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Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk

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Re: Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk

#281

Post by battery_glasses »

This underscores how important small businesses are to the health of a city.

I live a in less walkable neighborhood on this map - but about a year ago a small (tiny really, ~700sqft) corner store opened up 2 blocks from me. It sells coffee, pastry, simple sandwiches, but also pantry staples (flour, sugar, milk etc.) and has a really good beer and wine selection.

I can't do my normal grocery shopping there, but being able to walk 2 minutes to get coffee or a quick breakfast or that missing stick of butter for a recipe has been such a wonderful change to the neighborhood. (btw this store is not reflected on the map for coffeeshops or groceries.) They also host food trucks several days a week so its almost like having a restaurant in the neighborhood too.

All it took was 1 little store, owned and operated by a couple who lives in the neighborhood, to turn a 20 minute neighborhood into a 5 minute neighborhood for several thousand people.

Re: Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk

#282

Post by ultrarunner »

patja wrote: post #272
eastof wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this area has a ton roundabouts, this was just poor planning. Supporting your point about Americans not knowing how to use them though, I see many people cut these roundabouts in this neighborhood. Meaning they will just turn left directly instead of actually going around. This is super scary when they're going fast and you're coming from the street they're turning into.

Seattle proper has no proper/modern roundabouts. It has hundreds of traffic calming circles which are often confused with roundabouts, but are not in the same class. Roundabouts have dividers at each entry/exit point which are lacking in neighborhood traffic calming circles. https://wsdot.wa.gov/travel/traffic-safety-methods/roundabou... Technically you can go any way around a traffic calming circle you want to, beca…

This stuff boggles the mind. Make a way to get around that's easier, realize it's too easy and causing problems, so then hobble it ineffectively— thus creating frustration but also retaining the danger. All the while watching ads about 300 hp luxury work trucks and "sport" vehicles. What a bizarre slice of modern life.

Re: Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk

#283

Post by bailoon »

com2kid wrote: post #124
duxup wrote: post #2

I like the idea of walking 15 minutes to get all the things. But man when I think of the costs involved in making sure there is a High School (in the US they tend to be large and draw from a distance) within 15 minutes of everywhere (no small cost to drop in a high school somewhere), or plop down a grocery store in a neighborhood ... that sounds both super expensive and politically difficult, and for some good reason…

Seattle doesn't have nearly enough density to have that many high schools. Given the ever falling birth rate, it likely never will. The density would need to be obscenely high. Figure high schools have 4x the number of students that elementary schools do, and we'd need 2x the elementary schools to make them all walkable, that means Seattle would have to have 8x the number of students in high school than it currently…

> Given the ever falling birth rate, it likely never will.

But Seattle and Washington are attracting people from the world and the rest of the nation. Both Seattle and Washington have been experience positive population growth for decades now.

Re: Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk

#284

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

battery_glasses wrote: post #281

This underscores how important small businesses are to the health of a city. I live a in less walkable neighborhood on this map - but about a year ago a small (tiny really, ~700sqft) corner store opened up 2 blocks from me. It sells coffee, pastry, simple sandwiches, but also pantry staples (flour, sugar, milk etc.) and has a really good beer and wine selection. I can't do my normal grocery shopping there, but being…

> (btw this store is not reflected on the map for coffeeshops or groceries.)

Why not fix that? Submit it to OSM, Apple Maps, or Google Maps or all three.

Re: Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk

#285

Post by sandworm101 »

ryukafalz wrote: post #259
sandworm101 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The city doesn't plow the sidewalks and bike trails, at least not until the roads are passable. First priority is emergency services and highway connections to the outside world, not shovelling out bike trails through the woods. Even then, we drive on compact snow for 1/3 the year.

Then this goes back to what I said initially: > you just need the infrastructure to let you do so Yes, if your city treats cycling as an afterthought, it will be less practical to cycle. If your city treated driving as an afterthought, it would be less practical to drive. You get what you build for and what you prioritize. > Even then, we drive on compact snow for 1/3 the year. Oulu has snow for half of the year and…

Lots of alternative transport things are possible in cities with 10x the population and 4x the urban density. And little farming/agra business. In a country one can drive across in a day. There is no comparison to the middle parts of North America.

