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Economy

The 15-Minute City: An extraordinarily bad idea

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6 minute read

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Randal O’Toole

” the average resident of the New York urban area—the closest thing to a 15-minute city in the U.S. or Canada—can reach at least 21 times as many jobs in a 20-minute auto drive as in a 20-minute walk. The same will be true of other economic opportunities.  “

The latest urban planning fad to sweep across Canada is the 15-minute city, which proposes to redesign cities so that all urban residents live within an easy, 15-minute walk of schools, retailers, restaurants, entertainment, and other essentials of modern life. This is supposed to simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas emissions while it increases our quality of life.

Some think it is a conspiracy. Others insist it is not. Conspiracy or not, the only way to have true 15-minute cities would be to drastically change Canadian lifestyles.

Fifteen-minute cities mean a lot more people living in multifamily housing and fewer in single-family housing. It means most food shopping would be done in high-priced, limited-selection grocery stores. There is no way that Costcos or even large supermarkets can fit into 15-minute cities; to survive, these stores need a lot more customers than could live within a 15-minute walk from their front doors.

Most of the benefits claimed for 15-minute cities are wrong. Proponents claim they would be more affordable, but high-density, multi-story housing costs two to five times as much, per square foot, as single-family homes. Packing people into four- and five-story apartment buildings would require cutting average dwelling sizes at least in half to make them anywhere close to affordable.

Proponents also claim 15-minute cities would save energy and reduce greenhouse gases and other pollutants. But let’s be honest: people aren’t going to give up their cars or stop going to Costco.

Admittedly, the U.S. Department of Energy says that people living in high-density cities do drive a little less than people in low-density areas. But it also says that there is a lot more congestion in high-density cities. Since cars use more energy in slower traffic, high-density cities use more energy (and therefore emit more greenhouse gases) per capita than low-density areas.

Proponents also claim that 15-minute cities will be more equitable. Yet, before about 1890, most Canadian cities were 15-minute cities. Most people in these cities lived in crushing poverty and there were huge disparities between the rich and the poor, with only a small middle-class in between.

What changed these cities was the mass-produced automobile. The Model T Ford democratized mobility, allowing more people to escape the dense cities to find better housing, better jobs, access to lower-cost consumer goods, and a wider range of social and recreation opportunities.

The University of Minnesota Accessibility Observatory calculates that the average resident of the New York urban area—the closest thing to a 15-minute city in the U.S. or Canada—can reach at least 21 times as many jobs in a 20-minute auto drive as in a 20-minute walk. The same will be true of other economic opportunities. Eliminating the automobile, which is the goal of the 15-minute city, would eliminate those economic benefits.

We had this same debate 50-some years ago when urban skies were polluted with carbon monoxide, smog, and other toxic automobile emissions. Some people advocated policies that would force people to drive less. Others advocated new technologies that would reduce the air pollution coming from autos and trucks.

Today, total automotive air pollution has been reduced by about 90 percent. All this improvement came from cleaner cars: new cars today pollute only about 1 percent as much as cars made in 1970. None of this improvement came from anti-automobile policies, as Canadians drive far more miles today than they did 50 years ago.

If anything, policies aimed at reducing driving made pollution worse as one of those policies was to increase traffic congestion to get people out of their cars. Yet, as noted above, cars actually pollute more in congested traffic.

Anti-automobile policies today, including 15-minute cities, spending billions on rail transit lines that carry only a small percentage of urban travel, and converting general street lanes into exclusive bike lanes, are going to have the same effect.

People who care about the planet should demand policies that actually work and not ones that are based on urban planning fantasies and fads. Instead of attempting to drastically change Canadian lifestyles, that means making cars that are cleaner and more fuel-efficient so that the driving we do has a lower environmental impact. The 15-minute city may not be a conspiracy, but it is still an extraordinarily bad idea.

Randal O’Toole is a transportation policy analyst and author of Building 21 st Century Transit Systems for Canadian Cities, an upcoming report published by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

Watch Randal on Leaders on the Frontier here.

Business

‘Time To Make The Patient Better’: JD Vance Says ‘Big Transition’ Coming To American Economic Policy

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JD Vance on “Rob Schmitt Tonight” discussing tariff results

 

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Hailey Gomez

Vice President JD Vance said Thursday on Newsmax that he believes Americans will “reap the benefits” of the economy as the Trump administration makes a “big transition” on tariffs.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1,679.39 points on Thursday, just a day after President Donald Trump announced reciprocal tariffs against nations charging imports from the U.S. On “Rob Schmitt Tonight,” Schmitt asked Vance about the stock market hit, asking how the White House felt about the “Liberation Day” move.

