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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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When reading Is Seattle a 15-minute city? this morning, I couldn't help thinking about what's missing from it. For context, the 15-minute city is an urbanist idea about making every residential area a 15-minute walk to important amenities like grocery stores. It's a good idea if it could be achieved without incurring too many other costs, and it's the other costs that I couldn't help thinking about. Specifically, crime.

The metric "walking time to the nearest supermarket" I'm sure correlates closely to rate of property crimes. Where I live, homeless encampments tend to spring up close to grocery stores. These things are related.

I'm very sympathetic to concerns about car dependence, and how much better life could be if housing was built closer to stores, schools, and workplaces. But the problem is always crime. Requiring a car to get to a place disproportionately screens out would-be criminals, even if it also screens out some upstanding citizens who cannot or will not drive. Suburbia is the epitome of this phenomenon, where everything is too far from anything else to live without a car. In cities that are naturally denser, there are constant fights over zoning that dance around this issue but don't address it directly (at least when the participants are nominally progressive and need to be seen as non-discriminatory).

There's a more general point here, which is this: discrimination is required for a well-functioning society. I'm using 'discrimination' in the more technical sense here, as "To make a clear distinction; distinguish." The concept of statistical discrimination covers a lot of what I mean here, but discrimination based on signaling is important too.

Statistical discrimination is basically using Bayesian inference, using information that's already available or easy to get, to make inferences about hidden or illegible traits that predict some important outcome. In the context of walkability, people who don't own cars are more likely to commit crimes or to be bad customers and neighbors than people who do own cars. So you end up with a better-behaving local population if you require a car.

By discrimination based on signaling I mean things like choice of clothing, personal affect and mannerism, accent, vocabulary, presence of tattoos, etc. These things are useful for statistical discrimination, but they're under conscious control of the person in question, and they're hard to fake. They basically prove "skin in the game" for group membership. It takes time and effort to develop a convincing persona that will get you accepted into a different social class, and higher social classes have much stricter standards of behavior. Basically the guy speaking in Received Pronunciation, with no tattoos, who uses PMC vocabulary and dresses in upper-middle-class business attire is very unlikely to rob you, because it would be very costly to him. He'd lose his valuable class status for doing something so base.

Why is discrimination required for a well-functioning society? Because every choice is almost by definition discriminatory, and preferentially making positive-sum choices leads to a positive-sum society. Imagine if you made zero assumptions about a new person you met, aside from "this is a human." You wouldn't be able to talk to them (you'd be assuming their language), you wouldn't know what kind of etiquette to use, you'd have no idea whether they're going to kill you for doing something they consider obscene; you wouldn't be able to get any value out of the interaction. If instead you inferred based on their appearance that they're a middle-class elderly American woman who speaks English, you could immediately make good choices about what to talk about with them.

I'm sure this is all pretty obvious to anyone rationalist-adjacent, but I had a confusing conversation with a more left-leaning relative recently who seemed to have internalized a lot of the leftist ideas that are basically of the form "statistical discrimination is useless." Setting aside topics outside the Overton window like HBD, even for questions like "does the fact that a person committed a crime in the past change the likelihood they'll commit a crime in the future, all else equal?" the assumption seemed to be "no." Michael Malice's assertion seems to be true, that answering "are some people better than others" is the most precise way to distinguish right-wing from left-wing.

Bringing this to the culture war, there is a scientific or factual answer to every question "does observable fact X predict outcome Y", and pointing out that leftist assumptions contradict the evidence is how to convince reasonable people that the leftist assumption is false. I'm speaking as a person living in one of the most left-leaning places in the country, so the false leftist assumptions are the ones that most harm my life. Rightist assumptions of course also contradict the evidence, but I don't have salient examples.

The astute observer will note that most of the leftist intellectual movement of the last 50 years is trying to poison the evidence (via ad hominem and other fallacious arguments). How can one improve the quality of evidence when the wills of so many high-status people are set against it?

P.S. I'm sorry for the emotional tone of this post. This community is the only place I have to talk about this and I appreciate your thoughts.

Back when I made the unfortunate decision to live in Seattle, I did actually live less than a 15-minute walk from a supermarket. And I literally never walked to it, because Seattle is full of steep hills similar to San Francisco's and even if it wasn't you can only carry so much in a single trip. Asking if it is a 15 minute cit is asking "Do you want to make a 30 minute round trip to the grocery store on foot every three days?" And I'm guessing for most Americans the answer is a resounding no.

