18 ms·

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

249 points by sebg 4y ago

duxup 4y ago
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..."
- logifail 4y ago
  > a High School (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?
  - Qworg 4y ago
    According to the USDA, about 6.2% (19M) Americans have limited/no access to a grocery store. https://www.aecf.org/blog/exploring-americas-food-deserts https://www.aecf.org/blog/exploring-americas-food-deserts covers the research (and links to the paper).
    - logifail 4y ago
      I'm sorry, but I've read that article twice and I'm still not sure what they're actually saying. Are we talking about neighbourhoods not having a store selling fresh fruit and vegetables, or not having a grocery store of any kind?
      - mikeyouse 4y ago
        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-Staple-Foods.pdf 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. https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/82101/eib-165.pdf?v=3395.3 https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/82101/eib-165....
        ghaff 4y ago
        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.
        mikeyouse 4y ago
        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.
        ghaff 4y ago
        I'm guessing the income criteria is satisfied in a lot of rural areas however.
        mikeyouse 4y ago
        Yeah, you're not wrong, here's the 2010 map; https://assets.aecf.org/m/blogimg/blog-exploringamericasfooddeserts-2021.png https://assets.aecf.org/m/blogimg/blog-exploringamericasfood...
  - ry4nolson 4y ago
    > Are there many neighbourhoods which don't already have some kind of grocery store? Tons. They're called food deserts.
  - trillic 4y ago
    They're called food deserts and they exist all over the United States. Even in big cities. They are not the same as a food dessert.
    - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      Food deserts can also be looked at as cheap (in time or money or both) transportation deserts.
    - logifail 4y ago
      > They're called food deserts and they exist all over the United States. Even in big cities. Wiki (sorry) appears to define that as "an area that has limited access to affordable and nutritious food" I appreciate their point, but "no grocery store" really isn't the same as "limited access to affordable and nutritious food".
      - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
        >no grocery store" really isn't the same as "limited access to affordable and nutritious food". Without a grocery store you are at best in a "pick one" situation, at least in the US.
      - brewdad 4y ago
        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.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    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.)
    - logifail 4y ago
      > 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 :/
    - LeanderK 4y ago
      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.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    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.
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  - micromacrofoot 4y ago
    Yes, these are called food deserts, some people "grocery shop" at Walgreens, 7-11, Rite Aid, or CVS and have very limited access to fresh produce.
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  Zoning laws are too strict. Buy a home and convert it to a grocery store? No can do, in many places.
  - duxup 4y ago
    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. Gotta be a balance between things.
    - trgn 4y ago
      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.
    - tstrimple 4y ago
      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.
    - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      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.
    - 4y ago
- blakesterz 4y ago
  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?
  - danny_codes 4y ago
    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.
    - LeanderK 4y ago
      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.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  My guess is that most USA urban neighborhoods in, say, 1960 (or 1930), met the 15 minute criteria. Still, I'd guess you'd be right that it would be enormously expensive and difficult to bring this back. But it was once this way, and it was human decisions that made it not this way. If we want it to be this way again and start, it can be eventually.
  - duxup 4y ago
    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.
    - jrochkind1 4y ago
      For me personally, coffee shops and restaurants within a 15 minute walk is huge for my quality of life. I currently have it... barely.
      - duxup 4y ago
        I think that's a personal preference thing, you pick where you go based on that. Just a bit less essential than say groceries.
        jrochkind1 4y ago
        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.
- elAhmo 4y ago
  Having schools distributed within walking distance should be done by city planners ahead of time.
  - duxup 4y ago
    Unless you're building a new city from scratch or have a lot of open land I think you're way far from what the article is about.
- jgwil2 4y ago
  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.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  > 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.
  - duxup 4y ago
    Yup, kids busing to school is very common in the US too. I agree about a bus stop. Heck even suburban schools around me are trying to stop everyone from dropping off their kid with their car in person. It's just a hassle / traffic.
    - dublinben 4y ago
      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.
      - duxup 4y ago
