[Who's going to extend the 15-minute conveniences to poor neighborhoods? It's not cost-effective.
Simple, we have a publicly owned supermarket chain who set up stores in any area not currently served by a supermarket within 15 min walk. The profits will be lower than a capitalist venture seeking maximum profits would tolerate, and they may even operate at a loss with the difference made up by the public purse as it represents as social good for the benefit of all.
As much of supermarkets profits come from the interest on the money taken from customers and not spent back out in paying the suppliers bills for 90 days or more, that could be challenging.
From looking at the link Alan Cresswell initially gave, it is not completely literal and absolute, with everything being fifteen minutes away. It's qualified by 'most.'
In a world where we work less and travel less and pollute less, it would mean that we have most of our basic needs for work, education, leisure, sport, entertainment localised.
I am actually thinking in many ways this is more difficult for the rich, as many are used to having lots of choice, turning their noses up at options they consider inferior, etc. And I can see it working pretty well for poorer areas.
Giving again the example of the residential area where I live, it was built specifically for poor people, people who needed council homes. It is a dense area of council homes (many of them now privately owned), and specifically for this residential area were built an ecumenical church to incorporate several denominations, a primary school, a secondary school and FE college, a big supermarket, a pharmacy, a couple of corner shops, a charity shop, a fish and chip shop, a library, a gym. Plenty of people don't have cars. Plenty of poorer people use these amenities. I do. There are more options further afield of course, and people with cars and more money will be more likely to choose those. But, with many things, they don't have to. They could choose to live more simply and with less choice, without always having what they consider to be the very best of everything.
I can envisage a society where travelling further afield is the exception rather than the rule. Plenty of people will of course have to travel for some things, like work. And people like variety, of course - it's nice to sometimes hop on a bus and go somewhere different. But perhaps more of a treat if it is less often, rather than all the time.
It would be a simpler life. For people with kids, it would mean not necessarily sending one's kids to all the best and trendiest clubs and activities, and satisfying their every whim, but finding good, constructive things to do in one's own area. It is something I think plenty of poorer people do already, and will be much harder for the richer people.
[Who's going to extend the 15-minute conveniences to poor neighborhoods? It's not cost-effective.
Simple, we have a publicly owned supermarket chain who set up stores in any area not currently served by a supermarket within 15 min walk. The profits will be lower than a capitalist venture seeking maximum profits would tolerate, and they may even operate at a loss with the difference made up by the public purse as it represents as social good for the benefit of all.
This may work in other nations. We can't even keep a publicly owned postal service without threat from the Republicans to tear it down and take it private.
So, a simplified lifestyle with reduced consumption is certainly consistent with that.
Does reduced consumption have to mean reduced choice? You might reasonably argue that 50 different kinds of breakfast cereal was too much choice, until your preferred variety is the one that gets canned. But if all the shops go corner-shop scale, nobody can stock 50 kinds of cereal, and everyone will just stock the top few.
This is the kind of thing I mean. Yes. It might mean not having your favourite breakfast cereal, which I suspect will be much harder for richer people who are used to being free to have their favourite of everything.
I would argue (from the perspective of having never been in a position to buy the very best of everything) that it's generally absolutely fine not to have your preferred variety of cereal. Plenty of other varieties might be fine, or if, like me, you just don't like breakfast cereal at all, you don't have to eat it. Fruit, nuts and yogurt is delicious for breakfast. As is the occasional bacon and eggs. Not for everyone, of course, as we all have different tastes, but it's entirely possible for most people to have an enjoyable diet without having their ultimate top choice of variety of everything.
And if there is one particular food that is a special treat for you, that you really like having a good quality variety of, then that can be an occasional buy where you travel further afield or order online. For myself, it's nice tea leaves, which I can't get in Asda at all. I order online (cheap in bulk from an online store that sells dried food that's nearing or past its best before dare - doesn't affect flavour at all in tea, so I get a lovely bargain). But I wouldn't expect such tea leaves to be stocked locally - it would be nice, but if they aren't selling, there's no point.
That's the kind of thing I mean about the exception rather than the rule. Not that people should never travel outside the 15 minute thing, but that it's very possible for it to be less frequent, less the norm for everyone.
[Who's going to extend the 15-minute conveniences to poor neighborhoods? It's not cost-effective.
Simple, we have a publicly owned supermarket chain who set up stores in any area not currently served by a supermarket within 15 min walk. The profits will be lower than a capitalist venture seeking maximum profits would tolerate, and they may even operate at a loss with the difference made up by the public purse as it represents as social good for the benefit of all.
This may work in other nations. We can't even keep a publicly owned postal service without threat from the Republicans to tear it down and take it private.
The buggers did privatise ours. Tories in our case, naturally. They undervalued it, too, so the taxpayer lost out and some very rich people buying lots of shares and selling them shortly after got even richer, as satirised by John Finnemore here: https://youtu.be/HetLxhI1txY
I've mentioned that I live in the sort of area we're talking about. For the last two months I wasn't allowed more than one kilometre from my house and apart from shortages due to panic buying, I have never been unable to buy a foodstuff I wanted. The supermarkets are all relatively small but they all stock different brands. You learn which of the half dozen nearby shops carries the one specific brand you like. Example: we like a specific brand of coffee capsules. They are available in Monoprix and Carrefour but not Franprix or Intermarché. Not sure about Auchan. If we want those specific ones we walk five minutes to Monop or Carrefour. Same applies to other products. It makes you go to several different places but having everything on the doorstep means we don't tend to buy huge amounts of shopping in one go.
It would be a simpler life. For people with kids, it would mean not necessarily sending one's kids to all the best and trendiest clubs and activities,
I'm hovering close to a hell call for this, but I think we can keep it civil.
If you want to engage in a trendy activity, you won't need to travel far to do it, because, by virtue of the activity being trendy, lots of people who live near you will want to do it. If my kids want to play soccer or baseball, they can find hundreds of like-minded children within walking distance. It's only if they want to play at an elite level that they'd need to travel any distance.
If they were interested in martial arts, they'd have to travel further, depending on which martial art they had an interest in. Other sports - again, closer or further, depending on the sport. The less popular the activity, the further (in general) you'll have to travel to find it.
Apart from church, I've never lived within a half hour walk of any of the leisure activities I have engaged in. The things I like to do are comparatively unpopular, so each instance of it has a rather wider catchment area.
I'm a bit confused, though, as to why you think it's reasonable to travel more than the magic 15 minutes to get to work, but not to get to a leisure activity or a shop? The single place I travel to most often is work. This is true for everyone that has a job. You get the most bang for your proverbial buck by trying to ensure that most people live close to their place of work, and that there is nearby schooling for their children. That takes care of the lion's share of people's journeys. Add in basic food shopping, and you've got most journeys. You're far better off having someone living close to their place of work and travelling a longer distance for their weekly tiddlywinks tournament than forcing them to play tiddlywinks with the people on their street, but having them commute an hour to work.
It would be a simpler life. For people with kids, it would mean not necessarily sending one's kids to all the best and trendiest clubs and activities,
I'm hovering close to a hell call for this, but I think we can keep it civil.
