"As an asthma sufferer, I went from needing my rescue inhaler several times a day to not touching it for several months during the pandemic."

Perhaps that indicates you live in the wrong place - it shows you what is possible! Obviously the world is not ideal and you may be tied to where you are but it sounds like you need to reconsider where you live.

I was a smoker for about 30 years and gave up just over three years ago. I did some damage to my lungs but there you go - mea culpa. In your case it isn't your fault but I have an idea what it is like to have some difficulty breathing. It's different for me and you but I understand: my mum was asthmatic (had some episodes that ended up in hospital) and suffered from awful hayfever - a bit crap for a farmer's daughter but then she still managed to become a Captain in the WRAC (Women's Royal Armoured Corpse! Ok Army, oh alright Corps)

Anyway, why not consider moving to somewhere more rural? I remember after about a fortnight after deciding to give up the fags, I stood outside my office without a cigarette in my gob. The air tasted and smelled fresh and pure. At this point I was trying to enforce positive experiences as an enticement to help giving up. It is quite hard to give up smoking. Then a diesel car drove past nearby and the smell was horrendous, really horrendous. I suspect you know that as well or better than me.

Take care mate.

As much as I love the idea of being out in nature, the thought of leaving the city I was raised in, my entire family behind and of the opportunities, experiences and quality of life that come with living in a place that for the most part prioritizes people, is a non-starter. I’ve lived out in more suburban places for a few years and I couldn’t imagine going back to needing a car to do practically anything. I’d much rather dedicate my energy advocating for solutions rather than leave everything I have behind.

And if everyone lived in nature, there would be no more nature.

indeed. and that "rural" lifestyle really often involves driving far and often, therefore pushing your fossil fuel & auto (ev or otherwise) externalities on other people.

i think we should remove the cars from the cities, not remove the people from the cities. People were there first after all

Agree!

>Perhaps that indicates you live in the wrong place

Perhaps that indicates that we as a society are doing it wrong.

Back when I bike-commuted, I used to pick routes and times for biking based on smog levels. I'd rather double my time on the road than arrive coughing from breathing exhaust.

I get hay fever, so I moved to a coastal location which usually has an onshore breeze. That has helped me a lot, although obviously can only work for some people and depends on your job location.

I have had days when driving into town has hit me badly because of the pollen loads, and other days when the breeze has changed to coming from inland which have also been yucky for me even at home.

Wouldn't this mean you should look somewhere else where your quality of life would be much better? I mean I know people like to be in this place or that, but life often isn't fair. I like some nothern cities but it literally wrecks my skin (cold weather in place like the north east and upper midwest). Dries and cracks it and makes me miserable and gross. I never found a solution so I moved to the sun belt and have lived in various cities here for the past 20 years, I would rather live in the northeast but it's not possible with the weather there 4 months or so out of the year.

No such a thing as "have to". To walk everywhere you need to would take hours in a day it's impractical.

> The ‘15-minute city’ idea hit the headlines when Anne Hidalgo made it one of the driving issues of her re-election campaign. “The concept of a 15-minute city, in a nutshell,” explains Carlos Moreno, professor at the Sorbonne and scientific advisor to the Mayor of Paris “is to design the city within a distance of 15 minutes by foot or by bike to enable the six main urban activities for living in cities: to live, to work, to supply, to education, to health, and to enjoy.” After Anne Hidalgo’s election last summer, the wheels have started turning to bring the idea to life.

https://eurocities.eu/latest/parisians-will-live-within-a-15...

One problem with this is that we've distributed our families and social circles. I would love to ditch my car, but then I wouldn't be able to get to my parents, siblings or friends.

That's where public transport comes in.

I have another comment referring to Canberra, Australia. They failed on the public transport front. They are trying to do better.

On the whole, I think city planners should design everything around public transport and it should be seen for the societal value add, rather than as a public expense.

Sadly, in Canberra it is buses, often once an hour. And most people feel as though if you catch a bus, it is a social signal that you are not doing very well.

Doing public transport well is hard.

But Canberra laid a good foundation for great bicycle riding!

A bus once an hour is the backup of a backup plan for those who have no other options. It means the blind don't have to bother their friends for a ride as often.

What it isn't is in anyway useful to anybody. It shouldn't even be called public transit, be honest and call it last ditch option.

Real public transit needs to run more often. Half hour service is marginal public transit.

Canberra, Australia, lived 19 years there as adult.

Designed and planned from the beginning, founded in 1913.

Has several "town centres" with the similar idea of "close to everywhere you need to be".

But imbalances of distribution through all the various factors of life mean one town centre has better [X], another has better [Y], your [Z] hobby group may be mostly in another area and your friends and family end up all over the place.

And so you travel everywhere anyway.

"To health" I presume means to see a doctor. But if I need to see a doctor, I may not be in a condition where I can walk or bike there.

Perhaps, but (based purely on anecdotes) most medical visits are the type where you walk in. I expect check-ups are far more common than open heart surgery, simply because every major operation requires a precautionary followup or two.

It’s not to say there would be zero taxis and certainly not zero ambulances.

I haven’t owned a car in several years. I can walk to my local grocer, pharmacy, gym, dozens of restaurants, job, extended family, and many more places in less than an hour. I just biked to get my Covid shot at a place 4 miles away. It took me 25 minutes to get there as I breezed passed gridlocked traffic on the way up. If I had taken a car it would have likely cost $20+ and taken over 40 minutes.

If you think ‘need to’ doesn’t needs quotation marks, try sitting through a few local community board meetings focused on re-allocating free parking for anything more useful :)

I lived downtown Toronto for several years and I had to replace my car battery three times because I drove it so infrequently that they died. I understand that living downtown isn't an option for everyone, but I strongly believe we can build dense "city centers" even in the suburbs that offer similar conveniences with larger units for families.

