Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk(nathenry.com)
nathenry.com
Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk
https://nathenry.com/writing/2023-02-07-seattle-walkability.html
385 comments
Incredible analysis! As a Seattleite I can say the conclusions here are very close to accurate, with the key additional note being that distance is not the only thing that defines walkability.
Seattle has some of the most confounding civil engineering I’ve ever seen, and I’ve lived in five cities and visited dozens more. Here are some things that make a pedestrian life near impossible in my neighborhood:
- two high-traffic, multi-lane streets where people routinely run red lights and drive erratically, one dividing us from my child’s elementary school
- Many areas with no sidewalks and no area on the side of the road that’s safe to walk
- 5-way intersections with extremely confusing walk signals.
Seattle has some of the most confounding civil engineering I’ve ever seen, and I’ve lived in five cities and visited dozens more. Here are some things that make a pedestrian life near impossible in my neighborhood:
- two high-traffic, multi-lane streets where people routinely run red lights and drive erratically, one dividing us from my child’s elementary school
- Many areas with no sidewalks and no area on the side of the road that’s safe to walk
- 5-way intersections with extremely confusing walk signals.
Seattle is complex in this regard as the elevation changes between neighborhoods are an additional dimension. If I was living at the base of Lower Queen Anne and the "facilities" meeting the 15m criteria was at the top, that's not something I would consider a viable walk.
When I first started reading this article, I'll admit, the first thought, as a life-long Seattlite, that crossed my mind was, here we go again, some dumbass writes about what it is like to live in Seattle. Goddamit. But when I saw the chart that showed walking distance to a park at the top of the list then I started to realize this one hit the mark.
I actually purchased the home that I did because it is one block from my favorite park in the whole world, it is a magical place, to me, I discovered on a bike ride training for the STP. And I vowed I was going to buy a place near this park someday.
Call me crazy, but parks, just in general, are so extremely important to the quality of life and sometimes I think people overlook the importance of having a lot of public spaces like that.
I'm going to venture an educated guess that proximity of things like grocery stores, restaurants and schools in urban areas is going to be highly correlated with income. Lower income neighborhoods are going to have gas stations and 7-Elevens/AMPMs. So an effort to make a true 15-min city should help improve quality of life and access to healthier food for lower-income residents. That would be a good thing.
Anyone else torn between wanting to live in a 15 minute city and in a log cabin in the woods?
The way “supermarkets” are in the US, I don’t WANT to be a 15 minute walk from one. They are usually surrounded by a mile of blacktop and concrete, for all the drive-in shoppers in the front and all the trucks offloading goods or picking up deliveries in the back.
Would much rather be near a decent small or midsize grocery with no or limited off-street parking, and which receives its deliveries on the street in the early morning (no loading dock)
Would much rather be near a decent small or midsize grocery with no or limited off-street parking, and which receives its deliveries on the street in the early morning (no loading dock)
I like the idea of walking 15 minutes to get all the things.
But man when I think of the costs involved in making sure there is a High School (in the US they tend to be large and draw from a distance) within 15 minutes of everywhere (no small cost to drop in a high school somewhere), or plop down a grocery store in a neighborhood ... that sounds both super expensive and politically difficult, and for some good reasons.
Heck I'd be annoyed if someone decides "Sorry we're rezoning / creating an incentive to build a restaurant in the plot next to you, not enough restaurants nearby. Good luck..."
But man when I think of the costs involved in making sure there is a High School (in the US they tend to be large and draw from a distance) within 15 minutes of everywhere (no small cost to drop in a high school somewhere), or plop down a grocery store in a neighborhood ... that sounds both super expensive and politically difficult, and for some good reasons.
Heck I'd be annoyed if someone decides "Sorry we're rezoning / creating an incentive to build a restaurant in the plot next to you, not enough restaurants nearby. Good luck..."
>Of the 89 neighborhoods considered, only nine are “15-minute neighborhoods” walkable for 90% or more of their residents.
I'd love to see the median rent in those nine compared to elsewhere in the city. Can any Seattle residents here provide some insight?
I'd love to see the median rent in those nine compared to elsewhere in the city. Can any Seattle residents here provide some insight?
The toggleable map in there is amazing and you can really see how it's the schools and libraries letting the map down... which is distinct in that they're the government-provided services. Here in Ontario we had a knock-down fight like a decade ago as the province decided to save money by shutting down unneeded schools, ending a lot of locality in the school system... and ever since the school boards have been scrambling to deal with insufficient bus-drivers as they effectively offloaded the problem onto the busing system.
Aside, the conspiracy-theory right has decided that "15 minute city" is another "agenda 21" conspiracy to force all westerners to live in tiny urban walled ghettos, and traveling outside of your "15-minute-city" will be illegal. And of course, the mainstream right media has been feeding this monster by treating walkability as some nefarious conspiracy but without explicitly mentioning the most insane tinfoil-hat parts of it.
Aside, the conspiracy-theory right has decided that "15 minute city" is another "agenda 21" conspiracy to force all westerners to live in tiny urban walled ghettos, and traveling outside of your "15-minute-city" will be illegal. And of course, the mainstream right media has been feeding this monster by treating walkability as some nefarious conspiracy but without explicitly mentioning the most insane tinfoil-hat parts of it.
Interesting how the visualization highlights the Eastlake and Montlake neighborhoods (along the south bank of the canal northeast of downtown) as walkability outliers.
When I was newer to the Seattle area and looking for housing I did a similar exercise and charted the location of grocery stores. I was surprised that those neighborhoods just didn't have any grocery stores, especially given their proximity to downtown and the UW. Given the amount of investment the city/state is making to improve the WA-520 corridor (the east-west highway which goes through there) for cars and pedestrians, I wonder if that's going to change in the near future.
