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as i've read elsewhere this morning...
There’s the freedom to drive, and then there’s the freedom of being able to quickly get across town in an ambulance, of having your merchandise arrive on time, of having streets that are safe enough for kids to play in, and of riding a bike without worrying about getting crushed. Maybe the real conspiracy theory is being forced to buy a two-ton, dinosaur-juice-powered metal box from one of a dozen mega-corporations just to get to the damn grocery store.
and unfortunately we still live in hyper-atomised post thatcher britain where everyone has internalised the first kind of freedom. When it comes to the second, people moan about the symptoms all day long but can't stomach what the solutions might look like.
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The problem is that the conspiracy wonks aren't just making it sound worse than it is, they're painting it as something that it just isn't. If Oxford just shut the roads in question with the message "if you're going by car you have to take the long way round, rather than drive along other people's high streets and past their schools" that would have been straightforward. Ironically it's only because they tried to mitigate some criticism by giving people limited car access along those routes that people have been able to paint it as some sort of Orwellian plan, rather than just human-centred urban design.
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gillies
ffm
@lemonade
Am I right in thinking that a key step in between 15 minute cities being a harmless academic concept about getting to the shops easily, and it being the subject of tonne of weird conspiracism, is the particular example of traffic control being promoted recently in Oxford?
As I understand it (and I probably don't) Oxford actually is proposing something that, while not quite what the conspiracies are imagining, is sort of in the same ballpark. Well not really, but you can see the link.
They are dividing the city into neighbourhoods and charging £70 to drive between the filters that divide them. They are also branding it as a '15 minute city' concept, which is a silly thing to do because councils should communicate in normal English, not use policy wonk terms when the general public won't understand them.
There are a tonne of caveats that make it less bad than it sounds (you won't be charged for driving between neighbourhoods if you use the ring-road instead of local filtered roads, residents get 100 days free filter-crossing-passes per year, businesses & blue badge & blue light get to pass for free, etc).
But you can see where the conspiracists get the idea from. They see this as the slippery slope to some Orwell/Stalinist/Blade Runner world where Oxford City Council's eye of Sauron laser beam will evaporate you if you step outside of your allocated sector.
They then read up and hear that council transport teams all over the country have been making appreciative noises about 15 minute cities, and that makes it even worse.