AIBU to think 15-minute cities are a good thing?

[ForthegracegoI]

I live in a 15-minute city location and it's absolutely brilliant.

Within 15 minutes walk I have easy access to:

Multiple cafes, bars, pubs, restaurants.
Multiple hairdressers, salons, barbers etc.
Many, many shops.
Several gyms.
Cinema.
Two swimming pools.
My oldest's high school is literally across the road. My youngest's school is slightly further, probably 12 minutes walk.
My GP, gynaecologist, dentist, optician - all within 10 minutes walk.
Trauma centre: when my youngest fell and broke his arm on the way home from school, he was in the trauma centre and being treated straight away. We walked there, and walked home afterwards.
Hospital - DH is having an operation in a couple of weeks: he'll walk there, and probably walk home a few days later
Veterinary surgery.
Small supermarket and two different fresh produce markets, and loads of bakers / grocers / 'metro' type supermarkets.
Huge park, including a zoo and botanical garden.
Four smaller parks with play equipment and outdoor gyms - one literally across the road.
Bus stops, underground stops and the main city railway station is (just) within 15 minutes walk.

The 'price' I pay for this:
We live in an apartment, not a house.
We don't have off street parking (we do still have a car for holidays / weekend trips / trips to IKEA for big items) but we do have resident parking - it's never been a problem to get parked.

For work, DH and I both cycle - 25 minutes each way. It's a great way to build exercise into the daily routine. Our apartment building has a secure bike storage room in it.

So as not to drip feed; we don't live in the UK, we live in France. We aren't huge earners - DH is a teacher, I work in administration in a school. We are definitely in a 'naice' area, but it's not super-wealthy at all.

I can't understand why Rishi Sunak would actively campaign against making essential services easily accessible to people living in cities.

Exactly!
To get me from one side of Manchester to the other (by train - changing at Manchester Piccadilly) is £20 return.
For two 15 minute trains!
So it's £100 a week to get to work if I did 5 days in the office.
Madness.

The thing is though it's easy to prove the naysayers wrong. Start with opening more facilities, monitor car usage etc. If the theory is correct and usage drops you're halfway there, no need for extreme measures like traffic filters.

What doesn't sit right with me is the idea that people choose 'car-based lifestyles' , like what @3Tunes stated. They don't really. They choose peace, quiet, space, the consequence of that is needing a car.

Well, we could try nit letting the government defraud us of billions, I guess…

Why have so many people fallen for the conspiracy that they'd be limited to 15 mins journey from their home?

I didn’t think people would be limited to 15 min journeys - like some urban version of Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner. I assumed, reasonably I think, that measures would encourage walking and cycling and discourage car use. So pedestrianisation, more cycle lanes, refusal of planning for shop long car parks (or reducing their permissible size), one-way schemes, LTNs, and so on.

But for many, many people in cities (let alone people who live more rurally) the efficiency of roads and the availability of parking is central to how they have to live their lives.

If ‘15 min city’ means nothing will change for the driver but more amenities will be encouraged locally, I can’t see what the point is of the idea is or how it could possibly work. Why would I go to a more expensive shop if I can drive to Tesco or B&Q or Curry’s or a garden centre. As for public utilities, there isn’t a police station within 30 or 40 minutes of me anymore. And there’s never been a hospital or clinic within 15 minutes.

In my local city, the only people who have a 15 minute walk to everything are the students.

Could you be more specific about the “billions” “defrauded”? I’ve seen this said over and over again (like the falsehood that the latest ULEZ expansion was urged on the Mayor of London by the Tories) but I’ve never seen any evidence.

People aren't objecting to having more amenities - that's great!
They're objecting to LTN's.
If having more amenities naturally reduces car usage then there's no need for further enforcement with traffic filters etc. The need for the latter allows me to deduce that the former, while a great aspiration, isn't really going meet its objectives. Hence the need for active enforcement.

Well, we could try nit letting the government defraud us of billions, I guess…

and back in the real world?

Well, if the idea is that every neighbourhood has these but you don't have to live there to work there, it doesn't reduce rush hour traffic and is in fact just a theme park.

Im not objecting to it and I dont really know or understand what is meant by control, Im simply disagreeing with the concept that cars are bad and that everything has to be arranged around getting rid of or minimising cars. We need cities and towns to be able to be accessible, not just for those who can walk to amenities within 15 mins, they need to be accessible for all, from afar, from local, from within. So build roads and underpasses, fly overs, huge underground car parks, build housing estates with proper width roads so that cars are not parked half on the pavement, build houses with proper sized garages so that cars can be put away and off the roads, build business with proper parking so that they dont clog up parking on residential areas.

We could but where's the profit in that. A lot of new estates are dormitory estates for commuters. The ones around us were approved with social housing, a pub, shops, a surgery and a school. When the went up these parts were put of till last and eventually postponed till 'the next phase'. The new housing estates now dwarf the original village and we still have the same school and surgery and one supermarket.

It’s absolutely baffling how 15min cities have become this big divisive issue.

All 15min cities mean is to design places so it is easier for people to reach the services they need within about 15mins walking or cycling. This would be more convenient, enhance communities, be healthier and reduce car dependence.

My uncle used to live in a big housing estate, about 2 mins direct walk from a parade of shops. Except it wasn’t 2 minutes walk, it was 20mins walk or a 5 min drive because when the estate was built no decent pedestrian or cycling routes were built in. The 15min city is about designing places so that you don’t have miles and miles of housing with no facilities planned in. And not ignoring the need for pedestrian and cycling routes.

