15 Minute City

So we've arrived at Gollum's "we're not in decent places" moment in the discourse.

Fair enough, though I’d like to be clearer about where I’m coming from, I think. When it comes to these projects there’s always a bunch of people who act like someone saying “wouldn’t this be neat?” hasn’t thought of these things or would otherwise think of them as something you could do over a weekend. Like, we know that it will take effort and there’s already so much effort going into objectively wrong, but familiar, projects that we can divert to doing good things. So when someone busts in trying to discourage these projects it’s kinda frustrating. We used to destroy whole neighbourhoods for god-awful highways but a little work to make a community greenspace is always “way too hard”. And while some of your points were at least factual when you said “trees take time to grow” I really had to wonder a) how stupid you think I am and b) how stupid you might be.

To address your last point how often has profit really been a terribly good motivator when it takes longer than twenty minutes to see a return even if that return is guaranteed and far greater? I see the private sector constantly doing extremely stupid things because the people who have all the money usually didn’t earn it and all too often think of themselves as geniuses who shouldn’t be questioned so bad ideas happen all the time. Highway expansions, for example, have a fucking terrible return on investment, at most only barely helping for a year, yet they’re always the go-to. Another golden example is how every single fucking time a pedestrian street is proposed the business owners get pissed off and every single time it happens anyway they actually end up making more money because of it. Just because something is or isn’t happening isn’t a super great indicator for how good an idea it is.

There’s also the point to make that if the landowners can’t be responsible with it then maybe we should do something about that. I’m not saying we need to do away with private business entirely but things paid for with taxes don’t need to be profitable but they do need to provide real value and that’s kinda awesome. Projects like this improve the lives of everyone living nearby and do real good for the people living there which can have immense indirect economic value. A golden example would be USPS, a service which serves everyone and doesn’t avoid or gouge “non-profitable areas” like a private mail service would(and don’t get me started on the theft that is the brokerage fee). Here in Canada the CBC makes sure that people all over the country have access to news and culture even when it doesn’t make them money because that’s important to us as human beings.