If you want to engage in a trendy activity, you won't need to travel far to do it, because, by virtue of the activity being trendy, lots of people who live near you will want to do it. If my kids want to play soccer or baseball, they can find hundreds of like-minded children within walking distance. It's only if they want to play at an elite level that they'd need to travel any distance.
If they were interested in martial arts, they'd have to travel further, depending on which martial art they had an interest in. Other sports - again, closer or further, depending on the sport. The less popular the activity, the further (in general) you'll have to travel to find it.
Apart from church, I've never lived within a half hour walk of any of the leisure activities I have engaged in. The things I like to do are comparatively unpopular, so each instance of it has a rather wider catchment area.
I'm a bit confused, though, as to why you think it's reasonable to travel more than the magic 15 minutes to get to work, but not to get to a leisure activity or a shop? The single place I travel to most often is work. This is true for everyone that has a job. You get the most bang for your proverbial buck by trying to ensure that most people live close to their place of work, and that there is nearby schooling for their children. That takes care of the lion's share of people's journeys. Add in basic food shopping, and you've got most journeys. You're far better off having someone living close to their place of work and travelling a longer distance for their weekly tiddlywinks tournament than forcing them to play tiddlywinks with the people on their street, but having them commute an hour to work.
I meant trendy among the upper middle classes, if you happen to live in a poorer area.
In terms of why I think it's reasonable to travel to work, I was thinking in terms of realistic. It's more likely people will have to travel further for work, as the article Alan Cresswell initially linked alluded to. You can adapt your leisure and spending activities to what is available, but not so much your work. In theory, it would be great to live a 15 minute distance from your work, and it is possible for some, but as has been pointed out already, much work is in a city/town centre, and for poorer folks, they can't afford a place there, so live further away to commute. Personally, I'd love to be in walking distance from my workplace. I find taking the bus gives me sensory overload and dizziness and makes my workdays exhausting. This is only three days a week, because of health issues meaning I can only work part time.
I'm not sure why you want to do a hell call, but go ahead if you're angry and want to express it. I found your posts a bit insensitive to those who are on a low income and can't afford all the choice you seem to think should be everyone's right. I would also say that in hell if you called me there.
To clarify further, in my observation, it's far more common for upper middle class people to have expensive, unusual hobbies that require travel than it is for poorer/working class people. The idea of doing something unusual and elite (and expensive) is in itself trendy - as in part of what is expected. So that is all part of what I meant by trendy too.
I think Mr Cniht is right about the bang-for-buck thing. It's why I moved close to work, which (I was lucky) was stable for a long time. But most people in my field get made redundant with sufficient regularity these days to make weird commutes almost inevitable once one has a family, schools and all that to consider, and can't move easily or regularly. I wish that weren't so.
I'm committed to the idea of 'geographic church' which is a bit quaint for some people these days, and I also volunteer a bit in the local area. But two of my volunteer gigs are further afield - one by bike, one a bit too far for that.
The lockdown has been something like a fast, for me. I'm looking forward to little trips again of 10 or 15 miles with some anticipation and renewed excitement. I don't suppose it will last; I wonder to what degree stories in the press about our collective enthusiasm for a green, sustainable recovery will turn out to have substance.
I'm not sure that this "we depend on other people outside of our community to survive" thing is unique to major metro areas.
How many of y'all could live without going to a grocer that gets its food delivered by semi? Anyone?
Few people now. But it would be possible with small populations, it isn’t with large
How would it be possible? Also, my comment wasn't directed to an ideal hypothetical world of extreme locavorism, but to modern reality. Your comment seems to single out metro areas as if everyone outside a major city is some kind of perfectly self-sustaining locavore. And I simply do not think that is true.
Wow, no. First, I made no such claim about rural areas. When I talk about population densities, I am talking about the world, not just cities. Fewer people overall, living in smaller communities, could live a more localised life. But that would mean massive reduction in overall population and a massive restructuring. My point is that it is possible from small communities to have that lifestyle for everyone and in large cities, it is impossible.
IMO, a 15-minute lifestyle for everyone is pie in the sky. Some people can manage it, but not everyone unless there is a lot less of everyone.
As someone who grew up in a small town, I feel a lot more "localized" in my city neighborhood, small towns are, in my experience, far more isolated places internally and externally. And at least in the US, small communities are wrapped up in the same webs of interdependence as larger cities. Again, you're using technology to type this message that involves components from a massive global supply chain. Most modern humans aren't cut out for a life of subsistence agriculture, most people have economic needs that are best filled by broad global market. And small towns participate in it just as much as cities do, if not moreso. You can only produce so many goods and services within a 20 mile radius.
With smaller populations, I think the need for transportation to a gazillion tiny places would be greater, not lesser. Do you know anyone who takes medication that's manufactured outside of their local town?
Also, "massive reduction in overall population" is a pretty scary phrase if you take it seriously. Should metro areas be cleared out for the sake of someone else's rural idyll?
I do think we're somewhat talking past each other.
If the 15-minute lifestyle gains traction with urban planners, we will see an entrenchment of stratified society. Society needs to change first.
The only way to currently build 15-minute areas is to accept that the poor will be poor and that the middle will slide into poverty.
If one designs with mixed economic levels in mind, low income housing mixed with higher, then part of the problem is solved. But it still misses the supply side and still ignores that jobs are not interchangeable. The only people that come out of this on the plus are rich people.
I think that horse fled the barn a long time ago.
Don't blame city slickers. Small towns have ghettos and class divides as well. I've seen them.
On another level, if you factor in the cost of a car, I think it's cheaper to pay a bit more in rent and save a small fortune by not having to pay for a car and all of its accoutrements.
If the 15-minute lifestyle gains traction with urban planners, we will see an entrenchment of stratified society. Society needs to change first.
The only way to currently build 15-minute areas is to accept that the poor will be poor and that the middle will slide into poverty.
If one designs with mixed economic levels in mind, low income housing mixed with higher, then part of the problem is solved. But it still misses the supply side and still ignores that jobs are not interchangeable. The only people that come out of this on the plus are rich people.
I think that horse fled the barn a long time ago.
Don't blame city slickers. Small towns have ghettos and class divides as well. I've seen them.
On another level, if you factor in the cost of a car, I think it's cheaper to pay a bit more in rent and save a small fortune by not having to pay for a car and all of its accoutrements.
That assumes you can do all the other things you need to do without the car. I know I'd find that very restrictive and I'm not particularly car oriented, but just visiting relatives 30 miles away would take hours and cost a fortune.
I found your posts a bit insensitive to those who are on a low income and can't afford all the choice you seem to think should be everyone's right.
I boggle at anyone who sees the problem of some people having less choice than others and thinks the solution is to limit choice for everyone.
If poor people can't afford to do Activity X then the solution is to find ways to make it affordable for them, not to get rid of Activity X altogether.
