No, 15-Minute Cities Aren’t a Threat to Civil Liberties
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
15 minute cities are a great idea if you are building a new city, not partitioning an existing urban landscape into monitored zones.
If you want to look at it from a conspiracy perspective it allows humanity to slow down global warming slightly while corporations and wealthy people can still pump out as much carbon as they can afford and require.
But from experience, living in a 15 minute city IS nice IF the infrastructure is good and crime is low. Still a good part of the workforce will need to commute outside of this 15 minute area, which needs further investment into rails and roads to bring blue collar workers quickly to factories and warehouses.
I quoted this in another comment but I think it's worth repeating:
"When [the traffic filters] are operating, private cars will not be allowed through the filters without a permit."[1]
"Residents [of the area affected by the traffic filters] will be able to apply for a permit to drive through the traffic filters for up to 100 days per year"[1]
1: https://www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/sites/default/files/file/road...
If you stop and reflect for a few seconds you likely are already aware of this, but you already cannot drive a car anywhere in the city without a permit.
That said, I'm not familiar with UK driver's licenses - do they normally restrict where and when you can travel?
People are still allowed to travel, to travel in private cars around those zones, and to travel in those zones on foot, by bus, or in a commercial vehicle delivering goods, etc.
Claiming this equates to people "won't be allowed to travel without a permit" is delibrately misleading.
According to the linked report, it's about:
"Encouraging a change in behaviour to tackle private car use"
The headline targets include replacing or removing 50% of car trips and delivering a net-zero transport network by 2040.
Traffic filters are not new to the UK, and plenty have existed for decades in cities like London without controversy or conspiracy. They do not form an impermeable cordon around an area.
They restrict through traffic on certain streets, in order to provide faster and safer routes for either bikes or buses. As far as I can tell the Oxford proposal is less restrictive than traditional filters as permits allow car driver to bypass the restrictions a certain number of times a month.
I don't know enough about Oxfordshire to be sure, but it seems unlikely that the goal here is simply to move the traffic to different streets - especially after they said the goal is to eliminate 50% of car traffic.
Your characterization of this as not being "allowed to travel without a permit" is utter nonsense made to make something rather routine and benign sound like Nazi Germany.
We restrict where, by whom, and how motor vehicles and literally every other form of transportation is used all the time.
Looking at other countries in Europe, all (or most of them) seem to require some kind of extra registration and monitoring when it comes to Low Emissions Zone. Again, technically there is nothing that requires low emission zones to implement heavy handed registration and monitoring, but as has been demonstrated they do tend to go together. Even in countries with multi-party system, there is generally no party to vote for which want Low Emissions Zone without the inclusion of extra registration and monitoring.
I’m not sure why this story has resonated so strongly with the conspiracy theorists out there, but I guess it’s some wild cross-pollination between the idea that the world government is out to control everyone & hearing the phrase “15 minute neighbourhood” and jumping straight to the most insane conclusion possible.
I don't doubt that deep in the bowels of conspiracy theory web sites, they've found something to occupy their next fifteen minutes of mutual outrage. But has this actually appeared anywhere else, or is this just news outlets looking for some outrage to report on?
I haven't seen it as a live usage. Not that my anecdote means anything; I try to live in a bubble that filters out the stupidest people. So I'm unclear if this is actually going to result in real pushback on urban planning, or just noise.
https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/16092556469934571...
It doesn't mean you'll have an obligation to live within 15 minutes enclosure around your house. It means you'll be able to walk or bike to any necessity in 15 minutes, so it'll make your life easier. You can still go to your favorite convenience store half an hour away if you want, but you CAN instead go to a corner shop.
Honestly as a European I fail to understand what's even controversial about that.
You can willfully misread and misinterpret public documents all you want, but at least be honest about why you keep referring to "Soros and WEF people" like they're a shadowy cabal.
I agree with the article: The movement needs to be crystal clear on what's within scope and what's out of scope to alleviate fear and misinformation.
This kind of stuff won't fly in United States, thankfully.
It is about the civic liberty far exceeding personal liberty.
I did a quick google search for supporting articles. Unsurprisingly, I was bombarded with "debunk" articles similar in tone. The top result was the WEF. Here's a citation from an aligned write-up:
>They’re right that the traffic cameras will restrict their freedom to drive around town.
https://slate.com/business/2023/02/15-minute-city-oxford-con....
If people wish to live in dense urban communities, they can do so voluntarily. There's nothing wrong with individuals making these value judgments and finding the communities on a voluntary basis. The concerns are related to the use of coercion. The article talks past these concerns.
Finally, the narrative of "climate lockdowns" has been advanced by the same voices. As have personal carbon credits connected to a social credit score and a central bank digital currency. Perhaps partisans paint these concerns as unhinged extremism because they have no way to legitimately address these concerns.
