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.
Shame we decided to shutter all those down across the country, for an extended period because they were deemed "non-essential", leading to many of them to shutter forever. At the same time massive mega-corps were able to be deemed essential, and allowed to continue to operate, turning record profits.
But of course that's just conspiracy theory thinking and only someone who hates grandma would say something like that.
>
Shame we decided to shutter all those down across the country, for an extended period because they were deemed "non-essential", leading to many of them to shutter forever.
This meme needs to die already.
A lot of those businesses shut down in 2020.
It's 2023 now, we haven't had any COVID restrictions for 2 years, and all the ones that have gone away... Have long since been replaced with equivalents. Some of whom have also shut down, and have been replaced with equivalents.
Restaurants and coffee shops die and open all the time. 2020 was rough, but in the long term, the net impact on my neighborhood has been ~zero.
You know where they have been dying and not re-opening? Downtown, because half their former patrons are now WFH and don't go into the office anymore. Unfortunately, that's a little harder to blame on COVID shutdowns.
Not everything closed during the past few years because of restrictions. There was a chocolate shop that we loved going to for date night. All the locations closed during the pandemic AFTER they had been reopened for months because the parent company was bought out by a venture capital firm who only wanted the chocolate production part of the business (for selling to high end grocery stores) and didn’t want the retail stores.
I lived in a neighborhood like this too, and it was fantastic. I hated the city, but loved where I lived. I've been wishing to find something like it ever since, but it was a very old neighborhood and everything now seems to be planned, isolated communities.
We need zoning revamped, and you'd see a lot more of this.
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.
7-11 or CVS/Walgreens fills this void in a lot of US geographies.
They aren’t as personalized or localized as the neighborhood place, but the use case you describe is exactly the market 7-11/CVS/Walgreens is going after.
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.
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.
Right where they throw the fish? I've only been to Pike Place Market a few times, but there's a little road there that looked like an absolute nightmare if you inadvertently turned down it.
not saying I turn down it every chance I get, and it depends on time/day of week. but there's a good amount of parking with good turnover on that street.
Street traffic is allowed through Pike Place Market because the vendors want it that way. The Market is an irreplaceable treasure and I think we generally ought to support the preferences of the people who make it work, for fear of "fixing what ain't broke".
Do the vendors specifically want cars as a whole, or specifically their cars and delivery vehicles? We could allow just the latter, and prohibit cars that aren't in service of the market. Similar to the "Healthy Streets." The rules won't be 100% honored of course, but it'd likely reduce a substantial amount of the traffic there. Especially if towing is on the table for non-Market-affiliated cars parked there.
The vendors want cars in that street because otherwise pedestrians would walk down it instead of on the narrow sidewalk which goes right by their businesses. They literally want the traffic so that people are more likely to go into their shops.
Probably cars as a whole. Based on other such places (I know nothing about Seattle) they have no clue what cars are costing, but they know some people get there by car so they are scared to lose them.
The parking spots at Pike Place dwarf in comparison to the crowds the market serves. Here's a maps screenshot[1] where I've highlighted the parking available there[2]. Meanwhile the market serves ~10m annual pre-pandemic visitors[3], which averages to 27k daily visitors. The amount of visitors coming in by car are negligible.
>These three grid patterns (due north, 32 degrees west of north, and 49 degrees west of north) are the result of a disagreement between David Swinson "Doc" Maynard, whose land claim lay south of Yesler Way, and Arthur A. Denny and Carson D. Boren, whose land claims lay to the north (with Henry Yesler and his mill soon brought in between Denny and the others):[2] Denny and Boren preferred that their streets follow the Elliott Bay shoreline, while Maynard favored a grid based on the cardinal directions for his (mostly flat, mostly wet) claim. All three were competing to have the downtown built on their land.
my favorite street layout in Seattle is that a part of it got named "Tangletown" (there's a rip in the fabric of the continuum of the big grid right there)
Queen Anne has a 7-way stop! The first time I encountered it I was thoroughly stumped. Actually, I'm still stumped years later every time I go through it. At some point, I just commit and hope for the best.
I pity all those coming from the right side of the screen (I believe that is southbound but I avoid that intersection so I haven't driven through in a while) at ground level that's the scariest direction to come from.
Ha, I pass through this stop on my work commute. Glad to see it getting recognition as being completely bonkers. It’s not easy to keep track of the order in which the six other cars arrived at the intersection. Most of the time someone just slowly inches forward until it seems everyone else agrees it’s that person’s turn and then they floor it the rest of the way through. I’m surprised there aren’t more accidents here. It’s on a hill, too.
Sounds like it used to function as something of a roundabout, and America forgotten how to navigate yielding to traffic coming from a relative direction (i.e. people already in the roundabout from your left) instead of someone always having the right of way, or the weird turn-taking stress of an all-way stop.
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.
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.
Technically you can go any way around a traffic calming circle you want to, because they are too small to accommodate delivery trucks going counterclockwise. It is highly recommended to go counterclockwise if you can, but not legally required. They have no more legal significance than a speed bump.
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.
Roundabout; Cars in the roundabout ALREADY have the right of way. Everyone entering is yielding to the street they're T-ing into. Exit, in theory, is from right of way into a dedicated path.
Only self driving cars, or better licensing tests for drivers can save us from this. Every N years drivers probably should need to re-test, including a physical practical test in a standard unit (from the DMV) for parking and to see how the driver responds if driving a rental car that they aren't familiar with.
If they are talking about the intersection I think, a roundabout would not work because some inputs are major road offramps, others are side streets, and the intersection is basically super narrow as all of them merge together. There just would not be enough space!
The cameras can't take pictures of the driver or occupants and court time is accrued when anyone other than the registered owner committed the infraction:
(f) Automated traffic safety cameras may only take pictures of the vehicle and vehicle license plate and only while an infraction is occurring. The picture must not reveal the face of the driver or of passengers in the vehicle. The primary purpose of camera placement is to take pictures of the vehicle and vehicle license plate when an infraction is occurring. Cities and counties shall consider installing cameras in a manner that minimizes the impact of camera flash on drivers.
An officer has to actually review the photos:
(g) A notice of infraction must be mailed to the registered owner of the vehicle within 14 days of the violation, or to the renter of a vehicle within 14 days of establishing the renter's name and address under subsection (3)(a) of this section. The law enforcement officer issuing the notice of infraction shall include with it a certificate or facsimile thereof, based upon inspection of photographs, microphotographs, or electronic images produced by an automated traffic safety camera, stating the facts supporting the notice of infraction. This certificate or facsimile is prima facie evidence of the facts contained in it and is admissible in a proceeding charging a violation under this chapter. The photographs, microphotographs, or electronic images evidencing the violation must be available for inspection and admission into evidence in a proceeding to adjudicate the liability for the infraction. A person receiving a notice of infraction based on evidence detected by an automated traffic safety camera may respond to the notice by mail.
So automated cameras don't scale and are only deployed where they are most needed.
Oregon has a slightly different approach: the photograph has to show the driver. They then mail a notice to the registered owner. The last I knew, it was possible to say "no, that's not me" without being required to say who it was. You do have to send in a copy of your driver's license so they can (presumably) compare the two photos.
In Beijing, the infractions are attached to the vehicle, and you have to pay all your fines on the plate before you can renew your registration every year.
Seems like the solution here would be to station an officer at each major intersection permanently, and to fund it, take the operational cost and divide it out to those fined. So say it cost $100,000 for the day and 100 fines were given out, the fines are $1,000 each. This scales infinitely.
A ruinously expensive ticket is likely an effective deterrent. So what do you do when this works and you get zero dollars to fund all those traffic cops because nobody ran any red lights?
We do not have many red light cameras, although there is some recent talk of increasing them (and rolling out speed enforcement cameras). There are a handful.
Stuck in traffic I often wondered why downtown Seattle is in the worst spot possible on the east side of Puget Sound. For a small town it's a fine spot, for a major metropolitan area it's right at the chokepoint of a narrow north-south corridor.
That may be one of the reasons. If you're in Kent and you want to sell strawberries to Everett you basically have to go through Seattle. The other is that Seattle originally was going to be founded in West Seattle, but the weather was so bad they moved off the peninsula but in the lee of it. The Port of Seattle is built into a river delta that was probably only traversible in the mid 1900's so just moving to the lee side would have not helped with access.
But here we are 150 years later with a city built like a corset.
After West Seattle, the city built up around the area where the stadiums are. Capitol Hill was called that because they were going to put the Washington state capitol there, but decided not to because it was too far from "Seattle". That should give some idea of how small the city was. There were single digit thousand white people in the entire area at that time. The width of the isthmus was not a problem at that time.
The reason the city picked that spot is because it had the best deep water access on Elliott Bay.
