Pasadena is (almost) a 15-minute city

The idea of a 15-minute city is simple: a livable city should have most of the things that most people need accessible within 15 minutes by walking, biking, or riding public transit. In a 15-minute city, it should be easy and convenient to walk to a restaurant, ride a bike to the park, or take a bus to the grocery store. This includes safe options for kids to walk to school, and for at least some adults, places nearby where they could work.

This isn’t a hard thing to envision. We could debate about exactly what cities are or are not 15-minute cities, but you don’t have to look far to get the idea. Many East Coast cities have urban cores that could be called 15-minute cities. For example, someone living in Manhattan or Boston is very likely to walk or use public transportation for most of their daily trips. In Paris, many residents don’t own a car, and it’s easy to get around on a subway that goes everywhere and has typical wait times of just three or four minutes. A number of other American cities also score well as 15-minute cities, including San Francisco, Long Beach, and Seattle. 

Pasadena is a well designed city

Though Pasadena is part of the megalopolis of Los Angeles, it is also a self-contained city. People who live here know that Pasadena is a wonderful place to live, and for lots of reasons. Many stem from the fact that much of Pasadena was developed in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries before automobiles became dominant. As a consequence, Pasadena has great bones, including an easy-to-navigate street grid with walkable sidewalks in most places, and a mix of land uses. As a mature city, Pasadena has areas that combine dense commercial uses and housing like Old Pasadena and the Playhouse District; high levels of employment at dispersed locations around the city; educational facilities that include not only local-serving K-12 schools but also institutions of higher learning; a major cluster of medical facilities; nice park space; and a well-developed public transportation system. So - in terms of a 15-minute city - Pasadena has many assets.  In fact, most of the elements of a 15-minute city are already here! 

But, there’s an important thing missing. These elements need to be more effectively linked together to create a safe, inviting, and amenable public realm that promotes walkability and bikeability. If the purpose of a city is to minimize distance and maximize choice, putting these elements together are key to fully realizing the 15-minute city in Pasadena.

15 minutes by bike

15 minutes by bike is … the whole city!

A good rule of thumb is that in 15 minutes, most people can ride about 3 miles. In Pasadena, that means nearly the entire city is accessible via a 15-minute bike ride! This map shows the range of a 15-minute bike ride in Pasadena, provided by traveltime.com.

My personal experience of biking around Pasadena is that it’s very fast. Most of my typical trips in town take 10-15 minutes on my Class One e-bike. Ride to the hardware store? 10 minutes. Ride to work? Takes me 16 minutes. Ride to the grocery store, drug store, or the local burger spot? Done in less than 5 minutes. And I never get stuck in traffic, and I never have to look for parking.

This is the thing I can’t seem to help people understand: biking around Pasadena is fast and convenient. Honestly, if it wasn’t, I probably wouldn’t do it.

What’s missing is a network of safe biking routes.  Riding a bike alongside high speed traffic is scary and dangerous. Most people won’t do it. Adding safe biking routes, like protected bike lanes and All Ages & Abilities Greenways has worked in dozens of other cities, and it can definitely work here, too.

15 Minutes by Walking: Old Pasadena

15 minutes by walking

Most of Pasadena’s Central District is accessible by a 15-minute walk. This part of the city includes dense, multi-unit housing and access to the A-line metro. Many people who live in this area don’t own a car. Image adopted from traveltime.com

The ingredients for a pedestrian 15-minute city are here in Pasadena. Walking is the backbone of transportation.  Accessing any form of transportation involves walking. People walk about three miles per hour, which means that in 15 minutes, people walk on average 0.75 miles. In Pasadena, walking can thrive in a compact, multi-purpose, multi-use place like the Central District, an area poised for a robust pedestrian network. There are 25,000 residents in the district with thousands more on the way. 