We live where we do because of the excellent public transit. Also, like many Americans, we have to drive over ten hours or take a plane to see any relatives. God would I love to have relatives 30 miles away who could stay with my kids sometimes let alone how much I'd love to see my mother or sister more. In the end, I'm puzzled by the theory that this sort of very local area is a rich thing because I see no evidence. We are comfortably off currently, but when I am laid off next, half odds we won't be. We have lived in this area when we didn't know how we would pay the bills. Living in a walkable area without a car is a choice--and yes we save a lot of money by not having one--and I would not say everyone would like to make that choice, but it makes no sense to me to assume that having no car is suburban. Sure I know bicycle nerds and hippies who don't drive on principle, but ironically if that's all you see, you (general you) are erasing half my neighbors. Many of the people I know who have no car do it because they can't afford one. Don't erase them.
As someone who grew up in a small town, I feel a lot more "localized" in my city neighborhood, small towns are, in my experience, far more isolated places internally and externally. And at least in the US, small communities are wrapped up in the same webs of interdependence as larger cities. Again, you're using technology to type this message that involves components from a massive global supply chain. Most modern humans aren't cut out for a life of subsistence agriculture, most people have economic needs that are best filled by broad global market. And small towns participate in it just as much as cities do, if not moreso. You can only produce so many goods and services within a 20 mile radius.
The global supply chain is a complex thing and to fix that as best as possible is impossible because it involves the globe cooperating. You are correct in that we cannot maintain our current lifestyle and fix the supply chain issues. But our current lifestyle is part of several problems. We don't have to go full luddite, but we should adjust our lifestyles. Of course, unless everyone does this, it will only stratify society further.
BTW, other than some raw materials, the reasons we but from the globe is that we want everything and we want it cheap.
With smaller populations, I think the need for transportation to a gazillion tiny places would be greater, not lesser. Do you know anyone who takes medication that's manufactured outside of their local town?
I'm not suggesting that everything can be done in a 15-minute radius. I'm talking about what it takes for most people to be able to live this way.
Also, "massive reduction in overall population" is a pretty scary phrase if you take it seriously. Should metro areas be cleared out for the sake of someone else's rural idyll?
I do think we're somewhat talking past each other.
I' not talking about implimenting a plan to reduce population, but merely supplying the realistic counter to the unrealistic dream of 15-minute lifestyles.
If the 15-minute lifestyle gains traction with urban planners, we will see an entrenchment of stratified society. Society needs to change first.
The only way to currently build 15-minute areas is to accept that the poor will be poor and that the middle will slide into poverty.
If one designs with mixed economic levels in mind, low income housing mixed with higher, then part of the problem is solved. But it still misses the supply side and still ignores that jobs are not interchangeable. The only people that come out of this on the plus are rich people.
I think that horse fled the barn a long time ago.
Pessimist that I am, I don't think so. If we truly worked to have a more balanced society, built new development with integration of economic levels and localise needs and slowly rebuilt our cities with this in mind, we could do it. But the pessimist understand that we won't.
I have a vague feeling that Harlow New Town was deisgned as a 15-minute city, though I can't find it mentioned in its Wonkipedia page.
AG
Nothing about it in Gibberd's master plan (link), although there is a discussion of subdividing the town into four areas with their own centres, and lots of preservation. Only the cluster based around the town centre and one other has retained their shopping areas, unless he counted the north east corner as based around Old Harlow, and there's some pretty dire housing in places plus whole areas where professionals visit in pairs.
There are some internal bus routes and railway stations on the outskirts (two along the north on the same line), but public transport isn't great and the original planning did not predict the prevalence of cars, so there's not enough room for one car for each home let alone more than one. The bike network, on the original roads, is not well maintained and has additional problems from broken glass, often from bottles thrown down from the road bridges above.
Much of the industry has died and gone. And Harlow has spread, into Church Langley and Newhall most recently, with housing geared to car ownership - the Church Langley one and only shop is a superstore.
lilbuddha: I think we have some deep disagreements about what is and isn't "realistic."
What you're labelling "unrealistic" is my life, and I'm not that kind of rich. Maybe I am by global standards, but if you have the leisure time to humor a long internet conversation, you're also rich.
And the kinds of labor-built supply chains that seem to offend you are part and parcel of every American community I've ever seen. Is this a pond thing?
lilbuddha: I think we have some deep disagreements about what is and isn't "realistic."
What you're labelling "unrealistic" is my life, and I'm not that kind of rich. Maybe I am by global standards, but if you have the leisure time to humor a long internet conversation, you're also rich.
Your life, and mine, are unrealistic for most of the world. I'd argue they are unrealistic for much of our own countries.
And the kinds of labor-built supply chains that seem to offend you are part and parcel of every American community I've ever seen. Is this a pond thing?
I'm not pointing fingers at one side of the pond. Much of what is globalised is only done so to make our things cheaper and to make more money for those upstream in the production chain. We cannot move everything local, nor am I suggesting doing so. But I would make prefer to make the lives of as many people better as possible, rather than focus on my own. And, no offence meant, I think this is what most people on this thread are doing. Not necessarily out of selfishness, but from naive optimism.
That's an argument for better public transport, though, not necessarily general car ownership.
Yeah, but I won't hold my breath on that.
People saying we should rearrange our cities so that as far as possible everyone can live within 15 of their work and the shops. In that context, I feel that complaining that the proposal won't work without better public transport is slightly irrelevant.
Your utopian proposal won't work unless we also do this other (marginally less utopian) thing.
In theory, it would be great to live a 15 minute distance from your work, and it is possible for some, but as has been pointed out already, much work is in a city/town centre, and for poorer folks, they can't afford a place there, so live further away to commute.
If you have a 15-minute environment, you don't have city/town centres in the same way. You have something like an array of 2km-sided equilateral triangles, with a supermarket and shopping cluster at each vertex.
For work, the question again is "how rare is your job?"
Just like it's easy to live near a grocery store and a kids' soccer team (because everybody eats food, and lots of people like soccer) if there are lots of people who do your kind of work, it's easy for you to do it closer to your home.
If you have a less common occupation, you have to serve a larger area of population, and so it's less likely that you find yourself living near a potential employer.
I don't have a utopian proposal. I just don't think there's the societal or political will to make any significant change.
But my main point was that as things are, moving closer to work will generally not avoid the cost of running a car because most people use them for so many other things than getting to work.
Other issue is that at least in my country very few people are willing to walk everywhere whether or not they could. People tell me they can't imagine carrying groceries home from the store even when they know how close our local stores are. To be fair, Google tells me that the average American only walks 5k steps a day, so walking to the grocery store and then back carrying stuff--and doing it regularly since most of us can't carry the shopping for a week--would be a lot of walking.
In theory, it would be great to live a 15 minute distance from your work, and it is possible for some, but as has been pointed out already, much work is in a city/town centre, and for poorer folks, they can't afford a place there, so live further away to commute.
If you have a 15-minute environment, you don't have city/town centres in the same way. You have something like an array of 2km-sided equilateral triangles, with a supermarket and shopping cluster at each vertex.
