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I haven't done my research but from what I've gathered from news over the years hasn't London had very high car tax, tolls, super expensive gas, and just outrig

I haven't done my research but from what I've gathered from news over the years hasn't London had very high car tax, tolls, super expensive gas, and just outright closing streets and eliminating parking? So with a big enough stick and very little carrot anything is possible? Is that a win? Aren't we hearing that actual residents really don't like these "15 minute" cities?

sofixa 4y ago
> with a big enough stick and very little carrot anything is possible Yep, so all those complaining that nothing is being done or can be done about climate change are wrong. There are tools, they just need to be used. > Aren't we hearing that actual residents really don't like these "15 minute" cities? We're also hearing that Zuckerberg is a lizard and the Earth is flat, so fucking what? London is a major metropolis, rather dense, and with very relaxed and mixed zoning (you can have a 13th century "Church of X Girls School" next to a Tesco store in a glass skyscraper. It already does everything a "15th minute city" is about, apart from being "15 minutes big" - commute times are usually bigger, and somewhat concentrated to City and Canary Wharf, but there's work, leisure, shopping, housing to be found all around. Idiots who rage against a concept they couldn't begin to comprehend because toilet paper quality "journalists" make money that way aren't concerned residents of London, they have nothing to do with the city, and their opinion is best ignored.
- Maxburn 4y ago
  Do you live there? In a utopian ideal it seems kind of nice having "everything you need" close by. Thinking about it critically I currently live in a 15 minute city, but there is a car involved. I'm kind of confused about how people living in mass transit even get groceries, can you take your own cart on the train?
  - koyote 4y ago
    As someone who lived in London for nearly a decade, getting groceries was 100x easier than when I lived somewhere you had to drive for 15-30 minutes (traffic) to get to a large hypermarket. A rucksack will easily carry around 5-6 days of food. Other than that, I would simply pop by the shop on my commute home from work. It would be a 5-10 minute detour max. Remember that the shops in such cities are directly accessible (no need to walk through a massive shopping centre), there's no time wasted on finding a parking space, there's so many shops that it's extremely likely that there's at least one between your home and the bus/tube stop and they're mostly exclusively filled with food so you're not walking past dozens of aisles filled with non-groceries. The big bonus of course is that if you wake up in the morning and realise you're out of milk, it's a usually a <5min walk to the closest shop to pick some up and no one will bat an eyelid if you're still wearing your bathing gown. :) There's also generally less food waste (as you shop for fewer days and can plan better) and you can opt into buying your fruit, veg, meat and fish fresh every day instead of having to hope that your 'big shop' at the megastore will still be fresh at the end of the week.
    - Maxburn 4y ago
      OK, that sounds decent. I can see myself doing that.
  - milkytron 4y ago
    I live in what would be called a 15 minute city, but we don't really call it that. I just bring a bag or two and ride my bike to the store. Or if I'm downtown, which is a 10 minute train ride away, I'll stop by the grocery store next to the station before hopping on the train and just carry my groceries in a bag or put em in my backpack. The only times I choose to drive are when I want to get a large quantity of something lightweight, like toilet paper or paper towels. I typically don't buy a lot at once, I'll plan my meals for the next few days and only buy what I know will definitely get eaten to reduce waste.
    - Maxburn 4y ago
      That's probably healthier for fruit/veg, but I find myself a weekly shopper. Even for just myself the rucksack guy above you might be pushing the limits.
      - milkytron 4y ago
        If you're in the US, weekly shopping is very common because it is such a chore to get to and from grocery stores. They tend to be very large and relatively far away from where people live, so it's quite an inconvenience to shop there. Smaller stores within neighborhoods allow for quick trips without much hassle.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    I get my shopping delivered. Costs me $2 on average, they drive it in a refrigerated small truck and often drop off several deliveries to the same building/street in one trip. And then for stuff I want right now, I just walk to the supermarket with one bag. Since I go out for a walk every day after work, I just head to the supermarket along the way which is about 700m away.
