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Comment by pja | Hacker News Reader

You have completely misunderstood the proposed scheme: The permits allow local residents to drive through the actual restriction points themselves a limited number of times a year.

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.

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Thanks for the clarification. Not familiar with the exact layout of Oxford.

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.

https://archive.is/imeYL

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.

> Seems like it would be difficult to leave your neighborhood if you're blocked behind these bollards. Especially on a one way street.

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.

>Not sure why the conspiracy theorists have decided to make Oxford their place to protest all this stuff

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.

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