I'm finding this thread extremely frustrating because I actually live in the kind of environment we're talking about and it looks nothing like what's being described. I have a whole array of supermarkets at my disposal. Fairly small supermarkets, it's true, but that's really not a problem when you don't have a car and do your shopping for a week at most. The average Parisian does their shopping on foot with one of those wheely shopping trolleys. We also have greengrocers, butchers, bakeries and markets a couple of times a week. In my family we make the distinction between stuff that you buy in the supermarket and stuff you buy somewhere else. I wouldn't dream of buying fish anywhere except on the market, for example. The 15 minute city doesn't mean a huge supermarket on the corner of a 2 km triangle, it means people with different shopping habits.
This doesn't solve the issue of getting to work for many people and in that sense I agree that the true fifteen minute city is a bit of a pipe dream. I'd also be the first to admit that very high density city living isn't for everyone. But it really doesn't look the way I'm seeing it described here.
and doing it regularly since most of us can't carry the shopping for a week--would be a lot of walking.
Doing it regularly is the thing. When I lived in the UK, I used to do my shopping by bicycle - I'd stop on the way home from work 2 or 3 times a week, and fill a backpack with groceries. But that was when there was just two of us.
These days we go to the grocery store once a week (minimizing trips, because virus) and come home with 6 gallons of milk, a couple of gallons of orange juice, and many pounds of solid food. If I was going to shop with a backpack these days, I'd have to fill my large hiking backpack every day to approach having enough food, which means I'd have to shop every day. That's not very efficient from the point of view of my time - it doesn't take much longer to buy a week's worth of groceries than a day's worth.
What I'd actually do, if I wanted to avoid shopping by car, is to somehow acquire a large cargo-carrying bike trailer, and shop once a week with that in place of the car. This would suck mightily in the summer (too hot) and winter (too cold and icy / snowy).
But my main point was that as things are, moving closer to work will generally not avoid the cost of running a car because most people use them for so many other things than getting to work.
And once you have a car, the marginal cost of making an additional trip in it is small, so everyone just uses the car for everything.
If I didn't need a car for work, Mrs C and I could manage with once car between us rather than a car each most of the time. At that point, it would become reasonable to have one car, and rent a second for the handful of weekends where we needed one each.
When I crashed my car some years ago and it was in the shop for three weeks, I got a chance to see what it was like to do without a car where I live, and it was okay. My longest walks were to work and to church, 35 minutes one way for each, as my neighborhood has a very high walk score, with a supermarket, restaurants, coffeehouses, bars, lots of shops, and a movie theater all within a 10- or 15-minute walk.
But when it eventually came time to give up on that old car, rather than live without a car I bought a new one, for these reasons:
I spent an awful lot of my free time just getting around during those three weeks, which I found wearing. Nowadays I listen to podcasts when I walk to work, but it's just whiling the time away - it's less boring, but still not how I want to spend hours and hours each week.
Getting to places outside my neighborhood would have been even more time-consuming - once I looked at how much time I'd spend on the bus to get to a garden store or a bookstore, I just put it off till my car was out of the shop.
Getting to places outside my city was ridiculous - two hours on the bus each way to see my best friend, when the drive is 25 minutes.
My elderly mother lives 125 miles away. Getting there without a car means taking a local bus downtown, then another bus to the train station in LA, then the train, then a bus or taxi to my mother's place - about 8 hours of travel instead of 2, so not something I could do just for a weekend. Renting a car just for the trip would be the way to go, but it still poses the problem of not being able to leave immediately in the case of an emergency.
I could live with these things if I had to, and a lot of people do because they don't have the means to do otherwise. But I could afford a car, and I don't regret the choice.
and doing it regularly since most of us can't carry the shopping for a week--would be a lot of walking.
Doing it regularly is the thing. When I lived in the UK, I used to do my shopping by bicycle - I'd stop on the way home from work 2 or 3 times a week, and fill a backpack with groceries. But that was when there was just two of us.
These days we go to the grocery store once a week (minimizing trips, because virus) and come home with 6 gallons of milk, a couple of gallons of orange juice, and many pounds of solid food. If I was going to shop with a backpack these days, I'd have to fill my large hiking backpack every day to approach having enough food, which means I'd have to shop every day. That's not very efficient from the point of view of my time - it doesn't take much longer to buy a week's worth of groceries than a day's worth.
What I'd actually do, if I wanted to avoid shopping by car, is to somehow acquire a large cargo-carrying bike trailer, and shop once a week with that in place of the car. This would suck mightily in the summer (too hot) and winter (too cold and icy / snowy).
Cargo trikes are the solution. They cope better with ice and snow than most cars (they don't grit the roads around here and there have been times I've arrived at work and found everyone looking frazzled because they were slipping and sliding while I was fine), in hot weather you can slow down and trundle at a manageable pace. For hills just crank down to first gear and crawl up. You've little to no risk of falling off and you can load them up with almost anything. I've carried a stack of four dining chairs, people, dogs, small marquees, all sorts. A weekly shop barely fills the bottom. We got by without a car for 5 years on a remote island. In a city with most things within 15 minutes walk? Perfect. Tinker with the electric-assisted pedal cycle laws and you could allow them to be throttle-controlled so people who can't pedal can use one too. With the electric assist they ought to be good even for people who are quite elderly. The only downside is that the good ones are relatively expensive. Before we moved up here we used to just put our shopping in a large wheeled holdall. Much easier than carrying.
With the electric assist they ought to be good even for people who are quite elderly. The only downside is that the good ones are relatively expensive.
You can DIY a capable one for considerably less money thatn off the shelf. You do need a bit of knowledge and the ability to handle a spanner though.
With the electric assist they ought to be good even for people who are quite elderly. The only downside is that the good ones are relatively expensive.
You can DIY a capable one for considerably less money thatn off the shelf. You do need a bit of knowledge and the ability to handle a spanner though.
The electric assist, sure (I've done it myself). Cost wise I meant the trikes. Those are more a welding job!
Other issue is that at least in my country very few people are willing to walk everywhere whether or not they could. People tell me they can't imagine carrying groceries home from the store even when they know how close our local stores are. To be fair, Google tells me that the average American only walks 5k steps a day, so walking to the grocery store and then back carrying stuff--and doing it regularly since most of us can't carry the shopping for a week--would be a lot of walking.
Another issue in some areas is the total lack of sidewalks. You have the road, you have stores and restaurants with large parking lots, but no sidewalks in between.
(I don't think we should overlook the humble moped. 150+ mp(UK)g, very cheap to buy 2nd hand, no battery problems, get a Honda50 (4 stroke) if 2-stroke fills you with horror. Ruth's 125 mile trip would be an adventure - but an Innova (newer 125 version of Honda C90) would do this in 3 hours easily still at 100mp(UK)g+. On the way to saving the planet, accessible for poor people, what folks used to do when car ownership was out of reach. Lots of kids and shopping? Fit a sidecar ).
What I'd actually do, if I wanted to avoid shopping by car, is to somehow acquire a large cargo-carrying bike trailer, and shop once a week with that in place of the car.
We have one. It is still easier to shop more than once a week since we are a family of five. We only try to shop once a week now because pandemic. And I don't think it particularly sucks in any season except that B does not enjoy riding in a Chicago winter.
