15-Minute Cities

We'll dive into it on this episode of Transit Tangents . Hey everybody and welcome to this episode of Transit Tangents . Hey everybody , and welcome to this episode of Transit Tangents . My name's Lewis and I'm Chris , and today we are getting into the topic of 15-minute cities .

Are they the conspiracy to lock us all up into our own little districts of the city and track all of our very movements , or is it a plan to just make it so that you can maybe walk to the grocery store and pick your kids up from school on a bike and have a local coffee shop nearby ?

I'm not really sure it could go either way , frankly , uh , especially if you do any research on this topic online . Um , but yeah , that's . That's what we're getting into today is 15 minute cities .

It's really just about setting up our communities to be more convenient for people living in them and for folks to have to be less reliant on getting in a car to drive places or even getting on transit in some cases , although it has a lot of downstream benefits for transit , I would argue Fairly recent history , to this too .

Introduced the concept of 15-minute cities , yes , but the concept , even though it didn't have the name 15-minute city , it is a concept that has gone back to antiquity , right Like the idea that all of your essential services are within close proximity to you .

Essentially , these things have been pushed for by urbanists for a long time and we're just like what happened a long time ago , long before anyone was advocating for this to be set up .

It was just like , yeah , like people need to be able to walk to these things or , you know , bike to these things or whatever , I mean , ride a horse to these things , whatever , it would have been back , yeah , yeah , no , exactly so , uh , really , we're just talking about creating good , livable environments and , uh , you know it , in a lot of cases it doesn't

even necessarily need to be that like this specific city is a 15-minute city .

It's just like creating parts of your town , parts of your city that folks could live in that area , and either you could have a 15-minute walking city , you could have a 15-minute walking city , you could have a 15-minute biking city and the residents can get around easily and generally , what that means is creating good infrastructure for that sort of thing which

we've talked about in a whole lot of different episodes .

So you want to make sure that if you're going to implement a 15-minute city , you can add all the bike lanes that you want , but if you're not allowing the sidewalk cafe to exist on the same street as your homes , it's not going to help , right ? So just as important as the infrastructure piece and helping people be mobile and get around is the zoning piece .

I live on one of the busiest roads in Austin arguably , but it's in an area where we have pockets of this sort of thing . I can walk to a small grocery store in less than 10 minutes . I've got several bars and restaurants within about that timeframe . I've got coffee shops within that timeframe .

I the place that I vote is I walk across the street Like you're in way more of a 15 minute city than I am Right Exactly .

And having lived in not even a good example of this , right , uh , conversations that I have with my partner when we're talking about moving in the future is like why would we ever go back to what we had before ? Because of the convenience levels ?

Um , not because of , uh , you know I'm going to be cordoned off into this zone and , and you know , uh , trapped into it .

It's just like if you're going to live in an urban area , why would you not want to be , yeah , in this area , which makes the whole kind of uh scheme of talking against these things and conspiracizing around them wild to me people don't want to live in highly dense urban areas to be inconvenienced .

But you can walk to your healthcare provider , you can walk to a grocery store , to a cafe , to all of these different services that you would use in your everyday life . And it doesn't mean you have to go to the same ones either within this bubble around you .

It's just there are going to be places that you go to most often and if they are conveniently located to you , then you should be able to get to them quickly . And this concept again , it's not new . Reading through 15-Minute City , something that stood out to me .

Somebody made a comment in one of the articles about how neighborhoods in poorer countries and in societies that had less technology they built better neighborhoods than we have in what we consider the developed world and what we consider in the US . We , and for the most part , don't have good neighborhoods in most places in the US .

But you go to these other countries that have again more impoverished communities and maybe not even impoverished , just not as much as the US . Their neighborhoods are going to be way more vibrant , they're going to have way more services that are in close proximity to them and it's something that They'll often be more dense .