        The suburban schools I’m thinking of are perfectly walkable. There’s also ample bussing. The parents just want to pick their kids up.
      - User23 4y ago
        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.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  You perfectly describe the Nimby mindset. > 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.
  - duxup 4y ago
    I feel like people wield around “NIMBY” labels so that they don’t have to think about how to plan things.
    - adamsmith143 4y ago
      Keep telling yourself that's the reason you don't want a high density development in your neighborhood. Because "planning"
- pjc50 4y ago
  > annoyed if .. creating an incentive to build a restaurant in the plot next to you, not enough restaurants nearby Why?
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  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.
- throw0101a 4y ago
  > 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.
  - brewdad 4y ago
    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.
- dkarl 4y ago
  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.
- com2kid 4y ago
  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...)
  - duxup 4y ago
    >Seattle doesn't have nearly enough density to have that many high schools That's a good point too. The local urban schools near me have had to close high schools, not open new ones.
  - f1yght 4y ago
    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.
  - bailoon 4y ago
    > 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.
    - MobiusHorizons 4y ago
      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.
- LeanderK 4y ago
  > 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.
jgwil2 4y ago
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).
- david927 4y ago
  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.
  - ahoy 4y ago
    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!
hammock 4y ago
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)
- ahoy 4y ago
  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.
- jandrewrogers 4y ago
  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.
- gtk40 4y ago
  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. Example: https://goo.gl/maps/AeXZhm6ZfYntEE1p7 https://goo.gl/maps/AeXZhm6ZfYntEE1p7
  - teucris 4y ago
    Seattle has a mix of these. In my neighborhood, the closest supermarket has a gigantic parking lot. I never think of walking there.
    - Arelius 4y ago
      But in contrast, the QFC on Broadway in Capital Hill for instance, has no above-ground parking lot. And is very walkable.
kenperkins 4y ago
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.
- com2kid 4y ago
  > 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.
  - harshalizee 4y ago
    Well, today I can't afford to buy anything on either side of the hill on QA. Equality achieved! I'm only half kidding though.
  - Izikiel43 4y ago
    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.
- karaterobot 4y ago
  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.
kyeb 4y ago
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)
- hiidrew 4y ago
  it makes the top 10 according to this: https://www.walkscore.com/cities-and-neighborhoods/ https://www.walkscore.com/cities-and-neighborhoods/ honestly surprised that SF is more walkable than NYC with this criteria
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I'm guessing because NYC is not just Manhattan.
    - Steltek 4y ago
      I feel Boston is similarly handicapped in ratings by West Roxbury (limited transit and bike hostile residents).
      - ghaff 4y ago
        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.
  - petetheheat 4y ago
    SF top neighborhood: Tenderloin. ...starts to question list.
    - 4y ago
__derek__ 4y ago
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] [1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattles-longstanding-urban-village-strategy-for-growth-needs-reworking-new-report-says/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattles-... (using this for the nice map image because Seattle insists on publishing hulking PDFs)
insane_dreamer 4y 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.
- kortilla 4y ago
  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.
  - ahoy 4y ago
    Retail theft as a new/major issue is mostly a lie, told by corporations and parroted by the media who love a crimewave story, even if its fabricated. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shoplifting.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shopli...
    - HEmanZ 4y ago
      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)
    - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
      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.
Pxtl 4y ago
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.
- sbierwagen 4y ago
  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.
chabons 4y ago
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.
- bradford 4y ago
  > 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).
  - chabons 4y ago
    > 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.
- dendrite9 4y ago
  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.
TurkishPoptart 4y ago
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.
- ejb999 4y ago
  >>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.
  - lazyasciiart 4y ago
    Good news - allowing people to build more housing in cities achieves both outcomes.
  - calt 4y ago
    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.
- buildbot 4y ago
  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.
rileyphone 4y ago
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.
Dig1t 4y ago
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. Edit: A source: https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2023/01/25/15-minute-city-plans-cause-controversy/ https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2023/01/25/15-minute-city-plan...
