[HN Gopher] The 15-minute city (2020) ___________________________________________________________________ The 15-minute city (2020) Author : nephanth Score : 68 points Date : 2022-07-24 13:00 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com) | BurningFrog wrote: | In Tokyo most everything is nearby, because tall buildings have | enormous amounts of space. | potatolicious wrote: | Extra bonus to tall buildings having enormous amounts of space: | rent is cheaper, and as a result more businesses are viable! | | There is a depressing "sameness" to American cities and their | amenities that's oft remarked-upon but I remain convinced that | the single biggest contributor to that is real estate. When | real estate costs _that much_ the level of business to break | even is astronomical, and only businesses with the broadest | possible (and correspondingly, blandest possible) reach | survive. | | The thing I love most about the Tokyo is the absolutely off- | the-walls level of tiny businesses catering to incredibly niche | interests. A great majority of these businesses would be | totally unviable in the US - real estate in major cities is too | expensive, and real estate outside the major cities have too | small of a market. | NegativeLatency wrote: | > "We're often mixed up with Paris," jokes Chris Warner, director | of the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT). | | Portland looks good by comparison to other cities in the US that | are doing literally nothing, or actively trying to maintain the | existing car centric planning methods. | | The greenways in Portland are really nice compared to other | places, but it still requires a lot of bravery from cyclists | which limits the appeal of biking for a lot of people. Haven't | been hit by a car since moving out of SF though so that's | something. | cammikebrown wrote: | As someone who lives in Portland in what I'd consider to be a | 5-minute neighborhood (NE 28th), the bike infrastructure is | pretty good, but limited to certain streets. Biking on | Burnside, Sandy, and much of 28th itself is quite dangerous, | and there's often no bike lane at all. However, there are many | nearby streets (SE Ankeny, 30th) which are safe and actually | designated as bike streets. But I often see clueless cyclists | biking on the major streets instead. I'm not sure what we need | to do to educate, because as a daily cyclist it's really | frustrating to see. | NegativeLatency wrote: | I feel/understand the bit about "clueless cyclists biking on | the major streets" but that feels like a failure of | infrastructure to me (sort of like how rust is a improvement | over c). Anything from: - bad signage & route marking - bad | navigation instructions (Apple maps and sometimes google maps | sending people down streets they shouldn't be on as a | inexperienced bike rider) - longer routes around (Thinking of | Sandy here where cars get to drive the hypotenuse while bikes | are supposed to bike at right angles to the city grid) - lack | of completely separated bike roads (if these existed I would | almost never want to mix it up with cars) - lack of options | for connecting between bikeways can end up with someone being | in a bad spot pretty quickly through accident or intention. | | I live out a bit closer to the airport and agree it's still a | lot better than most cities but still end up biking around | and on Sandy which is always unpleasant in its current state. | | Also even on the bike streets you end up with frustrated | drivers who are trying to use it as a shortcut or find it | unacceptable to travel a couple of MPH less when they're | behind a bike for a few blocks. Specifically not allowing | non-local traffic would make the bike/slow streets a lot more | welcoming to people in my life who don't want to drive but | feel trapped by having to own a car. | abeppu wrote: | I was struck by the level of ambition in this article vs the bar | being set decades ago in some Soviet planned cities: (timestamped | link) https://youtu.be/JGVBv7svKLo?t=420s | | Now, admittedly there's a huge difference between a new planned | neighborhood and updating existing ones, and I'm not saying I | want to live in the planned one ... but a cap of 500m to some | amenities is a much higher bar to reach for. | kieselguhr_kid wrote: | I'm waiting eagerly for the day when people in the west can | grow up enough to learn from Soviet city and housing policies. | Too many people just turn their minds off when they hear that | godless commies did it. | kuldeep_kap wrote: | I'm dreaming of the day when US cities start adopting car-light | (if not car-free), walkable & bikeable urban designs. I have no | interest in car centric 15-min cities. They are hard to scale and | even when you achieve that goal with cars, the standard living is | poor. | | Portland & Detroit comparison is a bit laughable. May be we'll | see this one day, but I'll believe it when I see it. | kieselguhr_kid wrote: | I live in one of the "complete neighborhoods" in Portland and | it's really nice. I can walk to the grocery store to buy fresh | food for each day, and I'm less than fifteen minutes by foot | from three public parks (and a tiny one that I don't really | count). This is far from representative of the city itself, but | I would never want to give this lifestyle up. | munk-a wrote: | Burlington