If you've taken the Seattle Underground Tour, you have a notion of how much of Seattle was set on tidal mudflats. People were arguing against building an incline from the docks up to a bluff that started around 6th, which is about 8 blocks today, and I can't recall if when the sea wall was built if they went straight up or projected out into the Sound a bit farther.
Not to mention highway 99 where the pedestrians are just as crazy, if not more so, than the motorists. The guy coasting down the highway in a shopping cart takes the cake.
I put a lot of thought into the house I bought in Ballard, my kid won’t have to cross a four lane road (15th) till he hits high-school.
Where do you encounter roads that lack sidewalks and are also unsafe to walk on? I've frequently experienced the former in Seattle, but usually they're very low speed residential streets that are safe to just walk on. The only real counterexample I can think of is 5th Ave NE by the golf course.
"And are also unsafe to walk on," though? Most of those are residential streets with low traffic. I lived in that area and ran around somewhat regularly for several years. The street I mentioned as the worst one is in that district. :-)
Unfortunately so. There are some egregious ones up there like that, but also if you step one block off of any major thoroughfare the sidewalk ends, yet there is still consistent traffic. This includes streets that connect schools, libraries, parks, etc. There were 271 pedestrian injuries in Seattle last year, 17 were fatal. Source: https://remoteapps.wsdot.wa.gov/highwaysafety/collision/data...
> There are some egregious ones up there like that, but also if you step one block off of any major thoroughfare the sidewalk ends, yet there is still consistent traffic.
Sure, but again, those streets by and large did not feel unsafe to me (on foot).
> There were 271 pedestrian injuries in Seattle last year, 17 were fatal.
This datapoint is just not responsive to the discussion, unless you're saying those injuries happened specifically on non-sidewalked streets in north Seattle? I suspect most were in the street or crosswalks in busier parts of town.
> Sure, but again, those streets by and large did not feel unsafe to me (on foot).
I’m not sure about you or your situation but feelings of safety vary wildly among people. As a parent of young children, sharing a street with cars does not instill a feeling of safety unless visibility is astoundingly good.
There are dozens of pockets of streets with no sidewalks that seem safe until you find that they are significant overflow routes (of which there are many given Seattle’s various traffic struggles)
It's interesting how variable that is depending where you are. The area I live in Seattle will have people wave you through the stop sign if you're a pedestrian, has side walks on every street, and is grid based except where i5 runs through.
Seattle is complex in this regard as the elevation changes between neighborhoods are an additional dimension. If I was living at the base of Lower Queen Anne and the "facilities" meeting the 15m criteria was at the top, that's not something I would consider a viable walk.
Was thinking about this too. A 2D distance map doesn't do it justice, really, because it ignores the non-trivial hill in the middle of your route.
The other thing about Seattle is that you can have a grocery store nearby, but still not really have access to it if you're lower income. We have a lot of premium stores, especially in walkable neighborhoods. When I was a student I lived in Wedgwood, and I had 2 grocery stores within a 5-minute walk: the PCC, and the Metropolitan Market, both places where a week's groceries were about 2-3x as expensive as they were at the nearest Safeway, which was more than 15 minutes away.
Not faulting the creator of this article, as it's an okay rule of thumb, and it's hard to include details like that in a model.
I own a home very close to the PCC you’re talking about and only ever go there if we forgot something in the large weekly grocery run we do at the QFC. Met Market isn’t really an economical option either, but we do love their pre-made food options for when we don’t feel like eating leftovers.
The way I describe Metropolitan Market to people outside Seattle is that it's a just a regular old neighborhood grocery store where you can choose from multiple varieties of foie gras. But it did have some cool stuff in it too, you're right about their pre-made stuff.
> (...) that's not something I would consider a viable walk.
Why not? As long as it's truly a 15m walk? The metric should take into account that the speed is going to be reduced when walking on a steep incline, otherwise it's a bad metric...
Is it steeper than Spring St roughly from the waterfront to the library? ; ) In any case, if it's a workout to walk the distance in 15m, then it's not really a 15m walk. I can cover way more ground in 15m if the assumption is that I'll be out of breath when I'm done... :P
Half the roads on Queen Anne are just literally staircases.
A 15 min walk down and up stairs in a skyscraper would count but few would want to do it on the regular (and those who did wouldn’t need to worry about leg day).
> Seattle is complex in this regard as the elevation changes between neighborhoods are an additional dimension.
And then there is the socio-economic history of elevations in Seattle. tl;dr Historically poor people (and minorities) lived at the bottom of hills, rich people at the top. To this day, you can literally see houses get nicer as you go up hills.
There are also neighborhoods with a hill in the middle where one side of the hill was historically poor, and the other side well to do. My dad used to tell me that when he was a kid, him and all his friends knew not to go to up the hill where they didn't belong.
You see this in Magnolia neighborhood, the east side is where all the renters live as that's where there are buildings, the further west you go, the more expensive it gets.
When I first started reading this article, I'll admit, the first thought, as a life-long Seattlite, that crossed my mind was, here we go again, some dumbass writes about what it is like to live in Seattle. Goddamit. But when I saw the chart that showed walking distance to a park at the top of the list then I started to realize this one hit the mark.
I actually purchased the home that I did because it is one block from my favorite park in the whole world, it is a magical place, to me, I discovered on a bike ride training for the STP. And I vowed I was going to buy a place near this park someday.
Call me crazy, but parks, just in general, are so extremely important to the quality of life and sometimes I think people overlook the importance of having a lot of public spaces like that.
I just want a property with a park like atmosphere in the backyard. Pretty jealous after taking my kindergartener to a classmate’s birthday party a few weeks ago.
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.
If you google the New Yorker and Atlantic articles on shoplifting issues in the US, you get a slightly more nuanced take combining them all.
What I take away is that retail theft 1) is technically on the rise, mostly due to the ability to then sell those goods online, including on Amazon 2) It doesn't impact major retail chains by much, basically they do what they've always done and just adjust prices. It actually helps amazon on some other online sellers. BUT 3) it definitely contributes to how shitty it is to actually work retail 4) AND it will influence where places like Walgreens set up shop (I'm neutral on this, I would rather have a bunch of local corner stores than walgreens)
No it’s not. My local grocery store has incidents hourly, heck, you can get lucky and see it for yourself where some guy just walks out with a basket full of stuff (security can’t really stop them given liability). If it were fabricated, we wouldn’t see it happen in person so much.
Is there a problem with thievery of apples, oranges, asparagus and beetroots? I don't have the numbers but I would bet money that most store thievery is cigarettes, alcohol, maybe sodas, and small electronics, pills at CVS, etc.
Laundry detergent, baby milk powder are pretty popular if they aren’t locked up already. QFC in Capitol Hill had to lock up ice creams which is surprising to me since it can’t be fenced. Lego’s are popular at local neighborhood Targets, they were being fenced at Pike Place Market for awhile. I saw some lady buying up shop lifted paper towels on third and pine once when waiting for the bus (before they closed the stop down last year). I’m like WTF, really? If it isn’t perishable, it’s probably fair game.
Yes, but my point my OP was about the lack of grocery stores with healthier options -- i.e., fresh fruits and vegetables, etc. -- in lower income neighborhoods. Those are perishable and therefore much less of a target.
Yes, but perishables are more difficult to stock, so they still get neglected in lower income neighborhoods. But ya, unhoused neighbors aren’t shoplifting kale.
> perishables are more difficult to stock, so they still get neglected in lower income neighborhoods
exactly, and this is a big part of the problem; we have no problem subsidizing corn for Ethanol, why can't we provide incentives that provide lower income people access to healthier food?
Gas stations and corner stores also tend to have the highest prices. Climate change policy advocates are doing a real disservice to their cause by not being honest with people about the sacrifices/hardships these polices will cause in the short term. Deception is not a viable long term political strategy.
If you take the corner store model as far as many European, NY, etc cities - You remove the $300-400+/mo cost of a car (ballparking here)
Otherwise if the local shops are more expensive (in any meaningful way), consumers would simply drive the additional N miles to the Walmart Supercenter as things kind of are as is
A big part of the problem is that the U.S. doesn't have European-style local grocery stores (and if they do, they're expensive farmer market style boutiques in high-priced areas).
Normal farmers markets, at least where I have lived, not expensive however (excluding your fancy small flock lamb, or whatever). Unfortunately they are not run every day, generally once per week. Olympia, Washington was an exception with a 4 day per week farmer's market.
> Gas stations and corner stores also tend to have the highest prices.
Yes, along with the least healthy food. Food poverty (in the sense of being unable to afford or access healthy food) is a very serious problem in America that contributes to the high numbers of unhealthy people and obesity rates. It's one of those things that isn't talked about enough, and certainly I don't read much about efforts to fix it.
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...
