
Contributed by Robert Lyman © 2024. Robert Lyman’s bio can be read here.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Edmonton City Council has declared that that the city will follow the example of Vancouver and become a “15-minute city”. Few people know what this means. A serious examination is needed of what a 15-minute city would mean for residents and what are its real costs and benefits.
According to the 15-minute city concept, cities would be designed and governed so that most daily necessities and services, such as work, shopping, education, healthcare and leisure would be located within a distance reachable by a 15-minute walk or bike ride in any part of the city.
The inspiration thus arises from three ideas. One is the long-held view of most urban planners that cars and urban “sprawl” are bad and that increased density will reduce congestion. The second is the thesis that humans are causing catastrophic climate change by their energy use patterns and that eliminating Canadians’ use of hydrocarbons by 2050 is essential to solve this problem. The third is that government planning, zoning, infrastructure investments and various regulations are all acceptable ways to alter people’s choices as to where they reside and how they move within cities.
To meet all of a household’s needs would require nearby access to food, entertainment, education and jobs, among other things. Most grocery stores, bakeries, bars and restaurants are privately owned, so their size and location are dependent on market supply and demand for those services. The municipality has no legal means of creating and managing any business or of arbitrarily deciding its location. These are now decided by the market (i.e. people’s free choices) which already supplies all the food options needed; it would not be necessary to call upon municipal governments to make these choices. The same is largely true with the number and location of public kindergarten, primary schools, and other community services – they are linked to the demographics of the population served.
People choose freely to work where their best opportunities are. They choose to reside where they can find the optimal trade-off between the various employment locations of household members, the quality of schools, the residential environment, the housing price and a multitude of other considerations. It is reasonable to assume that people will go on wanting to exercise those choices, not to have them constrained by municipal governments.
The cities that already have adopted 15-minute city policies have restricted or taxed residents’ access to different areas and imposed taxes and fees to discourage outside the designated areas.
Urban planners seem to pursue ever-higher density for its own sake and seem to think we do not have enough lend in Canada to accommodate urban growth. In fact, the non-urbanized inhabitable land area of Canada is about 864,000 square kilometers. Generally, experience shows that cities with high densities have more traffic congestion, not less.
For Canada as a whole, of the 15,740,000 commuters in 2023, 83.6% travelled by car, truck or van, 10.2% travelled by transit, and 6.1% by active transportation (mainly cycling and walking). The percentage of people commuting by transit still has not recovered to pre-pandemic levels.
Planners’ desires that people live in ever-denser cities go decidedly counter to the demonstrated preferences of the people. Statistics Canada in 2022 published a report on the areas of population growth in Canada’s largest cities, and with few exceptions it reported that the populations are increasing faster in the suburbs located 20 kilometres or more from the centre than in any other areas.
Opposition to the 15-minute city concept is not limited to those who champion citizens’ free choices over the preferences of urban planners. It also includes one of the most prominent of the urban planning theorists alive today. Edward Glaeser is the Chairman of the Economics Department at Harvard University and has published dozens of papers on cities and economic growth. He has characterized the concept of the 15-minute city as “a dead end which would stop cities from fulfilling their true role as engines of opportunity”.
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With population densities comes increased STRESS, a major influencer of many a disease… STRESS, TENSION, AND STRIFE…
Humans are a small group species. They excel in bands of 25 or less… They are
also territorial, especially when CROWDED…
Politicians are very good at exploiting the stresses of overcrowding, deflecting
it outwards onto others…