“We’re feeling good. Look, I frankly thought in some ways it could be worse in the markets, because this is a big transition. You saw what the President said earlier today. It’s like a patient who was very sick,” Vance said. “We did the operation, and now it’s time to make the patient better. That’s exactly what we’re doing. We have to remember that for 40 years, we’ve been doing this for 40 years.”

“American economic policy has rewarded people who ship jobs overseas. It’s taxed our workers. It’s made our supply chains more brittle, and it’s made our country less prosperous, less free and less secure,” Vance added.

Vance recalled that one of his children had been sick and needed antibiotics that were not made in the United States. The Vice President called it a “ridiculous thing” that some medicines invented in the country are no longer manufactured domestically.

“That’s fundamentally what this is about. The national security of manufacturing and making the things that we need, from steel to pharmaceuticals, antibiotics, and so forth, but also the good jobs that come along when you have economic policies that reward investing in America, rather than investing in foreign countries,” Vance said.

WATCH:

With a baseline 10% tariff placed on an estimated 60 countries, higher tariffs were applied to nations like China and Israel. For example, China, which has a 67% tariff on U.S. goods, will now face a 34% tariff from the U.S., while Israel, which has a 33% tariff, will face a 17% U.S. tariff.

“One bad day in the stock market, compared to what President Trump said earlier today, and I think he’s right about this. We’re going to have a booming stock market for a long time because we’re reinvesting in the United States of America. More importantly than that, of course, the people in Wall Street have done well,” Vance said.

“We want them to do well. But we care the most about American workers and about American small businesses, and they’re the ones who are really going to benefit from these policies,” Vance said.

The number of factories in the U.S., Vance said, has declined, adding that “millions of workers” have lost their jobs.

“My town [Middletown, Ohio], where you had 10,000 great American steel workers, and my town was one of the lucky ones, now probably has 1,500 steel workers in that factory because you had economic policies that rewarded shipping our jobs to China instead of investing in American workers,” Vance said. “President Trump ran on changing it. He promised he would change it, and now he has. I think Americans are going to reap the benefits.”

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COVID-19

Trump’s new NIH head fires top Fauci allies and COVID shot promoters, including Fauci’s wife

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From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X. “Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.

On day one of his new job as head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya removed four powerful agency heads, including Dr. Anthony Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, and others associated with the questionable handling of the COVID-19 shots.

Grady, who had served as chief of the agency’s Department of Bioethics, and other longtime Fauci allies in top posts at the NIH involved in the development and distribution of the untested COVID shots produced by Big Pharma were offered jobs in Alaska and other remote locales far away from the NIH’s sprawling Bethesda, Maryland, complex just outside Washington, D.C.

The purge came amid massive layoffs in health-related agencies under the umbrella of Health and Human Services (HHS), now headed by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement’s founder, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long questioned vaccine safety and American medicine’s focus on treating disease rather than preventing it.

A total of about 20,000 personnel – mostly bureaucrats – or about 25 percent of the HHS workforce have been or will be handed pink slips amid Kennedy’s realignment of the agency.

MAHA critics were quick to call Tuesday’s axing of Fauci confederates as “one of the darkest days in modern scientific history” fueled by Kennedy’s desire to exact revenge on Fauci’s former trusted associates who represent the antithesis of the MAHA movement.

However, the revamping of the federal government’s side of the health industry is no more harsh than the treatment meted out by those formerly in control who, at best, suppressed, and worst, punished those who questioned their iron grip on health-industry regulations and standards.

For years, Kennedy’s critics have dismissed his quest to revamp healthcare and his questioning of the efficacy of the COVID-19 mRNA jabs as anti-science, labeling him as an “anti-vaxxer” in order to suppress his messaging.

Dr. Francis Collins – whom Bhattacharya replaced as head of NIH – in an October 2020 email to Fauci condemned Bhattacharya as a “fringe epidemiologist” because he had co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized harmful COVID lockdown policies.

“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X.

“Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.

“We spend 4X more than Italy on healthcare — and live 7 years less. Dead last in cancer rates. This isn’t science — it’s a system profiting off sick kids,” explained Calley Means, RFK Jr. HHS advisor during an interview with Laura Ingraham following the NIH firings.

“Firing the people who oversaw this? That’s step one,” declared Means.

Other NIH officials who were offered reassignments were Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who succeeded Fauci as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Clifford Lane, a close Fauci ally who served as deputy director for clinical research at NIAID, and Dr. Emily Erbelding, NIAID’s microbiology and infectious diseases director.

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