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No such a thing as "have to". To walk everywhere you need to would take hours in a day it's impractical.
by marshmallow_12 6y ago
No such a thing as "have to". To walk everywhere you need to would take hours in a day it's impractical.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y agoOnly if where you work and purchase necessities is far from where you live. If you live close or work remote, then it would be easy and convenient to walk.
- marshmallow_12 6y agoNeither your comment, or the other 2 have any bearing on the reality in which i live and that i know many others also live. The cities we live in are hundreds, if not thousands of years old. The idea of that a 15 minute city has any bearing on real life is sadly laughable. I'm sorry to have to say so, but it's true.
- alistairSH 6y agoCars didn't exist hundreds or thousands of years ago, so your statement can't possibly be true. Well planned communities can be close to car-free, at least for day-to-day activities. The problem is we haven't prioritized being nearly car free, choosing instead of externalize the costs of car culture (pollution that generations will have to deal with, health impacts on some community members today, depletion of fossil fuels and the impact of digging them up, vast swaths of land dedicated to flat tarmac for car storage).
- _carbyau_ 6y agoNot defending the post you reply to, but while well planned communities can require close to car free, the modern life is such that people are aware of - and cars enable easy access to - the greater world much more so than otherwise. They want to see sights 90 minutes drive away. 3 hours drive away. And be home again that night. I support "local living without cars as much as possible", but I think cars are here to stay for most of us.
- adrianN 6y agoPeople driving to see sights is really not the issue with cars that we have.
- alistairSH 6y agoNowhere did I ever claim people shouldn’t have access to cars. I own a car. My wife owns a car. I drive 12k miles/year doing just what you described - day trips or weekend trips. But, I have the option to leave the car parked most of the week and it amazes me that more communities aren’t planned similarly.
- makomk 6y agoHundreds or thousands of years ago, most people would be born, grow up, live their entire lives and die within a few miles of where their parents were born. We're not living in that kind of society today and I don't think it'd be possible to go back to it short of the total collapse of civilization and technology and death of almost all of the world's population.
- alistairSH 6y agoSure, but that's not what was said above: "The cities we live in are hundreds, if not thousands of years old. The idea of that a 15 minute city has any bearing on real life is sadly laughable." The two sentences don't make sense together. Those old cities were "15 minute" cities by necessity - easy long distance travel wasn't a thing until the industrial revolution. We've since redesigned many of them for car use, and in some cases realized the mistake and redesigned them again (Amsterdam, for example).
- andrewl 6y agoThe fact that the 15-minute city will not work everywhere does not mean that there is no place it can work. I live in a major city on the east coast of the United States, and I have it now. There are other cities in which it could be implemented. There are regions of my city in which it can not be implemented. But it's worth doing where possible. There will be various solutions to our energy and pollution problems, and some of the variations will depend on the region the solution is being implemented in. I don't think solar power will be as big in Canada as in, say, the Sahara Desert.
- foobiekr 6y agoI am curious which city we are talking about. This sounds very nice.
- hinkley 6y agoOnly because we structure our neighborhoods to require cars to do anything other than walk the dog.
- munk-a 6y agoAnd even then some folks need to drive to their dog walker.
- sokoloff 6y agoI worked near a gym a few jobs ago. I would see people circling the block trying to get a “good parking spot” presumably so they didn’t have to walk very far to get their workout.
- shiftpgdn 6y agoMore likey to be people who want to minimize the amount of time they're walking alone to prevent victimization. A personal data point: My wife and I used to live about 20 blocks from the gym we used. She would drive because of the vagrants and street people who would follow and harass women. Cycling wasn't an option because anyone who left their bike unattended would have it stolen.
- hh3k0 6y ago> The ‘15-minute city’ idea hit the headlines when Anne Hidalgo made it one of the driving issues of her re-election campaign. “The concept of a 15-minute city, in a nutshell,” explains Carlos Moreno, professor at the Sorbonne and scientific advisor to the Mayor of Paris “is to design the city within a distance of 15 minutes by foot or by bike to enable the six main urban activities for living in cities: to live, to work, to supply, to education, to health, and to enjoy.” After Anne Hidalgo’s election last summer, the wheels have started turning to bring the idea to life. https://eurocities.eu/latest/parisians-will-live-within-a-15-minute-radius/ https://eurocities.eu/latest/parisians-will-live-within-a-15...