I imagine the point is that what happens in the US isn't some inevitable state of things, it's the choices of US citizens, and they could look abroad to see counterexamples to their assumptions.
yeah it was meant in this direction... I lived and worked in Minneapolis and Boston and I don't get all the discussions why this segregation for livability, walkability etc is so prominent and by choice in the US compared to the cities in europe. I mean here you also have an separation by income (as indicated by the linked provided), but even the low income areas are livable and walkable and you have everything for your daily needs.
Both are not trashed up by cars. That's the relationship.
I think that's the main reason why the escape-to-the-woods fantasy is so strong in the US. It's an escape from car dependent drab. You don't have to flee to the woods for serenity; urban environments can feel spacious and verdant. But those will always be walkable, have calm traffic, or no cars at all.
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 early morning (no loading dock)
I haven't spent a lot of time in Seattle so I can't comment there, but in my experience urban supermarkets are more likely to have a parking lot underneath the building or in general have less parking than a suburban supermarket.
> 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.
I live in a walkable Seattle neighborhood. Accordingly, the "supermarkets" are not quite the mega-large stores they are in other parts of the city, and they have smaller parking lots accordingly.
This is a generalization, but as a rule, Seattle is laid out on a grid system, and every 5 blocks there is a larger 2 lane road where the speed is 25 MPH instead of 20MPH. Grocery stores are generally on the corner of those larger blocks.
> Would much rather be near a decent small or midsize grocery
In my experience, prices are higher and the selection is very limited, so living near one of those doesn't present much benefit to me.
Which is my next point, despite living walking distance to 3 grocery stores, I still typically drive a mile away to a larger store because prices there are 2/3rds to 1/2 what they are at any of the stores close to me.
>> ...despite living walking distance to 3 grocery stores, I still typically drive a mile away to a larger store because...
A mobile consumer base, people with cars that can travel to potentially hundreds of retail options, is a backbone of American competition. Like cars or not, they empower consumers to defeat local monopolies. The next stage, pickup trucks, then empowers retailers to sell large products (appliances) to an enormous consumer base from a central location without dealing with transport companies and/or teamsters for local delivery.
Nothing about cars specifically enables this. Building cities so that you have to drive to travel any significant distance, however, guarantees that you need a car to take advantage of competitive pricing. But that's self-apparent... Building dense cities that can be accessed by bike and on foot would have the same effect. Spreading out your city so that what could be a 15 minute walk is now a 15 minute drive isn't an improvement.
> Building dense cities that can be accessed by bike and on foot would have the same effect.
I love density, but, in my experience this is not true. London doesn't have a large competitive market of grocery stores. Neither does Boston or New York City.
Density means higher real estate prices, that means grocery store sizes go down, and the barrier to entry goes up. Yes you can get more small specialty shops (which is great!) but I've had times where I've had to go to 3 different large supermarkets to find some oddball item I needed, and density would make that even harder on me since stores would have a smaller variety of stock.
Of course the 2 largest grocery store chains in America are trying to merge, so very soon American cities won't have much competition either.
I'm not saying density isn't good, it is, and it makes lots of shopping easier, but certain types of (uniquely) American retail experiences fall apart when cities become more dense.
Heck Seattle already is dense enough that there is only 1 Costco within the city limits, the density of Costco's in the suburbs surrounding Seattle is actually quite high! Prior to living in the city proper, I was a 15 minute drive from two Costcos! Now I am a 30 minute drive from one Costco. Since I don't have the time to go that far on a frequent basis for groceries, I am paying more for food living in a city that has more grocery stores around me, than I was when I lived in the suburbs.
The Costco's are a result of bulk buying, which relies on motorized transport and easy at-home refrigeration, both very American things. The more European tradition of buying food multiple times per week is odd in America outside of a few downtown cores.
When I was doing AirBnB[1] in London, I noticed that the vast majority of London's grocery stores were quite small compared to the stores in America. The small co-op near me is about the size of an average London grocery store, and the selection of stock is poor enough that I really can't get much shopping done there.
London does have larger stores, but it isn't like in America where the average grocery store is, well, huge.
(Obviously some chains such as Asda have larger stores!)
On the west coast at least, American grocery stores are either small like Trader Joe's (Aldi sized I believe), tiny local ethnic stores, or you start getting into larger and larger categories that start at "really damn big" and end up at "you can get lost here".
The "you can get lost here" sized stores typically have much cheaper prices, and families go there on weekends to buy essentials (meat, veggies) to stay on budget.
All in all I'm not saying it is a bad thing, having a higher density of grocery stores is nice, it means going to the grocery store isn't a dedicated trip, but those cheap huge discount stores are very nice to have around.
[1] I like to stay for awhile in the middle of cities so I can actually shop at local stores, cook some food myself, etc.
Multiple neighborhoods I lived in had walking access to Stop & Shop, Star Market, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Target, bfresh, cheap overstock/clearance stores, a farmers market, and other independent grocers, many catering to nationalities/ethnicities with large subcommunities in the area. Just a train or bus ride away I could go to Market Basket, Roche Brothers, Wegmans, a worker owned-co-op, and more farmers markets and independent grocers.
Costco was a longer train ride away, but accessible if you wanted something specifically from there. Delivery is more economical because of the shorter distances involved.
You can see this yourself by doing a map search.
In rural areas I've lived, one is common, sometimes zero within a fifteen minute drive. Suburban areas might have two or three regional supermarkets, plus Walmart, Target, Costco and/or Sam's, but always way fewer within the area covered by the same travel time.
May depend on the part of Boston, my wife used to live there and her area didn't have much, she was either walking a mile or taking the train to a different area.
Different parts of Boston is incredibly varied though, I shouldn't have made a general statement.
- 2-3 specialty grocers (think italian importers, etc.)
- gourmet grocer
- two butcher shops and a fresh fish shop
- CVS (yes, they sell groceries! spooky)
- 2-3 bodegas that sell shelf-stable goods, as well as a small collection of fruit and vegetables
If you go expand it to 15 minute bike, the world is truly your oyster, but the primary one that pops up is Trader Joe's.
The most remarkable part of this description, is that it identifies at least 4 or 5 different neighborhoods in NYC, those are only the ones I can think of off the top of my head, and I haven't been close to everywhere.
There's a lot of things to knock about NYC, but it's easily the most walkable city in the US, that I've seen.
Sure but everyone would expect that in New York but people on here tend to miss that suburbs can be walkable too. I live in the most suburban neighborhood 25 miles away from central Phoenix that you could possibly imagine and have a 15 minute walk to 2 full size grocery stores, several bars, a wide variety of restaurants, plenty (an understatement) of medical offices, coffee shops etc. 20 minutes gets me to Walmart, a movie theater, and tons more. Having been to New York many times I strongly prefer the walk through tree lined, low traffic and noise streets that I have here.
But where is the calculation for all the effort to distribute food to all those tiny shops? It is comes in via truck/van often at night. Central large stores, with customers buying in bulk, means fewer trips. The total carbon/energy in the system isn't as simple as saying "walking is better". It may be that a monthly trip to fill a pickup with food is more green than thirty daily trips to the corner shop by foot. Environmental concerns and modern lifestyle trends don't always line up nicely.
I Costco baker told me once that they used less preservative in bread than small bakers. Costco has such a high turnover that they don't need bread that can survive a whole day on the shelf. Same too with their vegetables that spend far less time in transit than they would getting to a tiny farmers market.
100s of people driving individual cars to get to a grocery store is absolutely less efficient than a couple dozen box trucks delivering food to smaller localized stores. Not to mention, we can electrify those delivery trucks and negate a lot of the carbon emissions. Even if you electrify all of those cars you still have the massive environmental impact of building and maintaining the roads and parking lots they have to use. Individualized auto transit is a blight. "Modern lifestyle trends" not lining up with environmental concerns is usually more of an issue of modern lifestyle trends being unsustainable.
Reminder that it only takes about 6 minutes to bike a mile, or 8 if you go at a leisurely Dutch pace. You don't need cars to go far enough to have quite a few options, you just need the infrastructure to let you do so.
But it seldom snows in Seattle, so they don't bother to invest in any snow-clearing infrastructure - the city just shuts down for a day or two after a mild snowstorm.
San Francisco is known for its hills, but Seattle has some pretty bike-unfriendly hills as well, unless you've got an electric motor attached to your bike.
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.
> 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 still has a substantial cycling mode share, because they prioritize it: https://youtu.be/s3Sx_OH_wok
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.
> The next stage, pickup trucks, then empowers retailers to sell large products (appliances)
Most people buy appliance at most once a decade. There’s a reason the bed of trucks have shrunk while cabs have grow over the years: most people don’t need trucks. The harm pickup trucks cause society has to be worse than this empowerment.