VT was a lovely city to live in though the fact that | it's Vermont means you'd need a car to get practically anywhere | the downtown core is dense enough to allow you to walk, eat, | shop and dine[1]. But, honestly, the city has pretty weak | public transit infrastructure due to its size and the grocery | options available by foot are extremely limited and pricey. | | I think it's one of the better options in N/A outside of NYC, | Boston and places in Canada (especially Quebec City and | Montreal) - Boulder also often comes up in discussion though | I've never been. | | Comparing these to European cities which weren't leveled in WW2 | is insane though - when pedestrians are first class citizens | cities are absolutely wonderful to live in. | | 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Street_Marketplace | pharmakom wrote: | > I have no interest in car centric 15-min cities. | | A car centric 15 minute city is literally impossible. There | will always be too much congestion to get anywhere in 15 | minutes since cars take up too much space. | replygirl wrote: | tell me you live in a busier part of a global city without | telling me you live in a busier part of a global city | munk-a wrote: | I think car oriented cities come with a lot of issues, but I | don't think this is really a fair statement. Small towns can | easily exist with <15min commutes and the city scalable | version of this (which I hate, but does work) is basically a | continuous field of suburbs dotted with occasional clumps of | box stores stretching out into the horizon. | SkeuomorphicBee wrote: | It is possible, just not scalable. It is ready for a small | city to be a car centric 15 minute city, but once population | reaches the 6 digits problems start to arise, and ~500k is | the rough upper limit where it becomes impossible. | asdff wrote: | Cleveland is a car centric 15 minute city. But only because | it has enough highway infrastructure to contend with cities | 10x its size and it currently sits at about half its peak | population. Once you infill that it falls apart and you get | your chicagoland traffic going 12mph anywhere at all. | pavon wrote: | It's not clear what you mean by that. It is easy to build a | city where you can reach everything you need within 15 | minutes by car. What is hard is to build a city like that | where you can also reach everything you need by foot within | 15 minutes. I don't think it is as impossible as some | urbanists make it though. | | The downtown in my city is by far the most dense and walkable | area of town while still being far more accommodating for car | drivers than any of the areas that have been newly | revitalized for walkability. The main difference is the | existence of ample parking shelters where the main (st)roads | hit downtown, unlike the new areas that insist on only having | street parking to intentionally limit the number of cars. | Both approaches allow the area to be designed for walkability | first. But the former does a better job at accommodating | people who don't live within 15-minutes by walking or public | transit, and does a better job at keeping cars from being a | nuisance. Because the motorists have a convenient place to | park and walk they do so, while street parking only forces | the cars into the walkable streets(and surrounding | neighborhoods) to circle endlessly looking for a place to | park and increasing congestion. | | I really like the strong-towns framing of delineating roads | vs streets which are designed for cars and pedestrians | respectively. I think too many people are quick to jump on | the assumption that roads==bad and streets==good, when having | good roads and parking structures can relieve the pressure | and allow your streets to be streets. At least in the short- | term, and in the long-term you are going to want to keeps | some sort of arterial land strips for public transit use (in | all but the most dense areas which can support subways). So | making them roads now with a mix of buses and cars that | gradually becomes more buses, and then possibly dedicated | public transit makes for a good growth plan. | sien wrote: | I live in a car centric 15 minute city. | | My work is ~13 minutes away. There is a Primary and Secondary | School within 5 and 20 minutes walk. A supermarket is a 10 | minute bike ride away. A hospital is 10 minutes drive away. A | top 50 ranked University is 25 minutes drive away. | | There is a good question from w-j-w that has been deleted | here. Yes - it's a 15 minute car city at 8:30 AM. My commute | goes to about 14 minutes... | | This is on the days when I'm not WFH - which should also be | factored in. | [deleted] | w-j-w wrote: | Is your city a 15 minute city at 8:30 AM? | imachine1980_ wrote: | where?, sound interesting to research. | sien wrote: | Canberra. | HeyItsMatt wrote: | Walter Burley Griffin designed Canberra with space | allotted for highly efficient tramways that still haven't | been built. | | The guy has been dead for nearly one hundred years and | the city still hasn't assigned a replacement urban | planner... | rayiner wrote: | I live outside of Annapolis, in a metro area of about 150,000 | people, and everything is within 15 minutes even with | traffic. | bdcravens wrote: | Climates in Texas and other southern areas make this borderline | impossible during the summer. Ditto