This is a huge part of the problem. Loads of my friends have moved to new estates and been horrified at how little public transport there is. 30 minute walk to a bus stop with one bus per hour (if it shows up) so they end up driving everywhere.

I live in a suburb of a city and here it's not far off being a 15 minute neighbourhood. I don't have a cinema or hospital but other than that we have it all. It's a very sought after expensive area to live, partly for that reason, so not within reach of everyone. A PP asked what about the big shop - we don't need to do one. I pop into the butcher, fishmonger or greengrocer and get what I need most days. I visit Aldi or Lidl (15 minute walk) a couple of times a week with a backpack for the staples. I don't mind that it's a total 30 minute walk because it's exercise so not wasted time.

Two bugbears for me:

1. Public transport. We still need it to be decent. Friends, family and work are sadly not all within that 15 minute boundary or anything like it. My boyfriend lives 5 miles away on the other side of the city and it takes between 1-2 hours door to door on public transport.

1. Low traffic neighbourhoods. I live on a main road and we have enough traffic without channeling extra our way. Rat runs exist for a reason and the problem needs to be addressed at source not just pushed onto someone else who deserves all they get for buying a house on a main road.

OP said she had on-street parking (and I assume she meant on her own street). I didn't think that was the norm in 15 min cities - and that it would be likely that your parking zone would be a considerable walk away.

Traffic free in residential areas wrecks all home domiciliary health/social care. Both of which depend on staff using their own cars, which would not necessarily be allowed in

(edited for spelling)

Oh, you’ve seen it. You just don’t want to believe it.
and incidentally the ULEZ expansion was part of the deal for TfL funding in the pandemic, which kind of shows your bias in these matters.
But here’s some evidence for you.
https://bylinetimes.com/2023/06/06/government-fraud-quadruples-on-rishi-sunaks-watch-new-report-reveals/#:~:text=Government%20fraud%20has%20almost%20quadrupled,a%20new%20report%20reveals%20today.

I give up. You are deliberately misunderstanding/ failing to grasp the obvious.

Why would you think a 15 min city meant your parking was a considerable walk away? They aren’t traffic free areas. You have totally misunderstood. Several posters have explained more clearly than I seem to be able to, but 15 min cities are a planning aspiration to ensure everyone can access services without using cars. There’s no intention to make them (or you) car free.

I find it utterly bizarre how this conspiracy thing has become attached to it! It's just a sensible idea to make more livable cities, especially for older or less well off people; it wouldn't be in anyone's interest to trap entire populations within 15 minute zones, or whatever the hell the conspiracy nutters are saying. I suppose they confuse restricting the need to travel with restricting the ability to travel, which is not at all the same thing.

I can't get why anyone would go 'Oh no, I don't want all my essential services within 15 minutes!'

Because descriptions can be very muddled.

And if it's a new build 15 mins, then parking is deliberately at a distance.

And reduced traffic appears to be one of the aims.

So this is an initiative that will fail precisely because it lacks clarity

I dislike reading posts by people explaining why they need to travel further....I refuse to explain myself or "justify" why I go anywhere. I'm not in fucking prison. I will go where I please

its a bit like the delta city idea from robocop, yes i like the idea of them, but youll need to rebuild large areas of society to make it possible , i would presume ? @ForthegracegoI

The byline times article gives an account of fraud against the government, not by it. All governments suffer fraud against the public purse. Every court challenge brought against the award of covid-related contracts by government has failed. And those cases were selected by campaigners because they looked the best prospect for a result. Nope, all of them were found lawful by High Court judges after full evidence and careful examination, and in at least one case by the Court of Appeal.

The ULEZ nonsense is fully debunked here: https://fullfact.org/online/ulez-expansion-letter/

Even the Mayor’s office says it’s bollocks!

My bias is that I think circulating untrue claims is a bad thing to do.

despite people posting quite a few articles showing that reduced traffic is one of the aims @cardibach still insists that it's not!

But that doesn't make it "accessible for all". it makes it less accessible for the nearly a quarter of the population who don't have access to a car. All the extra parking space and wide roads means that things are further apart, no longer walkable, the roads are more difficult to walk along, impossible to cross, encouragement of car use means public transport is even worse, and few people can afford taxis on a daily basis.

My mum doesn’t have a pharmacy near her. They closed her local one down so the closest is Superdrug which is 45 minutes walk away and they don’t deliver. She is 88! So doesn’t walk that far.
One 15 minutes away would be amazing.

I don't object to the aspiration for 15mins walk to all amenties possible, its the LTNs, the stupid fines they are introducing to reduce car uage. Why are those people still driving if things are only 15 min walk away. I bet its beause the public transport is crap and too expensive.

If workers for those places are coming from outside the 15 mins I bet the public transport isn't up to scratch either so they will end up driving anway.

Even though my high street isn't a 15 min walk away, i can get the bus for a 10 min trip and I can do all my shopping there which I do, so I don't use my car that often. I have a car though to get to other places like garden centres, visiting friends, going to see family because their is so public transport to get me there or if there is: (1) the cost of doing it is far more than it would be to drive (2) time! This is something noone in the world can buy more of and I am not going to spend 3hrs trying to get to my parents when I can drive and it takes me 1hr and costs me £7 instead of £40.

My parents in the south eat are retired they have reduced using their car and take public transport to the shopping centre thats an hour bus ride away and is free for them. Buses are often late and not regular like London. They are okay to make this change because one its free and two they have time to spend doing a 2hr round trip to do their shopping.