Pickups are way more dangerous in an accident, way more likely to get in an accident, and require way more fuel to power. You’d have to empower a lot of appliance sales before this can even come close to balancing out.
I look forward to the day when we all drive semi trucks to work so that we can journey cross country to stock up on goods and not have to deal with the corrupt long-haul trucking industry.
I can choose between 5 supermarkets in a walking distance. And they are all busy.
America is just not denselly populated enough to really make it worth your while to build a supermarket ever 3 miles. Too much empty space so people refuse to live efficiently.
All of the grocery stores in the core of Seattle are exactly like that--urban centers with underground parking. Some even have apartments on top of them so you could live above the store if you desired.
Can confirm. This is also true in the denser areas outside the core. Ballard has a couple of large supermarkets with a lot of parking (although one of them is likely to get purchased and turned into a light rail station), but it also has several supermarkets that fit the urban core description. Fremont has an urban core supermarket right in the middle of the neighborhood; the U District has one coming.
I guess that depends on your definition of "core of Seattle". There's definitely grocery stores in ID, Wallingford, UW area, etc that all don't have underground parking and have outdoor lots taking up a lot of space.
I wouldn't say all. In the downtown core, most are (some in the ID are not), but once you start getting out of the more urban neighborhoods, it's hit or miss. West Seattle, North Seattle, and South Seattle all have plenty of supermarkets that are large one story buildings in the middle of a big parking lot.
And in some places it’s illegal to build something like that. Zoning laws can be so restrictive, even in urban areas like those you mention.
I think supermarkets becoming 4-over-1 buildings with living places above them would be fantastic. Walk down to the first floor to get your groceries, walk them up to your home.
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 these terms are used in other English-speaking countries
Does this fit your definition of the kind of grocery store that doesn't exist anymore? They have a few misc. items, but it's almost all just food, and a fairly small building.
No, it doesn't fit the pre-supermarket definition. It's self-service, prices are labeled, it has a selection of various items in each category, it has a meat department. Plus it has the word supermarket in the name.
That's definitely closer to my idea of a "grocery" versus a "supermarket". It seems like I see them in some small older towns but anything that had a lot of recent construction usually sees larger supermarkets with big parking lots even for small towns.
You do see smaller, usually not great, markets located especially in more rural areas. Sometimes they're affiliated with one of the bigger chains like Hannaford's.
I live in downtown Seattle. In the more dense urban areas such as Queen Anne and South lake Union the grocery stores aren't like that. They have underground parking and street parking. If you get into more residential areas such as Pinehurst, Lake City, etc then you find more grocery stores that are similar to what you're describing.
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.
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.
America really lost the cultural victory here. In pretty much anywhere else in the world a place's unique atmosphere, customs, architecture and way of organizing would be generally respected even if to an outsider it's unfamiliar or odd.
You see this idea everywhere, it's not "corn is one America's staple crops and the use of corn syrup which is sweeter and more abundant than cane sugar gave Americans a preference for the very sweet" but "Americans with their unrefined pallets, unhealthy diets, and obesity crisis put heaps of sugar in everything."
Even with a positive spin on it — the USA has huge shops, personal ability to travel long distances etc — you find plenty of Americans who don't approve. Like in the article.
Cultural things Americans themselves have more agreement over are often more respected abroad: cinema, music, American fast food, American sports, etc.
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.
I grew up in a rural area of upstate NY with a very low population... but still has the same "overbuilt, overwide, overfast" road problems.
I've lived in a few US cities since then; of them, NYC was the only place that didn't feel built for cars more than humans. But NYC still feels like humans have been pushed "out of the way" in favor of car traffic in many places, especially outside of lower Manhattan.
I currently live in a small New England town that does an OK job at "human" infrastructure because it was originally built for walking and there just aren't enough cars to ruin things for pedestrians. But I would love to hear suggestions of other not-cities in the USA that are walkable, bikeable, and not car-dominated. I've been considering buying a home to combat out-of-control rising rent prices and walkability is a requirement for me, so I love adding new areas to my list.
I don't doubt this and I've seen some of it firsthand! I only meant to compare the larger cities of Canada and America and the observed differences. Each of our lands has their own distinct beauties.
The more dense the area, the more likely you're in a 15 minute city and the more likely there is a supermarket with no big parking lot. Compare the Whole Foods in the UES Manhattan vs the Whole Foods in Manhasset.
That's actually what kills walkability in my neighborhood, the ridiculous acreage of parking lots in North Seattle near 130th and Aurora Ave. Most of my neighbors are in senior housing and are pretty much afraid to cross the street, so the three grocery stores a block away might as well be on the moon.
I live on top of a large supermarket, and did at my old building. It's absolutely awesome. No parking lot at all, but why would you need one? It's always packed.
San Francisco & Washington DC are USA cities in which I’ve lived that I enjoyed walking to & from the supermarket. I’d be fine walking 20 minutes each way, carrying a couple bag on groceries home with me. Those cities are very walkable, and by walkable I mean interesting.
I live in an apartment complex that has a full-sized grocery store in it in the US. It's actually not what you think. The grocery store and shops are on the bottom, with 5 floors of apartments on top. There's no big giant parking lot, but a parking garage that's built into the apartments. Shoppers park in the 1st floor of the garage (free for shoppers). It's a very walkable area, since it's about 500 feet from a riverside pedestrian path connected to tennis courts and a nice park. It's a little bit of a unique situation since it's across the river from a major city, and most people (rich or poor) take the bus or ferry in instead of driving.
Is this in Jersey City, across the river from Manhattan? (you don't have to dox yourself if you don't want to, but everything you say matches what I saw living there, particularly the ferry)
It's different in most parts of NYC, they're more like what you're describing as wanting (and I agree with you). The original supermarket in my neighborhood, about a block away, has no parking and a loading zone in front of it to receive shipments. I've always liked these regular NYC supermarkets.
A Whole Foods moved in down the street a few years back and they do have a parking garage under the building, but I'd guess most customers aren't using that. I wouldn't be mad if it went away tomorrow though.
We're of course a very different city than pretty much all other cities in the US, as we're not at all car dependent in most parts of the city.
The IGA in downtown Seattle is a great example of how it should be. It's just a standard store front on the block that goes down a level to a normal sized grocery store. No huge parking, and in fact, I walked past it for years before realizing it was a grocery store.
Maybe is Seattle, where weather means you can have door/windows more often than not. But opinions change north/southern in places that alternate between heating and air conditioning. Noise is less of an issue and walking takes much more commitment. It was -15c last night outside my place. I would love to be 15min from a large supermarket. At the moment I am a 25m drive from the nearest place selling bananas. Even if I biked, my food would likely freeze before getting home. And in summer (30c) I couldn't buy meat/frozen food. Motorized transport to buy food isn't going away, at least not outside inner cities.
There's nothing I hate more than a massive massive super market, offering the same variety of products as a decent sized store but with wiles filled with many feet and entire shelves with exactly the same product. So much pointless walking, hunting, and searching for so little benefit.
My favorite grocery store is about 1/4 to 1/5 of the typical supermarket like a Safeway, because it has all the same products without all the fluff. And an actual real butcher counter with plenty of on staff butchers, instead of row upon row of prepackaged cuts.
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.
Where I grew up we had the kind of huge parking lot stores you are talking about - where I live in Seattle now those dont exist. Some places have parking lots but none of them are big enough for a rousing game of hide and go seek.
Many of the supermarkets in the urban areas of Seattle have no surface-level parking lots and some have no parking lots at all. They are mixed in with all the other store fronts.
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 reasons.
Heck I'd be annoyed if someone decides "Sorry we're rezoning / creating an incentive to build a restaurant in the plot next to you, not enough restaurants nearby. Good luck..."
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 shame.
It is truly shocking how much damage the car has done to our cities and lives. Here in the Twin Cities, we have three enormous concrete canyons completely dividing up the city[1], destroying any chance at walkability or density for miles. All for the sake of people who don't even live in the cities to drive 30 minutes in their personal luxury steel cages from their suburban mansions to spend 30 hours a week here and then buzz off again. We lose so much to cater to the surburbanites and gain so little.
We have a real opportunity to fix this by removing one of them[2], but we're too terrified of change to improve our own lives. So the concrete canyon called I-94 will remain, poisoning the heart of our cities, for at least another four generations. Sigh.
Not to mention the opposition of public transportation here. People are already up in arms about the light rail expansion cost, plus the people angry about losing parking on Hennepin Ave for the proposed 24 hr bus lane.
I grew up there. The public transit was always worthless for anyone who wanted to do something more than go to work downtown. It is no wonder most people oppose anything: so many years of bad service makes even good ideas look like throwing more good money after bad (and like most cities they have plenty of bad ideas they are funding as well)
It’s difficult on a few levels I suspect, because genz will be fighting the previous generation and maybe the one before it too, all the homeowners that will fight tooth and nail for their investments to remain (plus any genz that benefits from the status quo, the inheritors of landlords)
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.
