'people who are promoting good traffic-calming measures...' Odd that Matt likes these, given that they are a flagrant example of NIMBY-ism. Such measures are typically an effort by those who live on a block to burden those who want to get somewhere in their cars -- and the drivers are forced to pay for the obstructions. Pure selfishness. The more we believe that we all are part of a whole -- no such thing as "outside agitators" -- the better our communities will be.
I think you miss the point and this has some good points but is basically a strawman argument. None of the people proposing 15min cities are literally arguing for that as the entire goal but it is a good framing for wanting to have better nearby options accessible in a reasonable amount of time. It is a mechanism to have people who live around cars think about benefits of multimodal accessibility and the loss of freedom by not being able to walk or bike places. A better framing, 15min neighborhoods and 30-45 min cities. Thru running trains for New York FFS and enough of non connecting arterials on stroads. These are complementary ideas and no need to argue against accessible local communities to argue for accessible regions.
We moved to Silver Spring 42 years ago because we couldn't afford to by in DC, and if my wife wanted to, I'd move back in a heart beat. That said, I now live in a 15 minute city out here, but my 15 minutes means driving. Hate driving, but then we have a fantastic veggie garden and nice places to walk & run. Just can't walk or bike safely to shopping, the doc, etc.
I didn't think the point of the 15-minute city was that it was specifically 15 minutes of walking only, but that between walking, transit, and maybe carshare you could get to everything you needed without having to own a car.
A city with zero public transit, by definition, can't be a "15-minute city" because there's a bunch of stuff you can't get to because it's too far away. Transit is a key part of the concept, is what I thought.
My major gripe about this column is that Matt buried the lede to an incredible degree in this one liner: "If neighborhoods became denser, the number of cars per person would fall, which would create more robust small-area markets for retailers."
No kidding! Housing/transit discourse gets wrapped around a chicken or egg housing-first vs transit-first approach. A bunch of people are totally fine (or so they say on the internet) with denser housing but they promise me it's impossible to do that without building out some very ambitious transit systems which are (1) not going to be efficiently used at the current housing density (2) not going to be funded in this country now or all that soon given the dynamics around public goods. Maybe the funding changes if people who live in dense areas start advocating for transit... which brings me to the housing-first approach.
This column is trying to anticipate a future trend or urbanists becoming obsessed with the FMC concept, but it does not address the extremely current trend of people freaking out over dense housing because they have shopped/eaten/leisured in some dense neighborhoods where they perceive the lack of parking to be a big pain. People simply don't associate density with stress free experiences because they limited time in dense neighborhoods with precisely the wrong mode of transportation.
On the one hand, I get it. Behind the wheel of a car, this urbanist gets super annoyed about traffic and parking. On the other hand, I have lived in dense neighborhoods with no car or one car per household (i.e. shared between two adults). I know that driving is just not important on a typical day unless one is leaving the neighborhood and going somewhere outside bike range and not served by transit, but most people either don't know that or have not reflected on their past living situations.
We agree that there is more to urbanism than a FMC, but Matt really missed the significant parking and traffic anxiety that people have in a good FMC. Possibly, people can't make this argument in the DC or NYC context because everyone knows better, but my view from LA, Reno, or Tucson where FMCs are sparse and the suburbs are vast suggests that people are still cranked up this.
(I'm also going to point out that parking and traffic anxiety is the most first-world middle-class problem ever. I know that, but I also know that most American adults do own cars and those that can afford cars in America are likely vote vs demos that don't own cars. Maybe that is changing a little bit as young people delay driver's licenses, but I don't think it is changing fast.)
Wow, what a great place to grow up! I was on the Upper West Side for grad school, that and my current city (Portland, the one in the West) has me agreeing with everything here.
What bugs me about our current development, happening all at once because a bunch of inner light-industrial land has been released, is that retail rental rates (dozens of empty "Prime Retail Location!" make it impossible for those small-scale shops to succeed. We also need a pharmacy and a mini-mart. The mandated affordable housing on the fringes of the next neighborhood down need a grocery store.
I wish I knew how the economics of planning, permitting, financing, construction, development, and subsequent building ownership could be incentivized to build these real neighborhoods. Visionary urban planners working for the city and planning committees in neighborhood associations don't have very much say. The developers always come back with "Sorry! that doesn't pencil out!"