for northern cities in | winter months. | NegativeLatency wrote: | Your claim about northern cities is just not backed up by | data, we have: | | - the large amount of bike culture in Minneapolis, people | ride all year long (once you're moving you'll stay pretty | warm with the right gear) | https://gearjunkie.com/biking/minneapolis-bike-capital | | - the bike culture in Finland where it's even colder: | https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike- | blog/2020/feb/0... | | the difference in most of the US that it's not prioritized by | local government, bike lanes don't get plowed and fill up | with gravel, there's not sufficient bike infrastructure to | being with etc | PeopleB4Cars wrote: | Perhaps we shouldn't be encouraging people to live in such | places then | milkytron wrote: | I think there are steps that could help reduce the affects of | heat. Things such as more street trees, less asphalt (reduce | the heat island effect), heat reflecting building roofs, etc. | | It's not like the south is a lost cause, improvement can | still be made. | bdcravens wrote: | Perhaps but 102 is still 102. I think you can make the same | argument in Chicago when it's 10 and snowing. | bobthepanda wrote: | Plenty of people walk to do things like get groceries in | Chicago. | | Heck, there is a subartic city in Finland with 12% | cycling share, which is a lot higher than pretty much any | city in North America. https://www.euronews.com/my- | europe/amp/2021/01/22/meet-the-b... | munk-a wrote: | Chicago can (and in some areas has - along with Boston) | fixed that issue with pedestrian tunnels that allow easy | movement during cold weather. A similar fix is available | for southern cities but I think a more reasonable | approach is just tighter pedestrian alleys that prevent | full sun from ever bathing the walking surface (and | reduce sun exposure to buildings) along with lots and | lots of trees. Trees are seriously amazing and | dissipating heat from the sun. | | Once you eliminate the sun you just need to make sure | that wind alleys are set up to keep air moving through | the city and have regular green spaces with water to help | reduce air temperature. This can be done quite | sustainably - Las Vegas is actually a great example of | (rather) sustainable water use from a city built in the | middle of a desert. | truth777 wrote: | stakkur wrote: | Nobody seems to stop and ask "are super high density cities | what's best for human health?", and that seems rather odd. | | No, I'm not talking about 'study x showed people like walkable | cities', I'm talking about efforts like making connections | between the correlated explosion in mental and physical health | issues and the rise of large, dense cities. | | Portland covers 145 square miles, is geographically diverse, and | has a profoundly hollowed out middle class that comes in part | from pandering to failed ideas like those of Richard Florida (who | has himself admitted being wrong). Now, 1 in 5 Portland kids live | in poverty, Californians and foreign investors buy entire | neighborhoods and build block upon block of condo boxes, and the | cost of living is through the roof. There is no 'Portlandia' | here, just caricatures and deepening poverty and a bizarrely out | of touch municipal government elected based on pet ideas. | | And the average age of Portland residents? ~37 and rising. The | percent of the population that are children (<19 years) has | declined over 30% in the last two decades. It's a city for | tourists, real estate speculation and arbitrage, and amenities | pandering to an ever-older base. | oangemangut wrote: | People do wonder whether low-density, un-walkable, cites are | _bad_ for human health, and studies show that they typically | are bad health. I recall some studies on urban form and it's | relationship to life expectancy, crime, happiness at certain | socioeconomic statuses. Poor people in much of Montreal are | able to live in walkable cities with low housing cost and | decent transit, and it turns out they live longer, are more | economically mobile, and are happier than equivalent SES | populations in large cities with car-centric design. | kieselguhr_kid wrote: | I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that density | itself is the cause of higher rates of mental illness. Density | is more likely to correlate with exposure to car exhaust, for | instance, and programs to care for mentally ill people tend to | be located in denser areas. The crushing economic pressures of | modern life regardless of location, combined with continued | urbanization, seem to me more likely to be the cause than dense | urban spaces. | stakkur wrote: | https://www.urbandesignmentalhealth.com/how-the-city- | affects... | | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5374256/ | lprd wrote: | I've thought a lot about this and I think the answer is no. I | lived in Paris for almost a decade and my mental health would | deteriorate if I didn't make it point to leave the city | periodically. Sure, there are many benefits to living in a | city...quality of life is not one of them. | | Apartment life simply wasn't for me. Being subject to my | neighbors noisiness was a huge drain! I understand that being a | home owner doesn't automatically shield you from bad neighbors, | but it hits much different when they