If everything is within a 15 minute walking distance, the average person is only going to be a 7.5 minute walk from each thing.

the average person is only going to be a 7.5 minute walk from each thing

That's for one dimension. Wikipedia suggests that the number is 10 minutes in two dimensions.

Not if your neighbourhood is a grid.

A grid is two-dimensional, not one-dimensional. The number of walkable destinations still increases with the second power of distance, not with the first power.

(The abstraction could break down if the city's blocks are gigantic—but Wikipedia suggests that a typical block size is 1/8 mile × 1/16 mile, which is much smaller than the distance of 1/2 mile that ASTM uses as the limit of walkability, so I think the abstraction remains valid.)

The number of walkable destinations does not increase with the square of the distance. It increases linearly until you're halfway to the maximum distance and then it decreases linearly.

Imagine a grid of grocery stores each half a mile apart. For each grocery store, there is a half mile by half mile square area that is closer to it than to any other grocery store. Each corner of this area is a quarter mile in each direction from the grocery store.

Now we can divide this area into four squares and use the average distance from the grocery store to a point within one of the squares as the average distance from the grocery store to a point within the larger area, because it's symmetrical.

Now, split the square into two triangles, with one triangle containing the grocery store and the other containing the point farthest from the grocery store. The square is symmetrical with respect to the diagonal line dividing the two triangles, so we know that the distance from the grocery store to any point on that diagonal line is equal to the average distance from the grocery store to any point within the square.

Since you can only travel in a direction that is parallel or perpendicular to the lines connecting the points of the grid, the distance to any point on this line is a quarter mile. So the average distance from a grocery store to any point closer to that grocery store than any other is a quarter mile.

This rough sketch appears to vindicate me.

You're assuming the grid of grocery stores is rotated 45 degrees relative to the grid of city blocks, when it would make more sense to for them to be aligned.

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Right. When we go to grocery store, we do it twice a month, we load up the back of our car with anything we could need for two weeks or more, and we also can visit several stores because one has good meat, another good veggies and another good dog food, etc. Replacing all of it with a walk to single supermarket with as much stuff as we could carry in our hands (actually I could, my wife couldn't carry much for that far) would be an insane drop in our quality of life. And while we're not very young, we're also not old yet and mostly healthy. What about those who are less healthy and agile than us? This is one of those "good ideas" that can seem good to a college freshman but dissolves quickly one you apply it to real people living a real life.

I think you're comparing apples and oranges a bit.

In cities where people shop by foot shops are not placed randomly but in close proximity to public transit, so what happens is that you shop much more frequently as part of another activity, such as going to and from work, which means you shop way less each time and that you won't have very heavy bags to carry.

This of course means that turning a car focused city into a "15 minute city" requires far more fundamental changes than just adding shops and this might not be viable or even thought of by the proponents, which is likely to make changes in that direction just make things worse.

you shop much more frequently as part of another activity, such as going to and from work

That is provided you can choose where you work and it's in a place near grocery store which carries all the things you need. And, of course, you have time and energy left after a full workday (or an energy to raise earlier - provided the store is open at that hour, and your workplace has storage facilities to store groceries for all the workers' shopping needs) to do the shopping. And you never buy anything you can't transport in your hands through an hour of commute.

At one period of my life, I have been commuting from my house in Bay Area to San Francisco office, on public transport. About an hour door to door. I've seen thousands of people doing the same commute. I don't remember many of them carrying groceries with them.

That is provided you can choose where you work and it's in a place near grocery store which carries all the things you need.

No, that's an Ameirca/Canadian/Australian thing. Explore, "walk" with google street view, clicking forward around in Istanbul, Chelyabinsk, Kyoto, random places in Africa whose names I don't know... There are grocery stores with better, cheaper and more variety of food than US supermarkets everywhere. It's mindboggling.

Ljubljana: https://www.google.com/maps/search/supermarket/@46.0395398,14.4861671,15z search "spar", "mercator", "hoffer". You're rarely 2000 ft from multiple markets at any point. And those are just the chains. There are then plenty of independent butchers, some farmers markets etc.

This is how most of the world is.

Here's Szeged, a city in Hungary: https://www.google.com/maps/search/supermarket/@46.2584053,20.1461581,14z searching grocery will give you different locations - near the same.

Now Guadalajara, Mexico https://www.google.com/maps/search/grocery/@20.6755284,-103.3554495,15z

try mercado and tanguis, but a lot of stuff isn't actually there. Almost every corner will have a shop selling meat, dairy and fruit - often on a corner.

