The 15-Minute City: Does Raleigh Pull It Off?

Raleigh, North Carolina.

It’s a city of over 482,000 people¹ (more than 1 million if you include the Triangle as a whole) and based on census data, travel time to the workplace is over 23 minutes for the average person.

Adding the back and forth, that’s 23 hours, every month, spent going to the workplace and back home without any other stops or errands.

So for the busiest parts of every week day, most people (64%) sit alone for 46 minutes, after 8 hours (probably) spent in an office.

But did you notice what I left out? The driving bit.

Why? Because I know you assumed it was driving. If you live in America, we all assume these times to be about driving and based on the data below, how could we not?

Let’s pretend that we live in a city where not only can you get to your work in 15 minutes but you can also go for a grocery run, a beer run, and heck… even a run run.

All of this without ever needing to drive.

Downtown Raleigh consists of 7 major³ areas:

These areas are where, if the concept exists, you’d expect to find it in.

To fit the prospect of a 15 minute city you need a mix of three things:

But let’s start simple.

Using a tool that launched just last year⁴ for nationwide travel time, we can get a rough idea based on walk-ability to grocery stores, something all of us need to visit.

As you can see, walking to a grocery store in 15 minutes is actually quite possible… if that is your only point of reference and you live in one of these exact blocks. However, we start to lose part of Oakwood and East Raleigh based solely on this one metric.

And as established above, we need more than just groceries to pass.

But notice what happens when we add just two more variables, any public school (pre-k through high schools) plus pharmacies, both things a family would use.

The 15 minutes or less drops dramatically to just the green and blue areas.

With just 3 basic metrics, we have ruled out portions of every single district in Raleigh, except for parts of Glenwood South and the Fayetteville Street Corridor.

If you ignore the safety of the shared bike lanes for a moment, we do open things back up to most of the districts again. However, the issue presented now is totally different.

You can get their faster, but who actually is going to do it regularly?

Based on stats at the top, less than 1% of people commute with a bike to work (0.6% of people nationwide⁵). As of 2021, Raleigh even has an initiative to help lower the accidents related to pedestrian and motor vehicles due to record traffic deaths⁶.

Clearly the incentive is not there for commuting via bike and the safety hasn’t been either (even with the expanded scooter and biking vendors around town).

This is the policy and planning coming back to bite us. You just can’t force a situation the city was not intended or built for and you can’t force people into it.

I’m gonna keep this one short.

We should have had rapid transit years ago (it’s maybe here by 2035⁷ but it’s hit yet another snag⁸). Plus, in a moment of uniquely western problems, the bus we got for the BRT system has been added to a normal route due to having no BRT lanes to occupy.¹⁰

Plus, one look at this reddit thread⁹ via the images below, shows why this can’t even be considered on a 15-minute time frame in it’s current form.

14 minute drive or 51 minute bus drive to work at 5:48AM?

The chicken and egg problem, as stated below:

I have hope that GoRaleigh has the shared goal of a better transit system, they do make money off the rides after all.

Charlotte has managed to make it work with their light rail (despite recent safety issues), and Raleigh is ever-growing due to the variety of family friendly things to do here.¹¹

Let’s say we get a MLB team in here¹⁹, land a new tech campus, build more affordable housing, and the game changes every time something shifts.

That’s where the hope lies, continued progress.

It may seem like a lot of doom and gloom for the short term, and it honestly might be (call me an optimistic realist). But for all of these issues, someone has already solved it.

And that is something to celebrate.

Copenhagen, Denmark is the most extreme example of a bike friendly city (don’t worry, we’ll draw our comparisons from US cities in a moment) with a whopping 67% of all people biking for their commute.

But it wasn’t always this way.

In the 1960s, the city was going the full direction of the automobile¹² but instead of continually widening the lanes and adding parking lots, they tried a different approach and focused on pedestrian infrastructure.

People thought the traffic would get worse with the less lanes, in fact it got better. They thought that businesses would suffer, but they boomed.

As more options became available to not use a car, the traffic started to clear, to the point that areas once covered with roadways now look like the below image today¹³.

It’s a fair question.

We went car dependent decades ago. You live in the suburbs and you drive to the city, it’s just the way it is and it’s the way it’s always been.

But in just 3 short years¹⁵, Cleveland, Ohio has revolutionized what it means to make meaningful progress towards a 15-minute city.

In 2022, the idea was proposed. 2023, their city council removed minimum parking requirements (yes, certain buildings legally require you to build parking, even if you don’t intend to use it, driving up costs and eating up land).

In 2024, land use and zoning laws changed to allow transit and shopping corridors of the city to enable denser mixed use development. To top it all off, they even have a website dedicated to the initiative and one of the coolest ArcGIS based websites¹⁴ I’ve seen.

This isn’t to say all things are perfect, but there is progress and goal setting happening as well as support from the city and it’s leaders. It’s cooperation. It’s a realization that 100 year old zoning laws don’t have to be the norm anymore.

From what I can find, as of 2024 entire districts are being staged to work towards this goal, the Cuyahoga Riverfront in Cleveland, being one of them.

But movement on this scale takes years and in the case of the riverfront, they project at least 15 years to see it to completion.

So, let’s start now, better late than never after all?

We already have pockets of success and with recent wins like the recent rezoning of Peace Street, which will allow new apartments and density downtown, we can mirror the success of these other locations.

This Peace Street location specifically is next to grocery, it’s on a future transit corridor, and Smoky Hollow Park¹⁶, a project that (while it keeps hitting delays) seems to have funding to start the first phase of construction in 2026.

All of this together? Increased density, which drives transit need, which drives better support for it, which further decreases the time needed to make it anywhere else.

In turn, new areas start to crop up that can now be “15-minute” journeys, walking becomes easier due to public green ways, biking trips can avoid main roads, and new businesses can move in to fill the gaps by the growing affordable housing.

More people saving money in walking distance, means more people spending at local businesses, and it continues to flow like this.

Combine all of this with recent efforts of addressing the missing middle problem, to allow more affordable housing and less restrictive zoning laws¹⁷ , you have most of the key parts of a 15-minute city within reach.

Psst, if you want to read all about the missing middle, check out Raleigh Forward¹⁸, who already has extensive coverage on the matter.

Furthermore, if you manage to make affordable housing with the new construction, you limit at least some of the lower-income segregation that tends to happens with new developments.

Suffice to say, we have a long way to go but the roadmap for success is there.

A couple years of policy changes turns into an affordable housing development, which shifts to a 15-minute district like Cleveland aspires too, which moves the area as a whole towards a 15-minute city that may be 60 years in the making, such as in Copenhagen.

So, keep telling people why this stuff matters.

Local leaders and YOUR voices are what drive these changes. Share this with a friend, write your own article, get out and vote for people that support this kind of change.

Anyway, that’s what I got on my mind this month.

See you next month folks and thanks for reading!

Check the citations below for a ton more info on what I briefly tried to summarize above. Plus, here are some other great links that didn’t quite get a call-out in the text.