A 15-minute-city analyser using OSM data. You gave it a list of everything you wanted to be close to (ie a school, restaurant, doctors office, food store etc.) and it would show you which parts of a given city had all those things with an N minute walk.
Fascist! How dare you suggest I shouldn't ever go further than 15 minutes to access necessary resources to live my life! It's my god given right to spend at least an hour in traffic to get to the doctors...
/s there is actually a whole movement of people in the UK that beleive the very idea of a 15 minute city is a conspiracy to limit their freedoms...
The problem is simply one of putting the cart before the horse. Most people simply can’t afford to live within a 15 minute walk of a doctor’s office and there is no real plan in place to fix that.
The plan is to identify where there are a lot of people living but there aren't any doctors offices within 15 minute walk, and then find the optimal places to open new doctors offices to cover as many people as possible that don't currently have a doctors office within a 15 minute walk.
Nobody’s objecting to just sound urban planning. The problem is when you don’t have it and use license plate readers or physical barricades as a band-aid.
In the UK they're called Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. It's what's at the very heart of the 15 minute city controversy.
Why would people complain about being able to walk to where they need to go? It's obviously being cut off from the places that they aren't able to walk to that people have a problem with. Deflecting from one by pretending it's about the other is a clear sign of bad faith.
Nobody is being cut off from anywhere - their route is being made longer in order to avoid residential areas - their journeys would be quicker if they walked they just don't want to...and that is the point highly polluting journeys are being disincentivised...if you absolutely must drive then you need to set off earlier this isn't an attack on people's civil liberties you have no right to drive somewhere..
Low traffic neighbourhoods and 15 minute cities are entirely different concepts, trying to solve different problems and that have very little to do with each other. You can easily have one without the other.
Deflecting from one by pretending it's about the other is a clear sign of bad faith
Exactly this! It all boils down to people being pissed that their car journey in London takes longer than it used to - nobody is actually being blocked from getting anywhere just their route is being changed - somehow this has been wrapped up in the 15 minute conspiracy...
Not the OP, but I've actually made something like that to help people figure out where to live in London based on the criteria they care about -- here it is https://findmyarea.co.uk/?search_type=areas
Would be great to see similar tools for other cities!
In principle it should be possible to do the same for any city. The hardest part is getting the data and massaging it into shape, which can be somewhat tedious. London is a fairly "easy" city for this due to the large amount of open data that's readily available from the ONS and the like.
This is really cool! Appreciate sharing this work and the explanation.
You mentioned that massaging the data into shape as one of the problems, which I think is possibly one of the best applications of LLMs in my opinion. Creating a pipeline of a data feed (still hard) into an LLM which outputs JSON with the fields of interest would be amazing.
The code never advanced beyond some hack scripts and a Jupyter notebook. Cleaning it up and perhaps making it into web app has been on my todo list for the past 2-3 years. Maybe this reminder will be the kick I need to actually do something about it.
Sorry I don't know how hackernews notifications work, didn't see this reply. But if you see this here's another reminder for you to clean this up into a public demo :)