(I don't think we should overlook the humble moped. 150+ mp(UK)g, very cheap to buy 2nd hand, no battery problems, get a Honda50 (4 stroke) if 2-stroke fills you with horror. Ruth's 125 mile trip would be an adventure - but an Innova (newer 125 version of Honda C90) would do this in 3 hours easily still at 100mp(UK)g+. On the way to saving the planet, accessible for poor people, what folks used to do when car ownership was out of reach. Lots of kids and shopping? Fit a sidecar ).
Mopeds are not legal on freeways in California; you gotta have 150cc or more to call something a motorcycle and ride it on the freeway. From my place to my mother's I'd have to take Pacific Coast Highway, which Google Maps says is a 3 hour, 45-minute trip in a car - probably longer on a moped.
As someone else who lives the 15 minute lifestyle it's also not what you guys are describing.
That time spent walking or cycling around, plus daily yoga stretches means enough exercise without going to the gym. When we used to do the fitness challenge, the people who came top, always, didn't have/use cars and exercised naturally as part of their day to day routine. It takes us out of our sedentary lifestyles that is killing us in developed nations.
When I did a weekly family shop for lots of us in London and had a baby/toddler with me, one of the tricks was to walk to the supermarket and get a cab back, along with lots of others. People around here still do it. But it's much more fun to wander round the local shops chatting to people, picking up bits in different places, or detour into the corner shop / local supermarket on the way home from work than do a massive boring shop. And if you cost in fares or petrol, wear and tear on your car, and the bargains you're suckered into buying, how much cheaper are supermarket prices?
The other thing Londoners are beginning to do is sign up to a hire car system, which means they have access to a car for the weekend they want to go out of London to see their parents or need a car to carry more than they can on a bike, but they don't have the expense of running a car permanently. That means one car can be shared between many households.
(I don't think we should overlook the humble moped. 150+ mp(UK)g, very cheap to buy 2nd hand, no battery problems, get a Honda50 (4 stroke) if 2-stroke fills you with horror. Ruth's 125 mile trip would be an adventure - but an Innova (newer 125 version of Honda C90) would do this in 3 hours easily still at 100mp(UK)g+. On the way to saving the planet, accessible for poor people, what folks used to do when car ownership was out of reach. Lots of kids and shopping? Fit a sidecar ).
Mopeds are not legal on freeways in California; you gotta have 150cc or more to call something a motorcycle and ride it on the freeway. From my place to my mother's I'd have to take Pacific Coast Highway, which Google Maps says is a 3 hour, 45-minute trip in a car - probably longer on a moped.
Not legal on UK motorways either, but it is possible to get anywhere on the non motorway road network, if sometimes more cirtuiutously. More of a problem are the trunk dual carriageway, which are Not Motorways In Name Only but because in theory all traffic is allowed to use them no alternative had to be provided when they're put in, even though anyone on a bike or moped would risk ending up laminated to the surface.
(I don't think we should overlook the humble moped. 150+ mp(UK)g, very cheap to buy 2nd hand, no battery problems, get a Honda50 (4 stroke) if 2-stroke fills you with horror. Ruth's 125 mile trip would be an adventure - but an Innova (newer 125 version of Honda C90) would do this in 3 hours easily still at 100mp(UK)g+. On the way to saving the planet, accessible for poor people, what folks used to do when car ownership was out of reach. Lots of kids and shopping? Fit a sidecar ).
Mopeds are not legal on freeways in California; you gotta have 150cc or more to call something a motorcycle and ride it on the freeway. From my place to my mother's I'd have to take Pacific Coast Highway, which Google Maps says is a 3 hour, 45-minute trip in a car - probably longer on a moped.
Not legal on UK motorways either, but it is possible to get anywhere on the non motorway road network, if sometimes more cirtuiutously. More of a problem are the trunk dual carriageway, which are Not Motorways In Name Only but because in theory all traffic is allowed to use them no alternative had to be provided when they're put in, even though anyone on a bike or moped would risk ending up laminated to the surface.
Eh, you risk getting laminated to the surface on single carriageway A-roads. The Loch Lomond road north of Glasgow heading towards Oban is hair-raising enough in a small car. I don't think I'd dare it on a bike. At least with a dual carriageway they're pretty straight so you're easier to spot.
(I don't think we should overlook the humble moped. 150+ mp(UK)g, very cheap to buy 2nd hand, no battery problems, get a Honda50 (4 stroke) if 2-stroke fills you with horror. Ruth's 125 mile trip would be an adventure - but an Innova (newer 125 version of Honda C90) would do this in 3 hours easily still at 100mp(UK)g+. On the way to saving the planet, accessible for poor people, what folks used to do when car ownership was out of reach. Lots of kids and shopping? Fit a sidecar ).
Mopeds are not legal on freeways in California; you gotta have 150cc or more to call something a motorcycle and ride it on the freeway. From my place to my mother's I'd have to take Pacific Coast Highway, which Google Maps says is a 3 hour, 45-minute trip in a car - probably longer on a moped.
Not legal on UK motorways either, but it is possible to get anywhere on the non motorway road network, if sometimes more cirtuiutously. More of a problem are the trunk dual carriageway, which are Not Motorways In Name Only but because in theory all traffic is allowed to use them no alternative had to be provided when they're put in, even though anyone on a bike or moped would risk ending up laminated to the surface.
Eh, you risk getting laminated to the surface on single carriageway A-roads. The Loch Lomond road north of Glasgow heading towards Oban is hair-raising enough in a small car. I don't think I'd dare it on a bike. At least with a dual carriageway they're pretty straight so you're easier to spot.
I found your posts a bit insensitive to those who are on a low income and can't afford all the choice you seem to think should be everyone's right.
I boggle at anyone who sees the problem of some people having less choice than others and thinks the solution is to limit choice for everyone.
If poor people can't afford to do Activity X then the solution is to find ways to make it affordable for them, not to get rid of Activity X altogether.
It's more that I think we really don't need the huge amounts of choice we have become accustomed to. I actually think people would generally be happier with a simpler life - certainly in general this seems to be the case. Not poverty level, of course, but we don't need fifty brands of breakfast cereal, or even breakfast cereal at all. The more choice we have, the more people feel the need to try more and more, and feel they are missing out if they don't have everything available. It's like the who scenario of 'the more you have, the more you want.' I don't think the amount of choice we now have is healthy.
And I do think the 'we should be entitled to all this choice because we usually have it' attitude is generally insensitive, not because such choice is necessarily desirable, but because it suggests that people who don't have it somehow have an inferior life, and suggests an oblivion to how others live. Like when people with a salary of £100k say that it would be impossible to live on a salary less than £100k, and they can't possibly be expected to. The solution is not (in my view) to give everyone a £100k salary. And the attitude of 'Oh others can manage just fine on their lower salary, but I am special, and I need this salary', which tends to be the underlying assumption, is both insensitive and superficially true, because the person has arranged their life so that they are dependent on this salary, and would need to scale down their living if it were reduced.