In fact, the Central District requires walkability to make the district work – to be a “15-minute city”  where people can ”circulate without a car”.   Simply having buildings next to one another in a dense, compact area does not guarantee walkability.  Can you imagine a densely developed place without sidewalks, crosswalks, or shade?  The spaces between buildings – the “public realm” – needs the city’s attention more than do individual private developments. Pedestrian improvements must be knit together to create a walkable 15-minute city that includes a dense walking network that connects residents to commercial areas and to one another.   

The City has direct responsibility for the public realm and for mobility. As much as ad hoc pedestrian improvements are welcomed, such improvements must be part of an overall pedestrian network to be most effective. If the spaces between buildings, like alley walkways, sidewalks, parks and streets, are more effectively linked together, the attractiveness and efficiency of walking is exponentially increased. This pedestrian network has been very slow in coming to Pasadena. 

While in many ways Old Pasadena is already a great place to walk, in truth, it could be a lot better.  The City’s pedestrian infrastructure has not and is not keeping up with the significant increase in the Central District’s population.  Instead, the lion’s share of transportation funds go to traffic mitigation.  Pedestrians walking in the Central District have to cope with speeding cars, long stretches of roadway with no speed limit signs, and too few marked pedestrian crosswalks.

Fine-grained pedestrian improvements that should be funded throughout the district, not just in the commercial areas, include heavily striped continental and illuminated crosswalks; more pedestrian "scramble" intersections; embedded lighting in crosswalks; warning signs and flashing yellow pedestrian lights; synchronized traffic signals timed to slow down traffic; raised crosswalks; extended times for pedestrians to cross intersections; pedestrian-scale lighting, signage, and trash receptacles; traffic calming; street tree canopies; pedestrian way-finding signs... and many more. 

Compared with other transportation projects, such as improving transit or roads, most fine-grained pedestrian improvements can be implemented in the very near term, are of modest cost and can be phased in to match funding availability. Also, these modest investments can leverage important economic and community benefits for the city as a whole.

Going further on transit

Of course, biking and walking won’t work for every trip; some trips are just too far to ride a bike.  That’s OK - it makes sense to choose the right tool for every trip.  Even though I sometimes drive a car, it still makes sense to walk or ride a bike when it’s convenient.  Everyone is better off when we have more than one transportation option.

Having said that, Pasadena is often a great place for longer trips by bike, especially when I pair it with the A-line metro. For example, recently I had jury duty in downtown Los Angeles, near the LA City Hall. The A-line gets there in about a 35-minute ride, and it now shows up every 8 minutes. So, I rode my bike out the front door, took it with me on the train, and was at the courthouse with a door-to-door trip time of around 45 minutes. If you drove a car the same distance during rush hour, parked a few blocks away, and then walked to the courthouse, I think it would have taken the same amount of time. And I got to catch-up on email on the train.

I often bring my bike on the A-line for short trips, such as errands in Arcadia or South Pasadena. Using the bike and the train together, I can reach most of what I need, most of the time.

Complete streets improve access

Research shows over and over that the number one reason people drive cars for short trips, instead of walking or biking, is due to concerns over safety.  But, building safe streets (or not) is a choice, and making streets safer has huge impacts on how people choose to get around.

Experience in other cities shows that, with a modest investment in biking infrastructure, the bike mode share can be boosted from around 2% to 6-10%. In Pasadena, this would reduce traffic and open up lots of parking spots for drivers who need them.  Similar investments in pedestrian infrastructure could greatly improve the walking experience.

Pasadena already has a great street grid and lots of wonderful schools, restaurants, and businesses within easy biking distance. So, it’s most-of-the-way there in terms of being a GREAT 15-minute city. What’s missing? Some help making our street grid feel safe and comfortable for people walking and biking. That means supporting projects like new protected bike lanes, family greenways, traffic calming, and a more comfortable pedestrian environment.  It also means creating a comprehensive pedestrian plan as part of the Active Transportation Plan that will be crafted next year.  

Making our streets safer also makes them more convenient and more livable for everyone.  If we make these changes, Pasadena can be a 15-minute city for everyone, instead of only the brave.

This article includes significant contributions by urban planning experts Marsha Rood and Thomas Priestley.