Young people want things to do. I'm right on the divide between Millenials and Gen Z (the MillenialZ generation, if you'll forgive my poor portmanteau skills) and many college students I knew during covid have done one of the following:
- secured a remote job and settled down in their college city
- as a remote worker, followed a significant other or close friend to a city where they have to work in person
- found a hybrid role that allows some in-person work in a city
I think the "work remotely, from
your college city" trend is a positive one. I attended college in a small city with a serious brain drain problem (aside from medical folks) and it's nice to see more and more classmates move back to that city as the brain drain reverses.
Certainly the fact that I would have needed to commute to a job that was an hour outside the nearest major city (where I went undergrad) influenced the fact that I just went to live near my office when I graduated grad school. It was mostly the same with my classmates who also worked way out in the burbs/exurbs.
If the commute weren't a factor, I'd probably have at least considered living in the city--at least while I was still renting. (Of course, urban prices weren't nearly as relatively high as they are today.)
>Still, I'd guess you'd be right that it would be enormously expensive and difficult to bring this back.
I've moved into and out of downtown Boston over the past 20+ years, and it's been interesting to see this trend actually happen. In the neighborhoods I've lived in, there are usually 1-2 smaller markets that offer convenience at a price, and then a more "traditional" grocery store within 5-10 minutes of walking.
Over the years, a few new grocery stores have been built in the urban core, and they've actually been of the "larger traditional" variety. In most cases, they're part and parcel of new development, so the space, loading, and (reduced) parking requirements can be accommodated as part of the build.
The key is that the stores are being built concurrently with more housing being developed as well, so the stores are effectively meeting new demand. In my most recent "city phase", I actually had 3 "large format" grocery stores, 2-3 smaller markets, plus the assortment of convenience stores within a 15 minute walk.
Politically difficult, yes. Enormously expensive, I'd imagine not. Retrofitting a house to be a cafe/shop isn't that difficult or expensive. And it needn't be done all at once, it could be done gradually over time.
I think it is plausible to work towards, much of it. Some of it is fairly low hanging fruit. If you get several of the check boxes but not a coffee shop, high school, restaurant .... that's pretty good, you got a lot of bases covered.
I suppose it's all a personal preference thing to some extent -- at least if you have a car to get you further away for whatever it is.
But true, different people at different points in their lives, income levels, social positions, and preferences will prioritize different things.
The OP list seems pretty good for improving quality of life for a big round population of people at different stages of their lives and social positions. (After all, generational and income diversity in a neighborhood is probably also a plus?)
I wish I could make a personal preference to have all of those things in a 15 minute walk from me! It would require moving to a different city probably, and paying much much much more than I do now for living expenses.
I think 15 minute walkability actually has would have a much larger impact on quality of life than many people realize. I think if most people could get it without having to trade off between different personal preferences (like being able to afford the rent!), we'd be doing a lot better.
Like... nobody needs a coffee shop or everyday restaurant within a 15 minute walk. And if it requires trade-offs, including to affordability, not everyone is going to choose it. But when everyone has one (or ideally several), I think it's going to make neighborhood relationships and connections stronger in general, the people that run into each other at such establishments, or while one (and not necessarily the other) of them are walking to such establishments, the relationships between workers and customers, etc.
While you don't need those things, the more that is within a 15 minute walk, the more likely you are to walk there.
I've seen people who have drove to a neighbors house even though the walk from where they parked on the street was longer than just from their door to door (cutting across the lawn). They did it because that is their habit: they have so few places where they can reasonably walk that it never in occurs to them to walk the few times they could. (the above case was an extreme that they laughed about when they realized it, most people wouldn't drive that trip, but the thinking makes perverse sense)
Grocery, pharmacy, schools, and a public transit stop, only after those would I rate restaurants or coffee shops. This isn't some moral statement about making your own food, outsourifood preparation to a professional makes sense from a specialization standpoint if you can afford it, but if you can't and for daily life, being able to get food and medicine seems a bit higher.
I include public transit time in my 15 minute city. However you have to always include the worst case: just as your arrive at the stop the vehicle closes its doors and leaves.
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.
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.
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.
It takes a lot longer to walk across a street when you have to wait for a walk signal. City streets can be 1.5-2 lane residential streets which you can cross basically on demand, making them equivalent in time to walking on the sidewalk. Based on an average walking pace of 1.33 m/s (3.0 mph), you can cover 40m in 30 seconds.
The blocks in this section of Seattle are ~80m long, so one block takes 60s to walk. The "Mercer on Summit" apartments on this map are within 1/2 block (30s) from 3 restaurants, 2 bars, and 1 small grocery.
I also have to walk along the street a little, and cross a small road that intersects my road. It's still probably less than 30 seconds, but it's close enough. It's 30 seconds if you include walking down the stairs inside my house, slipping my shoes on, etc.
Most of the noise I hear from my apartment in a medium-density neighborhood, like 95% of it, is just car traffic. Big noisy trucks and people on Harleys, people honking at each other as they try to leave a parking lot, all that. Building spread out unwalkable areas creates way more noise than the opposite. What is true, however, is that this design was mostly created for the benefit of suburbanites who live in isolated communities with no readily accessible amenities besides a road into the city. Their peace and quiet comes at the expense of mine, and especially at the expense of lower income communities which often exist in the noisiest, most car-heavy parts of the city.
Good point in that European high schools (generally) do not have large sports facilities and therefore are suited to typical urban multi-story buildings. Kids do sports at private/public sports clubs that are usually located outside town or in suburbs.
So high schools within 15 min walk/bike in Europe is much more doable than in the U.S.
Caveat: this is how it was when I was growing up in France; it may have changed since then, though I looked up my old high school and it's the same.
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 does to justify building enough high schools to make them all walkable.
Not to mention Seattle couldn't really afford to build that many schools, as the city can't even maintain the current schools to basic levels of safety (ongoing lead water pipe issues...)
I would love smaller more local schools, but It's worth noting that unfortunately a bunch of the schools have reduced enrollment and the funding is per kid. I don't know how to fix it but I hope it doesn't lead to closing even more schools.
> 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.
I believe the relevant factor is the ratio of school aged children to adults. This determines the relative demand for schools over other amenities such as housing. That ratio is largely dependent on the birthrate regardless of the population or density of the city. While people are moving in, it's not clear that new residents have a higher average birthrate than existing residents.
(This is going to sound like we're playing Sim City 2000) but don't forget to add a hospital (a proper one, with an emergency room), a fire station, a police station...
> a grocery store
Are there many neighbourhoods which don't already have some kind of grocery store?
It probably depends on what you mean by "grocery store." In dense urban areas, bodegas, chain convenience stores, and pharmacies with a small grocery section are pretty plentiful. Supermarkets a lot less so.
That's probably part of a shift over time. In general, we probably have more relatively large but spread out businesses than little mom and pop places on every corner.
(This is sort of a US comment. There seem to be more serviceable smallish grocery stores in Europe that are in between a supermarket and a convenience store. That's less common in the US other than one-off markets and sometimes downsized chain grocery stores.)
> It probably depends on what you mean by "grocery store." In dense urban areas, bodegas, chain convenience stores, and pharmacies with a small grocery section are pretty plentiful. Supermarkets a lot less so. That's probably part of a shift over time. In general, we probably have more relatively large but spread out businesses than little mom and pop places on every corner. (This is sort of a US comment. There seem to be more serviceable smallish grocery stores in Europe that are in between a supermarket and a convenience sore. That's less common in the US other than one-off markets.)
While on a business trip I stopped at a petrol (gas) station in the UK a couple of weeks ago, the sort on the side of a major road outside a city, and with a mini-supermarket attached, and was literally speechless when I realised they had a whole shelf rack containing gluten-free products.
I have coeliac disease, and had been assuming I'd have to travel specially to some large supermarket to get the stuff I can eat, but thanks to this place I grabbed loaf of gluten-free bread and a pack of gluten-free cornflakes, and I was good to go.
I'm discovering that coeliac and mid-range hotels don't always mix :/
In europe, you often have mid to normal-sized supermarkets near public transit since a lot want to grab a few groceries after work.
I wonder what "chain convenience stores" are...are they more geared towards snacks? Mid-sized supermarkets are all over the cities in europe I would say. You usually visit a bigger supermarket once a week, but you can get everything in the smaller ones, from fruits and vegetables to pasta. They are really there to fulfil your everyday needs and you don't strictly need to visit a bigger one. Many don't because it's so convenient, but they tend to be a bit more expensive.
Mid-sized supermarkets are part of my everyday life and I wonder why they are not more common in the US.
