‘15-minute Cities’ May Help Mitigate Climate Change

In Pontevedra, a bay-hugging city of 83,000 in Northwest Spain, a newly-elected mayor and his action-oriented city council kicked off a global trend when they decided to revitalize their city by giving the old town back to pedestrians. 

Starting in 1999, Mayor Miguel Anxo Fernández Lores sought to reverse course for the once-vibrant city that had turned unmanageable and positively seedy.

With over 50,000 cars every day entering the 1.3 square-mile historic quarter and shopping district of Pontevedra, the noise was deafening, air pollution was thick, and traffic jams never let up; hundreds of pedestrians were hit by vehicles every year, some fatally. Moreover, as cars overran the city, residents stopped socializing in the public squares — and the spaces filled with heroin addicts and loud, late-night drinking parties. Crime rates were skyrocketing. 

“People didn’t want to go out,” said Daniel Macenlle, the city’s former chief of police. “They were afraid.”

So, Lores and his city council created new plazas, putting in benches and bright lighting, and they designated car-free areas, closing off main arteries, rerouting traffic down one-way streets, lowering speeds to a crawl, and banning on-street parking in the urban core. The council even transformed the main shopping drag into a pedestrian zone while putting in free parking lots across the bay and encouraging people to make the 10-minute stroll into the old town.

Initially, climate change wasn’t a top priority for Mayor Lores. But his visionary plan cut carbon dioxide levels by two-thirds from their 1999 levels.

Their radical ideas provoked angry outcries at first but ultimately worked. As residents began filling the squares again, the junkies fled, drinking parties ceased, crime rates plummeted, noise levels dropped, and pollution cleared up. Locals started selling their cars, no longer having much need for them. As Pontevedra became the first city in the Western world where unhindered pedestrianism was the norm, newcomers began flocking  — 12,000 have moved there since 1999 — for the experience of not needing a vehicle and subsequently boosting the local economy. Mayor Lores has been reelected four times since making his radical stand. 

Brendan Boyle, who works in marketing, moved with his partner from Madrid to Pondevedra two years ago, drawn by the quietness and high quality of life. “Now we're a short walk from absolutely everything we could want — including Michelin-star restaurants, movie theaters, gyms, grocery stores, and bars,” he said. When his partner recently went into labor, they simply walked to the hospital for the delivery.

Pontevedra’s transformation became a model for changes that are underway in European cities  — from Barcelona to Milan, Oslo to Utrecht — to create spaces where walking and other zero-carbon modes of transportation are prioritized and encouraged. Many are in the midst of making “urban villages” and “15-minute cities” that slash greenhouse gas emissions by lessening dependence on cars.

In Paris, promenades along the Seine River, where cars once zipped along a motorway, are now thick with walkers and bikers. Throughout the city, diesel-powered cars are banned, sidewalks are being widened, streets are being changed to one-way, and more bicycle lanes are going in, while mixed-use zoning in neighborhoods is expanded. With goals of slashing through traffic in half by 2024, in April, the city unveiled its first car-free, “zero-carbon” neighborhood.

Paris-based urbanist Carlos Moreno, a professor at Sorbonne University, who is credited with developing the concept of the “15-minute city,” says the idea “is to create neighborhoods where people can access their daily needs, such as work, school, healthcare, shops, and leisure activities, within a short distance” — ideally meeting them all with a 15-minute walk or bike ride from their homes. 

“The goal is to reduce the reliance on cars and promote sustainable modes of transport,” he added, “which in turn can help lower traffic congestion, air pollution, and carbon emissions.”

But can that idea, so popular in Europe, be adapted to the United States, where urban areas and suburbs were created with the car in mind? 

Some cities are certainly trying. Take, for instance, Seattle, where much of the population lives in one of 30 so-called “urban villages” and “urban centers” — which the planning department defines as “dense, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods served by high-quality transit.” 

Although nationwide, around 76% of Americans drive to work alone, that number drops to 21% in Seattle, according to last year’s Seattle Commuter Report. The report also shows that nearly half of the locals now work remotely, and more Seattleites headed to work on foot, bike, or via mass transit than commuted in personal vehicles. 

Seattle city planners are emphasizing pedestrianism and zero-emission modes of transportation in their comprehensive urban plan for 2035. 

“Much of our work is consistent with the underlying ideas of walkable communities where transit, walking, rolling, and biking are the first choices for travel,” said Kristen Simpson, Senior Deputy Director of Seattle’s Department of Transportation. 

Simpson pointed to innovations like the “Healthy Streets” program that closed 20 miles of the city to through traffic, transforming them into pedestrian green spaces. The city also boasts 400 miles of bike trails and bike lanes.

Such moves, along with high proportions of people working at home are paying off. Greenhouse gas emissions from Seattle’s transportation sector in 2020, the most recent year for statistics, dropped 24.5% from the previous year, according to Seattle’s Office of Sustainability and Environment.

About 180 miles to the south, Portland, Oregon, which the Willamette River bisects, has long been a haven for walking, being known for its “Pedestrian First” urban planning strategy that has lowered speed limits, widened sidewalks and resulted in the creation of the country’s first bridge devoted solely to mass transit, bicycles, and pedestrians. 

