
| people who don't live within 15-minutes by walking or public
| transit, and does a better job at keeping cars from being a
| nuisance. Because the motorists have a convenient place to
| park and walk they do so, while street parking only forces
| the cars into the walkable streets(and surrounding
| neighborhoods) to circle endlessly looking for a place to
| park and increasing congestion.
|
| I really like the strong-towns framing of delineating roads
| vs streets which are designed for cars and pedestrians
| respectively. I think too many people are quick to jump on
| the assumption that roads==bad and streets==good, when having
| good roads and parking structures can relieve the pressure
| and allow your streets to be streets. At least in the short-
| term, and in the long-term you are going to want to keeps
| some sort of arterial land strips for public transit use (in
| all but the most dense areas which can support subways). So
| making them roads now with a mix of buses and cars that
| gradually becomes more buses, and then possibly dedicated
| public transit makes for a good growth plan.
| sien wrote:
| I live in a car centric 15 minute city.
|
| My work is ~13 minutes away. There is a Primary and Secondary
| School within 5 and 20 minutes walk. A supermarket is a 10
| minute bike ride away. A hospital is 10 minutes drive away. A
| top 50 ranked University is 25 minutes drive away.
|
| There is a good question from w-j-w that has been deleted
| here. Yes - it's a 15 minute car city at 8:30 AM. My commute
| goes to about 14 minutes...
|
| This is on the days when I'm not WFH - which should also be
| factored in.
| [deleted]
| w-j-w wrote:
| Is your city a 15 minute city at 8:30 AM?
| imachine1980_ wrote:
| where?, sound interesting to research.
| sien wrote:
| Canberra.
| HeyItsMatt wrote:
| Walter Burley Griffin designed Canberra with space
| allotted for highly efficient tramways that still haven't
| been built.
|
| The guy has been dead for nearly one hundred years and
| the city still hasn't assigned a replacement urban
| planner...
| rayiner wrote:
| I live outside of Annapolis, in a metro area of about 150,000
| people, and everything is within 15 minutes even with
| traffic.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Climates in Texas and other southern areas make this borderline
| impossible during the summer. Ditto for northern cities in
| winter months.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Your claim about northern cities is just not backed up by
| data, we have:
|
| - the large amount of bike culture in Minneapolis, people
| ride all year long (once you're moving you'll stay pretty
| warm with the right gear)
| https://gearjunkie.com/biking/minneapolis-bike-capital
|
| - the bike culture in Finland where it's even colder:
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-
| blog/2020/feb/0...
|
| the difference in most of the US that it's not prioritized by
| local government, bike lanes don't get plowed and fill up
| with gravel, there's not sufficient bike infrastructure to
| being with etc
| PeopleB4Cars wrote:
| Perhaps we shouldn't be encouraging people to live in such
| places then
| milkytron wrote:
| I think there are steps that could help reduce the affects of
| heat. Things such as more street trees, less asphalt (reduce
| the heat island effect), heat reflecting building roofs, etc.
|
| It's not like the south is a lost cause, improvement can
| still be made.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Perhaps but 102 is still 102. I think you can make the same
| argument in Chicago when it's 10 and snowing.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Plenty of people walk to do things like get groceries in
| Chicago.
|
| Heck, there is a subartic city in Finland with 12%
| cycling share, which is a lot higher than pretty much any
| city in North America. https://www.euronews.com/my-
| europe/amp/2021/01/22/meet-the-b...
| munk-a wrote:
| Chicago can (and in some areas has - along with Boston)
| fixed that issue with pedestrian tunnels that allow easy
| movement during cold weather. A similar fix is available
| for southern cities but I think a more reasonable
| approach is just tighter pedestrian alleys that prevent
| full sun from ever bathing the walking surface (and
| reduce sun exposure to buildings) along with lots and
| lots of trees. Trees are seriously amazing and
| dissipating heat from the sun.
|
| Once you eliminate the sun you just need to make sure
| that wind alleys are set up to keep air moving through
| the city and have regular green spaces with water to help
| reduce air temperature. This can be done quite
| sustainably - Las Vegas is actually a great example of
| (rather) sustainable water use from a city built in the
| middle of a desert.
