The 15-minute city, where daily life sits within a short walk, is an urban-planning dream. Dutch cities get closer to it than almost anywhere. In Haarlem, the four everyday errands we measure, the supermarket, the primary school, the GP and the daycare, sit a combined 2.1 kilometres from the average front door. Spread over four trips, that is a few minutes each on a bike.
Not everywhere is so compact. In the most spread-out district in our data, the same four add up to seven kilometres. Here is where everyday life is closest, and where it is not.
The ranking, city by city
For each city we take the average distance from home to the nearest supermarket, primary school, GP and daycare, and add them up. Lower means everything is closer. Distances are city averages, from official open data.
| City | Nearest supermarket | Four errands combined |
|---|---|---|
| Haarlem | 540m | 2.1km |
| Delft | 570m | 2.2km |
| Amsterdam | 580m | 2.2km |
| The Hague | 640m | 2.4km |
| Rotterdam | 630m | 2.4km |
| Utrecht | 730m | 2.6km |
| Maastricht | 660m | 2.7km |
| Leiden | 740m | 2.7km |
| Eindhoven | 700m | 2.8km |
| Breda | 750m | 2.8km |
| Tilburg | 810m | 2.8km |
| Nijmegen | 740m | 2.9km |
| Groningen | 750m | 3.0km |
| Almere | 790m | 3.0km |
| Amstelveen | 770m | 3.0km |
| Den Bosch | 770m | 3.0km |
| Arnhem | 790m | 3.1km |
Haarlem, Delft and Amsterdam lead, all dense, historic and built before the car. The more spread-out cities, Arnhem, Almere and the Brabant cities, sit at the other end, with newer, lower-density edges.
The most walkable neighbourhood in the country
Zoom into districts and the winner is the Transvaalkwartier in The Hague, where the four errands total just 1.36 kilometres. The Schildersbuurt next door and Hof van Delft in Delft follow close behind. These are dense, mixed inner-city districts where a supermarket sits on almost every corner.
The point is not that these are the nicest places to live, only the most convenient. Proximity and quality are different things, and this measure captures only the first.
And where the car is hard to avoid
At the far end sits Oosterwold in Almere, a low-density, self-build district where the four errands add up to about seven kilometres, five times the Transvaalkwartier. Outer parts of The Hague and Tilburg are close behind.
These are the new-build and garden-suburb districts, spacious and green, but built around the car rather than the corner shop. The trade-off between space and convenience shows up plainly in the numbers.
Convenience is a neighbourhood choice
Walkability, like price, is decided at the district level, not the city. Even in the most spread-out cities there are compact, everything-nearby neighbourhoods, and even in Amsterdam there are corners where the nearest supermarket is a proper trip.
You can see the amenity distances for any neighbourhood, alongside the six expat profiles, in the neighbourhood explorer, or browse the city overviews. One caveat: these are straight-line averages to the nearest option, so they measure how close things are, not how good they are.