Hello! Progressive cosmopolitan type here to tell you that living in the city center and walking everywhere, whenever possible, is the best life I've ever had - well worth the premium I pay in order to enjoy it. You have no idea what you're missing.

hello! yes, that's exactly what I assume when I see walkable cities evangelism. I assume it's being evangelized by people who WFH or live near work, have a supermarket across the street, and get everything else delivered to their doorstep. I understand why cars may seem obsolete from their perspective, even a nuisance interfering with their 5-minute strolls to the coffee shop. but the overwhelming majority of us unfortunately lives in a vastly different reality.

Only because we have built our cities to prioritize car storage above all else. If we stopped building for cars and built for people instead things would change quicky.

And what does building for people look like, precisely? I live in a 1910s London housing estate with pretty ordinary single family sized homes with gardens and lots of green space. Cars were not really a big deal when they designed and built the place

Yet this is no utopia.

It takes 20 mins to get to the area with the shops on foot (3 or 4 minutes driving - and these are small shops, not even big ones). Like what do you actually want it to have? A supermarket on every street corner? And a doctor's and a dentist and a cafe and a school and a cinema and a sports center and a museum and a library, on every corner? You can't have that density of things people want all within 5 minutes walking.

What you have is a 5 minute walk to the bus stop where you wait for 5 to 10 minutes for the bus to come, then you sit on the bus for 10-30 minutes while it slowly slowly slowly goes some indirect route and then you get out and walk 5 to 10 minutes at the other end. Then repeat the return journey carrying 15kg of groceries back home. Eventually, 2 hours later, you get back home.

Or just drive for 10 minutes to the shops and drive back. Which is what everyone does because people can't spend that sort of time buying food for the next few days or going to the doctors or getting the kids from school or whatever.

The tube is great but it's very very very limited in where it goes apart from the very center if London. Once you are outside zone 1 the gaps between stations and the "spokes" becomes considerable.

How did people shop for groceries when your neighborhood was originally built? Surely it was not designed to be so inconvenient: what has changed in the meantime?

One popular way of talking about building for people is the concept of a "fifteen-minute city": neighborhoods where you can get to your daily needs in that much time by walking or biking. This does not require super-towers or any unusual level of density. My own neighborhood, about ten years older than yours, comes very close, and while it has some apartment buildings, none are taller than half a dozen stories, and there are just as many people living in townhouses or single-family homes as there are in the apartments.

Groceries might have been delivered. Also there were small food shops (butcher, grocer, fishmonger, baker) in every neighborhood that don't exist any more.

So would it be possible to bring those back, or at least a grocery store?

"15 Minute City" ideas sound nice on paper, but I think that in reality the research shows they are net-negative in basically everything apart from encouraging active-transport.

The main issue is around equity.

15 minute cities work great for high-paid knowledge workers with flexible schedules who can chose how and where they can work (i.e. laptop + wifi). But this is not true for everyone - you cannot expect everyone to find employment within 15 minutes of their home (e.g. healthcare workers, factory workers, maintenance workers, etc etc are unlikely to e.g. find a factory within 15 mins of their house).

Making area support more active-transport (i.e. removing road space and replacing it with pedestrian and cycling space) also has the beneficial side-effect of making it nicer for people and thus more desirable. So property value and rents go up. And again, the high-paid knowledge workers and their families are fine, but the poorer and less well paid are priced out. The lower-income families have to move further out into lower-density areas where there is not enough density of population to support smaller grocery shops, pharmacies, etc so the 15 minute rule stops working and now they need to pay to run a car. And where you do retain roads for the essential transport needs (e.g. grocery deliveries, emergency services, garbage collection etc) you end up with the lower-income families living there since they are less desirable and cheaper and it is those who suffer from that the most (pollution, noise, safety etc)

If you remove roads of block access or removing parking etc to promote active-transport you also disproportionately impact those with accessibility problems. Not just "disabled people in wheelchairs" but also people who are not officially disabled but would benefit from driving, e.g. pregnant people, or elderly people who are fine but cannot walk distances regularly etc. 15 minute cities punish people who cannot easily walk or cycle unaided.

Basically the "15 Minute City" idea is only for rich white-collar knowledge workers. It forces lower-income families and workers out of a neighborhood. I am undecided on if this is "working as intended" or not.

In a sense it IS "working as intended", because if you look close enough, the cycle-talibans (those who unflexibly express their maoist intent of forcing unwilling people to not use their private cars) are antisocial (at best).

Cars are the most antisocial device. They truly destroy communities, they destroy connections, they are giant sinkholes of money and effort. They are dangerous prisons that trap us in a cycle of cost and physical danger.

