Clarendon, a dense urban neighborhood of about 1,500 people, offered a favorable comparison. Everything we needed was just a short walk away. To be precise: 3.4 minutes, on average.
That’s according to a new study by researchers at Sony’s computer science lab in Rome. They combined population data, millions of points of interest from OpenStreetMap and an open-source routing algorithm to calculate how long it takes to walk to a bundle of amenities — from restaurants and schools to parks and theaters.
The work was inspired by the 15-minute neighborhood, an idea that has gained recent popularity as a means to create more-vibrant communities and reduce passenger vehicle travel, which accounts for about one-sixth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to a recent estimate.
The researchers analyzed cities around the world, and they agreed to share their data for some 200 metro areas in the United States. Together, these areas are home to roughly 60 percent of the U.S. population — apologies if your town is missing. You can explore the data below.
...Many people prefer to live in sprawl because it feels closer to nature. Yet the closer humans live to nature, the more damage they tend to do to it. Sprawl requires lots of land, encroaching on forests, wetlands and prairies. Sprawl helps explain why North America has lost an estimated 3 billion birds in the past half-century.
People, however, do not live according to the preferences of planners. Pew Research Center recently asked 5,079 American adults whether they would prefer to live in a community where the houses are smaller and closer to each other but schools, stores and restaurants are within walking distance — in other words, a 15-minute neighborhood — or where the houses are larger and farther apart but schools, stores and restaurants are several miles away — in other words, sprawl.
Most people, it turned out, preferred sprawl. The only demographic groups in which majorities were willing to give up the larger house for the walkable neighborhood were the young, highly educated and Democratic-leaning.
