How could Liverpool become a "15 minute city"?

[amcewen]

Via Dan Hill's excellent (if extensive :-) Slowdown Papers I learnt of Paris' plans for a "15 minute city":

This simple notion — that all your basic everyday needs, from education to commerce to healthcare to culture and so on, are located within 15 minutes walk or bike of your front door

That seems to me like a good tool for thinking about how to make the city more walkable, and to explore how the city might adapt to include more local, distributed approaches (particularly post-pandemic and with an increasing climate crisis).

A few years back, the Liverpool Architectural Society ran the Integrated City Project, which had some echoes of this. I'm not sure much of it ever ended up online, and now all I can find is my blog post about it.

However, it does give us this interesting map of 32 areas of the city, which we could take as a starting point to see how we fare at the moment.

Lots of these areas have existing focal points for shops, libraries, etc. Maybe we can identify gaps that we can work to fill, or barriers that make it hard for the flow of people between neighbouring areas. Or maybe we'll realise we already have a 15-minute city, and we just need to think about it differently.

[amcewen]

I'm going to see how easy it would be to pull together a map showing some travel time contour areas for those 32 districts (i.e. how far you can get in 15 minutes of walking, or cycling, from—for example—St. Mary's church in West Derby). It looks like OpenTripPlanner can help build that sort of thing, which means I can make some progress on #34 too 😀

[amcewen]

Having gotten an initial version of OpenTripPlanner up and running, it generates time travel isochrones like this (grey is 15 minutes walk to/from DoES Liverpool, green is 30 minutes...):

[amcewen]

The time travel isochrone is great fun. Picking Anfield as the centre, we can look at...

Walking

Cycling

Cycling with the option of putting the bike on the train too

Try it yourself

If you want to play around with it...

1. Go to trips.mcqn.com/ (or http://209.97.132.40 if that's not working)
2. Zoom into the bit of Merseyside you're interested in (as it's only got data for Merseyside)
3. Change from Multimodal Trip Planner to Analyst in the drop-down menu at the top
4. Right-click on the map at the place you want as the centre for your isochrone and choose Set as Analysis Location
5. Choose the Travel Options you're interested in from the dialog in the bottom-left corner
6. Zoom out to the area you're interested in (I think it limits the calculations to what's visible when you first generate the isochrone)
7. Hit the Refresh button in the Travel Options dialog
8. Wait for the spinner to finish. I sometimes found dragging the map round after that would make the travel contours show up

[amcewen]

There's also an API for it, so, for example, http://trips.mcqn.com/otp/routers/default/isochrone?fromPlace=53.4105095,-2.9704659&mode=WALK&date=05-05-2020&time=8:00am&cutoffSec=300&cutoffSec=600&cutoffSec=900 will give you a JSON representation of the 5, 10 and 15 minute walk time contours around DoES Liverpool.

I think the next steps might include:

• Making the default website explain some of the thoughts behind the #15MinuteCity idea, zoom to Liverpool when it first loads, and default to the Analyst isochrone view
• Work out the geographic centres of each of the 32 neighbourhoods from the Liverpool Architectural Society map (or choose a better set of neighbourhoods?)
• Generate 15 minute contours for each of those centres, for both walking and cycling
• Draw all those contours on the website by default (or try it to see if that's a useful thing to view)
• Allow people to trivially generate their own #15MinuteMap centred on their house (or wherever)
• Explore how bringing the "ghost stations" back into use would change transport options

Anything else? Anyone else want to help with any of this?

[davidtweaver]

I'd be interested in helping you somehow! I'm on furlough, so I'm looking for interesting projects to hack away on

[amcewen]

Haven't had a lot of time to work on this, but did fight with building OpenTripPlanner from source last weekend. Managed to build the dev-2.x branch, but that didn't seem to have the isochrone stuff working in it (or I couldn't work out how to turn it on).

However, when trying to debug that all, I happened upon this site showing how easy/hard it is to get to schools in Amsterdam. That has a Jekyll/Leaflet.js/Turf.js front end, which then calls to an OpenTripPlanner instance behind the scenes to generate the isochrones.

It seems that's probably a better approach here, given (for the #15MinuteCity approach) we don't need the trip planner element that's front-and-centre of OpenTripPlanner.

I've spun up a new repo to try that out.

@davidtweaver, if you're still up for helping out that'd be ace. I guess there'll be a bit of Ruby for any customisation of Jekyll (I expect there'll at least be some generating isochrones at build time, maybe not much more) and then a bunch of Javascript to load the isochrones, let people generate one for where they live, etc. (I haven't used Leaflet or Turf before). Let me know what takes your fancy...

[unusualevent]

that's so cool!