    - Maxburn 4y ago
      How is delivery any less impact on traffic from driving your own? It would save on parking space though.
      - Gigachad 4y ago
        It is mildly because it does multiple deliveries in one trip with I assume a routing and scheduling system which does it efficiently. But the main benefit is it enables me to not own a car, if I couldn’t get things delivered I might buy a car and then use it for other things I don’t strictly have to but since I’m paying for one anyway.
      - _dain_ 4y ago
        A lot of grocery deliveries are done by bike or moped.
        Maxburn 4y ago
        I had no idea.
  - cmonagle 4y ago
    Typically you carry your groceries in a bag. Some people have wheeled bags for bigger trips. In neighborhoods with a traditional urban form (or "15 minute cities"), you wouldn't usually take mass transit to the grocery store, it's within a short walking distance. With groceries close by, it's natural to make frequent, smaller trips.
    - Maxburn 4y ago
      When I lived in a condo with a shopping center ten minute walk away I still found myself driving it. Sometimes I carried stuff back but it felt like it was more of getting some exercise rather than convenience.
  - _dain_ 4y ago
    "but how do you get groceries???" is such a common bad objection it's become something of a meme to make fun of it. don't want to pick on you but getting food is really not that hard to do. you just do smaller shopping trips more often. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYHTzqHIngk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYHTzqHIngk what self-proclaimed "15 minute city" are you living in where this is hard? genuinely curious. wondering if the phrase is getting diluted for marketing reasons. I've lived in totally ordinary neighbourhoods of English cities where all this was possible and easy, I never heard them flaunting their "15 minute city"ness, even though they met and exceeded the technical definition. like I'm just confused that people are calling "utopian" the rather unremarkable reality I've lived for 25+ years. it makes me suspect ppl are using the same words to mean very different things.
    - Maxburn 4y ago
      As I noted above it's probably healthier for fruits/veg to shop more than once a week but I just don't like the hassle of grocery shopping that often. If it was along the way from mass trans to my flat maybe, but one stop away definitely not.
      - _dain_ 4y ago
        Yeah that's the thing, you're not meant to need "mass transit" to get groceries. It shouldn't even be a single "stop" away, it should be even closer. Are you saying you don't have a single decent grocery shop within a 5-10 minute walk of your house? A 15 minute city is meant to have that. And not just one shop ... you're meant to have lots and lots of them. In the last place I lived, there were at least six I could walk to conveniently. And that wasn't a big bustling world-class metropolis either, it was a fairly unspectacular inner suburb of Sheffield[1], a city of 550,000, solidly middle of the pack on most social/economic rankings compared to other UK cities. The closest to "mass transit" was a tram that came three times an hour, but I never took the tram to get food. I've linked the Streetview of the main high street[2] near where I lived, don't want to dox my exact address but I lived somewhere within a 1 km radius of this point[3]. I could get 98% of my monthly needs from this one street. You can explore the different directions on Streetview to see what I'm talking about. Look at the amenities nearby: cafes, coffee shops, greengrocers, hairdressers, newsagents, liquor shops, nurseries, daycare, schools, a gym, churches, pubs, a bus station, furniture shops, banks, a park, a dentist, pharmacies, several GP practices, a supermarket, hardware store, drycleaners, fast food, probably more that I've forgot, all within a short walk of this point. There's even the start of a pleasant walking trail through the Rivelin valley a bit further to the southwest (a godsend during the lockdowns). And this kind of high street isn't unique, there are plenty such high streets dotted around in the adjoining neighbourhoods: Middlewood, Crookes, Kelham Island, the lot. Most people in the city can walk to one. In fairness it may not meet the "15 minute city" definition since most workplaces are in the city centre so a walking commute takes more than 15 minutes. But