Fifteen Minutes

Photo by Nick Agee on Unsplash

 

Asked to imagine an ideal walk in an ideal environment, I instantly pictured a 15-minute city, that controversial idea that makes perfect sense to all but the conspiracy theorists. I am a city boy at heart. I grew up in a boring semi-rural area populated by boring white people. I longed for cultural diversity, the excitement of city life, with its concerts and festivals, and expressions of culture from borders far beyond the confines of the Kentucky hills.

The city of my choice doesn’t exist, or if it is out there somewhere, I am unaware of it. It is a city of mixed-used zoning, one in which I live in an apartment above a consumer-oriented business on a street served by automobile, rail, bicycle rentals, and clutter-free sidewalks. There is, of course, at least one bookstore withing walking distance of my apartment, and a coffee shop, convenience store, café-style restaurant, and a bar. The addition of a public library would be a nice touch.

That is an ideal denied by the current political regime and the extreme-right wing’s Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025. Page 635 of that document calls for defunding the precise types of public transportation that would aid in the development of so-called “Fifteen-Minute Cities” or “Smart cities” described above. The document alludes to the Covid pandemic but ignores its (temporary) contribution to the reduction in public transit ridership.

Regrettably, the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act13 authorized tens of billions of dollars for the expansion of transit systems even as Americans were moving away from them and into personal vehicles. Lower revenue from reduced ridership is already driving transit agencies to a budgetary breaking point, and added operational costs from system expansions will make this problem worse. The Capital Investment Grants (CIG) program is another example of Washington’s tendency to fund transit expansion rather than maintaining or improving current facilities. The CIG program, which began in 1991, funds only novel transit projects. These can include new rail lines (regardless of the demand for preexisting rail in the area) and costly operations such as streetcars.

Project 2025’s promotion of personal vehicles (read, automobiles) is merely maintaining the status quo and its massive donations to politicians and fails to account for transit usage over time--fears of COVID fade and commuters are again taking advantage of public transit. The better the public is served by public transit, the greater the number of riders. Washington’s never-ending campaign to force Americans into automobiles provides a vicious circle of lower mass transit budgets resulting in reduced services which results, in turn, lower usage by the public; a self-fulfilling prophecy. The use of private automobiles as mass transit, and its contingent covering of city neighborhoods in concrete cannot continue at the current pace. The fossil fuel industry’s nearly $800 billion federal welfare (wealthfare?) subsidies were reduced in 2021by executive order under President Joe Biden, though the order was defied by Americas Import-Export Bank and its nearly $100 billion loan to an oil refinery in Indonesia.

 

The 15-Minute City concept has drawn conspiracy theories from the dark corners of the internet. Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has remarked, in his continuing campaign to make himself relevant:

"The idea that neighbourhoods should be walkable is lovely. The idea that idiot tyrannical bureaucrats can decide by fiat where you're 'allowed' to drive is perhaps the worst imaginable perversion of that idea — and, make no mistake, it's part of a well-documented plan."

That, from a guy who says women should be barred from the workplace because they wear lipstick. Apparently, lipstick on a woman in Canada turns men into lusty automatons unable to control their urges or fulfill their employment obligations because that woman in lipstick has filled them with erotic thoughts. Yeah, that’s a sample of his though process.

If I read Mr. Peterson’s quote correctly, I can assume there are no traffic laws in Canada. The idea that bureaucrats can decide where you are “allowed” to drive shows up everywhere, here in the states. We have traffic lights and turning lanes, speed limits speed bumps and speed traps and school zones and all manner of signs telling us where to go, when to go, and when not to go. That does not change with the implementation of the 15-minute city.

 

Notes

“A study of 100 major cities found that median central city permitted apartment dwellers to live on only 12%  of its residential land.”

62% of all homes in the U.S. are single family detached structures. Desmond, Matthew. Poverty, by America. Crowne Publishing, 2023, pp. 115-115

 

Crossing the Stroad

 

 

Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash

 

                        

           

         Crossing the Stroad

The bumper on a speeding SUV stopped inches from my shin. I was crossing a lane of traffic called by urban planners a “turn lane on a horizontal curve.” [1] Crossing Northwest Highway at Skillman Street means crossing a stroad.[2] Stroads are evidence that street planners hate non-automobile traffic. They are streets that have been widened to accommodate increasing numbers of cars, leading to higher speeds, larger business setbacks for greater expanses of parking lots, and hostility toward bicycles, mopeds, scooters, pedestrians, and wheelchairs. Stroads are the sacrifice of the benefits of urban life for the convenience of suburban car culture. Stroads lead to the suburbs or to airports. They are not for the convenience of urban residents.

