Dan Wentzel 🏳️‍🌈Apr 5, 2023
“My hot take on “15 minute cities” is if you can get to the coffee shop within fifteen minutes, but the barrista who makes your drink can’t afford to live closer than a half-hour away, then you live in a theme park.” - Gareth Klieber #cities #urbanism #housing #transit #cycling
Show threadAlonApr 5, 2023

@danwentzel When I lived in Vancouver, I talked to one of the baristas at my regular cafe, who told me they lived on a res and the bus-train-bus commute was around an hour and a half each way.

P.S. I'm seeing a lot of people in @-replies miss the point. Yes, in theory, the idea of the 15-minute city is that the barista's commute is 15 minutes. In practice, the cities run by people who most loudly subscribe to this view, like Paris, are theme parks.

Show threadPierre Lebeaupin

@danwentzel @Alon Exactly, and that’s why I was glad when a Paris hotel group relented after a strike by their service personnel in exactly that situation (one of which is now an M.P.).

Most of them rely in the infamous RER B, which is worse because, while never nominally long (no station is more than an hour away from Paris, on the timetables), its performance is unpredictable due to frequent failures.

Apr 5, 2023 at 1:06pmWeb
Show threadAlonApr 5, 2023
@PierreLebeaupin @danwentzel The RER B isn't even bad (I reverse-commuted on it for two months). It has a bad reputation but the reliability is pretty decent, it's just less frequent than the Métro and it passes through really poor banlieues so people pile on the negative stereotypes. My current line, Berlin U8, gets the same treatment because of the neighborhoods it goes through and that too is exaggerated.
Show threadPierre LebeaupinApr 5, 2023
@Alon @danwentzel Some of it is bad reputation, but some of it is attested, for instance the situation of child minding: https://web.archive.org/web/20120210094319/http://sucyenbrie.blog.lemonde.fr/2012/02/06/les-musso-le-rer-et-la-nounou-en-or/ (via https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/transports/2013/02/05/ces-details-qui-expliquent-les-retards-du-rer-b/ by the invaluable @OlivierRazemon ). The RER A has improved since then (new trains in particular), but the B much less. And there’s the infamous CdG express…
Les Musso, le RER et la nounou en or

Sucy en Brie, terminus pavillon