20-Minute Living

What if you didn’t have to drive anywhere? What if you could bike to work, and the grocery store, and the doctor’s office? What if your kids could skateboard to school? How does a stroll downtown for dinner and a movie sound? Need to travel a distance? Walk to the train station, which can get you to the nearest city or to the airport.

This is the way of life supported by the planning concept called “20-minute living,” a term coined by the Portland, Oregon-based real estate development firm Gerding Edlen to describe neighborhoods in which everything residents need is within 20 minutes of their homes. Not only are these neighborhoods convenient; they are planned with people in mind. As Allison Arieff put it in a post on BNet, “Less time in transit means more time for family and friends, and less wear and tear on you and the planet. Or, as we like to call it, the good life.”

In 20-minute neighborhoods like Davis and Los Altos, California, Portland, Oregon’s Hawthorne neighborhood and Victoria, B.C.’s Dockside Green, there is an emphasis on being outside, on compact, mixed-use downtowns populated with lots of local vendors and businesses, and on green living. The bike population in Davis is thought to be larger than the human population. The Green-Town Los Altos program challenges its residents “to reduce waste, water and energy use.” Hawthorne’s Livethe20 Blog highlights organic food delivery services and innovative apartment and parking garage designs. Dockside Green operates “as a total environment system...a largely self-sufficient, sustainable community where waste from one area will provide fuel for another.”

Of course it takes a lot longer than 20 minutes for neighborhoods like these to become established—try 20 years (or 30 or 40) of community dialogue, design, investment and planning for healthy growth patterns to take root and for quality of life to become a shared responsibility. So says Jeff Loux, director of the Land Use and Natural Resources Program at the University of California at Davis Extension. But all that work pays off in countless ways and for many generations.

Here are a few stats to drive (or bike or walk) this point home:

• As a nation, we waste $87 billion annualy on lost productivity and fuel while stuck in traffic.
• For every 10 minutes of a commute, there is a 10 percent loss in time spent engaged in community or social activities.
• Eliminating a commute by car could afford the average American with 4 extra hours a week and the atmosphere 12,000 less pounds of CO² emissions a year.
• Suburban moms, on average, spend 17 days behind the wheel each year (much of it ferrying kids thither and yon), which is more time than the average American parent spends bathing, feeding and clothing a child.
• In walkable towns, 68 percent of a resident’s dollars are spent locally, and a whole bunch of calories are burned locally as well.

Still need convincing? Here are a couple studies, one from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute and the other from the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership (STPP).