What is a 15-minute city?
When planners consider where to place services like transport, schools, and public health, they have long considered journey time. Like drivers in the grid-locked Los Angeles, they don’t measure distances. They measure the time it takes to get where you want to be. The idea of the 15-minute city is that the things we need in life should be available within a 15-minute walk or cycle time.
It was an organising principle for the planners of the post-war New Towns like Harlow, Stevenage and Basildon. Using Google data, the World Health Organisation is using it to measure progress on the World Decade of Healthy Ageing. But the idea is no longer a driving factor in much housing development, and key amenities are disappearing in many rural areas.
How we are using our cars
What do we do now? In 2020 households in the East of England had, on average, 1.35 cars, up from 0.75 in the last 20 years. Only 22% of households have no car or van, and that percentage is shrinking. In 1971 48% of households had no car. It costs over £218 per month to run the average car in the UK, which has increased by 34% since 2018. The costs for young drivers are even higher.
So how do people use their cars? Car use for drivers and passengers accounts for only 8% of trips under half a mile but rises to 76% of all trips in the 2 to 3 miles category. So, the nearer something is, the less likely you will use your car to get there. Surely at a time of cost-of-living and climate emergency crises, a non-car-dependent living environment should be a cheaper and lower carbon win-win for us all.
What is making some people angry about this idea?
Core to the concept of the 15-minute-city is diverting motor traffic away from residential streets and focusing it on feeder roads. It means some form of pedestrianisation, traffic filtering and some road blockages. Known as ‘modal filters,’ these barriers can be bollards, boom barriers or, more frequently, planters. Some involve charging for residential parking and accessing feeder roads, like the Congestion Charge in London, while others do not.
Cities with real traffic problems, like the medieval cities of Oxford and Cambridge, are at the forefront of finding ways to keep out traffic and make their centres more liveable. Having lived in both, I can testify that traffic management is a massive problem without easy solutions. This has been made particularly difficult as all transport planning in the post-war period has been designed around journeys in and out of the centre, alongside the development of out-of-town shopping and office parks reachable by car. The 15-minute concept conflicts with those zoning assumptions and the current housing patterns of our towns and cities.
Why has this all flared up now?
We have a combination of terrible urban air quality, a push to reduce carbon emissions and an after-effect of the Covid lockdowns when people used cars to avoid public transport. The libertarian right is able to present barriers as a ‘loss of freedom’. But freedom for what?
Traffic pollution is often described as the silent killer. “The annual mortality of human-made air pollution in the UK is roughly equivalent to between 28,000 and 36,000 deaths yearly. It is estimated that between 2017 and 2025, the total cost to the NHS and social care system of air pollutants (fine particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide) will be £1.6 billion.”
Getting rid of air pollution requires a combination of cleaner vehicles and fewer miles travelled. However green the engine, car brakes generate 20% of fine particulate matter pollution, compared to just 7% contributed by diesel exhaust fumes. A team of scientists, led by King’s College London, suggest that particulate pollution from brake wear could contribute to increased susceptibility to airway infections and other adverse effects on respiratory health. Approximately one in five people in the UK have asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or another long-term respiratory illness. Half of them are currently on treatment (such as inhalers). Lung disease, deaths, and ill health are costing the NHS billions.
We are also getting fatter and less healthy because of our car dependency. Oxford University researchers estimate that swapping 1 in 4 car journeys in urban areas for walking or cycling could save over £1.1 billion in health damage costs annually. So personal choices do indeed have public impacts.
But people really love the idea
Protestors in Oxford, Cambridge and recently even Thetford, have been encouraging people to protest against this conspiracy to restrict our freedom. But, as one commentator pointed out “what could be more British than to live within walking distance of the pub, the post box and a bus stop (with a bus!)?” There are many villages and towns in East Anglia where this used to be normal, and is no longer. So, what do people actually want?
YouGov recently polled a representative sample of the population to find out. The idea was overwhelmingly popular. Two thirds of people would like their local council to adopt a target of creating 15-minute neighbourhoods, and less than a quarter oppose it. However, they are more divided about whether it can be achieved and, unsurprisingly, confidence is much lower in rural areas. In urban areas more than two thirds were confident that it is achievable, compared to less than a fifth in rural ones.
YouGov asked people about 15 amenities, asking whether they would like to live within 15 minutes of each, and whether they already do so. The results are not very surprising. Clear majorities wanted 15-minute access to 12 of the 15. The most wanted were bus stop, post box, pharmacy, and GP surgery. The things which people were most likely to want within 15 minutes, but not have, were GP surgery, pharmacy, and bank.
So, by comparison with many political ideas, the 15-minute neighbourhood is extraordinarily popular, across age groups, regions and political allegiances.
Back to the conspiracy rabbit hole
However, some people see constraints on using cars as aligning naturally with other things they distrust – an intrusive state, vaccination and efforts to combat global warming. Add in a sprinkling of anxiety about a central bank digital currency and its potential for controlling our lives and you have a perfect storm.
Transport planning and city design have been pitched as the new ‘international socialist concept’ on the part of left-wingers in Davos and the World Economic Forum! It’s news to me that being a wealthy capitalist makes you a socialist.
It is clear that, on this issue, protestors are out of step with the vast majority, but they have shown that they can generate alarm. What is driving ordinary people towards that view of the world? It’s something we will return to in future articles.