Yes , I stayed at my hotel and , like walked to cafes , into the museum and I didn't get in the car all the time . I hopped on the bus or I hopped on the subway and it was , it was wonderful , I loved it . And then you come back to your suburban home outside of austin and you're like I have to drive 20 minutes to atb to get my groceries right .

this sort of stuff which , like , directly goes against , uh , all the things that they loved on their trip abroad in europe , um , which is just that's a little bit of an aside there , but uh , we've also kind of talked a little bit about this , and and it's it's maybe not the best example , but uh , the episode where we talked about the suburbs and we used the

example here in austin of the development called the grove uh , streetcraft has kind of talked about this on some of their episodes , referring to this too , where , you know , there there's the potential for new mixed use development . That kind of encompasses this idea as well .

Again , the grove's not the perfect example of this , but they do have a small grocery store . It's not like a real , you know , uh , you're not doing your weekly full shop there . They've got a small grocery store . They've got a couple restaurants . Uh , there's school is not super far from that area . You've got good bike lanes and infrastructure .

You've got the transit stops , um , so you know , there's also potential for this sort of thing , uh , in new developments , out in the suburbs , to be able to be like hey , if you want to stay close to home to run some of your errands and be able to do so on foot , we're just providing that option for you .

Not we're restricting you to staying here , but we're providing that option .

You tie in the multiple disconnected neighborhoods from around a suburb to at least being centered around some type of town center and then you get all of these services within a close proximity . And it may not be 15 minutes , it may be 20 minutes , but it is still something that is centralized Right .

The mall becomes a town center , the parking lots become residential developments and whatnot . You use some of that parking lot and build a new school , whatever it may be .

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Acc is Austin Community College , but with turning the actual mall building into a community college , they also added there's a PBS station there . There are tons of apartments now .

You have gyms nearby , you have cafes , you have a 24-hour coffee shop there , you have a transit stop right across the street , easy access to the highway , tons of bus lines , dedicated bike lanes like really wide , really nice bike lanes off the street . So they've turned this whole area into a really vibrant community .

That kind of starts to fall into this mold of a 15-minute city model . Yeah , into this mold of a 15-minute city model .

Even know , maybe it's not a full-size grocery store at every single one , although that'd be like ideal to have all of these things that you need right there in that area to make it so that you don't need to get in a car or ride multiple stops down the train every single day if you don't want to .

If you want to , that option is always still there for you you're allowed to leave your 15 ? yes , you're allowed to leave your zone . You're allowed to leave your district .

All you need to do is show your district card at the crossing point and make sure that you swipe and that the the government official on the other end of it approves it for you , and then you'll be able to leave the district . It's you know they're going to track all of your movements , but you'll be able to leave .

Paris is going really hard on taking spaces for cars away from the city and to make that viable , you really have to work on city services and making things more accessible , and that includes pushing into this sort of 15-minute city model where they are making sure that the right zoning is in place for you to have the cafes and the restaurants and the shops that

you need . They've turned about 100 streets into pedestrian streets now , yeah , it's amazing . They've added a ton of bike racks , a ton of biking infrastructure . They are expanding their metro by a ridiculous amount .

Again , if you're curious about that , go back and watch our episode about the Olympics the amount of work Paris is doing to make their city completely transform it into a city where you don't need a car . Right , the work is amazing , right , um .

So it's one city that's really fallen into this , uh , this push , and that's with the mayor , um , around me her name you're asking the wrong guy .

Now , instead of being required to get in a car to go to a grocery store , you now have the freedom to choose to be able to walk to a grocery store , to a grocery store , or you can still get in your car if you want to . No one is trying to restrict you being able to get in your car .

They're just trying to provide the options so that you don't necessarily have to , and that can have a lot of great downstream effects from uh being better for the planet and not needing to burn fossil fuels but also help your bottom line in your wallet .

Uh , like I moved into a better part of town where I can walk and bike to more places more easily , and it has made uh , my partner and i's ability to have one car between the two of us much more possible , saving us . I did the math .

I mean we save over seven thousand dollars a year because we have one car instead of two , and that was with like a fairly low car payment and and all that sort of stuff , that dollar amount could be higher for you , and $7,000 a year , that's real money ?