Walking home from the Half-Price Books on Loop 12, a locally infamous stroad that promises the threat of death and injury to pedestrians, I had the light to cross. In the center of the turn the SUV made a right turn at the aforementioned “turn lane on a horizontal curve” without noticing me. Fortunately, traffic was heavy enough that day that drivers were no getting up to full speed. The driver was doing only about twenty-five or thirty miles-per-hour- enough to fracture my leg and drag me under the car to an almost certain death.

I started walking the city when a mechanic handed to me a four-thousand-dollar repair estimate on my car. Every seal in the engine, he said, needed replacement. That meant pulling the engine. Rather than shell out that kind of money for a twenty-three-year-old car, I sold it for a fraction of its book value. Surrendering an only car is a scary decision under the best conditions, and my situation was less than ideal. I had no backup- no motorcycle, bicycle, not even a skateboard. And, I live in Dallas, Texas, a city known as one of the most car-dependent cities in the U.S. [3]

         Pedestrian Casualties

Fifty-four pedestrians were killed in Dallas by automobile drivers in 2018 and 3,434 were killed nationally in the first six months of 2022. Texas was one of three states (along with California and Florida) that produced 38 percent of pedestrian deaths in the first six months of 2022 but are home to 28% of the U.S. population.[5]

The U.S. experienced 6,205 fatal pedestrian incidents and 76,00 pedestrian injuries in 2019. [6] How many of the increasing numbers of pedestrian casualties are due to the rate at which we turn streets into stroads? The numbers are not available.

         Pedestrian Life

The problem with living sans-automobile became apparent the first time (two days later) I had a doctor’s appointment and learned the hard way that Uber is more expensive, calculated on an annual basis, than the car, its repairs, fuel, and insurance. I paid over fifty dollars for the trip to and return from my doctor’s office 0.08 miles distant. There could have been mitigating situations: I had no experience with the Ube app and didn’t know that I had a range of pricing options. My ignorance might have contributed to the excessive cost, but I belong to an economic class that believes that, for fifty dollars, the trip should have come with champagne and showgirls.

A problem acquiring food, medicines, and household goods revealed itself when I subscribed to a national super center delivery service. It became apparent that deliveries are a way for grocers to get rid of bruised fruit and dented cans. I received a couple of canned vegetables so badly damaged that they should have been labeled with a botulism warning.

I am a good tipper. I appreciate good service and I empathize with service workers. I tended bar for years, and I know what they must deal with. I tip twenty percent for even mediocre service. A twenty percent tip on a fifty-dollar delivery adds ten dollars to each grocery order, and for that, you get botulism.

I have since changed over to Instacart for deliveries. Much of the unpleasantness associated with that first experiment in acquiring food without a car has disappeared, and the cost of tipping and a service charge are offset by coupons and random reductions in the dollar minimum for free deliveries.

All those factors, though frustrating, have solutions. The planning of cites to favor the automobile with stroads, sidewalk obstructions, and right-on-red turns on high-speed stroads is a threat to the lives of those without cars. My city, Dallas, has acquired some infamy for its “unwalkability”. The city has its moments: Uptown, Deep Ellum, some parts of the Oaklawn/Cedar Springs neighborhood, Highland Park, and Downtown. My neighborhood, Vickery Midtown,[4] is a sea of low-rise apartment buildings and condos far enough from consumer and cultural facilities to discourage walking, but close enough to discourage ride shares who can’t make enough money from the fare to make it worthwhile. And no one wants to brave crossing Greenville Avenue at Park Lane or travel Skillman Street in a wheelchair, on a bicycle, or on foot. That is an adventure analogous to playing Russian Roulette.

Times change. The automobile culture is supported by the petroleum lobby and espoused by Dennis Prager, co-founder of PragerU, a right wing misinformation group; Randal O’Toole, Senior Fellow and anti-urbanist at the libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute; and corrupt politicians legally purchased by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.

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Citations:

[1] https://accessmanagement.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/TRB2015stover619.pdf

[2] https://www.thegazette.com/opinion/stroads-hybrid-of-streets-and-roads-make-linn-county-less-safe/

[3] https://www.walkscore.com/TX/Dallas

[4] https://www.niche.com/places-to-live/n/vickery-meadow-dallas-tx/

[5] 2018- 54 pedestrians killed in dallas

https://www.statista.com/chart/21013/pedestrians-killed-in-large-us-cities/?gclid=Cj0KCQjw98ujBhCgARIsAD7QeAhcTY-IlZseWh3uRlAc3BhZASlW_6BL4bBYsOUuCe1JDs8Qv6b8TA4aAhy0EALw_wcB

[6] https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA-Pedestrian-Spotlight23#:~:text=Over%20the%20past%20ten%20years,the%20start%20of%20the%20pandemic.