Who needs a car in Hoboken, the ultimate 15-minute city?

Ron Hine | FBW | March 13, 2023

It takes me less than 15 minutes to walk to my office in the old, industrial Neumann Leathers Building at Hoboken’s southern border. My apartment is just around the corner from Church Square Park and the Hoboken Public Library. Within a several block radius, there is a supermarket, two schools, a variety of restaurants and five coffee shops. A bus from New York City stops a few doors down on the corner, and a 15 minute walk will get me to the New York City ferries and trains traveling throughout the region. My doctor’s office and dentist are both within walking distance.

Hoboken was mostly developed more than 100 years ago at the turn-of-the-century. Like other communities built at this time, the human scale, density, and mix of residential and commercial uses have created a walkable urban village. Hoboken is an ideal example of what has been termed a 15-minute city. This concept is a way for people to understand the value of creating neighborhoods that are walkable and bikeable where many residents do not need a car.

In fact, 75 percent of Hoboken residents do not own a car. Prior to the pandemic, an estimated 56 percent of Hobokenites took public transportation to get to work. Today, urban planners strive to recreate neighborhoods where residential, commercial and recreational uses are all within walking distance.  

In the 1950s, car culture became dominant in the United States. Roadways were built to facilitate people’s ability to drive everywhere. The interstate highway system was built and where it sliced through urban areas, many neighborhoods were destroyed in the process. 

In 1961, Jane Jacobs wrote the classic, influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities which extolled the virtues of traditional, mixed-use urban communities. She led an epic battle against the legendary urban planner Robert Moses, defeating his plan to run a highway through her beloved Greenwich Village neighborhood. 

In the 1980s, town planners Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk designed three planned communities on Florida’s Gulf coast. The first, Seaside, started a movement among planners to create mixed-use neighborhoods that reduced the dependence on cars. They used older, traditional neighborhoods, Hoboken being a good example, as a model for new development. This trend in the town planning profession was dubbed new urbanism.   

By the 1970s, one of the world’s great cities, Paris, France, had become polluted and dominated by cars. Historic pedestrian pathways were converted to automobile thoroughfares. In 2001, Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë initiated the world’s first major bikeshare program and the city’s first climate plan. Anne Hidalgo, Paris’ next mayor, built upon this, adopting the term “15-minute city” that had been coined by Carlos Moreno, a professor from the Paris Sorbonne Business School. Mayor Hidalgo replaced many car lanes with pedestrian plazas and further promoted the use of bicycles.

The concept of a 15-minute city has gotten considerable attention lately thanks to a group of conspiracy theorists in Oxford, England. These folks organized demonstrations against this idea, claiming that it was a dystopian scheme to rob them of personal freedoms and confine them to their neighborhoods. So I, and many others, have run to its defense. For me it is personal, having enjoyed the pleasures of living in the lively, urban village of Hoboken for many years, and knowing its many charms.