hey, the tram is about that quick, and biking doesn't take much longer, 20 minutes maybe. And of course you can drive too; plenty of cars about. Another example: when I was a student my house was in a 1 km radius of this point[4]. It's clearly suburban, but look at all the amenities. Easy, no "mass transit" needed to buy milk. And now I live within 1 km of this[5] point, exact same thing. It's not even the only such high street I can walk to; there's another about the same distance in the opposite direction from my house. British high streets have overlapping walking-distance radii that jointly cover almost all the suburban parts of a city, on top of the big central shopping district of the city-proper. Having lots of groceries in walking distance is not a high a bar to clear. The examples I gave are all second- or third-rate cities, unimpressive in most respects; they're not the ones urbanists always talk about like Amsterdam or Copenhagen or Tokyo or anything fancy like that. It takes no particular conscious government policy to make this happen, it just happens on its own, because there's more than enough market demand. Look at the houses, they're almost all 2 storeys, only a few apartments in the 3-4 storey range, and hardly anything taller than that; the places I showed are not very densely populated, yet they support all this business. If your city is big and dense enough to have "mass transit" (I'm assuming a subway or high-frequency surface rail?), it ought to have grocery shops even more densely distributed than where I've lived. If not, it sounds like something has gone very wrong! That just shouldn't happen. What land-use regulations/laws are preventing it? This is what I meant when I said people use the same words to mean different things ... all kinds of confusion. Best to use Streetview and give examples. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough,_Sheffield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough,_Sheffield [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Street [3] https://goo.gl/maps/6h6qSdFcn2thifM9A https://goo.gl/maps/6h6qSdFcn2thifM9A [4] https://goo.gl/maps/HQy3Lens5nqv54fY8 https://goo.gl/maps/HQy3Lens5nqv54fY8 [5] https://goo.gl/maps/5DphPFeKdcJVkNyb8 https://goo.gl/maps/5DphPFeKdcJVkNyb8
Zigurd 4y ago
We are hearing from trolls and astroturf bots that 15 minute cities are a deep state plot.
_dain_ 4y ago
First, the City of London hardly has any residents; almost all traffic demand comes from outside. I imagine the few residents it has welcomes these measures, since they suffer the bad effects of commuter traffic, while generating little of it themselves. Second, how else are cities meant to do this? The fundamental problem is that there is a huge and rising level of driving demand[1], and limited supply. There is a scarcity of road space in London and you can't really add more. Basic economics tells you that you can manage that scarcity through some combination of prices, queues, and lotteries. Throughout most of the 20th century, we defaulted to queues, in the form of traffic jams. You can use the road at zero cost, but you'll have to wait a long time. But that became increasingly untenable as car ownership rose -- the number of cars in Britain has doubled over the last few decades. And traffic jams are themselves unpleasant: they're noisy, ugly, emit pollution, etc. So now cities are using prices too, in the form of congestion charges, taxes, and so on. That's not some punitive "stick" done for its own sake, it's just a tool used to cope with an inescapable economic reality. When you have more cars and the same amount of road, you need to deter an increasing fraction of those cars from using those roads. The "carrot" is providing alternate, more space-efficient ways to get around: bike infrastructure, public transport. [1] "driving demand" is itself a weaselly, meaningless phrase, because "demand" only makes sense in reference to a specific price level. motorists have been conditioned by a century of car-friendly policy to expect to drive and park for free, but there's no real justification for that. just because the roads are publicly owned doesn't give them the right to use them for free, any more than state-owned railways should have free fares.
- Maxburn 4y ago
  Where's the carrot? Other than beating drivers over the head what is being done to help the situation? Better mass trans, bikes etc? They are doing that stuff right?
