For almost 44 years, my life was measured in miles and minutes behind a steering wheel. Living in Taunton, Massachusetts, meant that even a simple “quick” errand was a logistical event. If we needed a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread, it involved a 20-minute round trip minimum. In that environment, your autonomy is tethered to your vehicle.
In Taunton, that means being on the road with people going too slow or someone else thinking you’re going too slow. Everybody’s in a rush like it’s the end of days and all you needed was something simple. It is stress inducing just thinking about it. Then there is the parking. Do you park on the side knowing you’ll be in the way, wait for someone to leave, or park uncomfortably close to the person who thinks they need two spots for their Prius? That stress permeates everything around you. It radiates off all the stressed and angry people.
When we spent 11 weeks in Colmar, I was looking for a way to describe why that daily friction simply vanished. I found it in the term 15-minute city.
As a former network engineer, I see it as a system upgrade. In a sprawl-based system, the latency is high. You spend a massive percentage of your bandwidth just moving between nodes. In Colmar, we lived in a high-bandwidth environment where the architecture is built for people, not engines.
In Colmar, it was a simple, “Oh, we need to grab some veggies, or a baguette, or some cheese, milk, or meat. Who wants to go?” Half the time, the kids were already putting their shoes on. If I was cooking, they could go without me. I knew no one was driving 60 MPH on the streets like they do here.
There was a sense of calm and peace in the atmosphere. I knew the kids would be fine because they did this and they proved it to me. They found an independence in 11 weeks that the American suburbs couldn’t offer them in a decade.
We aren’t moving to France for a vacation. We are moving because we found a place where the system actually works. We are trading the chaos of car-dependent stress for the 15-minute peace of Alsace.