are on top of you. It just | felt like a discounted way of living. Having things like a yard | (where you can do whatever you want with) are huge quality of | life boosters. Having a house on some land I think is ideal. | Although that goes against the current narrative. I am very | worried about this new push for 'optimizing living spaces'. | Where companies are buying up land en masse and constructing | condos/apartments. It's not the way to live! | | I think being in close quarters to each other goes against our | nature. Humans need space. How much? More than you may think. | milkytron wrote: | I'm fine if people think they need space, I just don't think | that cities should outlaw other options, and sprawling | infrastructure should have its costs tied more closely to the | users. It's very expensive and unfortunately it's people | living in denser areas that foot a large part of the bill. | Karrot_Kream wrote: | > Although that goes against the current narrative. I am very | worried about this new push for 'optimizing living spaces'. | Where companies are buying up land en masse and constructing | condos/apartments. It's not the way to live! | | It's important to remember that different people have | different preferences. Having a yard to my partner and I has | always been yet another maintenance burden, another one of | life's incessant worries to upkeep. My favorite part of our | local park is the ability to go there and not mow the lawn, | not make sure the grass is upkept, not make sure the wind | blew something over or whatnot. I have a friend with a large | suburban home who is constantly fixing some thing or the | other and seems to be forever living in a state of partial | brokenness. He loves it, every day is a project for him, but | this would drive my partner and I insane. Our neighbors are | families and while they can be noisy at times the kids go | silent around 9 PM and everything is quiet. My sleep is never | disturbed. | | It's good that you realized space is helpful for your mental | health. But not for everyone. Living in an SFH neighborhood | made my partner deeply depressed. The sound of neighbors' | conversations gave her a sense of connectedness which | improved her mental health drastically. When my grandparents | from an urban area in a developing country first visited my | parents SFH in the US, they found the area to be incredibly | isolating and had a hard time sleeping without the background | hum of people around them. | | People are different. It's important for us to build housing | of all types, so those who desire space have their space and | for those who desire close connectedness have it as well. | rsaz wrote: | Its really incredible the ways in which living in a walkable | neighbourhood can improve your life. More activity from walking | around, less pollution, better views etc. | | One thing I've noticed is I tend to see small businesses in | walkable areas more often. Not sure why that is, but its another | benefit I haven't seen discussed quite as much. | Karrot_Kream wrote: | Car-dependent areas need a lot of requirements to thrive. They | need large setbacks, minimum parking allotments, throughput | requirements on entrances and exits, etc. Walkable areas have | minimal setbacks and can have no minimum parking allotments. | This lends itself to smaller building footprints and | correspondingly lower building and maintenance rents. Smaller, | lower-revenue businesses can afford to rent these smaller | locations out. Correspondingly small businesses in walkable | locations need to spend less money on signage (as only those on | foot will need to see it) and marketing as foot traffic | naturally leads to serendipitous shopping. | munk-a wrote: | In particular less cars means paths that are more suitable to | walking in all weather - having a treed foot path instead of a | boulevard outside your house makes a big difference in heat | exposure to pedestrians and buildings. If you look at old | Iberian (especially Portugal) you'll see very aggressive tree | placement coupled with narrow alleys to try and keep paths | walkable when things get really hot. It's night and day | comparing the tight shady paths in Porto to the sun blasted | avenues common in Florida - while the temperatures are pretty | close the experience is entirely different. | ryukafalz wrote: | Here's my suspicion, from having lived in both car-centric | suburbs and a dense city: | | When you're driving somewhere, you typically have a destination | in mind. You're often moving too fast to spot smaller | businesses that probably don't have enormous signs, and it's | probably not convenient to just suddenly stop and park your car | if you do happen to see something interesting. And everyone | already knows about the big chains, but not so much about small | businesses, so they're less likely to be your initial | destination. | | By contrast, when you're on foot, you're moving slowly enough | that you can take in anything around you, so you'll spot small | places more easily. And if you do decide to stop in, you're | right there. | | (Cycling is somewhere in between, but I'd say closer to walking | than driving in these respects.) | milkytron wrote: | All that, in addition to having the need to shop for as much | stuff as possible during a single trip. People will fill up | their entire