What I'm suggesting is such dependency is unhealthy. And plenty of studies show that, after a baseline of material security, people aren't any happier the richer they get. And I do think there would be a better standard of living for all if people in general simplified their lives, and were less materialistic.
In theory, it would be great to live a 15 minute distance from your work, and it is possible for some, but as has been pointed out already, much work is in a city/town centre, and for poorer folks, they can't afford a place there, so live further away to commute.
If you have a 15-minute environment, you don't have city/town centres in the same way. You have something like an array of 2km-sided equilateral triangles, with a supermarket and shopping cluster at each vertex.
I'm finding this thread extremely frustrating because I actually live in the kind of environment we're talking about and it looks nothing like what's being described. I have a whole array of supermarkets at my disposal. Fairly small supermarkets, it's true, but that's really not a problem when you don't have a car and do your shopping for a week at most. The average Parisian does their shopping on foot with one of those wheely shopping trolleys. We also have greengrocers, butchers, bakeries and markets a couple of times a week. In my family we make the distinction between stuff that you buy in the supermarket and stuff you buy somewhere else. I wouldn't dream of buying fish anywhere except on the market, for example. The 15 minute city doesn't mean a huge supermarket on the corner of a 2 km triangle, it means people with different shopping habits.
This doesn't solve the issue of getting to work for many people and in that sense I agree that the true fifteen minute city is a bit of a pipe dream. I'd also be the first to admit that very high density city living isn't for everyone. But it really doesn't look the way I'm seeing it described here.
Surely it is different for everyone though. Where I live, quite simply, it is a huge supermarket, which sells clothes and stationery and all sorts as well as food. That is not my ideal, but it's also why the area is so cheap, because areas with butchers and bakers and cheesemongers and such are generally seen as preferable by the richer/middle class folks, and so they are more expensive.
There's also class culture, and many working class people prefer a big, inexpensive supermarket - I'd say part of that is the idea in society that we need lots of choice, and a big supermarket is full of choice, or the illusion of choice, of inexpensive items. Being able to buy a variety of inexpensive things can help people on a low income feel richer, in a very consumerist society where lots of choice is seen as so important. A variety of smaller specialty shops actually wouldn't have the breadth of choice, at least not of all sorts of silly little things that the supermarket has, but would be more expensive. And also such shops can be considered posh, and associated with snobbery, because of the many people who boast about shopping there as if it's a sign that they have good taste, and make sneery comments about big supermarkets and people who shop there. This stuff easily gets internalised by people, and just as some people have the 'I'd never dream of shopping in Asda!' attitute, there are plenty of others who would hate to be associated with what they perceive to be the snobbery/poshness of some of the speciality shops.
It's not ideal, but it's how it often is at the moment.
The irony being that earlier generations the poor did all their shopping at small, local stores ... and it was the wealthy who went into town for the bigger stores.
The irony being that earlier generations the poor did all their shopping at small, local stores ... and it was the wealthy who went into town for the bigger stores.
Yes. It's come full circle. The rich folks made the big shops look appealing, and so everyone wanted them, and over time they were made cheaper, and everyone had access, so now they've discarded them! Perhaps part of it is rich folk wanting to have something that sets them aside as different and better. No point being richer if there's nothing to set you aside from the hoi polloi!
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Simple, we have a publicly owned supermarket chain who set up stores in any area not currently served by a supermarket within 15 min walk. The profits will be lower than a capitalist venture seeking maximum profits would tolerate, and they may even operate at a loss with the difference made up by the public purse as it represents as social good for the benefit of all.
I am actually thinking in many ways this is more difficult for the rich, as many are used to having lots of choice, turning their noses up at options they consider inferior, etc. And I can see it working pretty well for poorer areas.
Giving again the example of the residential area where I live, it was built specifically for poor people, people who needed council homes. It is a dense area of council homes (many of them now privately owned), and specifically for this residential area were built an ecumenical church to incorporate several denominations, a primary school, a secondary school and FE college, a big supermarket, a pharmacy, a couple of corner shops, a charity shop, a fish and chip shop, a library, a gym. Plenty of people don't have cars. Plenty of poorer people use these amenities. I do. There are more options further afield of course, and people with cars and more money will be more likely to choose those. But, with many things, they don't have to. They could choose to live more simply and with less choice, without always having what they consider to be the very best of everything.
I can envisage a society where travelling further afield is the exception rather than the rule. Plenty of people will of course have to travel for some things, like work. And people like variety, of course - it's nice to sometimes hop on a bus and go somewhere different. But perhaps more of a treat if it is less often, rather than all the time.
It would be a simpler life. For people with kids, it would mean not necessarily sending one's kids to all the best and trendiest clubs and activities, and satisfying their every whim, but finding good, constructive things to do in one's own area. It is something I think plenty of poorer people do already, and will be much harder for the richer people.
This may work in other nations. We can't even keep a publicly owned postal service without threat from the Republicans to tear it down and take it private.
This is the kind of thing I mean. Yes. It might mean not having your favourite breakfast cereal, which I suspect will be much harder for richer people who are used to being free to have their favourite of everything.
I would argue (from the perspective of having never been in a position to buy the very best of everything) that it's generally absolutely fine not to have your preferred variety of cereal. Plenty of other varieties might be fine, or if, like me, you just don't like breakfast cereal at all, you don't have to eat it. Fruit, nuts and yogurt is delicious for breakfast. As is the occasional bacon and eggs. Not for everyone, of course, as we all have different tastes, but it's entirely possible for most people to have an enjoyable diet without having their ultimate top choice of variety of everything.
And if there is one particular food that is a special treat for you, that you really like having a good quality variety of, then that can be an occasional buy where you travel further afield or order online. For myself, it's nice tea leaves, which I can't get in Asda at all. I order online (cheap in bulk from an online store that sells dried food that's nearing or past its best before dare - doesn't affect flavour at all in tea, so I get a lovely bargain). But I wouldn't expect such tea leaves to be stocked locally - it would be nice, but if they aren't selling, there's no point.
That's the kind of thing I mean about the exception rather than the rule. Not that people should never travel outside the 15 minute thing, but that it's very possible for it to be less frequent, less the norm for everyone.
The buggers did privatise ours. Tories in our case, naturally. They undervalued it, too, so the taxpayer lost out and some very rich people buying lots of shares and selling them shortly after got even richer, as satirised by John Finnemore here: https://youtu.be/HetLxhI1txY
I'm hovering close to a hell call for this, but I think we can keep it civil.
If you want to engage in a trendy activity, you won't need to travel far to do it, because, by virtue of the activity being trendy, lots of people who live near you will want to do it. If my kids want to play soccer or baseball, they can find hundreds of like-minded children within walking distance. It's only if they want to play at an elite level that they'd need to travel any distance.
If they were interested in martial arts, they'd have to travel further, depending on which martial art they had an interest in. Other sports - again, closer or further, depending on the sport. The less popular the activity, the further (in general) you'll have to travel to find it.
Apart from church, I've never lived within a half hour walk of any of the leisure activities I have engaged in. The things I like to do are comparatively unpopular, so each instance of it has a rather wider catchment area.