I went through these stages when learning about the 15MC idea:
1. that sounds nice
2. wait, are they promising everyone should have everything they need and want within 15 minutes?
3. skepticism
4. after rereading, no, I think it's meant to apply to "most" necessities, not strictly all
I don't hate the idea, but I'm uncomfortable with the possibility that #2 is a common misunderstanding and one that people get stuck on, which in turn leads to urbanism getting derailed by unrealistic demands from young lefties.
It’s genuinely the case that the need to drive significant distances in order to function as an American adult makes the government very deferential towards driving privileges and careful with car infrastructure. Most types of licenses you can have, you can lose much more easily than you can lose a driver’s license. Most government services do not work nearly as well as the interstate highway system. If driving becomes more of a niche or optional activity, it may start to be regulated more strictly, or provisioned more like education and less like sewers.
There are some assumptions in this article that are (I think) a little off-base. Namely the notions that corporations *cannot* locate in small towns or that it's inevitable that jobs like research scientist won't be present there.
Someone already pointed out Northwest Arkansas, but there's also Germany, which is known for having lots of mid-sized, highly competitive firms spread throughout the country in smaller cities and towns. We have land-grant colleges doing wonderful research everywhere which could support much larger business ecosystems were VC funding to be just a touch less concentrated.
We don't *have* to pile everything into an ever-smaller subset of metros like NYC and DC. I think a lot of the antipathy to stuff like this comes from that - people see the concept as an almost protectionist measure to keep jobs/firms from leaving places like that. I don't think that's accurate, and walkability and convenience are important for small towns and cities, too.
Maybe the folks behind ideas like 15MCs would do a little better if they talked about how these ideas could help Columbus, OH or Peoria, IL or Springfield, MO or Topeka, KS or any of hundreds of other mid-sized to small cities.
I agree with much of this—though I did want to nitpick the statement, "People would also want places to park their cars, and they’d want streets that were wide enough to drive cars on." While it is probably true, the minimum 50-60ft ROW that's become the default for residential streets in the US (due to a legacy of FHA and ITE standards) seems to be wider than the preferences of the home buying public. And basically all functions of a low traffic residential street can be accommodated in a ROW a third the size (between 16-20ft in width, the minimum alley width recommend by AASHTO). The 12ft (ish) ROWs in Montalcino aren't *that* much narrower.
The problem with 15MC, and a lot of similar sloganeering, is that there is too fine a line between "This is how I want to live" and "This is how everyone should live." It's also an example of how urbanists ignore that cities exist because of productive rural and exurban areas, not in spite of them. All the amenities within a 15MC depend on distribution centers, factories, warehouses, farms, refineries, etc., all of which can't be within a 15MC (or even a 15 Hour City). If more people want to live in 15MCs than are able to, it's because there are too few 15MCs and they are too expensive. We should have more, and upzone to make that possible. But not everyone will be living in one someday.
Per my other comment, it’s about having choices. At one point in my early twenties, I determined that the only American cities I would ever live in were New York, DC, and maybe Boston because based on my knowledge and travels at the time, it seemed like these were the only cities where you didn’t need to hop into a rolling social isolation capsule (aka, car) for every basic need. Even though I have discovered more places since then, in such a vast country, options should not be so limited. In other countries, and even in Canada, there are more living options that don’t involve total car dependency. This not due to market forces but deliberate choices and suburban-style zoning restrictions that separate commercial and residential zones and limit housing density in much of America.
After all is labeled, conspiracy or not, 15 or 45minutes, developed or preserved, the decision makers and the community members must have “functional communities” as the residents demand
If we can’t get more 15 minute zones, we should at least aspire to 5 minute drive zones. I grew up in a suburb that was not at all dense, but where everything you needed was a 5-10 minute drive away on 25 mph streets. It was not very “walkable” in the strict sense but I was surprised to experience that many suburbanites nowadays have to drive 15-30 minutes to do practically anything.