- throwawaythrow1 4y ago
  As someone who lives in the UK, this is news to me. Can you substantiate this please?
  - DoughnutHole 4y ago
    I presume he’s talking about the London congestion charge zone. Although he’s certainly being melodramatic.
    - m-watson 4y ago
      I was just reading in Vice[0] about talk like this. I am not saying OP is necessarily saying this but it does seem similar. [0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7g898/walkable-15-minute-cities-con https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7g898/walkable-15-minute-ci...
  - Dig1t 4y ago
    I admit that the way it was described to me was probably exaggerated, but this is what I'm talking about: https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/23073992.traffic-filters-will-divide-city-15-minute-neighbourhoods/ https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/23073992.traffic-filters-w... "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"
teucris 4y ago
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.
- watermelon59 4y ago
  Seattle has so many intersections that are completely bonkers. They’re not only poorly walkable, they also make driving extremely stressful.
  - goostavos 4y ago
    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.
    - calt 4y ago
      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.
      - buildbot 4y ago
        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!
mdorazio 4y ago
>Of the 89 neighborhoods considered, only nine are “15-minute neighborhoods” walkable for 90% or more of their residents. I'd love to see the median rent in those nine compared to elsewhere in the city. Can any Seattle residents here provide some insight?
- WaxProlix 4y ago
  Downtown (CBD): Expensive International District: Euphemism for Chinatown, not expensive Pioneer Square: It varies, but fairly expensive despite the rampant homelessness Pike Place Market: Very expensive Ballard: Expensive new buildings, more affordable older ones Capitol Hill: Expensive, generally South Lake Union: Expensive Madrona: Expensive
  - chamanbuga 4y ago
    Living in ID is not a choice, but a necessity when other options fail.
    - balls187 4y ago
      Until it gets gentrified like previous neighborhoods. Other neighborhoods missing: Fremont Wallingford Georgetown Columbia City Rainer Beach Northgate W. Seattle Queen Anne Belltown Magnolia S. Seattle Ravenna Beacon Hill South Park Leschi Madison Park Northlake Greenwood And a bunch more places that non-transplants know about...
      - simplyluke 4y ago
        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.
      - lazyasciiart 4y ago
        Missing from what? Pretty sure they were all listed in the article.
jobs_throwaway 4y ago
Do any Seattle-ites not have a car? How do you get around? Asking as a NYer who would consider living there if the car-free life wouldn't be too painful
- chamanbuga 4y ago
  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.
  - jobs_throwaway 4y ago
    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?
    - lazyasciiart 4y ago
      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).
  - simplyluke 4y ago
    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.
  - noirbot 4y ago
    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.
jdlyga 4y ago
Anyone else torn between wanting to live in a 15 minute city and in a log cabin in the woods?
- trgn 4y ago
  Yes! 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.
- monktastic1 4y ago
  I've always felt that South Lake Tahoe is my ideal town for this reason. You can get a 15 minute cabin in the woods!
Scuds 4y ago
lol the busses don't go through Laurelhurst. why not? Oh, people who ride the bus don't live there.
goodpoint 4y ago
More like 51 minutes. Of driving.
TheDesolate0 4y ago
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ruined 4y ago
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.
pclark 4y ago
Great work! 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!
mattpallissard 4y ago
I used to work with Nat at IHME. He and others there did great work in the global health space. I highly recommend playing around with some of the datasets and visualization tools. https://www.healthdata.org/data-tools-practices https://www.healthdata.org/data-tools-practices
trollski 4y ago
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battery_glasses 4y ago
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.
- ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
  > (btw this store is not reflected on the map for coffeeshops or groceries.) Why not fix that? Submit it to OSM, Apple Maps, or Google Maps or all three.
  - battery_glasses 4y ago
    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.
    - tantalor 4y ago
      The term is "bodega"
      - Symbiote 4y ago
        See the OSM wiki for their terms. It started as a British project, so "bodega" isn't one of them. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:shop%3Dconvenience https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:shop%3Dconvenience
zw123456 4y ago
When I started reading
zw123456 4y ago
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.
- sjkoelle 4y ago
  seattles park situation is all time
- kerpotgh 4y ago
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- lotsoweiners 4y ago
  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.
- genuine_smiles 4y ago
  Which park is it?
cafard 4y ago
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.
mungoman2 4y ago
Fantastic visualization! Would be really cool to get global coverage for this. Possible by leveraging Google Maps?
deleted 4y ago
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249 points by sebg 4y ago