car at costco, but if you're walking or cycling, | you don't typically have as much cargo carrying capacity. So | a massive costco, walmart, or target trip doesn't always make | sense. | | Splitting up the errands while walking or biking will result | in either multiple trips to a big box store, or every time | you leave the house, you knock off a few items on the list | from the nearest store. The nearest store probably isn't a | big box store since they have so much parking, so they aren't | really around walkable areas as much. | abeppu wrote: | Regarding small businesses in walkable areas, I think maybe the | flip side of the same phenomena is a partial explanation. Big | box stores, large corporate office parks, etc, don't work in | walkable areas; they need a large footprint and wrap themselves | in a lot of parking and they want people to get in and out of | those parking lots easily so they do best on an arterial. If | the big businesses are structurally pushed away from walkable | areas, small businesses will naturally be over-represented | there. Plus they can benefit from serendipitous discovery in | those locations, since their marketing budgets may be nil. | munk-a wrote: | It's interesting but that isn't actually always the case - a | lot of cities use oversized blocks (blocks that are both | taller and wider than a row of buildings - see Barcelona[1]) | if this is the case then large department stores can expand | into the courtyard or gardenspace interior of the block and, | of course, in a lot of European cities a lot of malls are | built vertically and underground - sometimes lying underneath | a road with entrances on both sides. | | Large stores can work in walkable cities and they do have a | place - but they are usually for relatively rare needs (so | more likely to be focused on clothes or specialty groceries). | | 1. https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/aerial-view-of- | barcelon... | waynesonfire wrote: | oh is the shopping mall with a large parking lot and a taco-bell | within a 15 minutes driving distance in every suburb formula not | working anymore? /s | blamazon wrote: | "The Real Reason Your City Has No Money" : | | https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason... | scrumbledober wrote: | No, not really. | wussboy wrote: | Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but the answer to | your question is "no, it doesn't scale and is too expensive to | maintain". | bee_rider wrote: | Got to scale in 3 dimensions to the stuff within a given | radius scales like O(n^3) rather than O(n^2). | gumby wrote: | SF should reinvent itself along these lines. | | I used to live in Paris and believed that this sort of | transformation would be impossible. | [deleted] | ceeplusplus wrote: | This would never happen in SF. The local store block would be | instantly taken over by homeless druggies [1]. To have this | sort of transformation, the local culture needs to have little | tolerance for disruptive behaviors and peoples. | | Ex: in Europe many public bathrooms require payment, in the US | you can't even allow stores to require a purchase to use the | restroom due to public pressure (not laws, yet). | | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2CVMCZ6F2M | uoaei wrote: | Wow, what an intolerant, judgmental, and useless comment. At | least you live your values... | ceeplusplus wrote: | I think you would have a different opinion when your | property was stolen, your partner assaulted, and your sense | of safety destroyed by such behavior. You can't promote the | use of bikes if your bike is going to be stolen and chopped | up the second you take your eye off it. | | I vote my values too, by the way. | munk-a wrote: | It really is a hard problem and a hard policy to advance. | I'm pro-pedestrianization but can really understand the | concerns of car folks in terms of service availability | and business health. There have been plenty of times | where car restrictions have been done wrong and ended up | killing off city centers - but in terms of safety the | availability of safe and secure bike storage seems to | require an almost autocratic initial effort. Forcing safe | storage and monitoring, along with safe bike lanes, to be | rolled out so that the demand can grow - it's very hard | for demand to grow organically while bike theft and car- | bike accidents are so common that they'll discourage | usage. | | Ditto for public transit, when public transit is sparsely | utilized it tends to be less safe while as dense public | transit will certainly have incidents but the increased | ridership leads to increased safety funding and just more | witnesses making crime less attractive in terms of | expected gain. | | It is a hard problem even before we get into NIMBYism and | other socio-political complications. I definitely | disagree with you but I think your comment was quite fair | and reasonable. | _dain_ wrote: | Intolerant, judgemental, and correct. | uoaei wrote: | Not sure how you can claim that since "correct" only | applies to factual claims and above is purely | hypothetical. Or do you always assume ideology can stand | in place of reality? | pookha wrote: | I live in a major US city that has expansive "outdoor | camping" w homeless who harasse and terrorize(rob) the | locals. The progressives live in fear of the