Yes, there's a term called "food desert" that exists for a reason. Think inner city areas. Parts of the town that are attempting to be "gentrified" (in whatever discriminating tone that word implies) where there were places to live, but stores were more than 15 mins by car. it was just yet another reminder of how city planning is anything but good.
It's pretty clever - they use SNAP benefits as a proxy (you can buy what they call staples; fruits/veggies, bread, meat & fish, milk, etc but no hot or prepared food: https://fns-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/snap/SNAP-...) but they map to all of the stores who accept SNAP and combine that with a map of supermarkets from a Nielson directory. They then map the number of census tracts and compare against that map -- the 6.2% figure is the "1 and 10" method which counts households >1 mile from a store in an urban area and >10 miles in a rural one.
Being more than 10 miles from a real market of some sort in an actual rural area seems a pretty low bar. Population density is certainly lower but 10 miles isn't very far if you need to drive to the next town over.
It's not just 10 miles, it's 10 miles and being a low income tract which they define as average household income below 80% of state median or >20% households in the tract being below the poverty line. So trying to measure where the poorest areas have the most limited access.
How are you defining rural? The people who live in small towns in farm country, or the farmers living on their farm. In general farmers are not poor, but the people who live in the towns around them often are. It takes a lot of money to run a farm, you have to be great at business as you will have several years in a row where you lose $100,000 - over the long term though things work out to making a lot of money on farms.
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!
The "limited access to affordable and nutritious food" criteria is primarily to distinguish between having a Safeway-type grocery store nearby versus only having a Plaid Pantry/7-11/Circle K where you can buy a gallon of milk and maybe a loaf of bread but it's nothing like a proper grocery store.
I was thinking the same thing. This doesn't seem like it's a realistic goal, as much as I do really like the idea. 15 minutes of walking isn't really much in terms of feet or meters or however you want to measure it. 15 minutes of biking time, that's better. I guess I live in a "15 Minute Area" if you only count the bike time. Maybe more like 20 if you count the time I end up sitting at intersections?
Better bike infrastructure really unlocks a lot of potential. With good bike infrastructure, rides of ~30 minutes are quite comfortable, which is a distance of about 4 miles.
IMO a well-designed city could easily keep all necessary amenities in that range.
or with a well designed bike infrastructure a 15 minute walk would become a 5 minute bike ride :) I wouldn't want to bike 30 minutes just to buy a few groceries.
> he 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 reasons.
A high school I understand (where I live in the UK it's common for high school kids to catch the bus to school if they don't live close - as long as you live within a 15 minute walk of the bus stop that seems fine). But a grocery store? What's difficult about that? Just convert a house.
> But a grocery store? What's difficult about that? Just convert a house.
I feel that the American view of a grocery store is one of those mega-Walmartesque stores with infinite aisles of stuff, rather than the more common small-scale grocery stores we are used to here in Europe.
At least on my trips to the US I don't recall seeing many small-scale grocers in neighbourhoods, it was either stores like CVS or going to a mega-grocer.
Those large stores are where most people buy food. The margins for food in them are very low, but they make it up by volume. Smaller stores cannot compete on price or selection, and so even if there is a small store close Americans will make regular trips to the large store that has everything at a low price for most food. There isn't much room for the small stores anymore.
There are pros and cons to the above. Do not claim what you are used to is better: it is different, not better or worse. Odds are you have not spent enough time using both to make a real claim. even if you have, odds are your stage of life is different enough that you cannot compare.
Many urban areas in the US all have lots of local, smaller, specialty, and neighborhood grocery stores. It's not a novelty for those who live in those areas. And they're not 7-11s.
In the US you don't really have the urban Tescos and Sainsbury's and so forth. You have some equivalent local markets but it's mostly fairly spread out supermarkets or 7-11/CVS/etc. which really don't count as grocery stores.
In many places there is a miserable quantity of political and legal infrastructure to prevent that from happening. Undoing that is a necessary part of 15-minute cities, but it may be weirdly unpopular.
(also, people expect a wider range of things than will fit in an old style corner shop, and you need to have HGV parking..)
Not weird at all. People don't like change. There's a reason NIMBY attitudes are nearly universal.
I don't agree that it's how it should be, but even in an already urban area (Somerville) getting things built is like pulling teeth. There's a literal hole in the ground from a fire a decade ago that people have been fighting development on for years, because they argue it will bring more people to the area and make it harder to street park. As if there's a guaranteed right to have public space dedicated to your private vehicle.
In the densest parts of European cities, the delivery lorry stops outside the supermarket just before or just after the shop opens and they unload quickly. Often, that pretty pedestrian street full of shops has road access to the rear, but not always.
Parking regulations are written to accommodate this. The pedestrian streets in the centre of Copenhagen allow deliveries from 4am to 11am, but I think there may be additional restrictions on large trucks as they seem to be out before 8am. Rubbish collection is also at these times.
Yeah, I would add: for a small shop the delivery van doesn't necessarily need to be that big either. I know a lot of shops that get supplied primarily by vans that are not much bigger than a transit van.
> But a grocery store? What's difficult about that? Just convert a house.
The difficultly is making the typical residential dwelling compliant comply with existing regulations like the Americans with Disabilities act and complying with things like commercial insurance policy requirements.
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.
You are correct. But Seattle's history with desegregation bussing had a major impact on the nature of the schools in Seattle today. It was very common for students to spend a total of 90 minutes each day being bussed across town rather than walking 15 minutes to their closest school. It gave birth to a thriving ecosystem of private schools that still dominates the social fabric of the city today. Over 25% of all students in Seattle are in private schools, with that figure being much higher in the wealthier North Seattle neighborhoods.
I think every neighborhood should have an elementary school within walking distance (my local elementary school is not and it annoys me to no end) but I agree that for high schools this might be unrealistic, and anyway a good transit system should be able to make it easy for kids to get to high school whether they attend their local school or not.
> or plop down a grocery store in a neighborhood ... that sounds both super expensive and politically difficult, and for some good reasons.
Heck I'd be annoyed if someone decides "Sorry we're rezoning / creating an incentive to build a restaurant in the plot next to you, not enough restaurants nearby. Good luck..."
> Heck I'd be annoyed if someone decides "Sorry we're rezoning / creating an incentive to build a restaurant in the plot next to you, not enough restaurants nearby. Good luck..."
I don't get this. Isn't a restaurant at the corner great? Why would you be annoyed? I like living next to a restaurants. It increases your quality of live I think, you can literally just swing by if you feel like it and after a while you get to know the owner and develop a personal relationship. It really makes this place more my home I think, I always greet them and have a quick chat, and brings some life to the street. Of course, there's a question of the size but that can be dealt with. A grocery store is another thing because often they tend to be really big, but I think often suitable places can be found. But I think the supermarkets in mind are small, not a giant supermarket. Something where you can get most of your stuff but don't really have a variety to choose from, something where you swing by because you forgot your eggs.
I don't live in the US so I am really unsure why that's so bad. I don't think living 15 minutes to a Walmart (I picture them to be massive) is meant.
I assume, of course, that you're living somewhere somewhat suitable. But we're talking about living in seattle, so I assume it's ok.
You make a good point. Living in walkable neighborhoods means evacuating most of the country and concentrating ourselves in fewer, denser cities. It'll be a great thing to the extent we can accomplish it, but people have a strong attachment to place and to suburban lifestyles, and the shift will fuel the nasty culture war we already have.
> 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
Not absolutely everything needs to be walkable in 15 minutes. Once kids are teenagers having go to school on transit or bicycle would be fine.
Perhaps focus on elementary schools being walkable.
Elementary schools having the added advantage of being a smaller footprint. In my area, elementary schools tend to be 200-400 students. Middle schools are around 800 students and high schools about 1500. I (car dependent suburb) live within walking distance of one elementary and a second one would be walkable if you didn't have to wind through a series of cul-de-sacs to get there.
The closest high school is 2.5 miles away and the high school my child attended was 6.5 miles away due to a quirk in the boundaries and which schools feed into which higher level school.
> I like the idea of walking 15 minutes to get all the things.
But
>Heck I'd be annoyed if someone decides "Sorry we're rezoning / creating an incentive to build a restaurant in the plot next to you, not enough restaurants nearby. Good luck..."
>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 reasons.
Even has the weak "what about the costs" argument.
I agree generally about zoning laws. But I also think they do a good job of keeping joe schmo from trying to turn a random plot into a car repair business that is just not suited to the job. Rando business guy doesn't care if the area is suited for it and neither do their customers.
I speak from experience as I lived in a house near a guy who decided to do just that... broken down cars parked everywhere (leaking all sorts of stuff), noise at all hours.