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..."

logifail 4y ago
> a High School (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?
- Qworg 4y ago
  According to the USDA, about 6.2% (19M) Americans have limited/no access to a grocery store. https://www.aecf.org/blog/exploring-americas-food-deserts https://www.aecf.org/blog/exploring-americas-food-deserts covers the research (and links to the paper).
  - logifail 4y ago
    I'm sorry, but I've read that article twice and I'm still not sure what they're actually saying. Are we talking about neighbourhoods not having a store selling fresh fruit and vegetables, or not having a grocery store of any kind?
    - mikeyouse 4y ago
      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-Staple-Foods.pdf 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. https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/82101/eib-165.pdf?v=3395.3 https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/82101/eib-165....
      - ghaff 4y ago
        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.
        mikeyouse 4y ago
        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.
        ghaff 4y ago
        I'm guessing the income criteria is satisfied in a lot of rural areas however.
        mikeyouse 4y ago
        Yeah, you're not wrong, here's the 2010 map; https://assets.aecf.org/m/blogimg/blog-exploringamericasfooddeserts-2021.png https://assets.aecf.org/m/blogimg/blog-exploringamericasfood...
- ry4nolson 4y ago
  > Are there many neighbourhoods which don't already have some kind of grocery store? Tons. They're called food deserts.
- trillic 4y ago
  They're called food deserts and they exist all over the United States. Even in big cities. They are not the same as a food dessert.
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    Food deserts can also be looked at as cheap (in time or money or both) transportation deserts.
  - logifail 4y ago
    > They're called food deserts and they exist all over the United States. Even in big cities. Wiki (sorry) appears to define that as "an area that has limited access to affordable and nutritious food" I appreciate their point, but "no grocery store" really isn't the same as "limited access to affordable and nutritious food".
    - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      >no grocery store" really isn't the same as "limited access to affordable and nutritious food". Without a grocery store you are at best in a "pick one" situation, at least in the US.
    - brewdad 4y ago
      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.
- ghaff 4y ago
  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.)
  - logifail 4y ago
    > 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 :/
  - LeanderK 4y ago
    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.
- dylan604 4y ago
  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.
- deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  Yes, these are called food deserts, some people "grocery shop" at Walgreens, 7-11, Rite Aid, or CVS and have very limited access to fresh produce.
actionfromafar 4y ago
Zoning laws are too strict. Buy a home and convert it to a grocery store? No can do, in many places.
- duxup 4y ago
  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. Gotta be a balance between things.
  - trgn 4y ago
    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.
  - tstrimple 4y ago
    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.
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    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.
  - 4y ago
blakesterz 4y ago
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?
- danny_codes 4y ago
  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.
  - LeanderK 4y ago
    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.
jrochkind1 4y ago
My guess is that most USA urban neighborhoods in, say, 1960 (or 1930), met the 15 minute criteria. Still, I'd guess you'd be right that it would be enormously expensive and difficult to bring this back. But it was once this way, and it was human decisions that made it not this way. If we want it to be this way again and start, it can be eventually.
- duxup 4y ago
  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.
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    For me personally, coffee shops and restaurants within a 15 minute walk is huge for my quality of life. I currently have it... barely.
    - duxup 4y ago
      I think that's a personal preference thing, you pick where you go based on that. Just a bit less essential than say groceries.
      - jrochkind1 4y ago
        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.
elAhmo 4y ago
Having schools distributed within walking distance should be done by city planners ahead of time.
- duxup 4y ago
  Unless you're building a new city from scratch or have a lot of open land I think you're way far from what the article is about.
jgwil2 4y ago
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.
nicoburns 4y ago
> 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.
- duxup 4y ago
  Yup, kids busing to school is very common in the US too. I agree about a bus stop. Heck even suburban schools around me are trying to stop everyone from dropping off their kid with their car in person. It's just a hassle / traffic.
  - dublinben 4y ago
    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.
    - duxup 4y ago
      The suburban schools I’m thinking of are perfectly walkable. There’s also ample bussing. The parents just want to pick their kids up.
    - User23 4y ago
      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.
adamsmith143 4y ago
You perfectly describe the Nimby mindset. > 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.
- duxup 4y ago
  I feel like people wield around “NIMBY” labels so that they don’t have to think about how to plan things.
  - adamsmith143 4y ago
    Keep telling yourself that's the reason you don't want a high density development in your neighborhood. Because "planning"
pjc50 4y ago
> annoyed if .. creating an incentive to build a restaurant in the plot next to you, not enough restaurants nearby Why?
insane_dreamer 4y ago
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.
throw0101a 4y ago
> 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.
- brewdad 4y ago
  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.
dkarl 4y ago
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.
com2kid 4y ago
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...)
- duxup 4y ago
  >Seattle doesn't have nearly enough density to have that many high schools That's a good point too. The local urban schools near me have had to close high schools, not open new ones.
- f1yght 4y ago
  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.
- bailoon 4y ago
  > 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.
  - MobiusHorizons 4y ago
    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.
LeanderK 4y ago
> 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.