  - _dain_ 4y ago
    Most (or at least, a plurality of) people who cycle or take the tube in London also drive a car sometimes; it's not like you have to be wedded to one particular transport mode. Drivers aren't drivers 100% of the time. Reducing motor traffic makes for safer, more aesthetically pleasant streets. You can expand the pavement, have flowers, landscaping, public art, outdoor dining, etc. The air quality is better, the surroundings are quieter, people don't get run over and maimed in collisions. And when you really want or need to drive, there's less traffic around. Nobody likes sitting in traffic jams! See this video for how these kinds of policies benefit drivers directly[1]. The carrot is having a more pleasant city. Everyone wins from that. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k

sofixa 4y ago

> with a big enough stick and very little carrot anything is possible Yep, so all those complaining that nothing is being done or can be done about climate change are wrong. There are tools, they just need to be used. > Aren't we hearing that actual residents really don't like these "15 minute" cities? We're also hearing that Zuckerberg is a lizard and the Earth is flat, so fucking what? London is a major metropolis, rather dense, and with very relaxed and mixed zoning (you can have a 13th century "Church of X Girls School" next to a Tesco store in a glass skyscraper. It already does everything a "15th minute city" is about, apart from being "15 minutes big" - commute times are usually bigger, and somewhat concentrated to City and Canary Wharf, but there's work, leisure, shopping, housing to be found all around. Idiots who rage against a concept they couldn't begin to comprehend because toilet paper quality "journalists" make money that way aren't concerned residents of London, they have nothing to do with the city, and their opinion is best ignored.

Maxburn 4y ago
Do you live there? In a utopian ideal it seems kind of nice having "everything you need" close by. Thinking about it critically I currently live in a 15 minute city, but there is a car involved. I'm kind of confused about how people living in mass transit even get groceries, can you take your own cart on the train?
- koyote 4y ago
  As someone who lived in London for nearly a decade, getting groceries was 100x easier than when I lived somewhere you had to drive for 15-30 minutes (traffic) to get to a large hypermarket. A rucksack will easily carry around 5-6 days of food. Other than that, I would simply pop by the shop on my commute home from work. It would be a 5-10 minute detour max. Remember that the shops in such cities are directly accessible (no need to walk through a massive shopping centre), there's no time wasted on finding a parking space, there's so many shops that it's extremely likely that there's at least one between your home and the bus/tube stop and they're mostly exclusively filled with food so you're not walking past dozens of aisles filled with non-groceries. The big bonus of course is that if you wake up in the morning and realise you're out of milk, it's a usually a <5min walk to the closest shop to pick some up and no one will bat an eyelid if you're still wearing your bathing gown. :) There's also generally less food waste (as you shop for fewer days and can plan better) and you can opt into buying your fruit, veg, meat and fish fresh every day instead of having to hope that your 'big shop' at the megastore will still be fresh at the end of the week.
  - Maxburn 4y ago
    OK, that sounds decent. I can see myself doing that.
- milkytron 4y ago
  I live in what would be called a 15 minute city, but we don't really call it that. I just bring a bag or two and ride my bike to the store. Or if I'm downtown, which is a 10 minute train ride away, I'll stop by the grocery store next to the station before hopping on the train and just carry my groceries in a bag or put em in my backpack. The only times I choose to drive are when I want to get a large quantity of something lightweight, like toilet paper or paper towels. I typically don't buy a lot at once, I'll plan my meals for the next few days and only buy what I know will definitely get eaten to reduce waste.
  - Maxburn 4y ago
    That's probably healthier for fruit/veg, but I find myself a weekly shopper. Even for just myself the rucksack guy above you might be pushing the limits.
    - milkytron 4y ago
      If you're in the US, weekly shopping is very common because it is such a chore to get to and from grocery stores. They tend to be very large and relatively far away from where people live, so it's quite an inconvenience to shop there. Smaller stores within neighborhoods allow for quick trips without much hassle.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  I get my shopping delivered. Costs me $2 on average, they drive it in a refrigerated small truck and often drop off several deliveries to the same building/street in one trip. And then for stuff I want right now, I just walk to the supermarket with one bag. Since I go out for a walk every day after work, I just head to the supermarket along the way which is about 700m away.
