Hundreds of grocery outlets needed across the United States to achieve walkable cities

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Horton, Drew, Logan, Tom, Skipper, Daphne, Speakman, Emily
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Horton, Drew
Logan, Tom
Skipper, Daphne
Speakman, Emily
author_facet Horton, Drew
Logan, Tom
Skipper, Daphne
Speakman, Emily
contents The notion of the $x$-minute city is again popular in urban planning, but the practical implications of developing walkable neighborhoods have not been rigorously explored. What is the scale of the challenge that cities needing to retrofit face? Where should new stores or amenities be located? For 500 cities in the United States, we explored how many additional supermarkets would be required to achieve various levels of $x$-minute access and where new stores should be located so that this access is equally-distributed. Our method is unique because it combines a novel measure of equality with a new model that optimally locates amenities for inequality-minimizing community access. We found that 25% of the studied cities could reach 15-minute access by adding five or fewer stores, while only 10% of the cities could even achieve 5-minute average access when using neighborhood centroids as potential sites; the cities that could, on average, required more than 100 stores each. This work provides a tool for cities to use evidenced-based planning to efficiently retrofit in order to enable active transport, benefiting both the climate and their residents' health. It also highlights the major challenge facing our cities due to the existing and ongoing car-dependent urban design that renders these goals unfeasible.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_01209
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hundreds of grocery outlets needed across the United States to achieve walkable cities
Horton, Drew
Logan, Tom
Skipper, Daphne
Speakman, Emily
Optimization and Control
The notion of the $x$-minute city is again popular in urban planning, but the practical implications of developing walkable neighborhoods have not been rigorously explored. What is the scale of the challenge that cities needing to retrofit face? Where should new stores or amenities be located? For 500 cities in the United States, we explored how many additional supermarkets would be required to achieve various levels of $x$-minute access and where new stores should be located so that this access is equally-distributed. Our method is unique because it combines a novel measure of equality with a new model that optimally locates amenities for inequality-minimizing community access. We found that 25% of the studied cities could reach 15-minute access by adding five or fewer stores, while only 10% of the cities could even achieve 5-minute average access when using neighborhood centroids as potential sites; the cities that could, on average, required more than 100 stores each. This work provides a tool for cities to use evidenced-based planning to efficiently retrofit in order to enable active transport, benefiting both the climate and their residents' health. It also highlights the major challenge facing our cities due to the existing and ongoing car-dependent urban design that renders these goals unfeasible.
title Hundreds of grocery outlets needed across the United States to achieve walkable cities
topic Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01209