Re: Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk

#286

Post by Pxtl »

bluGill wrote: post #275
Pxtl wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imho it was pre-war when it peaked. You look at rust-belt cities that were designed to be suburban but transit-oriented and you see a good balance; 3-bedroom houses where everybody has a back-yard but not necessarily a driveway, and the cities were irrigated with street-cars. Minor arteries would have corner stores and there were local shopping districts.

Those pre-war suburbs often featured larger lots than what modern suburbs do. (not exburbs which get very large).

While many modern suburbs have embraced townhomes and other denser form-factors, they have other strategies that result in taking up a lot of space - parking lots, massive wide right-of-way, Euclidean zoning blocking local shops, and heavily redundant road-ways, like arteries that have no development around them at all, just a sidewalk then a fence then some trees and a ditch and then the local road. Every person trying to walk to the artery to catch transit has to cross that.

In an old streetcar suburb, the only road wider than 3 cars were the arteries, and those arteries would still be lined with homes if not shops.

Re: Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk

#287

Post by Gigachad »

watermelon59 wrote: post #154
teucris wrote: post #114

Incredible analysis! As a Seattleite I can say the conclusions here are very close to accurate, with the key additional note being that distance is not the only thing that defines walkability. Seattle has some of the most confounding civil engineering I’ve ever seen, and I’ve lived in five cities and visited dozens more. Here are some things that make a pedestrian life near impossible in my neighborhood: - two high-t…

Seattle has so many intersections that are completely bonkers. They’re not only poorly walkable, they also make driving extremely stressful.

Do you guys not have red light cameras?

Australia has them everywhere so running a red light is almost never seen.

Re: Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk

#288

Post by battery_glasses »

ThePowerOfFuet wrote: post #284
battery_glasses wrote: post #281

This underscores how important small businesses are to the health of a city. I live a in less walkable neighborhood on this map - but about a year ago a small (tiny really, ~700sqft) corner store opened up 2 blocks from me. It sells coffee, pastry, simple sandwiches, but also pantry staples (flour, sugar, milk etc.) and has a really good beer and wine selection. I can't do my normal grocery shopping there, but being…

> (btw this store is not reflected on the map for coffeeshops or groceries.) Why not fix that? Submit it to OSM, Apple Maps, or Google Maps or all three.

It shows up on all 3, I think it might be a labeling issue. My guess is that its a classified as a "convenience store", but in reality its closer to a coffeeshop and bottleshop that sells pantry items.

Re: Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk

#289

Post by 2bitencryption »

teucris wrote: post #114

Incredible analysis! As a Seattleite I can say the conclusions here are very close to accurate, with the key additional note being that distance is not the only thing that defines walkability. Seattle has some of the most confounding civil engineering I’ve ever seen, and I’ve lived in five cities and visited dozens more. Here are some things that make a pedestrian life near impossible in my neighborhood: - two high-t…

And my personal favorite:

Street traffic is allowed through Pike Place Market.

Every weekend I have a grand old time in the market, watching tourists make the worst mistake of their visit, their rental car crawling at 1mph through probably the largest tourist attraction in the PNW.

Re: Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk

#290

Post by Dig1t »

throwawaythrow1 wrote: post #112
Dig1t wrote: post #107

Seeing the UK’s implementation of 15 minute cities, where cars are locked down to zones, movement is tracked by ubiquitous camera surveillance, and residents have to apply for a special pass to leave their zone. Talk of 15 minute cities in the US makes me nervous. When we talk about 15 minute cities here, do we mean zoning changes to build things differently? Or are we talking about authoritarian enforcement? Edit: O…

As someone who lives in the UK, this is news to me. Can you substantiate this please?

I admit that the way it was described to me was probably exaggerated, but this is what I'm talking about:

https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/23073992.traffic-filters-w...

"People can drive freely around their own neighbourhood and can apply for a permit to drive through the filters, and into other neighbourhoods, for up to 100 days per year. This equates to an average of two days per week."

This is enforced with surveillance cameras.

As I said in another comment: it does seem to me that enforcing movement like this and adding bureaucracy to drive through certain places is a solid step in the direction of authoritarianism.

The article is titled "Traffic filters will divide city into "15 minute" neighbourhoods"

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