I used to work with Nat at IHME. He and others there did great work in the global health space.
I highly recommend playing around with some of the datasets and visualization tools.
Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk
211–220 of 398 posts
Re: Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Queen Anne has a 7-way stop! The first time I encountered it I was thoroughly stumped. Actually, I'm still stumped years later every time I go through it. At some point, I just commit and hope for the best.
Sounds like it used to function as something of a roundabout, and America forgotten how to navigate yielding to traffic coming from a relative direction (i.e. people already in the roundabout from your left) instead of someone always having the right of way, or the weird turn-taking stress of an all-way stop.
Roundabout; Cars in the roundabout ALREADY have the right of way. Everyone entering is yielding to the street they're T-ing into. Exit, in theory, is from right of way into a dedicated path.
Only self driving cars, or better licensing tests for drivers can save us from this. Every N years drivers probably should need to re-test, including a physical practical test in a standard unit (from the DMV) for parking and to see how the driver responds if driving a rental car that they aren't familiar with.
Re: Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live within 30 seconds walk of 2 cafes, 2 grocery shops, and a pub (I can see them down the street from my window as I type this). And you literally can't hear them from my house. There's also a primary school nearby which occasionally gets noisy, but there's no noise from the shops.
What? It takes 30 seconds to walk across the street
It takes a lot longer to walk across a street when you have to wait for a walk signal. City streets can be 1.5-2 lane residential streets which you can cross basically on demand, making them equivalent in time to walking on the sidewalk. Based on an average walking pace of 1.33 m/s (3.0 mph), you can cover 40m in 30 seconds.
https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6243731,-122.3250919,18.81z
The blocks in this section of Seattle are ~80m long, so one block takes 60s to walk. The "Mercer on Summit" apartments on this map are within 1/2 block (30s) from 3 restaurants, 2 bars, and 1 small grocery.
Re: Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk
#214I'm going to venture an educated guess that proximity of things like grocery stores, restaurants and schools in urban areas is going to be highly correlated with income. Lower income neighborhoods are going to have gas stations and 7-Elevens/AMPMs. So an effort to make a true 15-min city should help improve quality of life and access to healthier food for lower-income residents. That would be a good thing.
Gas stations and corner stores also tend to have the highest prices. Climate change policy advocates are doing a real disservice to their cause by not being honest with people about the sacrifices/hardships these polices will cause in the short term. Deception is not a viable long term political strategy.
> Gas stations and corner stores also tend to have the highest prices.
Yes, along with the least healthy food. Food poverty (in the sense of being unable to afford or access healthy food) is a very serious problem in America that contributes to the high numbers of unhealthy people and obesity rates. It's one of those things that isn't talked about enough, and certainly I don't read much about efforts to fix it.
Re: Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gas stations and corner stores also tend to have the highest prices. Climate change policy advocates are doing a real disservice to their cause by not being honest with people about the sacrifices/hardships these polices will cause in the short term. Deception is not a viable long term political strategy.
If you take the corner store model as far as many European, NY, etc cities - You remove the $300-400+/mo cost of a car (ballparking here) Otherwise if the local shops are more expensive (in any meaningful way), consumers would simply drive the additional N miles to the Walmart Supercenter as things kind of are as is
A big part of the problem is that the U.S. doesn't have European-style local grocery stores (and if they do, they're expensive farmer market style boutiques in high-priced areas).
Re: Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk
#216I'm going to venture an educated guess that proximity of things like grocery stores, restaurants and schools in urban areas is going to be highly correlated with income. Lower income neighborhoods are going to have gas stations and 7-Elevens/AMPMs. So an effort to make a true 15-min city should help improve quality of life and access to healthier food for lower-income residents. That would be a good thing.
Has any city been able to do that? With the current hands-off punishment of theft, stores have multiple incentives working against them to open in low income neighborhoods.
Is there a problem with thievery of apples, oranges, asparagus and beetroots? I don't have the numbers but I would bet money that most store thievery is cigarettes, alcohol, maybe sodas, and small electronics, pills at CVS, etc.
So no, I don't think theft is the major factor.
Re: Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk
#217I'm going to venture an educated guess that proximity of things like grocery stores, restaurants and schools in urban areas is going to be highly correlated with income. Lower income neighborhoods are going to have gas stations and 7-Elevens/AMPMs. So an effort to make a true 15-min city should help improve quality of life and access to healthier food for lower-income residents. That would be a good thing.
this is a very US centric view and problem... in other countries lower income does not correlate with no access to local grocery shopping school etc... a german newspaper did a great income analysis of german cities [1]. You really see the differentiation in income, but if you overlay (at least for the cities I looked at) it with a map even in the low income neighborhood you get decent grocery shopping in walking dis…
Yes, I was specifically referring to the US (since the article was about Seattle). I've lived in Europe / Asia and it's very different of course.
Re: Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk
#218The way “supermarkets” are in the US, I don’t WANT to be a 15 minute walk from one. They are usually surrounded by a mile of blacktop and concrete, for all the drive-in shoppers in the front and all the trucks offloading goods or picking up deliveries in the back. Would much rather be near a decent small or midsize grocery with no or limited off-street parking, and which receives its deliveries on the street in the e…
The IGA in downtown Seattle is a great example of how it should be. It's just a standard store front on the block that goes down a level to a normal sized grocery store. No huge parking, and in fact, I walked past it for years before realizing it was a grocery store.
That store closed last year, I believe. That entire block of 3rd is a deserted wasteland now.
Re: Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> ...despite living walking distance to 3 grocery stores, I still typically drive a mile away to a larger store because... A mobile consumer base, people with cars that can travel to potentially hundreds of retail options, is a backbone of American competition. Like cars or not, they empower consumers to defeat local monopolies. The next stage, pickup trucks, then empowers retailers to sell large products (appliance…
Nothing about cars specifically enables this. Building cities so that you have to drive to travel any significant distance, however, guarantees that you need a car to take advantage of competitive pricing. But that's self-apparent... Building dense cities that can be accessed by bike and on foot would have the same effect. Spreading out your city so that what could be a 15 minute walk is now a 15 minute drive isn't a…
> Building dense cities that can be accessed by bike and on foot would have the same effect.
I love density, but, in my experience this is not true. London doesn't have a large competitive market of grocery stores. Neither does Boston or New York City.
Density means higher real estate prices, that means grocery store sizes go down, and the barrier to entry goes up. Yes you can get more small specialty shops (which is great!) but I've had times where I've had to go to 3 different large supermarkets to find some oddball item I needed, and density would make that even harder on me since stores would have a smaller variety of stock.
Of course the 2 largest grocery store chains in America are trying to merge, so very soon American cities won't have much competition either.
I'm not saying density isn't good, it is, and it makes lots of shopping easier, but certain types of (uniquely) American retail experiences fall apart when cities become more dense.
Heck Seattle already is dense enough that there is only 1 Costco within the city limits, the density of Costco's in the suburbs surrounding Seattle is actually quite high! Prior to living in the city proper, I was a 15 minute drive from two Costcos! Now I am a 30 minute drive from one Costco. Since I don't have the time to go that far on a frequent basis for groceries, I am paying more for food living in a city that has more grocery stores around me, than I was when I lived in the suburbs.
Re: Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk
#220Do any Seattle-ites not have a car? How do you get around? Asking as a NYer who would consider living there if the car-free life wouldn't be too painful
I've lived in Seattle for ~10 years and haven't owned a car the entire time. I use public transit, walk, or a Lyft to get around. I live in Belltown (5th and Vine) and in general all the places I need to get to are within walking distance. Even the international district is only ~20-30 minutes walk for me, or I can take the light rail.