  - Maxburn 4y ago
    How is delivery any less impact on traffic from driving your own? It would save on parking space though.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      It is mildly because it does multiple deliveries in one trip with I assume a routing and scheduling system which does it efficiently. But the main benefit is it enables me to not own a car, if I couldn’t get things delivered I might buy a car and then use it for other things I don’t strictly have to but since I’m paying for one anyway.
    - _dain_ 4y ago
      A lot of grocery deliveries are done by bike or moped.
      - Maxburn 4y ago
        I had no idea.
- cmonagle 4y ago
  Typically you carry your groceries in a bag. Some people have wheeled bags for bigger trips. In neighborhoods with a traditional urban form (or "15 minute cities"), you wouldn't usually take mass transit to the grocery store, it's within a short walking distance. With groceries close by, it's natural to make frequent, smaller trips.
  - Maxburn 4y ago
    When I lived in a condo with a shopping center ten minute walk away I still found myself driving it. Sometimes I carried stuff back but it felt like it was more of getting some exercise rather than convenience.
- _dain_ 4y ago
  "but how do you get groceries???" is such a common bad objection it's become something of a meme to make fun of it. don't want to pick on you but getting food is really not that hard to do. you just do smaller shopping trips more often. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYHTzqHIngk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYHTzqHIngk what self-proclaimed "15 minute city" are you living in where this is hard? genuinely curious. wondering if the phrase is getting diluted for marketing reasons. I've lived in totally ordinary neighbourhoods of English cities where all this was possible and easy, I never heard them flaunting their "15 minute city"ness, even though they met and exceeded the technical definition. like I'm just confused that people are calling "utopian" the rather unremarkable reality I've lived for 25+ years. it makes me suspect ppl are using the same words to mean very different things.
  - Maxburn 4y ago
    As I noted above it's probably healthier for fruits/veg to shop more than once a week but I just don't like the hassle of grocery shopping that often. If it was along the way from mass trans to my flat maybe, but one stop away definitely not.
    - _dain_ 4y ago
      Yeah that's the thing, you're not meant to need "mass transit" to get groceries. It shouldn't even be a single "stop" away, it should be even closer. Are you saying you don't have a single decent grocery shop within a 5-10 minute walk of your house? A 15 minute city is meant to have that. And not just one shop ... you're meant to have lots and lots of them. In the last place I lived, there were at least six I could walk to conveniently. And that wasn't a big bustling world-class metropolis either, it was a fairly unspectacular inner suburb of Sheffield[1], a city of 550,000, solidly middle of the pack on most social/economic rankings compared to other UK cities. The closest to "mass transit" was a tram that came three times an hour, but I never took the tram to get food. I've linked the Streetview of the main high street[2] near where I lived, don't want to dox my exact address but I lived somewhere within a 1 km radius of this point[3]. I could get 98% of my monthly needs from this one street. You can explore the different directions on Streetview to see what I'm talking about. Look at the amenities nearby: cafes, coffee shops, greengrocers, hairdressers, newsagents, liquor shops, nurseries, daycare, schools, a gym, churches, pubs, a bus station, furniture shops, banks, a park, a dentist, pharmacies, several GP practices, a supermarket, hardware store, drycleaners, fast food, probably more that I've forgot, all within a short walk of this point. There's even the start of a pleasant walking trail through the Rivelin valley a bit further to the southwest (a godsend during the lockdowns). And this kind of high street isn't unique, there are plenty such high streets dotted around in the adjoining neighbourhoods: Middlewood, Crookes, Kelham Island, the lot. Most people in the city can walk to one. In fairness it may not meet the "15 minute city" definition since most workplaces are in the city centre so a walking commute takes more than 15 minutes. But hey, the tram is about that quick, and biking doesn't take much longer, 20 minutes maybe. And of course you can drive too; plenty of cars about. Another example: when I was a student my house was in a 1 km radius of this point[4]. It's clearly suburban, but look at all the amenities. Easy, no "mass transit" needed to buy milk. And now I live within 1 km of this[5] point, exact same thing. It's not even the