Yeah , but 15 , 15 , 15 minutes , 15 minutes , 15 minute middies 15 minute cities aren't without their critics .

They were uh talking about adding dedicated bus lines in the city bus lanes bus lanes yeah sorry , dedicated bus lanes in the city and , uh , at one of their , their city meetings , there was a group of people that they didn't recognize who were there and started asking a lot of questions and it blew up into this , this huge kind of altercation with folks who were

were on this conspiracy theory that 15-minute cities are bad and that the World Economic Forum I think they had it thrown in there was behind it all . It's kind of crazy . So people who are really against them have fallen into this weird conspiracy , and Oxford was one place that was a flashpoint .

And the conspiracy involves what I've been joking about the whole time , what you've been , what you've been , yeah , alluding to um , but I just wanted to lay that groundwork before we then talk about how that conspiracy theory is being espoused here in the us by far right , far right , um media personalities uh , one of those being yeah , so the the clip that we'll

play in a second , which is pretty funny , uh , is uh from from the Joe Rogan podcast .

Rather benign urban planning concept . Yeah , english city of Oxford , click that . Yeah , okay , an academic behind the hit urban . The hit , it's a hit guys . It's like fucking Saturday Night Fever . It's a hit the hit urban planning concept slammed Flat earthers Spreading fake news about livable cities .

Take away their personal freedoms and lock them into their neighborhoods . The concept of the 15 minute city , popularized by the Franco Colombian academic Carlos Moreno , aims to make cities more livable by ensuring that all essential services think schools , medical care and shops are within the distance of a short walk or bicycle ride Broadly .

The idea is to cut down on long commutes and car emissions and improve people's quality of life , ensuring they have access to quality services where they live . It's not the way it's being seen In Oxford .

News of the city council adopted a plan to embrace the 15-minute city model prompted fierce backlash , with local groups and public figures alleging that authorities plan to restrict residents to their immediate neighborhoods and strictly police their movements , which will happen eventually .

The idea that that won't happen eventually particularly in the case of a pandemic or something where they can control people , that this is not a , this is not a fucking conspiracy theory .

The outrage has been fanned by popular right-wing media figures and politicians who seized on the issue as an outrageous example of government overreach I feel like , uh , I feel like I'm in the hunger games after listening to that yeah , what my favorite part of it is the idea that , like , they're all kind of gawking at the idea that you're going to be able to

walk to the school or the hospital or a local coffee shop .

This isn't just Joe Rogan either . We picked on him just because he's a very big example .

He's like lightly mentioning it but kind of clearly doesn't know what he's talking about unless like he's like google this specific thing , uh , which is is kind of strange that he decided to go down that rabbit hole there .

But uh , yeah , there are people who , frankly , like know more about it , who go way further , uh , and yeah , the whole world economic forum element to this and like , uh , talking about the next pandemic , you're gonna literally , you know , be cordoned off into your zone because somehow they're now going to have the ability to lock you into this zone .

Uh , we basically have like a super majority yimby council already where like nine out of the ten people on city council are are very much actively pushing for this stuff . Maybe not nine of them , but you'll get a lot of things about eight or nine um , where you know we , we just uh , you know , cut our minimum lot sizes in half .

Uh , in the city they're working on the , basically like putting out new stuff , where there's now increased density near all of our proposed light rail lines and there's more coming down the line as well , which leads into the other issue that kind of hinders us from getting the 15-minute cities is the zoning .

It was hundreds of people came out to speak on this stuff . Yeah .

It just gives you the ability that when you sell this lot , it can be subdivided or you may subdivide it yourself , make a little extra money .

In a lot of cases , urban schools are , are fine and actually do really really well . Um , like Austin public schools do pretty well .

Potentially walking city in a very dense area or a 15-minute biking city ? Potentially , uh . Or are you uh on the side of the conspiracy theorists here who think you're going to be cordoned off into some zone or another and you need to show your id everywhere ? You're gonna get really , really weird comments .

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