Contradiction: Copenhagen, notably walkable and bikeable city, was razed in the first half of the 20th century for parking and roads to make it more like an american city of today. They rebuilt before being the active transport friendly city that is now is.

Right now, I can get almost anything in a twenty minute walk, the only exceptions are a bakery and a hardware store. And I only upped it by five minutes so I could include the pharmacy and coffeeshop. And this is in an underdeveloped neighborhood, full of vacant lots and detached SFHs with yards. The dream is possible, the problem is getting people to see it and developers to build it.

To get to a 15min city in North American towns and cities we need to have a deeper look at city zoning.

We need more mixed neighbourhoods, and we need to get away from large suburban sprawl that has no transite options within the development.

Current suburban areas need to start looking at adding “missing middle” housing between the large swaths of single family homes. (Missingle middle housing is low rise housing generaly no taller the 5-6 floors and no larger then a single family home plot of land). We need train stations, trams and subways to run inside, and underneath these types of developments.

We need to look deeply into roadway classifications. We need to stop designing every single roadway as a “strode” with hwy specifications. We need to clearly have a different design for hwys/roadways/roads/streets. We need low density and traffic calmed streets where people congregation, we need city streets that are closed to traffic during certain hours or months.

We need to look at the implementation of pedestrian greenways, these are walkways that don’t run next to a road and are usually green and enjoyable to walk or cycle along. We need better and wider sidewalks with clear buffer zones from higher traffic roads. We need sidewalks that don’t have utility polls right in the cemter.

The addition of pedestrian crossways needs to implement. These are pedestrian crossing areas that are located between intersections. These crossways need to be built with a “pedestrian first priority”. Automobile traffic needs to understand to slow down and stop fully till a pedestrians makes it fully to the other side, only then can the automobile proceed.

All signalised traffic intersections need to be set to no right turns on a red, and all left turns need to be signalised. Pedestrian signals need to be to a “advanced start”, and automobile traffic needs to be educated to allow a pedestrian to cross fully to the other side before proceddding. Roundabouts need to become second nature in city planing and implemented as much as possible (these are cheaper and safer then signalised intersections).

Any city or town can become walkable, the problem is that a walkable city and a “enjoyable city” are two different things.

The trouble really is that in North America we have become so accustomed to our infrastructure that we fail to see the shortcomings of our designs. We all treat it as normal to live in a suburban area and have to drive 40min to get to the closest Walmart to pickup two things, or to drop the kids of at school with the car when its only 10min for them to walk.

Edit: If you think your city is “walkable”, but it looks like the pictures within this website link below then its on the really low end.

https://www.boredpanda.com/unwalkable-city-pedestrians-the-happy-urbanist/