I'm a bit confused, though, as to why you think it's reasonable to travel more than the magic 15 minutes to get to work, but not to get to a leisure activity or a shop? The single place I travel to most often is work. This is true for everyone that has a job. You get the most bang for your proverbial buck by trying to ensure that most people live close to their place of work, and that there is nearby schooling for their children. That takes care of the lion's share of people's journeys. Add in basic food shopping, and you've got most journeys. You're far better off having someone living close to their place of work and travelling a longer distance for their weekly tiddlywinks tournament than forcing them to play tiddlywinks with the people on their street, but having them commute an hour to work.
AG
I meant trendy among the upper middle classes, if you happen to live in a poorer area.
In terms of why I think it's reasonable to travel to work, I was thinking in terms of realistic. It's more likely people will have to travel further for work, as the article Alan Cresswell initially linked alluded to. You can adapt your leisure and spending activities to what is available, but not so much your work. In theory, it would be great to live a 15 minute distance from your work, and it is possible for some, but as has been pointed out already, much work is in a city/town centre, and for poorer folks, they can't afford a place there, so live further away to commute. Personally, I'd love to be in walking distance from my workplace. I find taking the bus gives me sensory overload and dizziness and makes my workdays exhausting. This is only three days a week, because of health issues meaning I can only work part time.
I'm not sure why you want to do a hell call, but go ahead if you're angry and want to express it. I found your posts a bit insensitive to those who are on a low income and can't afford all the choice you seem to think should be everyone's right. I would also say that in hell if you called me there.
I'm committed to the idea of 'geographic church' which is a bit quaint for some people these days, and I also volunteer a bit in the local area. But two of my volunteer gigs are further afield - one by bike, one a bit too far for that.
The lockdown has been something like a fast, for me. I'm looking forward to little trips again of 10 or 15 miles with some anticipation and renewed excitement. I don't suppose it will last; I wonder to what degree stories in the press about our collective enthusiasm for a green, sustainable recovery will turn out to have substance.
With smaller populations, I think the need for transportation to a gazillion tiny places would be greater, not lesser. Do you know anyone who takes medication that's manufactured outside of their local town?
Also, "massive reduction in overall population" is a pretty scary phrase if you take it seriously. Should metro areas be cleared out for the sake of someone else's rural idyll?
I do think we're somewhat talking past each other.
Don't blame city slickers. Small towns have ghettos and class divides as well. I've seen them.
On another level, if you factor in the cost of a car, I think it's cheaper to pay a bit more in rent and save a small fortune by not having to pay for a car and all of its accoutrements.
That assumes you can do all the other things you need to do without the car. I know I'd find that very restrictive and I'm not particularly car oriented, but just visiting relatives 30 miles away would take hours and cost a fortune.
I boggle at anyone who sees the problem of some people having less choice than others and thinks the solution is to limit choice for everyone.
If poor people can't afford to do Activity X then the solution is to find ways to make it affordable for them, not to get rid of Activity X altogether.
Yeah, but I won't hold my breath on that.
BTW, other than some raw materials, the reasons we but from the globe is that we want everything and we want it cheap. I'm not suggesting that everything can be done in a 15-minute radius. I'm talking about what it takes for most people to be able to live this way. I' not talking about implimenting a plan to reduce population, but merely supplying the realistic counter to the unrealistic dream of 15-minute lifestyles.
Pessimist that I am, I don't think so. If we truly worked to have a more balanced society, built new development with integration of economic levels and localise needs and slowly rebuilt our cities with this in mind, we could do it. But the pessimist understand that we won't. I'm not "blaming" anyone. I'm merely raining on an unrealistic parade.
Nothing about it in Gibberd's master plan (link), although there is a discussion of subdividing the town into four areas with their own centres, and lots of preservation. Only the cluster based around the town centre and one other has retained their shopping areas, unless he counted the north east corner as based around Old Harlow, and there's some pretty dire housing in places plus whole areas where professionals visit in pairs.
There are some internal bus routes and railway stations on the outskirts (two along the north on the same line), but public transport isn't great and the original planning did not predict the prevalence of cars, so there's not enough room for one car for each home let alone more than one. The bike network, on the original roads, is not well maintained and has additional problems from broken glass, often from bottles thrown down from the road bridges above.
Much of the industry has died and gone. And Harlow has spread, into Church Langley and Newhall most recently, with housing geared to car ownership - the Church Langley one and only shop is a superstore.
What you're labelling "unrealistic" is my life, and I'm not that kind of rich. Maybe I am by global standards, but if you have the leisure time to humor a long internet conversation, you're also rich.
And the kinds of labor-built supply chains that seem to offend you are part and parcel of every American community I've ever seen. Is this a pond thing?
Your utopian proposal won't work unless we also do this other (marginally less utopian) thing.
If you have a 15-minute environment, you don't have city/town centres in the same way. You have something like an array of 2km-sided equilateral triangles, with a supermarket and shopping cluster at each vertex.
For work, the question again is "how rare is your job?"
Just like it's easy to live near a grocery store and a kids' soccer team (because everybody eats food, and lots of people like soccer) if there are lots of people who do your kind of work, it's easy for you to do it closer to your home.
If you have a less common occupation, you have to serve a larger area of population, and so it's less likely that you find yourself living near a potential employer.
But my main point was that as things are, moving closer to work will generally not avoid the cost of running a car because most people use them for so many other things than getting to work.
I'm finding this thread extremely frustrating because I actually live in the kind of environment we're talking about and it looks nothing like what's being described. I have a whole array of supermarkets at my disposal. Fairly small supermarkets, it's true, but that's really not a problem when you don't have a car and do your shopping for a week at most. The average Parisian does their shopping on foot with one of those wheely shopping trolleys. We also have greengrocers, butchers, bakeries and markets a couple of times a week. In my family we make the distinction between stuff that you buy in the supermarket and stuff you buy somewhere else. I wouldn't dream of buying fish anywhere except on the market, for example. The 15 minute city doesn't mean a huge supermarket on the corner of a 2 km triangle, it means people with different shopping habits.
This doesn't solve the issue of getting to work for many people and in that sense I agree that the true fifteen minute city is a bit of a pipe dream. I'd also be the first to admit that very high density city living isn't for everyone. But it really doesn't look the way I'm seeing it described here.
Doing it regularly is the thing. When I lived in the UK, I used to do my shopping by bicycle - I'd stop on the way home from work 2 or 3 times a week, and fill a backpack with groceries. But that was when there was just two of us.
These days we go to the grocery store once a week (minimizing trips, because virus) and come home with 6 gallons of milk, a couple of gallons of orange juice, and many pounds of solid food. If I was going to shop with a backpack these days, I'd have to fill my large hiking backpack every day to approach having enough food, which means I'd have to shop every day. That's not very efficient from the point of view of my time - it doesn't take much longer to buy a week's worth of groceries than a day's worth.
What I'd actually do, if I wanted to avoid shopping by car, is to somehow acquire a large cargo-carrying bike trailer, and shop once a week with that in place of the car. This would suck mightily in the summer (too hot) and winter (too cold and icy / snowy).