As someone from a more small-town and suburban background I think this has a lot of merit and also highlights one of the weirder aspects of the commitment to 15-minute cities: if going to the grocery store takes me five minutes by car and I can also carry more stuff per trip (reducing time spent shopping and waiting in line compared to many trips and likely benefiting from economies of scale on pricing because I’m no longer constrained by the size of retail establishments within an urban walk-shed), how is this not basically a better way to do shopping (other than the minor exercise of walking to/from the store[1], which is fine but not actually the terminal goal of going shopping)?
Arguably this is the same for various other putative amenities: ten minutes gets you five to ten miles of distance in lightly trafficked areas by car, and even at low density you can fit a lot of stuff into that kind of radius, including some more space-intensive or specialized amenities than you’d see in a 15MC.
[1] the article I most recently read on this suggests that the idea that coty-dwellers walk more than others is a canard and in fact it’s (very slightly) the other way round))
People imagine that by driving to the grocery store, they can bulk shop and not need to go back there for a long. In practice, it doesn't end up working like that. Produce goes bad. You forget something have to go back to the store the next day.
And, as long as the close-in store has what you need, there no point in driving to a more distant store to buy the same stuff, just because it's bigger. Even if the more distant store is slightly cheaper, it's not worth the hassle of traveling further just to save $1 on groceries (and end up paying the dollar right back in gas anyway). And, in my case, the fact that the close-in store has what I need is not just luck - I specifically chose the neighborhood I did so that I could have amenities nearby I could walk to. It's not worth being chained to a car for every trip, just to get a slightly larger home per dollar of monthly mortgage payment.
And, yes, the exercise element of walking to the grocery store is a big deal. When every trip is a driving trip, then the only way to get exercise becomes to drive to the gym. This is a much larger time commitment than walking 10 minutes to a local grocery store.
I think what Yglesias is missing is that this concept is about choices. Fewer people live in 15-minute zones than would probably like to. This is partly because of the way we build, and because of the zoning restrictions which Yglesias usually argues eloquently against: the strict separation of commercial and residential zones, restrictions on multi-family homes, and parking, lot space and lot usage requirements.
'people who are promoting good traffic-calming measures...' Odd that Matt likes these, given that they are a flagrant example of NIMBY-ism. Such measures are typically an effort by those who live on a block to burden those who want to get somewhere in their cars -- and the drivers are forced to pay for the obstructions. Pure selfishness. The more we believe that we all are part of a whole -- no such thing as "outside agitators" -- the better our communities will be.
What did you use to make that walkshed map? I'm curious to see what it would look like for where I live.
I think you miss the point and this has some good points but is basically a strawman argument. None of the people proposing 15min cities are literally arguing for that as the entire goal but it is a good framing for wanting to have better nearby options accessible in a reasonable amount of time. It is a mechanism to have people who live around cars think about benefits of multimodal accessibility and the loss of freedom by not being able to walk or bike places. A better framing, 15min neighborhoods and 30-45 min cities. Thru running trains for New York FFS and enough of non connecting arterials on stroads. These are complementary ideas and no need to argue against accessible local communities to argue for accessible regions.
We moved to Silver Spring 42 years ago because we couldn't afford to by in DC, and if my wife wanted to, I'd move back in a heart beat. That said, I now live in a 15 minute city out here, but my 15 minutes means driving. Hate driving, but then we have a fantastic veggie garden and nice places to walk & run. Just can't walk or bike safely to shopping, the doc, etc.
I didn't think the point of the 15-minute city was that it was specifically 15 minutes of walking only, but that between walking, transit, and maybe carshare you could get to everything you needed without having to own a car.
A city with zero public transit, by definition, can't be a "15-minute city" because there's a bunch of stuff you can't get to because it's too far away. Transit is a key part of the concept, is what I thought.
My major gripe about this column is that Matt buried the lede to an incredible degree in this one liner: "If neighborhoods became denser, the number of cars per person would fall, which would create more robust small-area markets for retailers."
No kidding! Housing/transit discourse gets wrapped around a chicken or egg housing-first vs transit-first approach. A bunch of people are totally fine (or so they say on the internet) with denser housing but they promise me it's impossible to do that without building out some very ambitious transit systems which are (1) not going to be efficiently used at the current housing density (2) not going to be funded in this country now or all that soon given the dynamics around public goods. Maybe the funding changes if people who live in dense areas start advocating for transit... which brings me to the housing-first approach.
