Irish Examiner view: 15 minutes of fame for some cities

Urban planning

New traffic layouts making extra room for bikes and buses are being rolled out in Cork under the MacCurtain Street Public Transport Improvement Scheme. Picture: Cork City Council

In the future, our urban and metropolitan areas will look and function differently to the towns and cities of today.

There are irresistible reasons for this: Climate change and the need for green transport; the demand for affordable housing; drastic changes in retail habits and supply; and the lockdown, which has convinced many people that it is better to work from home than commute.

There is no shortage of what former US president George Bush sardonically called “the vision thing”, but when it comes to the detail then matters become complicated and timescales blur. While evidence suggests we should be progressing more quickly, behaviour is more reminiscent of the famous prayer of St Augustine of Hippo: “Give me chastity and temperance, but not yet.”

All around us, incremental changes are taking place. In Cork, the arrival of some cargo bike storage boxes, utilitarian rather than attractive, on St Patrick’s St and Grand Parade has stimulated debate about their role in the future.

The scheme encourages active travel, especially in the retail and business sector, but will also test demand for the transport of goods within cities, something that is already well-trialled with home delivery food services.

Another change, but with much more of an edge to public debate, is the alteration required to roads to permit bus-only lanes, which are a fundamental tenet of the planning revolution to speed passengers from place to place at low cost.

Central to the National Transport Authority’s ambitious €600m plans for 12 sustainable corridors for Cork is a 3.5km Mayfield-to-city centre route that will cut journey times from 35 to 12 minutes. To achieve this, the NTA wants to squeeze in two car lanes and a bus lane while trimming the dimensions of the footpath from the recommended 1.8m to 1.18m in some places, say residents.

Given that double buggies can be 82cm wide, and standard wheelchairs are 62cm from tyre to tyre, this looks very tight, particularly when pedestrians are supposed to be at the apex of road use.

These opening exchanges in public consultation are a foretaste of what might be facing us around Ireland. Cork is one of the Republic’s five locations — the others are Dublin, Galway, Limerick, and Waterford — deemed appropriate for the concept of the “15-minute city”, a topic that excites urban planners and environmentalists alike and which, on the face of it, should eventually produce a better quality of life.

The concept gains its working name from the fact that a mile is more or less the limit that many of us will walk to access goods and services, particularly groceries, fresh food, entertainment and healthcare. Beyond that we revert to motor vehicles, buses and trains. But if you can gain most of what you need, including education, within a one-mile radius, then what’s not to like?

Of course, this implies a higher density of population to support such enterprises and make them viable, which gives some people pause. And then there are suggestions, gaining momentum across the internet and through the views of sceptical politicians, that this will become a precursor to constraints on social mobility and private transport.

Some town planners were very quick to exploit pandemic restrictions with the accelerated rollout of low-traffic neighbourhoods and rapid expansion of bike lanes and they have been hawkish in their anti-car rhetoric. Paris leads the way in Europe on this (the idea was invented in the Sorbonne) and has promoted “la ville du quart d’heure” since 2016.

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In England, Oxford has coupled plans to reduce congestion with digital surveillance, bringing protestors onto the streets in their thousands proclaiming that penalties are on their way for people who move out of their arrondissements and council wards, or that this is the start of very localised road tolling. Other critics view this as yet more social engineering.

All of this is dangerous, because it could distract us from reaching necessary decisions because of arguments over personal autonomy and liberty. The architects, designers, and drafters of a future in which Ireland’s population is going to grow by one million within 20 years must beware of candle ending the specifications for their pet projects.

Not only will that reinforce suspicion, but it will also build resistance to changes for which hearts and minds have to be won. And the opportunity to improve life from the compact and amenity-rich neighbourhood upwards will be at best sadly delayed and, at worst, lost.