| truth777 wrote:
| stakkur wrote:
| Nobody seems to stop and ask "are super high density cities
| what's best for human health?", and that seems rather odd.
|
| No, I'm not talking about 'study x showed people like walkable
| cities', I'm talking about efforts like making connections
| between the correlated explosion in mental and physical health
| issues and the rise of large, dense cities.
|
| Portland covers 145 square miles, is geographically diverse, and
| has a profoundly hollowed out middle class that comes in part
| from pandering to failed ideas like those of Richard Florida (who
| has himself admitted being wrong). Now, 1 in 5 Portland kids live
| in poverty, Californians and foreign investors buy entire
| neighborhoods and build block upon block of condo boxes, and the
| cost of living is through the roof. There is no 'Portlandia'
| here, just caricatures and deepening poverty and a bizarrely out
| of touch municipal government elected based on pet ideas.
|
| And the average age of Portland residents? ~37 and rising. The
| percent of the population that are children (<19 years) has
| declined over 30% in the last two decades. It's a city for
| tourists, real estate speculation and arbitrage, and amenities
| pandering to an ever-older base.
| oangemangut wrote:
| People do wonder whether low-density, un-walkable, cites are
| _bad_ for human health, and studies show that they typically
| are bad health. I recall some studies on urban form and it's
| relationship to life expectancy, crime, happiness at certain
| socioeconomic statuses. Poor people in much of Montreal are
| able to live in walkable cities with low housing cost and
| decent transit, and it turns out they live longer, are more
| economically mobile, and are happier than equivalent SES
| populations in large cities with car-centric design.
| kieselguhr_kid wrote:
| I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that density
| itself is the cause of higher rates of mental illness. Density
| is more likely to correlate with exposure to car exhaust, for
| instance, and programs to care for mentally ill people tend to
| be located in denser areas. The crushing economic pressures of
| modern life regardless of location, combined with continued
| urbanization, seem to me more likely to be the cause than dense
| urban spaces.
| stakkur wrote:
| https://www.urbandesignmentalhealth.com/how-the-city-
| affects...
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5374256/
| lprd wrote:
| I've thought a lot about this and I think the answer is no. I
| lived in Paris for almost a decade and my mental health would
| deteriorate if I didn't make it point to leave the city
| periodically. Sure, there are many benefits to living in a
| city...quality of life is not one of them.
|
| Apartment life simply wasn't for me. Being subject to my
| neighbors noisiness was a huge drain! I understand that being a
| home owner doesn't automatically shield you from bad neighbors,
| but it hits much different when they are on top of you. It just
| felt like a discounted way of living. Having things like a yard
| (where you can do whatever you want with) are huge quality of
| life boosters. Having a house on some land I think is ideal.
| Although that goes against the current narrative. I am very
| worried about this new push for 'optimizing living spaces'.
| Where companies are buying up land en masse and constructing
| condos/apartments. It's not the way to live!
|
| I think being in close quarters to each other goes against our
| nature. Humans need space. How much? More than you may think.
| milkytron wrote:
| I'm fine if people think they need space, I just don't think
| that cities should outlaw other options, and sprawling
| infrastructure should have its costs tied more closely to the
| users. It's very expensive and unfortunately it's people
| living in denser areas that foot a large part of the bill.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > Although that goes against the current narrative. I am very
| worried about this new push for 'optimizing living spaces'.
| Where companies are buying up land en masse and constructing
| condos/apartments. It's not the way to live!
|
| It's important to remember that different people have
| different preferences. Having a yard to my partner and I has
| always been yet another maintenance burden, another one of
| life's incessant worries to upkeep. My favorite part of our
| local park is the ability to go there and not mow the lawn,
| not make sure the grass is upkept, not make sure the wind
| blew something over or whatnot. I have a friend with a large
| suburban home who is constantly fixing some thing or the
| other and seems to be forever living in a state of partial
| brokenness. He loves it, every day is a project for him, but
| this would drive my partner and I insane. Our neighbors are
| families and while they can be noisy at times the kids go
| silent around 9 PM and everything is quiet. My sleep is never
| disturbed.