This column is trying to anticipate a future trend or urbanists becoming obsessed with the FMC concept, but it does not address the extremely current trend of people freaking out over dense housing because they have shopped/eaten/leisured in some dense neighborhoods where they perceive the lack of parking to be a big pain. People simply don't associate density with stress free experiences because they limited time in dense neighborhoods with precisely the wrong mode of transportation.
On the one hand, I get it. Behind the wheel of a car, this urbanist gets super annoyed about traffic and parking. On the other hand, I have lived in dense neighborhoods with no car or one car per household (i.e. shared between two adults). I know that driving is just not important on a typical day unless one is leaving the neighborhood and going somewhere outside bike range and not served by transit, but most people either don't know that or have not reflected on their past living situations.
We agree that there is more to urbanism than a FMC, but Matt really missed the significant parking and traffic anxiety that people have in a good FMC. Possibly, people can't make this argument in the DC or NYC context because everyone knows better, but my view from LA, Reno, or Tucson where FMCs are sparse and the suburbs are vast suggests that people are still cranked up this.
(I'm also going to point out that parking and traffic anxiety is the most first-world middle-class problem ever. I know that, but I also know that most American adults do own cars and those that can afford cars in America are likely vote vs demos that don't own cars. Maybe that is changing a little bit as young people delay driver's licenses, but I don't think it is changing fast.)
Wow, what a great place to grow up! I was on the Upper West Side for grad school, that and my current city (Portland, the one in the West) has me agreeing with everything here.
What bugs me about our current development, happening all at once because a bunch of inner light-industrial land has been released, is that retail rental rates (dozens of empty "Prime Retail Location!" make it impossible for those small-scale shops to succeed. We also need a pharmacy and a mini-mart. The mandated affordable housing on the fringes of the next neighborhood down need a grocery store.
I wish I knew how the economics of planning, permitting, financing, construction, development, and subsequent building ownership could be incentivized to build these real neighborhoods. Visionary urban planners working for the city and planning committees in neighborhood associations don't have very much say. The developers always come back with "Sorry! that doesn't pencil out!"
I went through these stages when learning about the 15MC idea:
1. that sounds nice
2. wait, are they promising everyone should have everything they need and want within 15 minutes?
3. skepticism
4. after rereading, no, I think it's meant to apply to "most" necessities, not strictly all
I don't hate the idea, but I'm uncomfortable with the possibility that #2 is a common misunderstanding and one that people get stuck on, which in turn leads to urbanism getting derailed by unrealistic demands from young lefties.
"This concept has also become the subject of insane conspiracy theories about some kind of plot"
I know, it's enough to make one think that a lot of people don't trust the government, experts, authorities, institutions, etc.
It’s genuinely the case that the need to drive significant distances in order to function as an American adult makes the government very deferential towards driving privileges and careful with car infrastructure. Most types of licenses you can have, you can lose much more easily than you can lose a driver’s license. Most government services do not work nearly as well as the interstate highway system. If driving becomes more of a niche or optional activity, it may start to be regulated more strictly, or provisioned more like education and less like sewers.
There are some assumptions in this article that are (I think) a little off-base. Namely the notions that corporations *cannot* locate in small towns or that it's inevitable that jobs like research scientist won't be present there.
Someone already pointed out Northwest Arkansas, but there's also Germany, which is known for having lots of mid-sized, highly competitive firms spread throughout the country in smaller cities and towns. We have land-grant colleges doing wonderful research everywhere which could support much larger business ecosystems were VC funding to be just a touch less concentrated.
We don't *have* to pile everything into an ever-smaller subset of metros like NYC and DC. I think a lot of the antipathy to stuff like this comes from that - people see the concept as an almost protectionist measure to keep jobs/firms from leaving places like that. I don't think that's accurate, and walkability and convenience are important for small towns and cities, too.
Maybe the folks behind ideas like 15MCs would do a little better if they talked about how these ideas could help Columbus, OH or Peoria, IL or Springfield, MO or Topeka, KS or any of hundreds of other mid-sized to small cities.