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago"To health" I presume means to see a doctor. But if I need to see a doctor, I may not be in a condition where I can walk or bike there.
- sokoloff 6y agoIt’s not to say there would be zero taxis and certainly not zero ambulances.
- Qwertious 6y agoPerhaps, but (based purely on anecdotes) most medical visits are the type where you walk in. I expect check-ups are far more common than open heart surgery, simply because every major operation requires a precautionary followup or two.
- i_haz_rabies 6y agoOne problem with this is that we've distributed our families and social circles. I would love to ditch my car, but then I wouldn't be able to get to my parents, siblings or friends.
- andrepd 6y agoThat's where public transport comes in.
- scrose 6y agoI haven’t owned a car in several years. I can walk to my local grocer, pharmacy, gym, dozens of restaurants, job, extended family, and many more places in less than an hour. I just biked to get my Covid shot at a place 4 miles away. It took me 25 minutes to get there as I breezed passed gridlocked traffic on the way up. If I had taken a car it would have likely cost $20+ and taken over 40 minutes. If you think ‘need to’ doesn’t needs quotation marks, try sitting through a few local community board meetings focused on re-allocating free parking for anything more useful :)
- mustyoshi 6y agoDo you live alone? I can't imagine doing weekly shopping for a family without a car (we buy from both a grocery store, and a wholesale warehouse store)
- scrose 6y agoI don’t live alone. I have several grocery stores within 5 minutes of me, and a farmers market and a Whole Foods within half a mile which all serve me well and allow me to get a few things at a time without making me going out of my way every week :) I find that’s nicer since you can get things fresh and you never have too much sitting around.
- coughupalung 6y agoI lived downtown Toronto for several years and I had to replace my car battery three times because I drove it so infrequently that they died. I understand that living downtown isn't an option for everyone, but I strongly believe we can build dense "city centers" even in the suburbs that offer similar conveniences with larger units for families.
- stjohnswarts 6y agowhat kind of car uses $20 in gas driving 4 miles? even if you're idling most of the time (which actually uses surprisingly little gas compared to moving)
- alistairSH 6y agoBull manure. That's a choice you've made for yourself, not some larger truth about life. I live in the suburbs (20 miles west of DC). My office is 1 mile away and I walk. The schools are 1 mile away; if I had school-age kids, we'd walk. I can walk or cycle to the grocery, the brewpub, coffee shop, post office, and burger joint (all 0.5-2 miles away). I rarely use my car during the week; the vast majority of my mileage is weekend trips to the mountains.
- _carbyau_ 6y agoYour last sentence is interesting. Even having it all sorted for day to day living. You still have a car to go somewhere else. I feel the same here in Australia. Much of our day to day living doesn't need a car. Some of our friends though are in small country towns that would be a big hassle to visit without a car.
- alistairSH 6y agoI’d love if I could take the train to the mountains, but the US (and Australia) is a large place with low overall density, so cars make sense for some travel. But few American communities are planned with minimizing car use as a key tenet. I’m lucky to live in one that is.
- jxf 6y agoI've lived in multiple places where I could walk to everything I needed to walk to within 15 minutes. Why do you think it's hard for you to imagine this could be true?
- clairity 6y agoyes, i live this way in the middle of LA, as do a number of my neighbors, because parking is such a hassle and most of us aren’t rich. grocery/retail, schools, entertainment, medical care, etc. are all walkable, and farther amenities are usually just a scooter/bike/bus/lyft/train ride away. this lifestyle is totally within reach in many places if desired. the ties that bind aren’t much at all, once scrutinized.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoYeah I'm in suburbia but I live within 15 minute bike ride of a large grocery store, a couple spas, hairstyling place, a couple bars, gas station. the only thing missing is a theater and warhammer 40k/comics store.
- atoav 6y ago5 minutes in my old job, 50 minutes in my new job, I usually cycle there because it is faster than both car or subway.
- jsemrau 6y agoReminds me of my talk in 2013 at The Guardian's Activate here in Singapore. Many cities around the world especially in Europe and Asia do not require cars for most of one's daily routine. The American model where living, working, and shopping spaces are distinctly separated into Suburban, Industry/Tech parks, and Malls are fortunately not the norm here.