Yeah. Some things need to be kept out. Funnily enough, it's nearly always car related. Repair shops, gas stations, parking lots, ... Nothing trashes up a city more than cars.
I think this is why people tend to like the Japanese zoning model where things are divided up into different "nuisance" levels. Something like an auto shop would be more of a nuisance than say a coffee shop. You're allowed to build anything in a zone as long as it's below the zone's nuisance level. This will help keep real industrial style work away from where people are living and eating, but allows for so much more retail opportunity in those zones.
When you kick out all those businesses that the upper middle class finds unsightly there ceases to be enough latent economic activity for the businesses you do like to exist in an economically sustainable manner.
Banning automotive repair might be ok by itself but there's another idiot who wants to ban X, and Y and Z and their complaints are just as valid as yours and the status quo is what you get when you try and accommodate all of them.
>A far cry from buying some milk and cereal in the morning.
Depends on the store. I've lived next to grocery stores with the loudest compressors for refrigeration that I've ever heard. Going to take some nuance there.
Zoning laws are a great way to implement social segregation without explicitely saying it too loudly, I guess that's the reason they are so popular in "free" and "open" societies.
It's not about rent so much as density. Seattle has this "urban village" concept where designated areas have zoning that allows apartment buildings and usually has a commercial strip. I'd guess the urban village map [1] overlaps the 15-minute zones pretty closely.
Outside of the urban villages, Seattle is comprised of neighborhoods of single-family homes. Those areas can't all be 15-minute walkable because catchement areas don't have the population needed to support those amenities.
But it's also certainly a class issue. The people walking to the grocery store are mainly the poor, students, and a small core of idealists who go out of their way to live a "city lifestyle". Everybody else drives everywhere. Which has a strange effect that wealthier neighborhoods are less likely to have things like a pharmacy, because the wealthier are in the habit of driving everywhere. I get my prescriptions filled at Costco, five miles from my house, even though the closest pharmacy is one mile.
Madrona probably doesn’t have anywhere to rent, it’s just enormous old houses. 6 of the 9 are downtown+surrounds, all very expensive. Ballard and Green Lake are going to be the cheapest on the list, and I would guess they’re in the most expensive quarter of neighborhoods?
> International District: Euphemism for Chinatown, not expensive
It’s not a euphemism. Euphemism refers to a word that conceals something unpleasant or embarrassing. It is anything but. It is working class yes but nothing wrong with that.
The full name (since 1999) is Chinatown-ID. The majority of the inhabitants are Chinese but it encompasses Little Saigon and the less prominent but still existing Japantown (Uwajimaya and several Japanese businesses still have a presence).
I appreciate the reply and suggest just stating that it is Chinatown-International District with no additional adjectives other than expensive (or not) like you did with the other neighborhoods listed.
I have a connection with the C-ID and it is a neighborhood like any other and is in my opinion one of the more vibrant neighborhoods food-wise in Seattle despite (or due to it?) being working class.
I lived there myself and love it, and wouldn't want to cast aspersions. Fell in love with spicy soups and banh mi. Not all of us were 18 year old college students straight into the 6 figure lifestyle, you know?
And also extremely on the other side - Market housing can be very low-cost. A number of my friends are paying < $300/month for some nice/decent apartments with a very long wait-list.
Cf: the apartments under the Market and Stewart House.
I'm familiar with all of these neighborhoods as a < 5 year transplant, and several are not particularly walkable neighborhoods, certainly not by the definition proposed in the article. This is an odd thing to gatekeep on.
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.
I would say that the right wing conspiracy theory is half being locked in a ghetto, and the other half just who you're being locked in with, given right wing views on immigration and the "police abolition" movement.
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.
> I was surprised that [Eastlake and Montlake] just didn't have any grocery stores ... Given the amount of investment the city/state is making to improve the WA-520 corridor
Montlake had a small grocery store that was torn down precisely because of the 520 construction. (I can't speak for Eastlake).
520 is a highway after all, and highways are hostile to walkability for a multitude or reasons. (this fact still remains, even though efforts are being made to improve the situation in Montlake).
> Montlake had a small grocery store that was torn down precisely because of the 520 construction.
Right, I forgot about the Montlake Market. That closed before my search, but I did hear about it.
> 520 is a highway after all, and highways are hostile to walkability for a multitude or reasons
Yeah, that's fair. I'd argue that 520 in it's final incarnation will be a little bit less hostile than most, as it's mostly over water, and the lids over the 2 land crossings (with parks + transit) will partially mitigate the walkability concerns. It'll still be a noisy eyesore though.
Geographically, Montlake is in a pretty desirable location. It will have quick transit connections to downtown Seattle+SLU, UW (and light rail), and the eastside. I imagine the future only blocker to development will be zoning and pushback from existing residents.
The 520 construction took out a gas station and a small but varied grocery store on the south side of the highway. I believe the Montlake library was a drug/grocery store long ago. And there used to be gas stations at 24th and Boyer.
Currently I'd guess the grocery options are Monts, Little Lago, Eastlake market, and Petes. But I doubt many people do all their shopping at any of those they are closer to convenience stores than grocery stores.
Cool map. If you select Elementary schools and all of the amenities except Link stations, the map basically highlights Seattle's Urban Villages (plus a few extras).[1]
To be perfectly honest, although it's technically possible to go car-free here, it can be more trouble than it's worth. You'll be able to get to the essentials easily enough, but there are a long tail of places that you may want to get to which are only bus-accessible if you transfer- and that can add a ton of time to your trip.
It's more realistic to think of Seattle as a city where you can be "car-light": it's entirely possible to go without driving during the week, assuming you commute by bus and have a small supermarket nearby to pick up dinner/essentials. Then, on the weekend, a vehicle can be super useful to fill in the gaps, whether that's going to the larger supermarket for bulkier goods, getting out of the city into nature, or going over to a distant neighborhood to check it out.
Part of this is because of the city's geography- I might not mind (for instance) living in West Seattle and commuting by bus to downtown, but if I'm trying to go visit the Woodland Park Zoo up, I'd probably want to drive there because it would be a considerably longer trip involving a transfer in Downtown.
Yes, I've lived in Seattle without a car, that is easily achievable and many people do this. In the core, you can get around by walking since the weather is mild most of the year, you don't even need to use public transit. You can expand your footprint on light rail and buses, which has been slowly improving its range but many people don't use those if they are in the dense urban areas.
The one gap is that Seattle is surrounded by very popular nature and outdoorsy activities up in the mountains or out on the islands. It is one of the major perks of living in Seattle. If you want to spend a lot of time wandering around the Cascades, you'll need a car. Some people that have a car use it almost exclusively for outdoors activities, not day to day living.
I lived in Seattle from 2016-2020 and didn't have a car for about half that time. If your house and work are near a link stop you certainly don't need it, everything you'll need is in walking distance or a train ride away. Other than link and the rapid buses, there's good bus coverage, but it's slow, wouldn't want to rely on it IMO.
Biking is not great. I did it a lot, but I'm comfortable riding through heavy traffic on steep hills, if you're not, probably would be hard to rely on.
Finally, I'm big into climbing/mountaineering and lack of a car was never a big problem. I'd rent one the few times I had too (way cheaper than parking and insurance), but otherwise could usually carpool with someone else who was going. Sorta' puts you on someone else's schedule, but if you need a belay partner anyway...
A friend of mine has lived in Seattle for about 8 years without a car so I have a pretty good idea what it's like. We both live in one of the 15 minute areas from this article.
Public transportation is decent compared to most of the US (but worse than NYC obviously.) There are also lots of other ways to get around like Uber, scooters, bikes, and Gig cars (rental car you pick up and drop in public parking spots.)
The biggest problem is getting to the mountains if that's your thing. That's the main reason I have a car.
It's possible, but you have to carefully choose where to live. I spent my 20's in Seattle with no car: I lived in an apartment-dense neighborhood close to shops and groceries (Capitol Hill), and relied on buses, walking, and biking for transportation. That was before Uber and Lyft, which would have helped to fill in the gaps. It was a fun bohemian lifestyle, but I wouldn't want to do it now that I have kids and have a much busier schedule. Buses here are really slow.
Living the car-free life in Seattle is depressing due to gloomy weather. Life in Seattle is great if you accept the grey and live outdoors as much as possible. For that you need a car.
I'm not sure that tracks? When I've visited Seattle with friends, I walk to almost everything, even in gloomy weather. I don't see how "living outdoors" requires a car - if anything, driving everywhere is the the opposite of living outdoors.
Sure, if you want to go out to the mountains every weekend you need a car, but with a light rain-proof jacket, it's not too bad to walk or bike through much of the city. The grey weather is either depressing or not, but I don't find it to be much more depressing out of a car than in it.
I was afraid that'd be the answer. Do you use your car for everything, or are you able to handle day-to-day stuff on foot and use the car mostly for adventures?