I agree with much of this—though I did want to nitpick the statement, "People would also want places to park their cars, and they’d want streets that were wide enough to drive cars on." While it is probably true, the minimum 50-60ft ROW that's become the default for residential streets in the US (due to a legacy of FHA and ITE standards) seems to be wider than the preferences of the home buying public. And basically all functions of a low traffic residential street can be accommodated in a ROW a third the size (between 16-20ft in width, the minimum alley width recommend by AASHTO). The 12ft (ish) ROWs in Montalcino aren't *that* much narrower.
A more thorough analysis of American ROWs can be found here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01944363.2021.1903973
Strong upvote on this. Streets in this nation are too wide!
The problem with 15MC, and a lot of similar sloganeering, is that there is too fine a line between "This is how I want to live" and "This is how everyone should live." It's also an example of how urbanists ignore that cities exist because of productive rural and exurban areas, not in spite of them. All the amenities within a 15MC depend on distribution centers, factories, warehouses, farms, refineries, etc., all of which can't be within a 15MC (or even a 15 Hour City). If more people want to live in 15MCs than are able to, it's because there are too few 15MCs and they are too expensive. We should have more, and upzone to make that possible. But not everyone will be living in one someday.
Per my other comment, it’s about having choices. At one point in my early twenties, I determined that the only American cities I would ever live in were New York, DC, and maybe Boston because based on my knowledge and travels at the time, it seemed like these were the only cities where you didn’t need to hop into a rolling social isolation capsule (aka, car) for every basic need. Even though I have discovered more places since then, in such a vast country, options should not be so limited. In other countries, and even in Canada, there are more living options that don’t involve total car dependency. This not due to market forces but deliberate choices and suburban-style zoning restrictions that separate commercial and residential zones and limit housing density in much of America.
“ we should try to build functional communities”
After all is labeled, conspiracy or not, 15 or 45minutes, developed or preserved, the decision makers and the community members must have “functional communities” as the residents demand
If we can’t get more 15 minute zones, we should at least aspire to 5 minute drive zones. I grew up in a suburb that was not at all dense, but where everything you needed was a 5-10 minute drive away on 25 mph streets. It was not very “walkable” in the strict sense but I was surprised to experience that many suburbanites nowadays have to drive 15-30 minutes to do practically anything.
As someone from a more small-town and suburban background I think this has a lot of merit and also highlights one of the weirder aspects of the commitment to 15-minute cities: if going to the grocery store takes me five minutes by car and I can also carry more stuff per trip (reducing time spent shopping and waiting in line compared to many trips and likely benefiting from economies of scale on pricing because I’m no longer constrained by the size of retail establishments within an urban walk-shed), how is this not basically a better way to do shopping (other than the minor exercise of walking to/from the store[1], which is fine but not actually the terminal goal of going shopping)?
Arguably this is the same for various other putative amenities: ten minutes gets you five to ten miles of distance in lightly trafficked areas by car, and even at low density you can fit a lot of stuff into that kind of radius, including some more space-intensive or specialized amenities than you’d see in a 15MC.
[1] the article I most recently read on this suggests that the idea that coty-dwellers walk more than others is a canard and in fact it’s (very slightly) the other way round))
People imagine that by driving to the grocery store, they can bulk shop and not need to go back there for a long. In practice, it doesn't end up working like that. Produce goes bad. You forget something have to go back to the store the next day.
And, as long as the close-in store has what you need, there no point in driving to a more distant store to buy the same stuff, just because it's bigger. Even if the more distant store is slightly cheaper, it's not worth the hassle of traveling further just to save $1 on groceries (and end up paying the dollar right back in gas anyway). And, in my case, the fact that the close-in store has what I need is not just luck - I specifically chose the neighborhood I did so that I could have amenities nearby I could walk to. It's not worth being chained to a car for every trip, just to get a slightly larger home per dollar of monthly mortgage payment.
And, yes, the exercise element of walking to the grocery store is a big deal. When every trip is a driving trip, then the only way to get exercise becomes to drive to the gym. This is a much larger time commitment than walking 10 minutes to a local grocery store.
I think what Yglesias is missing is that this concept is about choices. Fewer people live in 15-minute zones than would probably like to. This is partly because of the way we build, and because of the zoning restrictions which Yglesias usually argues eloquently against: the strict separation of commercial and residential zones, restrictions on multi-family homes, and parking, lot space and lot usage requirements.