I follow the argument but the conclusion feels off. If the reason white collars move in is that it's nicer and more desirable, is the solution not improving a place? Making it worse?

It seems like the solution would be making nice cities less rare, and thus less of a hot commodity, rather than preventing them. After all, nearly anything that would make an area nicer to live in, would also make it more desirable, and therefore less affordable. I can't believe letting inner cities be hideous slums is the best thing for society overall (historically, indeed quite common).

The point is that it makes some bits nicer for rich people, while the poorer people are forced out of these nicer areas.

You can't have the entire place be 15 minutes because some people have jobs etc that are just incompatible with that, and they tend to be lower income people.

Which gaps? Unless you're outside zone six, you can get pretty much anywhere in London by tube or train within 20 minutes walking and if 20 minutes walking is too much for you then sure use the car, but traffic is so heavy in London that plenty of people just train.

Worth noting a 20 minute walk is a ~5 minute bike ride. I live a 20 minute walk from my local train station and when I can't ride a bike (which is rare, but happens for one reason or another) it's pretty annoying.

I don't know. I have been living in south of Spain for the last 7 years, buildings aren't high rises yet i the 2 neighborhood I have lived in I had most of the commodities available.

Right now I live in a residencial bmneighborhood, not a city center and I have in a 5 min walking distance general, groceries , 2 pharmacies, veterinary, vegetables, butcher, fast food (roasted chicken, burgers, kebab), stationery shop, physiotherapist, 2 small chinese "sell anything" shops (basically aliexpress at your door), a swimming pool + multisport area (soccer, paddle, basketball + others), several hairdresser and nail/beauty shop, a shop selling hicking goods, one selling mattresses, a car bodywork shop, a general mechanic car shop, a gambling joint, primary and secondary school and 2 english schools, some place with activities for older people, a park to walk the dogs and several playgrounds.

A 10min longer walk distance and I have 4 other groceries supermarkets, lots of other smaller shops/specialties. The closest cinema is a 10min ride in a bus or bicycle, city center ~20min. Closest airport is a 15min car ride.

I ride my bicycles 10 minutes and I am in the woods in a natural park where I can only hear birds.

It doesn't seem that hard to replicate.

That's close but not quite right. I understand exactly how necessary cars are for most people, having spent many years trapped in a car-dependent life myself, and I am so glad to have escaped from it that I want to do everything I can to liberate others. A walkable urban life should not be an expensive luxury - there is no fundamental economic reason for it. The scarcity is entirely a function of uptight, restrictive zoning codes, and we can fix that.

Yeah so the walkable cities evangelism wants everyone to be able to have that.

by wishing it, apparently, because no one except China had built a new city in a very long time.

America managed to demolish and rebuild most of its cities less than a century ago to make cars mandatory. Amsterdam did the same in reverse only two decades ago - in this century! Except that involved more building and less demolition because it was the cars that forced the demolition.

Having done both, I can honestly say I prefer living in the countryside and driving to living in the city center and walking in every way except getting home after a night out. The city felt massively overwhelming in almost every way, I actually found it less convenient in a lot of ways, and I found it very hard to get away from noise and people without a car to get myself into the countryside. I'm not debating that it's the best life for you, but I think there's a good number of people who are like me as well.

In Dublin, we periodically pedestrianise a street or two. And there is much angst about “oh, but the businesses”. And inevitably a year or so on the businesses on the street are busier than they ever were.

Really makes you wonder why businesses hate having customers. Or are the businesses separate from the group that's complaining about businesses?

Many of the folks who complain about parking removals 'hurting business' are the business owners who are annoyed that they can't park right in front of their operation. It slightly inconveniences them as a person so they assume it 'hurts' their business overall.

Hah, that's very funny if true and reminds me of the AI CEOs assuming because AI can replace them it can replace everyone.

I remember thinking "why the hell are cars allowed on Capel street?" the whole time I lived there. Delighted they finally fixed it.

How pathetic to be unable to survive without depending on a car.

Light rail, busses, bikes.

The US might be terminally carbrained but if you design infrastructure for walkability it is fantastic, much more convenient (parking is awful, carparks are awful), and cheaper.

The sell is downtown brooklyn and its a good sell and would be nice. Convenience, density, transit access, some of the best in the world.

The rub is nyc can’t even do that anymore. How many subway lines came up before 1940 and how many after? What has population growth been like since 1940? All bad on all counts.

We can articulate the solution but we can’t deliver it. Unless you already have this lifestyle you won’t get it. You have to move to where it already is. You can’t expect it to be built for yourself.

Who are you quoting?