There are grocery stores with better, cheaper and more variety of food than US supermarkets everywhere

I've never been to Kyoto (maybe one day), but I severely doubt it about Chelyabinsk. I haven't been there either, but I have been to many many other Soviet city, and central planned system does not allow too much variety. So the way it works in Soviet cities (I am talking about 20th century of course, post-Soviet period is a bit different - the places are the same but the patterns shifted a bit) is that you have one bigger store (compared to US supermarket like Safeway) per micro-district and a bunch of smaller specialized stores (basically, bread, milk, eggs, basic veggies, you're done). The smaller stores are within ~10 mins walk from your dwelling usually. The bigger one would be about 20 minutes walk (on average, you could happen to live right next to it - or have to walk more, but probably no more than 30 minutes). No public transportation whatsoever within the micro-district whatsoever, if you can't walk for 20 minutes loaded with all the groceries that you need, you are so much screwed. Find someone who can, or subsist on the basic choices available in the mini-stores. The choice in the larger store would be about as good as in a below average US supermarket, with corrections for local conditions of course. The situation is a bit different if you live in the center of the city (majority of people don't since it'd be a) very expensive and b) there's just not that much residential space in the center) or in the places which are not part of the system of the micro-districts for reasons of remoteness or history. In the former, you'd probably have access to closer stores, in the latter you'd have to go farther.

The situation has changed a bit in post-Soviet times due to several factors: 1. people got access to personal transportation (of course nobody planned the parking nearly enough to cover the needs, so the parking situation usually would be not ideal) 2. There's now informal public transportation networks supplementing official transportation and 3. There are private markets and mini-stores popping up everywhere, which are usually hideously ugly, but significantly improve access to goods and groceries.

I don't understand this comment. Today is now, not 30 years ago. But you doubt things have changed while you give the historical background of what it was 30 years ago, then say it changed?!

The situation has changed a bit in post-Soviet times

Yes...?

You don't carry them on the commute, there are supermarkets at literally every subway stop.

You get off at your stop, get your groceries from the supermarket right by the station and walk home with them.

Generally I would say that even the smaller stores carry 99% of what you would need but there can be reasons for you to go to a larger store occasionally anyway. I go to a larger store and buy a bunch of meat to keep in the freezer and larger packages of non-perishables, because those items significantly cheaper in the larger store.

And it only gets worse when you get married and have kids. I briefly had to bike to the supermarket almost daily to buy meat and vegetables and other sundries for our family of five. It was a short bike ride, but the sheer amount of stuff required ghetto engineering to get home. Several time I had to lash a box of diapers to the back of my bike because my basket and backpack were full. First world problem, perhaps, but simply living close isn't always enough to make walking or biking convenient. We have a car now and life is way easier.

Sorry that's just a poor excuse. There are plenty of bikes in Europe which have cargo space.

https://electrek.co/2020/11/21/bunch-the-coupe-cargo-e-bike-dutch-design/

The fundamental problem is that the US is a car-centric society and too many Americans try to find ways to keep it that way.

There's a good intro/overview of these bikes, which are quite common in the Netherlands, here:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=rQhzEnWCgHA

Sorry, but no, it's really not. I was living in Tokyo at the time, and Japan is not really a car-centric society. Not only do they not sell bikes like that in Japan (never seen one in years living there) but the sidewalks and parking areas are way too small for something like that.

Congrats to the Netherlands I guess, but not every country has been built around bikes in the same way and so you can't extrapolate what works in the Netherlands to other non-car-centric countries.

Also not to get personal but I'm tempted to ask whether you have personally spent a year carting groceries back and forth on a giant tricycle for your spouse and children. Have you done it with a 39 degree fever? Have you done it when it's raining? Freezing cold and snowing? While heavily pregnant? When your spouse is travelling and you've got no one to watch the kids? It's not as easy as "get a giant trike bro."

I don't know much about cargo bikes, nor do I care about them in particular. But either way, I'm sure most people who use them are villagers who have their own closed yards.

Would you be surprised to know that urbanists scoff at most of those things? Here's NJB saying "cold weather is just an excuse; the real problem is inadequate bike infrastructure". Here's him again saying "it sucks to have to walk or bike in the rain, but by golly, it's simply better to force me to exercise". I wouldn't be surprised if they came up with other defenses against objections of someone being pregnant or has a 39-degree fever. And that's if they consider them at all and don't just say "okay but most of the time you don't have these conditions; really you're just being lazy".

For the record, I agree with you and do not agree with NJB; I'm presenting this because I've spent way too long trying to get into the headspace of online urbanists and can recite most of their arguments from memory.