Yet many residents are not maximizing the climate-friendly policies. Perhaps because of the river dividing key parts of town, nearly half of commuters drove alone to work in 2021, according to the Portland Transportation Department. Even worse, the numbers of cars keeps increasing, and the city’s plans to reduce greenhouse emissions are going up in smoke, according to economist Joe Cortright of City Observatory, a think tank focusing on urban strategies.

With the city and state transportation departments planning to dump over $7.5 billion into expanding interstates, some residents worry that Portland is emphasizing automobile traffic and abandoning its “Pedestrian First” strategy. To protest the move, high school activists are writing to agencies urging them “to break up with highways,” and environmental groups are demanding that the city expand its pedestrian programs further instead of catering to the car. Whether Portland stays a “Pedestrian First” city remains to be seen.

The struggle to convert American communities to places that aren’t entirely reliant on cars stems from the historical emphasis on creating spacious outlying communities for housing, said Jacob Mason, Director of Research & Impact at the Institute for Development and Transportation Policy in Washington, D.C. 

Unlike in Europe’s densely-populated cities, in the U.S., with its abundance of land, the post-World War II model was to build lots of highways to connect low-density neighborhoods of detached single-family homes with yards, where zoning prohibited commercial development within walking distance. “We’ve locked ourselves into that pattern of suburban-style development, and it’s very hard to change,” Mason said. But according to a study by IDTP and UC Davis, to meet the Paris Climate Change Agreement target of 1.5 degrees, that model must be altered. “We need to both be electrifying all vehicles and having a lot fewer vehicles — but neither one of those will get us there. So we need more compact cities” — that encourage walking, biking, and other no-carbon modes of transport, Mason said.

Kyle Shelton, director of the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Minnesota, notes that while European urbanites are used to walking and “robust public transit systems,” that just hasn’t been the case for many Americans. Now that thinking needs to shift. “The ideal is to give people lots of types of housing, lots of types of neighborhoods and many options to access those neighborhoods” — not simply emphasizing the car. 

But doing so, he said, is “like turning around a big ship. We’re stuck with the legacies of highway investments we made in the 50s and 60s.” While he sees a growing desire to create more sustainable climate-friendly infrastructure, it often runs head-on with the old models for growth. “I’d say we’re still experiencing a pretty big disconnect between those two things.” 

Yet there are some encouraging moves, he said, pointing to policies that are rezoning communities, such as is happening in Minneapolis, where small grocery stores are now legal in any neighborhood, and new laws allow for increasing housing density. 

What’s more, last month, Tempe, Arizona unveiled the country’s first no-car neighborhood, a 17-acre community with 700 apartments and on-site stores.

And on an individual level, changes are in the air.

On the East Coast, Boston is known as “The Walking City,” being one of the three most pedestrian-friendly cities in the country, according to a report from Walk Score, a subsidiary of real estate company Redfin. 

“Less than half of Bostonians drive to work,” added Vineet Gupta, Director of Transportation for the City of Boston. That makes sense when one considers that Boston’s subway system, the first built in the U.S. — it opened in 1897 — is extensive and relatively inexpensive.

Despite the sometimes brutal weather, he said that around 14% of Bostonians, like Gupta himself, typically walk to work, one of the highest rates in the country.

Like a third of Bostonians, Gupta doesn’t own a car and believes that pedestrianism and biking are taking off. 

“Lifestyles are changing,” he said, pointing to recent statistics showing that 20% of Americans between 20 and 24 years of age do not have a driver’s license.  “Young people are often very comfortable without cars,” he noted, whether due to the expense of maintaining a car or their concerns about contributing to climate change. 

Adah Crandall, a 17-year-old Portlander who organized a student group to fight highway expansion when in middle school, dreams of a no-car future for cities, where mass transit provides climate-friendly and free transportation, urban areas are safe for walking and biking, and highways are simply “ripped up.” Now an outspoken member of the Portland chapter of the national Sunrise Movement, an organization of youth battling climate change, she’s visionary but pragmatic.

“I think it's hard to imagine cities entirely without cars,” Crandall said. “But that's something that young people bring to this movement — the ability to imagine things being different than the way that they are. “Older people can get really bogged down in the status quo. It's hard for them to see [cities] as really different than they are now. But I do believe that it's possible.” 

For American cities to effectively reduce traffic and boost pedestrianism, the most important step is preventing unnecessary cars from entering cities in the first place, according to Pontevedra’s Mayor Lores, who notes that much of the traffic in his city resulted from drivers taking a short cut to get somewhere else or circling in the search for parking spots. Eliminating on-street parking and putting in underground garages — or siting parking lots outside of the urban core — drastically restricting speed limits, and creating one-way streets with narrow lanes for cars and wide sidewalks, while creating more well-lit pedestrian-only public spaces are crucial steps, he said.

“I tell those in other cities to do things along these lines — and not to be afraid,” said Lores. “If you make mistakes, you can fix them. It’s better than being paralyzed by cars. You’ll have better air quality, better quality of life in the city, and you’re fighting climate change.”