|
| It's good that you realized space is helpful for your mental
| health. But not for everyone. Living in an SFH neighborhood
| made my partner deeply depressed. The sound of neighbors'
| conversations gave her a sense of connectedness which
| improved her mental health drastically. When my grandparents
| from an urban area in a developing country first visited my
| parents SFH in the US, they found the area to be incredibly
| isolating and had a hard time sleeping without the background
| hum of people around them.
|
| People are different. It's important for us to build housing
| of all types, so those who desire space have their space and
| for those who desire close connectedness have it as well.
| rsaz wrote:
| Its really incredible the ways in which living in a walkable
| neighbourhood can improve your life. More activity from walking
| around, less pollution, better views etc.
|
| One thing I've noticed is I tend to see small businesses in
| walkable areas more often. Not sure why that is, but its another
| benefit I haven't seen discussed quite as much.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Car-dependent areas need a lot of requirements to thrive. They
| need large setbacks, minimum parking allotments, throughput
| requirements on entrances and exits, etc. Walkable areas have
| minimal setbacks and can have no minimum parking allotments.
| This lends itself to smaller building footprints and
| correspondingly lower building and maintenance rents. Smaller,
| lower-revenue businesses can afford to rent these smaller
| locations out. Correspondingly small businesses in walkable
| locations need to spend less money on signage (as only those on
| foot will need to see it) and marketing as foot traffic
| naturally leads to serendipitous shopping.
| munk-a wrote:
| In particular less cars means paths that are more suitable to
| walking in all weather - having a treed foot path instead of a
| boulevard outside your house makes a big difference in heat
| exposure to pedestrians and buildings. If you look at old
| Iberian (especially Portugal) you'll see very aggressive tree
| placement coupled with narrow alleys to try and keep paths
| walkable when things get really hot. It's night and day
| comparing the tight shady paths in Porto to the sun blasted
| avenues common in Florida - while the temperatures are pretty
| close the experience is entirely different.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Here's my suspicion, from having lived in both car-centric
| suburbs and a dense city:
|
| When you're driving somewhere, you typically have a destination
| in mind. You're often moving too fast to spot smaller
| businesses that probably don't have enormous signs, and it's
| probably not convenient to just suddenly stop and park your car
| if you do happen to see something interesting. And everyone
| already knows about the big chains, but not so much about small
| businesses, so they're less likely to be your initial
| destination.
|
| By contrast, when you're on foot, you're moving slowly enough
| that you can take in anything around you, so you'll spot small
| places more easily. And if you do decide to stop in, you're
| right there.
|
| (Cycling is somewhere in between, but I'd say closer to walking
| than driving in these respects.)
| milkytron wrote:
| All that, in addition to having the need to shop for as much
| stuff as possible during a single trip. People will fill up
| their entire car at costco, but if you're walking or cycling,
| you don't typically have as much cargo carrying capacity. So
| a massive costco, walmart, or target trip doesn't always make
| sense.
|
| Splitting up the errands while walking or biking will result
| in either multiple trips to a big box store, or every time
| you leave the house, you knock off a few items on the list
| from the nearest store. The nearest store probably isn't a
| big box store since they have so much parking, so they aren't
| really around walkable areas as much.
| abeppu wrote:
| Regarding small businesses in walkable areas, I think maybe the
| flip side of the same phenomena is a partial explanation. Big
| box stores, large corporate office parks, etc, don't work in
| walkable areas; they need a large footprint and wrap themselves
| in a lot of parking and they want people to get in and out of
| those parking lots easily so they do best on an arterial. If
| the big businesses are structurally pushed away from walkable
| areas, small businesses will naturally be over-represented
| there. Plus they can benefit from serendipitous discovery in
| those locations, since their marketing budgets may be nil.