homeless AND | saying anything about the problem because they don't want | to be the bad-guy. It's very interesting. From what I can | tell people have become extremely hyper-socialized and | are willing to put their safety at risk. | _dain_ wrote: | "Over-socialized", one might say. | gumby wrote: | Most of the city is much more sedate than what was shot on | that video (which is extreme. I don't dispute it, but was | next to a treatment center.) | | Paid public toilets are all over California and businesses do | typically restrict bathroom use to paying customers, yes, in | SF too. | | Without SF's tolerance for weirdos due to the gold rush we | wouldn't have had the rule breakers of the valley. | ceeplusplus wrote: | Funnily enough, this sort of behavior is not tolerated in | the actual Valley, where things were actually started. You | don't see it happening in Mountain View and Cupertino. | gumby wrote: | The Valley is all suburbs, where people don't like that | sort of thing. That being said, Palo Alto used to have a | lot more homeless people, and more weirdness too. I can't | imagine the Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane starting | there any more. Yet still I live in PA. | | SF has always had a much higher tolerance for weird | behavior. Back when the city was a bedroom community for | the Valley, people lived there (I did too) for its | weirdness and culture. What happened with the dot com | boom is that people who didn't appreciate the weirdness | showed up, moved to SF, and then complained about it. | | Honestly SF is a lot cleaner and safer now. Those whiners | would not have tolerated the true weirdness. | abeppu wrote: | The main definition set in the article seems to be | neighborhoods in "which almost all residents' needs can be met | within 15 minutes of their homes on foot, by bike, or on public | transit." The maps in the center of the article ignore biking | and only show walking and transit, but the difference is pretty | big. If you work from home, or live near work, what parts of | the city are more than a 15-min bike ride from "needs"? In a | city that we pretend is 7 miles a side, 15 min of biking can | take you to a very different neighborhood. | | I'm also super skeptical of the transit maps ... b/c even if a | route is going where you need it to go, the 15 min should also | include waiting times. In some cases, 15 min takes you 0.0 | miles on muni buses. | gumby wrote: | Transit in modern cities like Paris, Tokyo, or Moscow is very | rapid and frequent. Don't be deceived by old fashioned places | like SF. | | A lot of people can't bike (I am forbidden from biking for | another six months, for instance, due to an injury). Plus | biking in SF isn't the same as biking in Manhattan. | abeppu wrote: | I guess, you've claimed that "SF should reinvent itself | along these lines" in response to an article that | specifically includes biking as part of its 15-min | definition. I've suggested that in SF we probably largely | already meet that definition, relying heavily on the "or" | in "on foot, by bike, or on public transit". It sounds like | you're now discounting a whole mode of transit that was | repeatedly discussed in the article, on the basis of not | being universally accessible. | | I would hasten to point out that not everyone walks or can | take all public transit (BART elevators frequently being | broken is an issue for wheelchair users, for example). | | > Plus biking in SF isn't the same as biking in Manhattan. | | It's true SF has more hills. But why should Manhattan be | the baseline? Wrt getting to necessities within 15m, I | still think almost all of the city qualifies. We don't | mostly put our grocery stores on hilltops, for example. | | I'll refine my point: even though SF does have a bunch | neighborhoods which are set up to be residential, the | city's small footprint means that without trying all that | hard, people end up being close in absolute distances to | the necessities of life anyway. | | I do think it's worth pointing out that Tokyo and Moscow | each have literally >10x the population of SF. It's kind of | an apples-and-oranges comparison; of _course_ they have | more rapid public transit. | robertlagrant wrote: | > It's a utopian vision in an era of deep social distress--but | one that might, if carried out piecemeal, without an eye to | equality, exacerbate existing inequities. | | Progress and equality (of outcome) are almost always in | opposition. You can't have Tesla model 3s without much wealthier | people having bought Roadsters to prove the concept in low scale. | Nevermark wrote: | I would argue the opposite conclusion. | | Tesla leveraged existing inequality to get the funding to bring | the advantages of quality electric cars to more people (i.e. | reducing inequality of options). | | This can be contrasted with dysfunctional dynamics that | maintain or expand the differences between rich and poor | options. | r5Khe wrote: | https://archive.ph/id7ev | ramesh31 wrote: | Fifteen minutes might as well be 20 or 30. As soon as I have to | get in my car, it doesn't make much difference. | | Living somewhere that you can meet your daily needs without a car | is lifechanging. But just having a shorter commute only makes | things slightly more convenient. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-25 23:00 UTC)