My 15-Minute City is Amazing

It’s not a climate solution. That's not the point.

On the left, my kids’ actual school

La Petite-Patrie is not hip. Far from.

A neighborhood built for workers in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, it’s one of the last bits of Montreal built before planners assumed everyone would own a car. Here, rows of duplexes and triplexes line each street. Usually, an owner-occupier lives on the ground floor, but the building has one or two rental apartments upstairs. East-West streets are commercial, north-south is residential. 

It’s odd reading the furious takes on 15-minute cities from a place like this. Nobody originally designed La Petite-Patrie to be a 15-minute city. Yet a 15-minute is very much what it became.

My kids walk to school and back each day in about 12 minutes, though the ten year old recently demanded he be allowed to go by bike, which cuts that down to four or five. The grocery store is a three minute walk, the dentist about eight, the metro maybe ten, and my gym a neat 15 by bike. And so, while we do have a car, we put maybe 8,000 km. a year on it — one of the kids’ extracurricular is just too far to go entirely without a car. Other than that, we’ve gravitated to doing almost everything by bike, not out of any ideological thought but just because it’s usually the most practical option. 

This is just how the math works out at the kind of medium density La Petite-Patrie is built on. It’s around 6,000 people per square kilometer around here. That’s not packed like Manhattan (27,000 people/km2) but way denser than single-family housing zoned suburbs where about half of Montrealers live. Those tend to range in the 1,000-2,000 people/km2.

But it’s not just about density. La Petite-Patrie isn’t any denser than it was 12 years ago when we moved here, but it’s become much more bikable. Why? Because we elected a hippie-dippy mayor and her municipal administration started building bike paths everywhere. Which was a huge factor this winter, when we finally decided to go all in, got spiked tires for our bikes and joined the little gang of nutters who cycle through the winter.

photo: Ville de Montréal

How was it? Remarkably unremarkable.

You just suit up like you mean it, put on a ski helmet and head out. Since Mayor Plante took the ballsy decision to plough the bike paths first, we usually had it easier than the pedestrians and even the poor drivers, having to dig their cars out of a snowbank with a shovel.

Sure, it was a mild winter. Well, it was mild compared to the last 50, though still probably quite cold compared to the next 50. Still, it’s Canada, it snows a lot. Yet only once did we have to throw in the towel, accepting there was just too damn much snow, and took the bus instead. Once, in the harrowing five-month ordeal of a Montreal winter. 

Here’s the thing, though: mention to people you’re a winter cyclist and they immediately assume you’re some kind of climate zealot. Active mobility’s become so politicized, the image of the bicycle’s become inseparable, in people’s mind, from an ideological agenda.

Mostly, I just go with it. It’s too exhausting to have to explain again and again that climate is the single worst reason to cycle. I cycle because I get there in a better mood. Because parking is never a problem. Because gas is expensive. Because I hate getting stuck in traffic. Because the exercise is good for you. Because the bus usually smells kinda gnarly in winter. Because it makes you feel more connected to the place where you live. Because it just feels good. These are all really good reasons to cycle everywhere. But climate? It’s just a non-sequitur.

Treating cycling as a climate solution betrays an inability to grasp the actual scale of the climate problem, and a kind of pernicious narcissism about it, a determination that you have to be at the center of a story that’s so much bigger than any one of us.

I usually don’t say anything. I usually don’t rant about how even if every person in Canada would stop driving cars tomorrow and the entire country turn into hardcore year-round cyclists, that would make not the slightest dent in the overall trajectory of the climate. You come across as a weirdo curmodgeon if you say that. I try not to weird people out.

Still, it bothers me. There’s a religious tinge to climate discourses that demand all good decisions be defended on climate grounds. Whether climate grounds make the slightest bit of sense in context or not. 

Personally, I am at once extremely concerned about climate change and increasingly hostile to climate as religion.

I’m thrilled to live in a 15-minute city and dismissive of the usual defense of 15-minute cities.

I love my damn bike, and I’m under zero illusions that my bike —or anyone’s bike— will make the least bit of difference to the climate.

I’m certain if more people had access to the kind of neighborhood where I live, they’d love it just as much as I do. And I just don’t get why so many think this kind of lifestyle has to be defended on specious grounds. It’s just a better way to live. And that’s enough.