| munk-a wrote:
| It's interesting but that isn't actually always the case - a
| lot of cities use oversized blocks (blocks that are both
| taller and wider than a row of buildings - see Barcelona[1])
| if this is the case then large department stores can expand
| into the courtyard or gardenspace interior of the block and,
| of course, in a lot of European cities a lot of malls are
| built vertically and underground - sometimes lying underneath
| a road with entrances on both sides.
|
| Large stores can work in walkable cities and they do have a
| place - but they are usually for relatively rare needs (so
| more likely to be focused on clothes or specialty groceries).
|
| 1. https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/aerial-view-of-
| barcelon...
| waynesonfire wrote:
| oh is the shopping mall with a large parking lot and a taco-bell
| within a 15 minutes driving distance in every suburb formula not
| working anymore? /s
| blamazon wrote:
| "The Real Reason Your City Has No Money" :
|
| https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...
| scrumbledober wrote:
| No, not really.
| wussboy wrote:
| Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but the answer to
| your question is "no, it doesn't scale and is too expensive to
| maintain".
| bee_rider wrote:
| Got to scale in 3 dimensions to the stuff within a given
| radius scales like O(n^3) rather than O(n^2).
| gumby wrote:
| SF should reinvent itself along these lines.
|
| I used to live in Paris and believed that this sort of
| transformation would be impossible.
| [deleted]
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| This would never happen in SF. The local store block would be
| instantly taken over by homeless druggies [1]. To have this
| sort of transformation, the local culture needs to have little
| tolerance for disruptive behaviors and peoples.
|
| Ex: in Europe many public bathrooms require payment, in the US
| you can't even allow stores to require a purchase to use the
| restroom due to public pressure (not laws, yet).
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2CVMCZ6F2M
| uoaei wrote:
| Wow, what an intolerant, judgmental, and useless comment. At
| least you live your values...
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| I think you would have a different opinion when your
| property was stolen, your partner assaulted, and your sense
| of safety destroyed by such behavior. You can't promote the
| use of bikes if your bike is going to be stolen and chopped
| up the second you take your eye off it.
|
| I vote my values too, by the way.
| munk-a wrote:
| It really is a hard problem and a hard policy to advance.
| I'm pro-pedestrianization but can really understand the
| concerns of car folks in terms of service availability
| and business health. There have been plenty of times
| where car restrictions have been done wrong and ended up
| killing off city centers - but in terms of safety the
| availability of safe and secure bike storage seems to
| require an almost autocratic initial effort. Forcing safe
| storage and monitoring, along with safe bike lanes, to be
| rolled out so that the demand can grow - it's very hard
| for demand to grow organically while bike theft and car-
| bike accidents are so common that they'll discourage
| usage.
|
| Ditto for public transit, when public transit is sparsely
| utilized it tends to be less safe while as dense public
| transit will certainly have incidents but the increased
| ridership leads to increased safety funding and just more
| witnesses making crime less attractive in terms of
| expected gain.
|
| It is a hard problem even before we get into NIMBYism and
| other socio-political complications. I definitely
| disagree with you but I think your comment was quite fair
| and reasonable.
| _dain_ wrote:
| Intolerant, judgemental, and correct.
| uoaei wrote:
| Not sure how you can claim that since "correct" only
| applies to factual claims and above is purely
| hypothetical. Or do you always assume ideology can stand
| in place of reality?
| pookha wrote:
| I live in a major US city that has expansive "outdoor
| camping" w homeless who harasse and terrorize(rob) the
| locals. The progressives live in fear of the homeless AND
| saying anything about the problem because they don't want
| to be the bad-guy. It's very interesting. From what I can
| tell people have become extremely hyper-socialized and
| are willing to put their safety at risk.
| _dain_ wrote:
| "Over-socialized", one might say.
| gumby wrote:
| Most of the city is much more sedate than what was shot on
| that video (which is extreme. I don't dispute it, but was
| next to a treatment center.)
|
| Paid public toilets are all over California and businesses do
| typically restrict bathroom use to paying customers, yes, in
| SF too.