I don’t drive and have been in Seattle for 15 years. I do carpool with friends to go skiing or camping out of the city, but day to day I used bike and transit for everything (until the pandemic, now I work from home and mostly just walk to nearby shops).
This is the real answer. I walk/ride a bike a ton for about 7 months of the year here. Winter months I am driving much more often than anything else. Standing around waiting for a bus, walking a mile+, etc in the pitch black when it's 40 degrees and raining is not fun and given the option of just driving I take it.
It depends where you live. I used to live in Belltown and did not have a car, this was just fine. But Belltown is right downtown so your choices are either very expensive newer buildings or older buildings that are somewhat affordable but kinda decrepit. But I'm now in the odd Queen Anne/Westlake border area and I think a car is pretty necessary, and if I were in the aggressively single-family zoned places like Magnolia it would be even more so.
I've lived in Seattle for ~10 years and haven't owned a car the entire time. I use public transit, walk, or a Lyft to get around. I live in Belltown (5th and Vine) and in general all the places I need to get to are within walking distance. Even the international district is only ~20-30 minutes walk for me, or I can take the light rail.
It's just a cool place to hang out for a day. Many great restaurants, interesting and cool stores, museums, live music, a cool ae-card, other attractions, a great zoo, a great waterfront.
Olympia's got cool stuff too but it's not as close. It's close to Tacoma though.
Really neat visualization. Would love to see it for other cities (perhaps Paris would be a good one for comparison, since it's touted as the fifteen-minute city par excellence).
I don't see how Paris is the best example. I would nominate Zurich.
Strangely, I live with my wife and daughter in Boise, Idaho and we don't own a car. The high school, my work, grocery stores, etc. are all within a short walk.
Almost every town in the US used to have these kinds of livable zones. Every "historic downtown" used to be a place where people lived and worked. You'd walk to the pharmacy, or the hardware store, or the grocery. You could live your whole live without a car payment yoked around your neck.
It bums me out that we had that taken from us. I'm glad you found one of the places where you can still make it work!
I spent my childhood in an inner suburb of Cleveland. Between kindergarten and eighth grade, I took a bus to school for part of sixth grade. Otherwise everything was in the 15-minute distance, mostly afoot. (The junior high school might have been twenty or thirty minutes on foot, but of course less on a bicycle.) Nobody mistook it for Paris, but within the radius was a quite decent library, an independent bakery, a deli, and a grocery store.
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)
Seattle is a weird hybrid that probably could be a model for what is realistic in the US. There a tons of walkable neighborhoods all over the city to provide daily necessities but you really do need a car to make that trip across town or even from one neighborhood to the next in some cases.
Yea, the hills and water really mess up public transit routes in Seattle, making it a lot harder to get around by bus in any sort of efficient timeline, especially around the Queen Anne and Beacon Hill areas.
I think that’s because of where the city is defined. SF is just SF- it doesn’t extend that far south and doesn’t even include the east bay. NYC on the other hand includes big areas like east Queens and Staten Island that are effectively just suburbs.
I’ve lived in both and if you’re sort of near the core then NYC is much, much more walkable than SF.
SF is walkable if elevation is not a problem for you. Some slopes are so steep that it's like hiking up a trail.
At least it isn't like San Jose or Newark, where sidewalks just aren't there along some roads, in residential area, or suddenly cut short in the middle of a block where you have to walk back to the previous crossing for an alternative route. And there are _so many_ dead ends without warning. So many.
Depending on the boundary of the city, it might not be an apple-to-apple comparison.
I wonder if NYC will rank higher if Staten Island is excluded. Not that I have anything against it, just that judging from the heat map it is less walkable than the rest.
It's similar in Canada too. Toronto is the megacity (1998 amalgamation) including some suburbs; Vancouver does not include Richmond; Montreal has weird holes like Westmount.
Discussions of urban density often require nuance because density/walkability/access to transit/etc. is very dependent on where political boundaries are drawn--often for fairly arbitrary historical reasons.
ADDED: For that matter, the other Boston neighborhoods out that way are not especially conducive to living without a car either although they're dense enough in spots to walking to some things.
Based solely on the metrics of the site, walkability, bikeability, proximity to transit, based entire on map data… sure! The reality on the ground of course suggests walkability is… not great. Better than having a car there though.
I live in West Seattle and tbh the maps for West Seattle look pretty solid, especially when you factor in the significant reduction in housing costs. I remain more people don't live here!
the supermarket map discounts a some of the very good corner and ethnic groceries that serve specific neighborhoods, which are a worthwhile and important (and imo better) segment of the grocery market. and some of the "no restaurant" locations definitely contain restaurants.
The decision to leave libraries in the standard criteria made the numbers at the end meaningless for the most part - most libraries are barely open as it is, and should be accessible enough by bus regardless. Still a very cool visualisation for Seattle; I think this city has great potential for denser urban development, while still retaining its charm.
As the mental health and drug crisis grows, I simply don't want to walk anywhere, and don't want my family walking places. Plus, it's incredibly inconvenient to do grocery shopping on foot. Yes, I know that people do it and it's possible and I've done it when living elsewhere.
Still, this 15-minute city is an initiative created by the WEF which should be ignored and not implemented. If the WEF is so concerned about the "carbon footprint" of regular citizens driving to work and to the store, a much more effective solution would be to ban private jets. Bill Gates' flight to Davos on a private jet (to urge people to eat fake meat) exhausts more carbon in one trip than my family's entire car usage.
It's really much safer than it used to be to walk anywhere than it was in the 80s or 90s... Sometimes you have to be street smart and maybe walk across the road to avoid some sketchiness, but by and large violent crime and muggings are not really a thing. I walk to the grocery store nearly every day, the most potentially lethal part is crossing the street (because of cars) by far.
>>As the mental health and drug crisis grows, I simply don't want to walk anywhere, and don't want my family walking places.
Good point. There is very little motivation to make cities more 'walkable', if your walk requires stepping in or over human feces and discarded needles and homeless people camped out on the sidewalk. That problem needs to be fixed first before there is going to be widespread support for proposals like this.
I think that the two go hand-in-hand. In car-centric America, if you can't meet the minimum of a car, then you can't live there. So you migrate to the city where the cost of a roof is artificially high.
And having more livable cities in America are exactly what we need to help solve the problem.
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: Okay maybe what I read was overblown. Seems this is being trialed in Oxford as "traffic filters" but the ubiquitous camera surveillance is certainly part of it. There is also talk of this expanding to other cities in the UK. Though not specifically talked about as apart of the 15 minute city plan, this seems to go along nicely with that concept.
"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"
Are you talking about LTNs? They were initially turning some residential roads into cul-de-sacs to limit through traffic, but a minority of motorists feigned concern about emergency service access so many were replaced with no entry signs and cameras, now the same minority are feigning concern about a surveillance state?
It's definitely non-locals using small resident roads as short cuts who are now slightly inconvenienced performing mental gymnastics.
My family lives in the UK and they all own cars. None of them have ever had the experience that you're describing. Either you're confused, or making it up, or there's something happening as an experiment in a few cities that you're blowing out of proportion.
"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"
> If residents in the permit areas are not using a permit or run out of permits, they will still be able to drive to any destination in Oxford or elsewhere, whenever they like, as often as they like. Depending on their location and destination, they might have to use a different route to avoid the filters, which would usually be the ring road.
The reason we have proposed these changes is because – as everyone who lives and visits Oxford knows – the city has had awful congestion for decades. This is damaging both our economy and our environment, and is making the bus network unviable.
Our aim is to reduce traffic levels and congestion, make the buses faster and more reliable, and make cycling and walking safer and more pleasant.
It's unfortunate to mix surveillance with these other things. It's completely orthogonal to other things.
(And yes, surveillance is real in London, but not the other things. You can also camera surveil sprawling, car oriented areas, and technology makes it cheaper every year.)
The wingnut right thinks that “15-minute city” is a global Jewish conspiracy to lock everyone into defenseless small neighborhoods and then I dunno, aliens?
"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.
I am saying that enforcing movement like this and adding bureaucracy to drive through certain places is a solid step in the direction of authoritarianism.
Well, the article is framed in terms of creating 15 minute neighborhoods:
"ROAD blocks stopping most motorists from driving through Oxford city centre will divide the city into six "15 minute" neighbourhoods, a county council travel chief has said."
I'm not abusing anyone, and I'm not saying there's a secret cabal trying to control the world. I'm just saying this makes me uneasy because it is reducing freedoms.
It is not reducing freedoms any more than a toll booth does. They are not road blocks. This is related to 15 minute cities exactly as much as it’s related to pedestrian crossings. It is making you uneasy because you are reading conspiracies and lies and believing them.
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.