> with a big enough stick and very little carrot anything is possible
Yep, so all those complaining that nothing is being done or can be done about climate change are wrong. There are tools, they just need to be used.
> Aren't we hearing that actual residents really don't like these "15 minute" cities?
We're also hearing that Zuckerberg is a lizard and the Earth is flat, so fucking what? London is a major metropolis, rather dense, and with very relaxed and mixed zoning (you can have a 13th century "Church of X Girls School" next to a Tesco store in a glass skyscraper. It already does everything a "15th minute city" is about, apart from being "15 minutes big" - commute times are usually bigger, and somewhat concentrated to City and Canary Wharf, but there's work, leisure, shopping, housing to be found all around. Idiots who rage against a concept they couldn't begin to comprehend because toilet paper quality "journalists" make money that way aren't concerned residents of London, they have nothing to do with the city, and their opinion is best ignored.
Do you live there? In a utopian ideal it seems kind of nice having "everything you need" close by. Thinking about it critically I currently live in a 15 minute city, but there is a car involved. I'm kind of confused about how people living in mass transit even get groceries, can you take your own cart on the train?
As someone who lived in London for nearly a decade, getting groceries was 100x easier than when I lived somewhere you had to drive for 15-30 minutes (traffic) to get to a large hypermarket.
A rucksack will easily carry around 5-6 days of food. Other than that, I would simply pop by the shop on my commute home from work. It would be a 5-10 minute detour max.
Remember that the shops in such cities are directly accessible (no need to walk through a massive shopping centre), there's no time wasted on finding a parking space, there's so many shops that it's extremely likely that there's at least one between your home and the bus/tube stop and they're mostly exclusively filled with food so you're not walking past dozens of aisles filled with non-groceries.
The big bonus of course is that if you wake up in the morning and realise you're out of milk, it's a usually a <5min walk to the closest shop to pick some up and no one will bat an eyelid if you're still wearing your bathing gown. :)
There's also generally less food waste (as you shop for fewer days and can plan better) and you can opt into buying your fruit, veg, meat and fish fresh every day instead of having to hope that your 'big shop' at the megastore will still be fresh at the end of the week.
"but how do you get groceries???" is such a common bad objection it's become something of a meme to make fun of it. don't want to pick on you but getting food is really not that hard to do. you just do smaller shopping trips more often.
what self-proclaimed "15 minute city" are you living in where this is hard? genuinely curious. wondering if the phrase is getting diluted for marketing reasons. I've lived in totally ordinary neighbourhoods of English cities where all this was possible and easy, I never heard them flaunting their "15 minute city"ness, even though they met and exceeded the technical definition.
like I'm just confused that people are calling "utopian" the rather unremarkable reality I've lived for 25+ years. it makes me suspect ppl are using the same words to mean very different things.
As I noted above it's probably healthier for fruits/veg to shop more than once a week but I just don't like the hassle of grocery shopping that often. If it was along the way from mass trans to my flat maybe, but one stop away definitely not.
Yeah that's the thing, you're not meant to need "mass transit" to get groceries. It shouldn't even be a single "stop" away, it should be even closer. Are you saying you don't have a single decent grocery shop within a 5-10 minute walk of your house? A 15 minute city is meant to have that. And not just one shop ... you're meant to have lots and lots of them.
In the last place I lived, there were at least six I could walk to conveniently. And that wasn't a big bustling world-class metropolis either, it was a fairly unspectacular inner suburb of Sheffield[1], a city of 550,000, solidly middle of the pack on most social/economic rankings compared to other UK cities. The closest to "mass transit" was a tram that came three times an hour, but I never took the tram to get food.
I've linked the Streetview of the main high street[2] near where I lived, don't want to dox my exact address but I lived somewhere within a 1 km radius of this point[3]. I could get 98% of my monthly needs from this one street. You can explore the different directions on Streetview to see what I'm talking about. Look at the amenities nearby: cafes, coffee shops, greengrocers, hairdressers, newsagents, liquor shops, nurseries, daycare, schools, a gym, churches, pubs, a bus station, furniture shops, banks, a park, a dentist, pharmacies, several GP practices, a supermarket, hardware store, drycleaners, fast food, probably more that I've forgot, all within a short walk of this point. There's even the start of a pleasant walking trail through the Rivelin valley a bit further to the southwest (a godsend during the lockdowns). And this kind of high street isn't unique, there are plenty such high streets dotted around in the adjoining neighbourhoods: Middlewood, Crookes, Kelham Island, the lot. Most people in the city can walk to one. In fairness it may not meet the "15 minute city" definition since most workplaces are in the city centre so a walking commute takes more than 15 minutes. But hey, the tram is about that quick, and biking doesn't take much longer, 20 minutes maybe. And of course you can drive too; plenty of cars about.
