Fuck Cars

@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars I can get to a gas station.

OK, maybe to a park if you don't require it to have playground equipment 🙂

Imagine if that gas station ⛽ could also be a kindergarten 😁! Your neighborhood would totally rock!

@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars if I make it a 20 min radius, then it's everything except sports arena and university, and there are multiples of both not much further than that.

If I keep it strictly to 15 mins, all I lose is the shopping mall and movie theatre.

I live where I live very much because I can have a walkable (slash cyclable slash public transportable) life.

@ajsadauskas
And the amount of grocery stores i can reach within a 15 minutes walk must be at least 80, easily.
This town is still structured around small family businesses.
@fuck_cars

@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars I also don't get A Bar being so low. The bar is exactly the place I WANT people to be walking to instead of driving. Perhaps this is just a limitation of the polling method; these responses are mostly just gut reactions, not carefully considered positions.

@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars Of those:

* A bus stop
* A restaurant
* Maybe a park, I haven't timed it?

There's also a convenience store (with no associated gas station), which while expensive has proven handy in emergencies.

The fact that only 68% of respondents say a bus stop should be within a 15 minute walk of your house and only 32% say a bar says a lot about the SEC and age of the sample pool.

I dont even want neighbors within a 15 minute walk of my house, why would i want a cities worth of foot traffic going by my house every 15 minutes?

Do people really use the post office or bank that often? If I'm walking into either of those, odds are something has gone catastrophically wrong that day.

@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars At the corner of my road, I have:
- Bakery (that took over the shops left and right because they kept winning awards)
- Pharmacy
- Post Office
- Women's Hairdresser
- Pizza, Chinese and Indian
- GP (although always booked out)
- Petrol Station chain which sells marked-up cornerstore stuff, don't get milk there it's 6 bucks

I'm in the UK. I have all except a hospital, movie theatre, university, and sports arena within a 15 min walk of my house. I live in a suburb in a large city (not London).

I can get to a hospital, movie theatre, and a university within 20 mins on a bus. I can get to 3 sports areas in about 30-40 mins on a bus in different directions.

My area is not a 15-min city, but is moving that way. My own street has been split up and blocked to through traffic (which I love), and there is proposal for a pollution tax to dissuade polluting traffic in the city.

But at the moment I cannot realistically commute to work as the public transport capacity is just too low to make it comfortable and safe (I work early and late hours).

I think the concept is great but I suspect they need most of the elements to be in place before they can achieve critical mass and change behaviour. Certainly for me I'm still doing a lot of driving.

@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars the only ones that are out of my reach by walking 15 mins are a bank, sports arena (I have many recreational pitches and fields around) and a mall. But they are not that far anyway.

There's some nuance to this: where I live there is a microcosm of sorts because of how big the city where I live is, so I CAN find all of this in my area but in many other places in the same city you couldn't get to half of the stuff listed there.

I can reach everything on that list in 15mins by foot except for a sports arena and a hospital.

Groceries, (crappy) park, pharmacy, 2 bus stops, light rail stop serving three lines, at least 15 restaurants/food carts, a bank, a gas station (and a standalone convenience store), a hospital, a barber shop, and a few bars.

For the missing, good transit access fills in the gaps mostly:

• Day care: I don't have kids, so I don't know this one. There probably is day care in the area.
• Post office: I'm in kind of an awkward area for some amenities, and that includes post offices. Post drop boxes are plentiful, but an actual office takes some travel.
• Shopping mall: I don't frequent shopping malls, but there the light rail links up with some. Most are dying, but one is doing well. This is a shrug.
• Movie theater: A few minutes on the light rail, no problem.
• University: Portland State University is an urban university that I work at. I can access it by bus or light rail.
• Sports arena: There are at least two sizeable sports arenas, the Moda Center and Providence Park, on the MAX light rail. The light rail gets heavy use from Portlanders who don't want to deal with parking.

There are two exceptions:

• Good parks: The area actually has a lot of great parks, but there is a freeway blocking the nearest one. I can take transit, bike, or walk a while. That's doable, but it adds a lot of time if I just want to go lounge around in the outdoors.
• Elementary Schools: If I had kids, the area would be not great. It's a 25 minute walk, which is a bit much. That said, one of the "bike bus" programs would be perfect since the route isn't that long.

Who are these people that responded "No, no I would not like a park or bank or gas station less than 15 minutes from my house!" ?

@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars Aw, c'mon! You have to have at least one pub or something to call it a neighbourhood. Sheesh!

the only ones i don't have within 15 min walk from me

• a university
• a hospital

I do have a local GP within that distance though so i'm fine with not having a hospital within walking distance. Plus there is a hospital not too far away, just not within 15 mins.

I have a college about 25 mins walk away too

I live in the centre of a large british town though so having everything on my doorstep is kind of expected