There might be a lot of them in Europe, but they certainly are not evenly distributed. For one thing, nobody is riding a cargo bicycle in Eastern Europe. It’s simply not a thing. Babushkas are pushing carts like in these photos, middle aged drunkards carry vodka in plastic shopping bags hanging from the handlebars of their bicycles. Everyone who can afford it drives. If you can’t drive, and live in a city, you can walk 5 minutes to a grocery store that carries extremely limited selection of food, which is fine, because you can’t afford much anyway (otherwise you’d have driven to a proper supermarket).

Frankly, I often get a feeling that Americans seriously underestimate how much Europeans actually drive (especially ones outside London, Paris or Amsterdam, which is to say, overwhelming majority of them), and what makes them choose other modes of transportation than driving (spoiler: most of the time it is simply the cost).

Also, forgot to mention: where do you think people are supposed to keep those big, heavy cargo bikes? Most of the apartment buildings in Europe don’t even have elevators.

This probably varies by country, but all the apartment buildings I've lived in have had an elevator, and only a handful of the ones I've even visited would have lacked one, generally older buildings in city centres.

If I had a cargo bike I'd keep it in the same place as my regular bike, the bike storage room in the basement (which is where we keep our two-seater pram, which is too big to fit our elevator.)

Also, forgot to mention: where do you think people are supposed to keep those big, heavy cargo bikes? Most of the apartment buildings in Europe don’t even have elevators.

Outdoors. It depends which city you live in but crime tends to be significantly lower than in the US generally speaking. That said, I agree with your points that some naïve center-left Americans have a very rose-tinted view of how car-dependent cities are in Europe, even in fairly progressive cities. But there has certainly been a huge amount of progress and it just keeps snowballing.

what makes them choose other modes of transportation than driving (spoiler: most of the time it is simply the cost).

This isn't so obvious anymore, depending on your class situation. There's more than enough of "climate conscious" middle-class families with fairly comfortable incomes who may have a car for occasional usage, but who typically use bikes and public transportation for most daily needs. It also depends whether we're talking about someone owning a house or not. Most families in big cities live in large apartments.

Outdoors. It depends which city you live in but crime tends to be significantly lower than in the US generally speaking.

Nobody does this. Use Google Street View to walk through a random residential neighborhood in Europe, and count bicycles outside. Check out Torino, or Bielefeld, or Bydgoszcz, or Ghent... wait, actually, unlike the other places, Ghent does seem to have a lot of bicycles everywhere I check. After more searching, it seems to me that some cities do have outdoors bicycles everywhere, and other places have basically zero bicycles, and it very much depends on the country more so than on the crime rate. No cargo bikes, though, even in places which have lots of bikes in general. In any case, outdoors bicycle are not a thing at Europe in general, though they are common in Belgium, Netherlands and Denmark.

That said, I agree with your points that some naïve center-left Americans have a very rose-tinted view of how car-dependent cities are in Europe, even in fairly progressive cities.

I think a lot of it is that even if they have first hand experience with Europe, it is in places that are highly atypical, like Paris, London, Copenhagen, etc. Places like Bielefeld or Bydgoszcz are much closer to what the typical European lifestyle is like, and it does involve a whole lot of driving to get to places.

There's more than enough of "climate conscious" middle-class families with fairly comfortable incomes who may have a car for occasional usage, but who typically use bikes and public transportation for most daily needs.

This is somewhat true about people living in top metros, because driving and parking there is simply hell, but in more typical places (like Bielefeld or Bydgoszcz), public transit is shit compared to driving, and is only used by students and retirees.

I don't really like to bike for groceries but that is mostly because I dislike biking not because of the issue you had which is easily solvable by getting some kind of side bags.

I did this for a few months in Seattle too, and it was ridiculous. Like what are these walkers even buying, single serving microwaved meals and a pack of orange juice? I needed a hiking backpack to be able to haul milk, rice, and flour bags (walking 15 minutes with one of those and seeing how much flour you have left is always fun!)

And that was 20 year old me. What's an 80 year old woman in the same situation supposed to do, hop on her skateboard with a turkey under her arm?

Everyone going "oh, just spend 30 minutes walking to and from the store every day instead of shopping once a week" needs to take an economics class, or maybe they just don't see other people's time as having any value. Which would explain the Seattle bus system, come to think of it...

Plus the week after I moved out of that strip along I5, a guy got mugged on my store route. If people want to mandate how we live according to their urbanist fantasies, they should bloody well be made to fix their own cities first.

