The idea of the 15-minute city (or neighbourhood) is an important one for reducing carbon emissions, and for making livable, vibrant cities - cities where you can meet most of your daily needs within 15 minutes walk or bike ride from your house, and destinations further away are connected by quality public transport. Unfortunately, it has attracted some conspiracy theories, so the term "15 minute city" itself might be falling out of favour - but the idea is a good one.
Part of the idea is to enable (but I must stress, not require) people to live without a car. And as soon as you suggest car-free living, it conjures up images of a busy metropolis with skyscrapers and underground trains, and people tend to think "That's something that might work in the inner city, but not in the suburbs - and certainly not in regional areas."
It leads even well-meaning advocates to suggest that good urbanism simply isn't possible at low densities, that regional folks will always be car-dependent, and that electric cars are the only solution.
I really want to challenge these assumptions. Not only is it absolutely possible for us to build walkable, cyclable lifestyles outside our capital city centres, in many cases we've almost done so.
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Average proximity times across global cities (via 15min-City) |
I recently stumbled across the 15min-City platform, which showcases a dataset of walkability for many cities around the world (note: it works much better on desktop than on mobile). It's a rare joy to find a dataset like this that not only includes Australian cities, but includes some non-capital cities like Ballarat.
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Average walking times for Melbourne, Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo (via 15min-City) |
Now, the statewide view shows some fairly red circles, indicating poor average scores. But when we click through, we can see that the average score hides a lot of variation - there is generally a sea of blue in the centre, surrounded by red. (We also see some significant gaps where there's no data at all, for reasons that are not immediately clear to me [1]). Crucially, this basic pattern holds true of both capital and regional cities.
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Walking accessibility for Melbourne, averaged over all destination types (via 15min-City) |
If you click through to Ballarat, you'll see that average walking accessibility is very good in some places - around 5 minutes walk in central Ballarat and southern Wendouree, and around 10 minutes in Soldiers Hill, Newington and Redan. It basically starts to get orange and red the further you get from the two railway stations.
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Walking accessibility for Ballarat, averaged over all destination types (via 15min-City) |
If you switch into bike mode, the picture improves substantially - which demonstrates the value of the bicycle as a range extender. Almost all the built-up area of Ballarat has an average score of 15 minutes or better, with Miners Rest across the freeway being the notable exception.
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Cycling accessibility for Ballarat, averaged over all destination types (via 15min-City) |
What's more, the above scores are averaged across all destination types. When you pick individual destination types, it becomes clear that some perform a lot better than others - below, we see a lot more of Ballarat is within walking distance of "eating" than they are of "healthcare", for example. What this means in a practical sense, though, is that even the redder areas might be less difficult to fix than you'd first think - they might already have most of the amenities they need, so we'd just need to provide the rest.
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Ballarat's walking accessibility is better for "eating" (L) than "healthcare" (R) (via 15min-City) |
So in many ways, we're off to a good start. What do we need to improve?
Clearly the first broad issue is equity. In Melbourne and Ballarat alike, the central areas generally have much better access than the outer areas, which correlates both with the age of the suburbs (ie pre-1950s or post-1950s) and with how expensive each suburb is. We need to recognise how badly designed car-centric suburbs are, and commit to retrofitting them; we need to stop making the same mistakes with new suburbs; and we need to make sure it's not just the wealthier areas that have good access to the things they need.
The second broad issue is that this dataset is just measuring the distance people would need to walk or cycle to access these amenities - it doesn't take into account what that journey is actually like. There's no guarantee there will be safe walking or cycling infrastructure, making it easy to make the trip by these modes - or, say, adequate bike parking when you get there. These problems are fixable, and work is underway to fix them - but it's by no means finished.
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The small western Victorian town of Ararat (via GMaps) |
Okay, so that's a large regional city like Ballarat. What about a properly small town, like my hometown of Ararat?
Ararat has a population of about 8000, which is much too small to be included in this dataset. But it's small enough that we can conduct a rudimentary analysis for ourselves without too much trouble - and the results are good.
Ararat is not very dense, and the vast majority of shops and services are centrally located (rather than mixed among the housing). But it's just so physically small that that doesn't matter; you can ride your bike from one side of town to the other in about 15 minutes, which means basically everything in town is within 15 minutes of everywhere else.
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You can ride from one side of Ararat to the other in 10-15 minutes (via GMaps) |
To take food shopping as an example, there's a Woolies, an IGA and an Aldi, all quite centrally located. Most of the town is within 15 minutes walk of one or both of them, and the whole town is within 15 minutes bike ride.
What's more, there isn't a whole lot that needs to be done to make a place like Ararat walkable and bikeable. I am definitely not part of the 'Strong and Fearless' crew that will ride anywhere, I am pretty cautious - but there are only about five main roads in Ararat that I didn't feel very comfortable riding on as a teenager. Everywhere else has sufficiently low volumes of traffic that I felt quite comfortable riding on the road, without any kind of protected lane.
As such, if the council (and higher levels of government) invested in protected or off-road cycling infrastructure in just a few key corridors, Ararat would quickly become a place where people of all ages and abilities could feel comfortable riding absolutely everywhere.
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The Western Hwy runs through Ararat and is one of the roads I avoid on bike (source) |
It's certainly true that farmers and other properly-rural people have lifestyles that inevitably require a car - and we should always be careful they don't fall through the cracks of any policy we create. But they constitute a vanishingly small minority of the population. Even if we make the crude assumption that only places with more than 10,000 people are big enough to support all the required amenities (note: Ararat does, and it's smaller than this) then that still constitutes 86% of Victoria's population. This is not some niche policy that only applies to a small elite - far from it.
Don't get me wrong. Regional Victoria is very car-dependent now - but so is Melbourne. Most urbanists accept that Melbourne and Melburnians can change if they are given better options - it's time for us to acknowledge that regional towns and cities can change too. And it's only fair that regional Victorians are given the same opportunities to change as Melburnians.
Next week, I will be appearing on Smart Living Ballarat's discussion panel about Life Without a Car. Head along or tune in online!
1. I will add that there are clearly issues with the dataset they've used. In addition to the large chunk of the west of Ballarat for which there is inexplicably no data at all, the scores for some areas are lower than I know they should be. The healthcare accessibility metric, for example, doesn't seem to know that my local doctor exists, so the surrounding area scores worse than it should. But if anything this strengthens my point, because the missing data makes the city seem less walkable than it actually is.
Great analysis Ben - I wonder why Alfredton/Lucas data is missing?
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