Say what you will of the so called "extremist conspiracy theorists" here, but I wouldn't paint them as the authoritarians in this context. The dangers of these authoritarian policies should be plain to see. Attempting to talk past the concerns and malign them as nuttery feels dishonest.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ajps.12501
>Does more media censorship imply more regime stability? We argue that censorship may cause mass disapproval for censoring regimes. In particular, we expect that censorship backfires when citizens can falsify media content through alternative sources of information. We empirically test our theoretical argument in an autocratic regime—the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
"When [the traffic filters] are operating, private cars will not be allowed through the filters without a permit."[1]
"Residents ... will be able to apply for a permit to drive through the traffic filters for up to 100 days per year"[1]
So this "conspiracy theory" is in fact literally true, the planners admit it, and these articles are lying.
https://www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/sites/default/files/file/road...
"more radical solutions are needed to transform transport in Oxfordshire."
More probably, they are cloistered within an ideological bubble where their spin on events is consistent with their worldview. Sprinkle in some partisan hyperbole and it all adds up. Perhaps they might concede there are a few minor exaggerations, but I suspect in the author's view it doesn't amount to lying.
In fact, if you live in one of these parts of Oxford you will be able to drive to and from where-ever you like: The only new constraint is that some routes that go through Oxford itself will be blocked - you’re still free to drive via the ring road around Oxford & get to your destination that way if you want to.
“City blocks road to through traffic” is not usually headline news. There’s something about this story that seems to trigger the conspiracy theorist mindset for some reason.
From what I've read you have to apply for a 100 day permit to leave your designated zone. You can only drive 100 days per year if your permit is approved. I can understand why people would object to this usurpation.
Not sure why these concerns need to be maligned?
They are not permits to allow people to leave their “designated 15 minute zone” or whatever else the conspiracy theorists have cooked up this time.
A resident of Oxford who owns a car can drive anywhere in the country (including around the ring road to a destination in another part of Oxford) 365 days a year. No permit is or will be required beyond those that everyone has to have if they wish to drive a motorised vehicle in the UK.
Seems like it would be difficult to leave your neighborhood if you're blocked behind these bollards. Especially on a one way street.
The idea that you're still allowed to drive nationally (for now?) seems like a moot point if you cannot leave your street.
From what I've read here, this is mostly for high streets and congested areas. The videos I've seen from the "conspiracy theorists" show residents sabotaging blockades in a residential area.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3224t7U7upQ
A simpler way to understand it would be an infringement on their freedom of movement. It isn't hard to see why that is objectionable, no matter the scale. Especially when aligned voices are suggesting that private car ownership is a problem.
>That is great. Private car use is insanely inefficient, and has numerous negative externalities like toxic gas exhaust, increasing the risk of injury to people not in a car, and rubber particulates.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34967148
>Goodbye car ownership, hello clean air: welcome to the future of transport
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/goodbye-car-ownership...
>There have been numerous examples of personal carbon allowance programs in discussions for the last two decades...
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/09/my-carbon-an-approach...
>Under a “climate lockdown,” governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling. To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently.
The missing context can easily be found in the talking points of those advancing this agenda. You could also consider giving some of the "conspiracy theorists" a good faith listen, instead of pejoratively dismissing them as such.
There are no one way streets blocked by these restrictions.
> The videos I've seen from the "conspiracy theorists" show residents sabotaging blockades in a residential area.
Those are anti-LTN protests.
LTNs are for eliminating through traffic from residential neighbourhoods by selectively blocking through roads. Effectively they turn a residential area into something more like a typical American or English suburb, which are usually built without through roads to prevent drivers using them as shortcuts to avoid congestion on the major arterial roads. No LTN prevents people from driving out of their own neighbourhood. The plans being described here aim to block arterial roads in Oxford to through traffic whilst allowing buses, taxis and some other traffic to pass, so have a wider impact than any individual LTN.
Oxford has extremely limited road space even on arterial roads - the city grew organically & the road network was established in the medieval period - this plan is an attempt to reduce through traffic on these roads in order to make enough “road space” to allow public transport (buses mostly) to make more efficient use of the available capacity.
Not sure why the conspiracy theorists have decided to make Oxford their place to protest all this stuff, but they seem to have decided that we need saving or something.
All the rest of the stuff you quote is stuff that particular people might like to do, but none of which is being planned or implemented here in Oxford. Nor is it likely to be, without the backing of the local population: This scheme is being implemented by democractically elected counsellors, all of whom the local population had the opportunity to eject in recent elections where they were opposed by anti-restriction candidates. A small minority may be making a great deal of fuss, but the voters don’t appear to agree with them.
Because they have maliciously or stupidly confused the permits which would allow residents to drive through traffic filters (instead of taking a longer route), with a passport system that wouldn't let them leave the zone at all.
From a good faith perspective, I'm not sure why it has to be a divisive either/or.
The bigger issue in my view is the compulsory nature of the program and how it plays into a larger, more concerning agenda. It isn't unreasonable to view this as trial balloon for the well documented agenda advanced by the WEF.