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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

#111

Post by elbigbad »

bitschubser_ wrote: post #90
insane_dreamer wrote: post #71

I'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…

The article is about Seattle, which is currently a US city, so imho it’s reasonable to have a US-centric view of the problem.

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

#112

Post by throwawaythrow1 »

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?

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

#113

Post by mikeyouse »

ghaff wrote: post #100
mikeyouse wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, you're not wrong, here's the 2010 map; https://assets.aecf.org/m/blogimg/blog-exploringamericasfood...

That map looks to me as if it's much more about poorer rural areas that are more than 10 miles from a grocery store than inner cities.

It's as misleading in that way as the big silly maps they show around election time -- since we care about the number of people, not the number of acres.

There are 19 million people in the shaded areas. If we bump up the criteria to 1 mile urban / 20 miles rural, it's still over 17 million people, so clearly a lot of the people at discussion are in urban areas. Even so, it looks like another half million people are over 20 miles from a store who don't have access to a vehicle. Not great!

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

#114

Post by teucris »

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-traffic, multi-lane streets where people routinely run red lights and drive erratically, one dividing us from my child’s elementary school

- Many areas with no sidewalks and no area on the side of the road that’s safe to walk

- 5-way intersections with extremely confusing walk signals.

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

#115

Post by eptcyka »

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…

What are you on about?

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

#116

Post by ghaff »

kortilla wrote: post #83
spacemadness wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hope is that if not Gen Z then the following generation will push for American cities to get their act together and become better for people to live in. It is going to take a lot of political will to make it work as the entrenched older generations want things to stay the same as always and/or cannot envision a different way of living. A walkable city with car free zones seems like a fantasy and that is a real sha…

Why would they though? Covid just forced the development of technologies even further to make working from home even more viable than before. Millennials followed the boomers right into the suburbs as they got older and that was before there was a path to killing the commute. When Gen Z can get by without a commute and live in social media, where is their push for cities going to come from?

A lot of what we consider "elite" US cities were losing population well into the 1990s. While I don't think the WFH trend is as widespread as people in some bubbles think it is, it's probably an open question whether the latest young college-educated cohort will move into cities for a while like some of their predecessors did.

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

#117

Post by ryukafalz »

kortilla wrote: post #88
nicoburns wrote: post #41

Earlier 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

A very wide street, maybe. Not the sort you're likely to have in a 15 minute city. :)

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

#118

Post by rhino369 »

throw0101c wrote: post #49
hammock wrote: post #38

The 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 way “supermarkets” are in the US, I don’t WANT to be a 15 minute walk from one. In a walkable neighbourhood, they'd just be a store front: * https://www.google.com/maps/place/197+Roncesvalles+Ave,+Toro... * https://www.google.com/maps/place/1435+King+St+West+Toronto,... Or at the very least, much smaller: * https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6395232,-79.4172267,3a,75y,3...

Chicago neighborhoods on the near north side (which are some of the most walkable in America) have large supermarkets. They just have parking garages (either above or below them). They are slightly smaller than suburban ones, but not that much.

Whole foods has plenty of them in all big cities.

It's just a cultural reason why some cities lack them--probably because people don't cook at home as much in NYC, for example.

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

#119

Post by ejb999 »

costcofries wrote: post #99
hammock wrote: post #38

The 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…

I'm not American but I really agree with this comment. Each time I do go to America, everything just feels very.. American. Lots of concrete, big vast spaces of industrial, roads that seem far too wide and just overall very, overwhelming and big. Just my personal observations of course.

True in a lot of areas in the USA, but someday when you are in the US explore some of the less populated areas in small to mid-sized towns, far away from the major population areas.

Sometimes I think people that grew up in, and live in a big city forget that not everyone in the USA lives like that.

There are still a tremendous amount of beautiful places in all 50 states.

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

#120

Post by User23 »

dublinben wrote: post #66
duxup wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, kids busing to school is very common in the US too. I agree about a bus stop. Heck even suburban schools around me are trying to stop everyone from dropping off their kid with their car in person. It's just a hassle / traffic.

That’s the inevitable consequence of the local decisions that have made it dangerous or impossible to walk to school. Many school districts then see an opportunity to save money by charging families to ride the bus. Ergo, massive traffic jams of parents individually driving kids to school.

Bussing in the USA was a civil rights innovation to integrate schools. At the time neighborhoods were still racially segregated, so neighborhood schools were overwhelmingly the race of whatever the local neighborhood was. The only way to have integrated schools was to send many kids to a school in a different neighborhood, hence bussing.
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