Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nathenry.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 398 posts

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

#81

Post by Aunche »

hiidrew wrote: post #50
kyeb wrote: post #48

I'd be super interested to see an analysis using exactly the same methodology as this performed on various other cities (SF, NYC, LA, maybe some European cities like Amsterdam or Cologne) for comparison. I would bet Seattle is near the top for the US in walkability (probably behind NYC only)

it makes the top 10 according to this: https://www.walkscore.com/cities-and-neighborhoods/ honestly surprised that SF is more walkable than NYC with this criteria

SF is a much smaller city. Areas in NYC not connected to the subway tend not to be particularly walkable like Staten Island.

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

#82

Post by Pxtl »

The toggleable map in there is amazing and you can really see how it's the schools and libraries letting the map down... which is distinct in that they're the government-provided services. Here in Ontario we had a knock-down fight like a decade ago as the province decided to save money by shutting down unneeded schools, ending a lot of locality in the school system... and ever since the school boards have been scrambling to deal with insufficient bus-drivers as they effectively offloaded the problem onto the busing system.

Aside, the conspiracy-theory right has decided that "15 minute city" is another "agenda 21" conspiracy to force all westerners to live in tiny urban walled ghettos, and traveling outside of your "15-minute-city" will be illegal. And of course, the mainstream right media has been feeding this monster by treating walkability as some nefarious conspiracy but without explicitly mentioning the most insane tinfoil-hat parts of it.

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

#83

Post by kortilla »

spacemadness wrote: post #45
jrochkind1 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that most USA urban neighborhoods in, say, 1960 (or 1930), met the 15 minute criteria. Still, I'd guess you'd be right that it would be enormously expensive and difficult to bring this back. But it was once this way, and it was human decisions that made it not this way. If we want it to be this way again and start, it can be eventually.

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?

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

#84

Post by ahoy »

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…

Well yeah, a "15-minute-city" kinda precludes the 10-acres-of-asphalt style development.

I live in brooklyn, exactly the kind of city described. I'm within a 10 minute walk of at least 4 grocery stores, none of which have a parking lot at all.

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

#85

Post by chabons »

Interesting how the visualization highlights the Eastlake and Montlake neighborhoods (along the south bank of the canal northeast of downtown) as walkability outliers. When I was newer to the Seattle area and looking for housing I did a similar exercise and charted the location of grocery stores. I was surprised that those neighborhoods just didn't have any grocery stores, especially given their proximity to downtown and the UW. Given the amount of investment the city/state is making to improve the WA-520 corridor (the east-west highway which goes through there) for cars and pedestrians, I wonder if that's going to change in the near future.

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

#86

Post by [deleted] »

allturtles wrote: post #65
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…

This comment seems to be based on a misconception of what "supermarket" means. These days supermarket pretty much == grocery store. The grocery stores that existed before supermarkets (with limited selection, probably no meat department, maybe no self-service, maybe no prices listed on the items) don't exist anymore. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermarket . edit: this is in a U.S. context, I don't know how the…

[deleted]

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

#87

Post by Pxtl »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #7
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…

My guess is that most USA urban neighborhoods in, say, 1960 (or 1930), met the 15 minute criteria. Still, I'd guess you'd be right that it would be enormously expensive and difficult to bring this back. But it was once this way, and it was human decisions that made it not this way. If we want it to be this way again and start, it can be eventually.

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.

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

#88

Post by kortilla »

nicoburns wrote: post #41
dabbledash wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's possible that we lost this because, while people do genuinely like it, they like quiet, space, and privacy more.

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

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

#89

Post by ahoy »

kortilla wrote: post #77
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.

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.

Retail theft as a new/major issue is mostly a lie, told by corporations and parroted by the media who love a crimewave story, even if its fabricated.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shopli...

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

#90

Post by bitschubser_ »

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 distance (Lidl has also good organic produce/groceries) and schools and gyms etc...

[1] https://www.zeit.de/community/2023-02/einkommen-deutsche-sta...

Post reply on HN