by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
At Club 20 in the 1990s, we often fought against diverting highway funds for non-highway purposes, such as mass transit. We reminded national officials that “there will never be a Japanese bullet train from Slick Rock to Egnar.” They had never heard of either place, of course, so it was a succinct way to explain that what might work in Boston and New York can never work in Colorado, or anywhere in the West, where cities evolved around the automobile. People here do not live 20 floors above their offices.
Even in Denver, hundreds of thousands of people live in single-family homes strung out one after another, mile after mile, and workers commute great distances along the Front Range every day. Suburban commuters in Jefferson, Arapahoe, and Adams counties drive an average of nearly 30 minutes each way every day. It’s closer to 40 minutes for commuters in Elbert and Park counties, and the story is similar in towns all across the West.
It is questionable whether cities should have been laid out that way, but it is reality. We have spent decades arguing about how to better plan for “smart growth,” but in a free and mobile society, the government simply has no way to stop people from living where they want to live and driving where they want to go. If we planned new cities from scratch, we might have better foresight.
In fact, in the early 20th-century, “neighborhood unit” theory became an academic subject even before the automobile took over. It was mostly theoretical, but in 2016, Professor Carlos Moreno, at the Sorbonne in Paris, coined a new term, proposing the “15-minute city.” He wrote of a city planning model where residents could reach almost all their daily needs — work, shopping, doctors, churches, government offices, parks, and schools — within a 15-minute walk or bike ride.