only such high street I can walk to; there's another about the same distance in the opposite direction from my house. British high streets have overlapping walking-distance radii that jointly cover almost all the suburban parts of a city, on top of the big central shopping district of the city-proper. Having lots of groceries in walking distance is not a high a bar to clear. The examples I gave are all second- or third-rate cities, unimpressive in most respects; they're not the ones urbanists always talk about like Amsterdam or Copenhagen or Tokyo or anything fancy like that. It takes no particular conscious government policy to make this happen, it just happens on its own, because there's more than enough market demand. Look at the houses, they're almost all 2 storeys, only a few apartments in the 3-4 storey range, and hardly anything taller than that; the places I showed are not very densely populated, yet they support all this business. If your city is big and dense enough to have "mass transit" (I'm assuming a subway or high-frequency surface rail?), it ought to have grocery shops even more densely distributed than where I've lived. If not, it sounds like something has gone very wrong! That just shouldn't happen. What land-use regulations/laws are preventing it? This is what I meant when I said people use the same words to mean different things ... all kinds of confusion. Best to use Streetview and give examples. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough,_Sheffield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough,_Sheffield [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Street [3] https://goo.gl/maps/6h6qSdFcn2thifM9A https://goo.gl/maps/6h6qSdFcn2thifM9A [4] https://goo.gl/maps/HQy3Lens5nqv54fY8 https://goo.gl/maps/HQy3Lens5nqv54fY8 [5] https://goo.gl/maps/5DphPFeKdcJVkNyb8 https://goo.gl/maps/5DphPFeKdcJVkNyb8

Zigurd 4y ago

We are hearing from trolls and astroturf bots that 15 minute cities are a deep state plot.

_dain_ 4y ago

First, the City of London hardly has any residents; almost all traffic demand comes from outside. I imagine the few residents it has welcomes these measures, since they suffer the bad effects of commuter traffic, while generating little of it themselves. Second, how else are cities meant to do this? The fundamental problem is that there is a huge and rising level of driving demand[1], and limited supply. There is a scarcity of road space in London and you can't really add more. Basic economics tells you that you can manage that scarcity through some combination of prices, queues, and lotteries. Throughout most of the 20th century, we defaulted to queues, in the form of traffic jams. You can use the road at zero cost, but you'll have to wait a long time. But that became increasingly untenable as car ownership rose -- the number of cars in Britain has doubled over the last few decades. And traffic jams are themselves unpleasant: they're noisy, ugly, emit pollution, etc. So now cities are using prices too, in the form of congestion charges, taxes, and so on. That's not some punitive "stick" done for its own sake, it's just a tool used to cope with an inescapable economic reality. When you have more cars and the same amount of road, you need to deter an increasing fraction of those cars from using those roads. The "carrot" is providing alternate, more space-efficient ways to get around: bike infrastructure, public transport. [1] "driving demand" is itself a weaselly, meaningless phrase, because "demand" only makes sense in reference to a specific price level. motorists have been conditioned by a century of car-friendly policy to expect to drive and park for free, but there's no real justification for that. just because the roads are publicly owned doesn't give them the right to use them for free, any more than state-owned railways should have free fares.

Maxburn 4y ago
Where's the carrot? Other than beating drivers over the head what is being done to help the situation? Better mass trans, bikes etc? They are doing that stuff right?
- _dain_ 4y ago
  Most (or at least, a plurality of) people who cycle or take the tube in London also drive a car sometimes; it's not like you have to be wedded to one particular transport mode. Drivers aren't drivers 100% of the time. Reducing motor traffic makes for safer, more aesthetically pleasant streets. You can expand the pavement, have flowers, landscaping, public art, outdoor dining, etc. The air quality is better, the surroundings are quieter, people don't get run over and maimed in collisions. And when you really want or need to drive, there's less traffic around. Nobody likes sitting in traffic jams! See this video for how these kinds of policies benefit drivers directly[1]. The carrot is having a more pleasant city. Everyone wins from that. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k