Another example: when I was a student my house was in a 1 km radius of this point[4]. It's clearly suburban, but look at all the amenities. Easy, no "mass transit" needed to buy milk. And now I live within 1 km of this[5] point, exact same thing. It's not even the only such high street I can walk to; there's another about the same distance in the opposite direction from my house. British high streets have overlapping walking-distance radii that jointly cover almost all the suburban parts of a city, on top of the big central shopping district of the city-proper.
Having lots of groceries in walking distance is not a high a bar to clear. The examples I gave are all second- or third-rate cities, unimpressive in most respects; they're not the ones urbanists always talk about like Amsterdam or Copenhagen or Tokyo or anything fancy like that. It takes no particular conscious government policy to make this happen, it just happens on its own, because there's more than enough market demand. Look at the houses, they're almost all 2 storeys, only a few apartments in the 3-4 storey range, and hardly anything taller than that; the places I showed are not very densely populated, yet they support all this business. If your city is big and dense enough to have "mass transit" (I'm assuming a subway or high-frequency surface rail?), it ought to have grocery shops even more densely distributed than where I've lived. If not, it sounds like something has gone very wrong! That just shouldn't happen. What land-use regulations/laws are preventing it?
This is what I meant when I said people use the same words to mean different things ... all kinds of confusion. Best to use Streetview and give examples.
Myself personally it's a 36 or 40 minute one way walk to two grocery stores by me. No sidewalks 90%. I'm not sure the big busy intersection even has ped cross walk buttons. <5 min drive, never any traffic. Own a house and decent land, not on top of neighbors. Just can't imagine why people would want to live in a city like that but it sounds like the place is in transition from rural like I am to full on city from too many people there.
I live in what would be called a 15 minute city, but we don't really call it that.
I just bring a bag or two and ride my bike to the store. Or if I'm downtown, which is a 10 minute train ride away, I'll stop by the grocery store next to the station before hopping on the train and just carry my groceries in a bag or put em in my backpack.
The only times I choose to drive are when I want to get a large quantity of something lightweight, like toilet paper or paper towels.
I typically don't buy a lot at once, I'll plan my meals for the next few days and only buy what I know will definitely get eaten to reduce waste.
That's probably healthier for fruit/veg, but I find myself a weekly shopper. Even for just myself the rucksack guy above you might be pushing the limits.
If you're in the US, weekly shopping is very common because it is such a chore to get to and from grocery stores. They tend to be very large and relatively far away from where people live, so it's quite an inconvenience to shop there.
Smaller stores within neighborhoods allow for quick trips without much hassle.
I get my shopping delivered. Costs me $2 on average, they drive it in a refrigerated small truck and often drop off several deliveries to the same building/street in one trip. And then for stuff I want right now, I just walk to the supermarket with one bag. Since I go out for a walk every day after work, I just head to the supermarket along the way which is about 700m away.
It is mildly because it does multiple deliveries in one trip with I assume a routing and scheduling system which does it efficiently.
But the main benefit is it enables me to not own a car, if I couldn’t get things delivered I might buy a car and then use it for other things I don’t strictly have to but since I’m paying for one anyway.
Typically you carry your groceries in a bag. Some people have wheeled bags for bigger trips.
In neighborhoods with a traditional urban form (or "15 minute cities"), you wouldn't usually take mass transit to the grocery store, it's within a short walking distance. With groceries close by, it's natural to make frequent, smaller trips.
When I lived in a condo with a shopping center ten minute walk away I still found myself driving it. Sometimes I carried stuff back but it felt like it was more of getting some exercise rather than convenience.
Yep, so all those complaining that nothing is being done or can be done about climate change are wrong. There are tools, they just need to be used.
> Aren't we hearing that actual residents really don't like these "15 minute" cities?
We're also hearing that Zuckerberg is a lizard and the Earth is flat, so fucking what? London is a major metropolis, rather dense, and with very relaxed and mixed zoning (you can have a 13th century "Church of X Girls School" next to a Tesco store in a glass skyscraper. It already does everything a "15th minute city" is about, apart from being "15 minutes big" - commute times are usually bigger, and somewhat concentrated to City and Canary Wharf, but there's work, leisure, shopping, housing to be found all around. Idiots who rage against a concept they couldn't begin to comprehend because toilet paper quality "journalists" make money that way aren't concerned residents of London, they have nothing to do with the city, and their opinion is best ignored.