|
| Without SF's tolerance for weirdos due to the gold rush we
| wouldn't have had the rule breakers of the valley.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| Funnily enough, this sort of behavior is not tolerated in
| the actual Valley, where things were actually started. You
| don't see it happening in Mountain View and Cupertino.
| gumby wrote:
| The Valley is all suburbs, where people don't like that
| sort of thing. That being said, Palo Alto used to have a
| lot more homeless people, and more weirdness too. I can't
| imagine the Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane starting
| there any more. Yet still I live in PA.
|
| SF has always had a much higher tolerance for weird
| behavior. Back when the city was a bedroom community for
| the Valley, people lived there (I did too) for its
| weirdness and culture. What happened with the dot com
| boom is that people who didn't appreciate the weirdness
| showed up, moved to SF, and then complained about it.
|
| Honestly SF is a lot cleaner and safer now. Those whiners
| would not have tolerated the true weirdness.
| abeppu wrote:
| The main definition set in the article seems to be
| neighborhoods in "which almost all residents' needs can be met
| within 15 minutes of their homes on foot, by bike, or on public
| transit." The maps in the center of the article ignore biking
| and only show walking and transit, but the difference is pretty
| big. If you work from home, or live near work, what parts of
| the city are more than a 15-min bike ride from "needs"? In a
| city that we pretend is 7 miles a side, 15 min of biking can
| take you to a very different neighborhood.
|
| I'm also super skeptical of the transit maps ... b/c even if a
| route is going where you need it to go, the 15 min should also
| include waiting times. In some cases, 15 min takes you 0.0
| miles on muni buses.
| gumby wrote:
| Transit in modern cities like Paris, Tokyo, or Moscow is very
| rapid and frequent. Don't be deceived by old fashioned places
| like SF.
|
| A lot of people can't bike (I am forbidden from biking for
| another six months, for instance, due to an injury). Plus
| biking in SF isn't the same as biking in Manhattan.
| abeppu wrote:
| I guess, you've claimed that "SF should reinvent itself
| along these lines" in response to an article that
| specifically includes biking as part of its 15-min
| definition. I've suggested that in SF we probably largely
| already meet that definition, relying heavily on the "or"
| in "on foot, by bike, or on public transit". It sounds like
| you're now discounting a whole mode of transit that was
| repeatedly discussed in the article, on the basis of not
| being universally accessible.
|
| I would hasten to point out that not everyone walks or can
| take all public transit (BART elevators frequently being
| broken is an issue for wheelchair users, for example).
|
| > Plus biking in SF isn't the same as biking in Manhattan.
|
| It's true SF has more hills. But why should Manhattan be
| the baseline? Wrt getting to necessities within 15m, I
| still think almost all of the city qualifies. We don't
| mostly put our grocery stores on hilltops, for example.
|
| I'll refine my point: even though SF does have a bunch
| neighborhoods which are set up to be residential, the
| city's small footprint means that without trying all that
| hard, people end up being close in absolute distances to
| the necessities of life anyway.
|
| I do think it's worth pointing out that Tokyo and Moscow
| each have literally >10x the population of SF. It's kind of
| an apples-and-oranges comparison; of _course_ they have
| more rapid public transit.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > It's a utopian vision in an era of deep social distress--but
| one that might, if carried out piecemeal, without an eye to
| equality, exacerbate existing inequities.
|
| Progress and equality (of outcome) are almost always in
| opposition. You can't have Tesla model 3s without much wealthier
| people having bought Roadsters to prove the concept in low scale.
| Nevermark wrote:
| I would argue the opposite conclusion.
|
| Tesla leveraged existing inequality to get the funding to bring
| the advantages of quality electric cars to more people (i.e.
| reducing inequality of options).
|
| This can be contrasted with dysfunctional dynamics that
| maintain or expand the differences between rich and poor
| options.
| r5Khe wrote:
| https://archive.ph/id7ev
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Fifteen minutes might as well be 20 or 30. As soon as I have to
| get in my car, it doesn't make much difference.
|
| Living somewhere that you can meet your daily needs without a car
| is lifechanging. But just having a shorter commute only makes
| things slightly more convenient.
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