After a very long summer away from school — officially 10 weeks of break, but a surprise set of half days last week due to lack of air conditioning in my kids’ school, plus a day off school for Labor Day this week has made it feel that much longer — I have been wondering who decided that such a long summer break was a good idea.
In the U.K., summer break is just six weeks long. In France, summer break is eight weeks long, but all workers are guaranteed five weeks paid vacation at a minimum. If everyone can enjoy summer vacation, a long break from school is a little more reasonable. Not so in the U.S., where there’s the added punishment of misaligned schedules between K-12 and college-aged kids, resulting in a lack of summer camp counselors and thus viable camps at the end of August.
When was the last time you felt like you understood your city’s time policy strategy? “Never” is an acceptable answer.
I should be moving on this week, but I’m frustrated that major institutions like public schools set schedules that influence thousands of people’s lives with little consultation to see if these old paradigms still work in the 21st century. Summer break is one example, but there are plenty of others, like transit schedules, bar curfews, trash pickup. When was the last time you felt like you understood your city’s time policy strategy? “Never” is an acceptable answer.
Surprise: Europe has better time policy
While time policy is a foreign concept in the U.S., it’s been around since the 1980s in Italy. You may have recently read of Bolzano in the New York Times, which was World Capital of Time Policies in 2023, and is one of the few Italian cities to buck Italy’s declining birth rate trend by crafting family-friendly policies. In terms of time policy, that looks like coordinating school schedules with parents’ work schedules.
Barcelona has been creating policies that value residents’ time for the past 20 years. “Our main mission is to promote a better organization of time in order to foster a healthier, more efficient and more equal society,” says Sonia Ruiz, gender and time policies director at the Barcelona City Council in a EuroCities article about the city’s time policies.
Some of the city’s time policies include the creation of time banks, where people exchange community services, such as helping students with homework in exchange for another task, such as performing a home repair. I love this example not only because it enables people without tons of money to access expensive services, but it also has the potential to create new social connections.
American cities need to acknowledge that saving time is critical to residents, and might even be valued by constituents as much as saving money.
Other examples of time policies include extending the hours of public buildings or municipal services in order to better coordinate with real people’s schedules. Imagine if your local library was open until 11pm instead of 5pm, and how that might change both how frequently you use the library and what kind of services it could provide.
Many of the strategies are meant to address time poverty — the fact that many people may not be technically financially impoverished but because they work multiple jobs or have extensive caregiving responsibilities they have little time to attend to the rest of life’s needs. To address time poverty, Barcelona rewards local businesses that encourage employees to avoid work on weekends and guarantees their right to digital disconnection.
Living on modern time
Respecting people’s time is critical these days. After all, what is the remote work revolution of the past 4.5 years but a grassroots attempt to have better control over time? It’s people trying to reclaim time from commuting. People wanting to not spend eight hours straight at work, but in a much more asynchronous, location-independent schedule. And for many people, it’s a way to arbitrage time, whether by being able to go grocery shopping midday, check in on a loved one during office hours, or access a new schedule by working for a company in a different time zone.
Likewise, many of the most popular companies working in urban areas are all about saving time for people — whether Uber and Lyft, or Doordash and Instacart. Do we really need government to create time policy officers or do we just need to be freed from the constraints of dumb schedules (see feelings about summer break above)?
In the U.S., an important first step is to start seeing the city through the lens of time. American cities need to acknowledge that saving time is critical to residents, and might even be valued by constituents as much as saving money. The concept of the 15-minute city is, of course, the epitome of planning a city with a time lens, but its focus on walking and biking may not be exactly the right frame — or too high a standard — for many American communities.
Time should be seen as a livability metric.
But if you look at a city through the lens of time, it changes a city’s goals. For example, the number of housing units built is less important than where those units are located and how close they are to jobs or amenities. The fact that your neighborhood has great public schools becomes less important if you are stuck in nightmarish car lines every day to drop off kids to school.
Time should be seen as a livability metric. As cities vie to be the most livable, it would be interesting to know how difficult the schedules are of the most vulnerable — how long does it take minimum wage workers to get to their jobs? Kids to get to school? Seniors to get to a doctor’s appointment? These indicators can tell you a lot more about livability than just how many parks of cultural amenities there are in a city and some of them may be easier to fix than adjusting the economic development or placemaking of a city.
A second step would be to review city-imposed schedules and see if they are actually working for people. In Philadelphia, the city is already experimenting with schools that are open longer hours to help with parents’ schedules and reviewing whether the school year should be extended and if they should shorten the long summer break. This is a smart example of how collaboration between a city, school district and families could create better results for everyone.
Speeding up cities
Cities should gather data to understand how people are spending time in the city and where their pain points are. Advocates for New York’s congestion pricing scheme built their argument for congestion pricing on data equating time and money, showing that the millions of hours lost in congestion resulted in $100 billion lost in productivity. Are there tweaks to our cities that could meaningfully address time lost in congestion, transit, or waiting for trains?
This question of wasted time extends beyond transit of course. City services could be efficient — what changes to the way people access benefits and housing could speed these processes and get people the resources without delay?
Finally, many of the European time policies aren’t just about speeding up cities, but about giving people back time to relax. Throughout Europe, cities and countries are experimenting with the four-day work week. It’s counterintuitive, but a shorter work week may be key to getting more workers back in the office. Maybe people wouldn’t need so much time to work remotely if they truly had an extra day off each week to tend to their life needs. In some cases, four-day workweek pilots began at the local level with a collective of employers experimenting with the concept. It’s a relatively easy way for local Chambers of Commerce to take the lead on researching the impact of a four-day workweek.
Whether it’s an official time policy officer or a working group within government tasked with this issue, our cities should be seeing time as a resource that they can influence. Liberating time for more residents can bring real value to their lives.
Diana Lind is a writer and urban policy specialist. This article was also published as part of her Substack newsletter, The New Urban Order. Sign up for the newsletter here.
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