And once you have a car, the marginal cost of making an additional trip in it is small, so everyone just uses the car for everything.
If I didn't need a car for work, Mrs C and I could manage with once car between us rather than a car each most of the time. At that point, it would become reasonable to have one car, and rent a second for the handful of weekends where we needed one each.
But when it eventually came time to give up on that old car, rather than live without a car I bought a new one, for these reasons:
- I spent an awful lot of my free time just getting around during those three weeks, which I found wearing. Nowadays I listen to podcasts when I walk to work, but it's just whiling the time away - it's less boring, but still not how I want to spend hours and hours each week.
- Getting to places outside my neighborhood would have been even more time-consuming - once I looked at how much time I'd spend on the bus to get to a garden store or a bookstore, I just put it off till my car was out of the shop.
- Getting to places outside my city was ridiculous - two hours on the bus each way to see my best friend, when the drive is 25 minutes.
- My elderly mother lives 125 miles away. Getting there without a car means taking a local bus downtown, then another bus to the train station in LA, then the train, then a bus or taxi to my mother's place - about 8 hours of travel instead of 2, so not something I could do just for a weekend. Renting a car just for the trip would be the way to go, but it still poses the problem of not being able to leave immediately in the case of an emergency.
I could live with these things if I had to, and a lot of people do because they don't have the means to do otherwise. But I could afford a car, and I don't regret the choice.Cargo trikes are the solution. They cope better with ice and snow than most cars (they don't grit the roads around here and there have been times I've arrived at work and found everyone looking frazzled because they were slipping and sliding while I was fine), in hot weather you can slow down and trundle at a manageable pace. For hills just crank down to first gear and crawl up. You've little to no risk of falling off and you can load them up with almost anything. I've carried a stack of four dining chairs, people, dogs, small marquees, all sorts. A weekly shop barely fills the bottom. We got by without a car for 5 years on a remote island. In a city with most things within 15 minutes walk? Perfect. Tinker with the electric-assisted pedal cycle laws and you could allow them to be throttle-controlled so people who can't pedal can use one too. With the electric assist they ought to be good even for people who are quite elderly. The only downside is that the good ones are relatively expensive. Before we moved up here we used to just put our shopping in a large wheeled holdall. Much easier than carrying.
The electric assist, sure (I've done it myself). Cost wise I meant the trikes. Those are more a welding job!
Fixed quoting code. BroJames Purgatory Host
Mopeds are not legal on freeways in California; you gotta have 150cc or more to call something a motorcycle and ride it on the freeway. From my place to my mother's I'd have to take Pacific Coast Highway, which Google Maps says is a 3 hour, 45-minute trip in a car - probably longer on a moped.
That time spent walking or cycling around, plus daily yoga stretches means enough exercise without going to the gym. When we used to do the fitness challenge, the people who came top, always, didn't have/use cars and exercised naturally as part of their day to day routine. It takes us out of our sedentary lifestyles that is killing us in developed nations.
When I did a weekly family shop for lots of us in London and had a baby/toddler with me, one of the tricks was to walk to the supermarket and get a cab back, along with lots of others. People around here still do it. But it's much more fun to wander round the local shops chatting to people, picking up bits in different places, or detour into the corner shop / local supermarket on the way home from work than do a massive boring shop. And if you cost in fares or petrol, wear and tear on your car, and the bargains you're suckered into buying, how much cheaper are supermarket prices?
The other thing Londoners are beginning to do is sign up to a hire car system, which means they have access to a car for the weekend they want to go out of London to see their parents or need a car to carry more than they can on a bike, but they don't have the expense of running a car permanently. That means one car can be shared between many households.
Not legal on UK motorways either, but it is possible to get anywhere on the non motorway road network, if sometimes more cirtuiutously. More of a problem are the trunk dual carriageway, which are Not Motorways In Name Only but because in theory all traffic is allowed to use them no alternative had to be provided when they're put in, even though anyone on a bike or moped would risk ending up laminated to the surface.
Eh, you risk getting laminated to the surface on single carriageway A-roads. The Loch Lomond road north of Glasgow heading towards Oban is hair-raising enough in a small car. I don't think I'd dare it on a bike. At least with a dual carriageway they're pretty straight so you're easier to spot.
You'd think so, wouldn't you?
It's more that I think we really don't need the huge amounts of choice we have become accustomed to. I actually think people would generally be happier with a simpler life - certainly in general this seems to be the case. Not poverty level, of course, but we don't need fifty brands of breakfast cereal, or even breakfast cereal at all. The more choice we have, the more people feel the need to try more and more, and feel they are missing out if they don't have everything available. It's like the who scenario of 'the more you have, the more you want.' I don't think the amount of choice we now have is healthy.
And I do think the 'we should be entitled to all this choice because we usually have it' attitude is generally insensitive, not because such choice is necessarily desirable, but because it suggests that people who don't have it somehow have an inferior life, and suggests an oblivion to how others live. Like when people with a salary of £100k say that it would be impossible to live on a salary less than £100k, and they can't possibly be expected to. The solution is not (in my view) to give everyone a £100k salary. And the attitude of 'Oh others can manage just fine on their lower salary, but I am special, and I need this salary', which tends to be the underlying assumption, is both insensitive and superficially true, because the person has arranged their life so that they are dependent on this salary, and would need to scale down their living if it were reduced.
What I'm suggesting is such dependency is unhealthy. And plenty of studies show that, after a baseline of material security, people aren't any happier the richer they get. And I do think there would be a better standard of living for all if people in general simplified their lives, and were less materialistic.
Surely it is different for everyone though. Where I live, quite simply, it is a huge supermarket, which sells clothes and stationery and all sorts as well as food. That is not my ideal, but it's also why the area is so cheap, because areas with butchers and bakers and cheesemongers and such are generally seen as preferable by the richer/middle class folks, and so they are more expensive.
There's also class culture, and many working class people prefer a big, inexpensive supermarket - I'd say part of that is the idea in society that we need lots of choice, and a big supermarket is full of choice, or the illusion of choice, of inexpensive items. Being able to buy a variety of inexpensive things can help people on a low income feel richer, in a very consumerist society where lots of choice is seen as so important. A variety of smaller specialty shops actually wouldn't have the breadth of choice, at least not of all sorts of silly little things that the supermarket has, but would be more expensive. And also such shops can be considered posh, and associated with snobbery, because of the many people who boast about shopping there as if it's a sign that they have good taste, and make sneery comments about big supermarkets and people who shop there. This stuff easily gets internalised by people, and just as some people have the 'I'd never dream of shopping in Asda!' attitute, there are plenty of others who would hate to be associated with what they perceive to be the snobbery/poshness of some of the speciality shops.
It's not ideal, but it's how it often is at the moment.
Yes. It's come full circle. The rich folks made the big shops look appealing, and so everyone wanted them, and over time they were made cheaper, and everyone had access, so now they've discarded them! Perhaps part of it is rich folk wanting to have something that sets them aside as different and better. No point being richer if there's nothing to set you aside from the hoi polloi!