Cool map. If you select Elementary schools and all of the amenities except Link stations, the map basically highlights Seattle's Urban Villages (plus a few extras).[1]
[1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattles-... (using this for the nice map image because Seattle insists on publishing hulking PDFs)
[1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattles-... (using this for the nice map image because Seattle insists on publishing hulking PDFs)
Do any Seattle-ites not have a car? How do you get around?
Asking as a NYer who would consider living there if the car-free life wouldn't be too painful
Asking as a NYer who would consider living there if the car-free life wouldn't be too painful
Really neat visualization. Would love to see it for other cities (perhaps Paris would be a good one for comparison, since it's touted as the fifteen-minute city par excellence).
I spent my childhood in an inner suburb of Cleveland. Between kindergarten and eighth grade, I took a bus to school for part of sixth grade. Otherwise everything was in the 15-minute distance, mostly afoot. (The junior high school might have been twenty or thirty minutes on foot, but of course less on a bicycle.) Nobody mistook it for Paris, but within the radius was a quite decent library, an independent bakery, a deli, and a grocery store.
I used to work with Nat at IHME. He and others there did great work in the global health space.
I highly recommend playing around with some of the datasets and visualization tools.
https://www.healthdata.org/data-tools-practices
I highly recommend playing around with some of the datasets and visualization tools.
https://www.healthdata.org/data-tools-practices
I'd be super interested to see an analysis using exactly the same methodology as this performed on various other cities (SF, NYC, LA, maybe some European cities like Amsterdam or Cologne) for comparison. I would bet Seattle is near the top for the US in walkability (probably behind NYC only)
lol the busses don't go through Laurelhurst.
why not? Oh, people who ride the bus don't live there.
Great work!
I live in West Seattle and tbh the maps for West Seattle look pretty solid, especially when you factor in the significant reduction in housing costs. I remain more people don't live here!
I live in West Seattle and tbh the maps for West Seattle look pretty solid, especially when you factor in the significant reduction in housing costs. I remain more people don't live here!
Fantastic visualization! Would be really cool to get global coverage for this. Possible by leveraging Google Maps?
the supermarket map discounts a some of the very good corner and ethnic groceries that serve specific neighborhoods, which are a worthwhile and important (and imo better) segment of the grocery market. and some of the "no restaurant" locations definitely contain restaurants.
The decision to leave libraries in the standard criteria made the numbers at the end meaningless for the most part - most libraries are barely open as it is, and should be accessible enough by bus regardless. Still a very cool visualisation for Seattle; I think this city has great potential for denser urban development, while still retaining its charm.
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More like 51 minutes. Of driving.
When I started reading
As the mental health and drug crisis grows, I simply don't want to walk anywhere, and don't want my family walking places. Plus, it's incredibly inconvenient to do grocery shopping on foot. Yes, I know that people do it and it's possible and I've done it when living elsewhere.
Still, this 15-minute city is an initiative created by the WEF which should be ignored and not implemented. If the WEF is so concerned about the "carbon footprint" of regular citizens driving to work and to the store, a much more effective solution would be to ban private jets. Bill Gates' flight to Davos on a private jet (to urge people to eat fake meat) exhausts more carbon in one trip than my family's entire car usage.
Still, this 15-minute city is an initiative created by the WEF which should be ignored and not implemented. If the WEF is so concerned about the "carbon footprint" of regular citizens driving to work and to the store, a much more effective solution would be to ban private jets. Bill Gates' flight to Davos on a private jet (to urge people to eat fake meat) exhausts more carbon in one trip than my family's entire car usage.
Seeing the UK’s implementation of 15 minute cities, where cars are locked down to zones, movement is tracked by ubiquitous camera surveillance, and residents have to apply for a special pass to leave their zone. Talk of 15 minute cities in the US makes me nervous.
When we talk about 15 minute cities here, do we mean zoning changes to build things differently? Or are we talking about authoritarian enforcement?
Edit: Okay maybe what I read was overblown. Seems this is being trialed in Oxford as "traffic filters" but the ubiquitous camera surveillance is certainly part of it. There is also talk of this expanding to other cities in the UK. Though not specifically talked about as apart of the 15 minute city plan, this seems to go along nicely with that concept.
Edit: A source: https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2023/01/25/15-minute-city-plan...
When we talk about 15 minute cities here, do we mean zoning changes to build things differently? Or are we talking about authoritarian enforcement?
Edit: Okay maybe what I read was overblown. Seems this is being trialed in Oxford as "traffic filters" but the ubiquitous camera surveillance is certainly part of it. There is also talk of this expanding to other cities in the UK. Though not specifically talked about as apart of the 15 minute city plan, this seems to go along nicely with that concept.
Edit: A source: https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2023/01/25/15-minute-city-plan...
I live a in less walkable neighborhood on this map - but about a year ago a small (tiny really, ~700sqft) corner store opened up 2 blocks from me. It sells coffee, pastry, simple sandwiches, but also pantry staples (flour, sugar, milk etc.) and has a really good beer and wine selection.
I can't do my normal grocery shopping there, but being able to walk 2 minutes to get coffee or a quick breakfast or that missing stick of butter for a recipe has been such a wonderful change to the neighborhood. (btw this store is not reflected on the map for coffeeshops or groceries.) They also host food trucks several days a week so its almost like having a restaurant in the neighborhood too.
All it took was 1 little store, owned and operated by a couple who lives in the neighborhood, to turn a 20 minute neighborhood into a 5 minute neighborhood for several thousand people.