Our carfree home's solution to this is simply ordering most of our groceries using home delivery. Big delivery once every two weeks, costs 10-11 € per delivery which is partially recouped by the greater ability to select offers and cheap goods when shopping online as compared to being distracted by shit in the store, small replenishments throughout the week when coming back home to work etc.

Isn't home delivery an option in a lot of places? One would think that Covid would have made it more common.

I just stop by the store after work and grab enough for a few meals, a couple steaks, some veggies and other needs. Not sure why this seems weird.

I don't think things being within a 15 minute walking distance means people can't drive if they prefer.

I don't think things being within a 15 minute walking distance means people can't drive if they prefer.

It does, because the anti-car people are correct when they note that the space used for cars means distances must be greater.

I did this for a few months in Seattle too, and it was ridiculous. Like what are these walkers even buying, single serving microwaved meals and a pack of orange juice? I

I do not understand this 'discourse'.

There's a LIDL almost exactly 15 minutes away from my place.

If I went there with a hiking backpack - one of those big 60 liter backpacks I could probably cram in enough food for 10 days. Maybe even 14 if I went for dense stuff.

As things are, I have my old backpack - maybe 20l, and maybe a 15l ancient black shoulder bag for the lighter stuff. I can, without much trouble, get enough food for 5-6 days.

Sure, it's fairly heavy - if I'm buying for 5 days, it's 25 lbs. Half of that is milk, but in any case 25 lbs is no big deal to a guy unless he has muscular dystrophy or something like that.

If you were buying bottled water for a week in summer, you could make a case of walking being impractical, but I say bottled water is a scam and if your water is that bad, get a filter.

While I get the utility of cars, if I lived in the same spot I live in now and had a family, I could still do a weekly grocery run by simply getting a bigger backpack.

My record in load carrying was 120 lbs. Well, wasn't pleasant but hey, probably not hazardous to one's health seeing as soldiers do that all the time and they spend way, way more than 40 minutes a week on that.

Ehhh, I don't know, groceries are pretty heavy if you cook at home all the time. I'm not usually the kind to make a big deal about small inconveniences, but back when I was biking, I decided to switch from potatoes to pasta or rice so that I wouldn't have to carry the extra water weight. Much, much easier to have it piped in or brought in a car. This was a young man with no kids who biked 20 miles to work every day.

So fantasies about painful hourlong trips to carry back-breaking groceries back home for a (very suburban) once-a-week shopping trip are just that.

When I was living in a city, there was a small convenience store five minutes away, with prohibitively-high prices for my limited budget and very poor selection. If I wanted actual food, I needed to either walk 30 minutes uphill to the actual grocery store, or more frequently, take public transit to the other grocery store, at an hour and a half round-trip, which involved pulling a 40-60-lb shopping caddy up multiple flights of stairs and about a quarter-kilometer of 30-degree incline, often in the rain.

That really seems like a specifically American experience to me. I've lived in various cities all over Germany and Europe and never been in a situation where the next grocery store offering about 95% of what I'd buy in a month is farther away than 10 minutes on foot. From where I'm currently sitting in Berlin there are no less than 6 medium-sized supermarkets of varying price- and quality-ranges within that radius. In the north-eastern countryside where I spent parts of my youth every third village had a store run by one of the large German chains, so even for rural residents it was either 5 minutes by foot or 10 by car.

Well, Canadian in this case. Vancouver.

This is the same in the UK. Wherever I've lived, the closest shop has always been much more expensive than a larger supermarket, to the point where milk was double the price in the local corner shop compared to the nearest supermarket

I loved it when I did it. I lived about four minutes from a grocery store and it was very convenient.

In most dense cities the walk to the grocery store is more like 5 minutes than 15

Not a chance, unless you're counting convenience stores.

When I lived in a big dense city, I had two convenience stores within a 30 second walk of my apartment and five grocery stores within a five minute walk. One of them was pretty big.

To be fair, until just last year the authoritative North American Industry Classification System did include both supermarkets and convenience stores within the overarching "grocery stores" category, so there is precedent for this nomenclature. (The 2022 edition of the NAICS now calls the overarching category "grocery and convenience retailers".)

5 minutes is true for my experience of urban Europe and Asia. In both one can drive further to a big box store and do weekly shopping, but walkable grocery stores are near major walking commute routes and sell quantities of food that the single person can carry back to their home.

I usually buy fresh groceries daily 5 min from my house (but 10 seconds off my route) on my commute home and nonperishables 1.5 hours away by bus once a month.