jgwil2 4y ago

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).

david927 4y ago
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.
- ahoy 4y ago
  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!

hammock 4y ago

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)

ahoy 4y ago
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.
jandrewrogers 4y ago
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.
gtk40 4y ago
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. Example: https://goo.gl/maps/AeXZhm6ZfYntEE1p7 https://goo.gl/maps/AeXZhm6ZfYntEE1p7
- teucris 4y ago
  Seattle has a mix of these. In my neighborhood, the closest supermarket has a gigantic parking lot. I never think of walking there.
  - Arelius 4y ago
    But in contrast, the QFC on Broadway in Capital Hill for instance, has no above-ground parking lot. And is very walkable.

kenperkins 4y ago

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.

com2kid 4y ago
> 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.
- harshalizee 4y ago
  Well, today I can't afford to buy anything on either side of the hill on QA. Equality achieved! I'm only half kidding though.
- Izikiel43 4y ago
  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.
karaterobot 4y ago
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.

kyeb 4y ago

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)

hiidrew 4y ago
it makes the top 10 according to this: https://www.walkscore.com/cities-and-neighborhoods/ https://www.walkscore.com/cities-and-neighborhoods/ honestly surprised that SF is more walkable than NYC with this criteria
- ghaff 4y ago
  I'm guessing because NYC is not just Manhattan.
  - Steltek 4y ago
    I feel Boston is similarly handicapped in ratings by West Roxbury (limited transit and bike hostile residents).
    - ghaff 4y ago
      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.
- petetheheat 4y ago
  SF top neighborhood: Tenderloin. ...starts to question list.
  - 4y ago

__derek__ 4y ago

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] [1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattles-longstanding-urban-village-strategy-for-growth-needs-reworking-new-report-says/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattles-... (using this for the nice map image because Seattle insists on publishing hulking PDFs)

insane_dreamer 4y 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.

kortilla 4y ago
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.
- ahoy 4y ago
  Retail theft as a new/major issue is mostly a lie, told by corporations and parroted by the media who love a crimewave story, even if its fabricated. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shoplifting.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shopli...
  - HEmanZ 4y ago
    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)
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    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.

Pxtl 4y ago

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.

sbierwagen 4y ago
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.

chabons 4y ago

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.

bradford 4y ago
> 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).
- chabons 4y ago
  > 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.
dendrite9 4y ago
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.

TurkishPoptart 4y ago

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.

ejb999 4y ago
>>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.
- lazyasciiart 4y ago
  Good news - allowing people to build more housing in cities achieves both outcomes.
- calt 4y ago
  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.
buildbot 4y ago
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.

rileyphone 4y ago

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.