Do you live alone?

I can't imagine doing weekly shopping for a family without a car (we buy from both a grocery store, and a wholesale warehouse store)

I don’t live alone. I have several grocery stores within 5 minutes of me, and a farmers market and a Whole Foods within half a mile which all serve me well and allow me to get a few things at a time without making me going out of my way every week :) I find that’s nicer since you can get things fresh and you never have too much sitting around.

what kind of car uses $20 in gas driving 4 miles? even if you're idling most of the time (which actually uses surprisingly little gas compared to moving)

Reminds me of my talk in 2013 at The Guardian's Activate here in Singapore. Many cities around the world especially in Europe and Asia do not require cars for most of one's daily routine. The American model where living, working, and shopping spaces are distinctly separated into Suburban, Industry/Tech parks, and Malls are fortunately not the norm here.

Bull manure. That's a choice you've made for yourself, not some larger truth about life.

I live in the suburbs (20 miles west of DC). My office is 1 mile away and I walk. The schools are 1 mile away; if I had school-age kids, we'd walk. I can walk or cycle to the grocery, the brewpub, coffee shop, post office, and burger joint (all 0.5-2 miles away). I rarely use my car during the week; the vast majority of my mileage is weekend trips to the mountains.

Your last sentence is interesting.

Even having it all sorted for day to day living. You still have a car to go somewhere else.

I feel the same here in Australia. Much of our day to day living doesn't need a car. Some of our friends though are in small country towns that would be a big hassle to visit without a car.

I’d love if I could take the train to the mountains, but the US (and Australia) is a large place with low overall density, so cars make sense for some travel.

But few American communities are planned with minimizing car use as a key tenet. I’m lucky to live in one that is.

Only because we structure our neighborhoods to require cars to do anything other than walk the dog.

And even then some folks need to drive to their dog walker.

I worked near a gym a few jobs ago. I would see people circling the block trying to get a “good parking spot” presumably so they didn’t have to walk very far to get their workout.

More likey to be people who want to minimize the amount of time they're walking alone to prevent victimization.

A personal data point: My wife and I used to live about 20 blocks from the gym we used. She would drive because of the vagrants and street people who would follow and harass women. Cycling wasn't an option because anyone who left their bike unattended would have it stolen.

Only if where you work and purchase necessities is far from where you live. If you live close or work remote, then it would be easy and convenient to walk.

Neither your comment, or the other 2 have any bearing on the reality in which i live and that i know many others also live. The cities we live in are hundreds, if not thousands of years old. The idea of that a 15 minute city has any bearing on real life is sadly laughable. I'm sorry to have to say so, but it's true.

Cars didn't exist hundreds or thousands of years ago, so your statement can't possibly be true.

Well planned communities can be close to car-free, at least for day-to-day activities. The problem is we haven't prioritized being nearly car free, choosing instead of externalize the costs of car culture (pollution that generations will have to deal with, health impacts on some community members today, depletion of fossil fuels and the impact of digging them up, vast swaths of land dedicated to flat tarmac for car storage).

Not defending the post you reply to, but while well planned communities can require close to car free, the modern life is such that people are aware of - and cars enable easy access to - the greater world much more so than otherwise.

They want to see sights 90 minutes drive away. 3 hours drive away. And be home again that night.

I support "local living without cars as much as possible", but I think cars are here to stay for most of us.

Nowhere did I ever claim people shouldn’t have access to cars. I own a car. My wife owns a car. I drive 12k miles/year doing just what you described - day trips or weekend trips. But, I have the option to leave the car parked most of the week and it amazes me that more communities aren’t planned similarly.

People driving to see sights is really not the issue with cars that we have.

Hundreds or thousands of years ago, most people would be born, grow up, live their entire lives and die within a few miles of where their parents were born. We're not living in that kind of society today and I don't think it'd be possible to go back to it short of the total collapse of civilization and technology and death of almost all of the world's population.

Sure, but that's not what was said above:

"The cities we live in are hundreds, if not thousands of years old. The idea of that a 15 minute city has any bearing on real life is sadly laughable."

The two sentences don't make sense together. Those old cities were "15 minute" cities by necessity - easy long distance travel wasn't a thing until the industrial revolution. We've since redesigned many of them for car use, and in some cases realized the mistake and redesigned them again (Amsterdam, for example).

The fact that the 15-minute city will not work everywhere does not mean that there is no place it can work. I live in a major city on the east coast of the United States, and I have it now. There are other cities in which it could be implemented. There are regions of my city in which it can not be implemented. But it's worth doing where possible.

There will be various solutions to our energy and pollution problems, and some of the variations will depend on the region the solution is being implemented in. I don't think solar power will be as big in Canada as in, say, the Sahara Desert.

I am curious which city we are talking about. This sounds very nice.

5 minutes in my old job, 50 minutes in my new job, I usually cycle there because it is faster than both car or subway.

I've lived in multiple places where I could walk to everything I needed to walk to within 15 minutes. Why do you think it's hard for you to imagine this could be true?

yes, i live this way in the middle of LA, as do a number of my neighbors, because parking is such a hassle and most of us aren’t rich. grocery/retail, schools, entertainment, medical care, etc. are all walkable, and farther amenities are usually just a scooter/bike/bus/lyft/train ride away. this lifestyle is totally within reach in many places if desired. the ties that bind aren’t much at all, once scrutinized.

Yeah I'm in suburbia but I live within 15 minute bike ride of a large grocery store, a couple spas, hairstyling place, a couple bars, gas station. the only thing missing is a theater and warhammer 40k/comics store.