Dig1t 4y ago

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. Edit: A source: https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2023/01/25/15-minute-city-plans-cause-controversy/ https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2023/01/25/15-minute-city-plan...

throwawaythrow1 4y ago
As someone who lives in the UK, this is news to me. Can you substantiate this please?
- DoughnutHole 4y ago
  I presume he’s talking about the London congestion charge zone. Although he’s certainly being melodramatic.
  - m-watson 4y ago
    I was just reading in Vice[0] about talk like this. I am not saying OP is necessarily saying this but it does seem similar. [0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7g898/walkable-15-minute-cities-con https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7g898/walkable-15-minute-ci...
- Dig1t 4y ago
  I admit that the way it was described to me was probably exaggerated, but this is what I'm talking about: https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/23073992.traffic-filters-will-divide-city-15-minute-neighbourhoods/ https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/23073992.traffic-filters-w... "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"

teucris 4y ago

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.

watermelon59 4y ago
Seattle has so many intersections that are completely bonkers. They’re not only poorly walkable, they also make driving extremely stressful.
- goostavos 4y ago
  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.
  - calt 4y ago
    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.
    - buildbot 4y ago
      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!

mdorazio 4y ago

>Of the 89 neighborhoods considered, only nine are “15-minute neighborhoods” walkable for 90% or more of their residents. I'd love to see the median rent in those nine compared to elsewhere in the city. Can any Seattle residents here provide some insight?

WaxProlix 4y ago
Downtown (CBD): Expensive International District: Euphemism for Chinatown, not expensive Pioneer Square: It varies, but fairly expensive despite the rampant homelessness Pike Place Market: Very expensive Ballard: Expensive new buildings, more affordable older ones Capitol Hill: Expensive, generally South Lake Union: Expensive Madrona: Expensive
- chamanbuga 4y ago
  Living in ID is not a choice, but a necessity when other options fail.
  - balls187 4y ago
    Until it gets gentrified like previous neighborhoods. Other neighborhoods missing: Fremont Wallingford Georgetown Columbia City Rainer Beach Northgate W. Seattle Queen Anne Belltown Magnolia S. Seattle Ravenna Beacon Hill South Park Leschi Madison Park Northlake Greenwood And a bunch more places that non-transplants know about...
    - simplyluke 4y ago
      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.
    - lazyasciiart 4y ago
      Missing from what? Pretty sure they were all listed in the article.

jobs_throwaway 4y ago

Do any Seattle-ites not have a car? How do you get around? Asking as a NYer who would consider living there if the car-free life wouldn't be too painful

chamanbuga 4y ago
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.
- jobs_throwaway 4y ago
  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?
  - lazyasciiart 4y ago
    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).
- simplyluke 4y ago
  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.
- noirbot 4y ago
  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.

jdlyga 4y ago

Anyone else torn between wanting to live in a 15 minute city and in a log cabin in the woods?

trgn 4y ago
Yes! 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.
monktastic1 4y ago
I've always felt that South Lake Tahoe is my ideal town for this reason. You can get a 15 minute cabin in the woods!

Scuds 4y ago

lol the busses don't go through Laurelhurst. why not? Oh, people who ride the bus don't live there.

goodpoint 4y ago

More like 51 minutes. Of driving.

TheDesolate0 4y ago

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ruined 4y ago

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.

pclark 4y ago

Great work! 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!

mattpallissard 4y ago

I used to work with Nat at IHME. He and others there did great work in the global health space. I highly recommend playing around with some of the datasets and visualization tools. https://www.healthdata.org/data-tools-practices https://www.healthdata.org/data-tools-practices

trollski 4y ago

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battery_glasses 4y ago

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.

ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
> (btw this store is not reflected on the map for coffeeshops or groceries.) Why not fix that? Submit it to OSM, Apple Maps, or Google Maps or all three.
- battery_glasses 4y ago
  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.
  - tantalor 4y ago
    The term is "bodega"
    - Symbiote 4y ago
      See the OSM wiki for their terms. It started as a British project, so "bodega" isn't one of them. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:shop%3Dconvenience https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:shop%3Dconvenience

zw123456 4y ago

When I started reading

zw123456 4y ago

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.

sjkoelle 4y ago
seattles park situation is all time
kerpotgh 4y ago
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lotsoweiners 4y ago
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.
genuine_smiles 4y ago
Which park is it?

cafard 4y ago

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.

mungoman2 4y ago

Fantastic visualization! Would be really cool to get global coverage for this. Possible by leveraging Google Maps?

deleted 4y ago

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