Oxford, England, wants to be a 15-minute city and towards that end it is creating low-traffic neighborhoods where only certain people will be allowed to drive automobiles. This has generated huge protests by people who claim this is limiting their freedom to travel.
I'm in Oxford for the rally against '15-minute cities'. No councillors, MPs or unelected globalists have the right to restrict the freedom of the people. pic.twitter.com/gQ32J5bpl4
— David Kurten (@davidkurten) February 18, 2023
Slate argues that this is all a misunderstanding; 15-minute cities are “not [about] stopping people from traveling more, but making it possible for them to travel less.” But if they are so benign, then why do Antifa thugs need to disguise themselves so they can’t be identified in case they happen to destroy anyone’s property when engaging in a counterprotest?
#Antifa had used Twitter to help promote their direct action in #Oxford today. They also posted instructions on how to hide identities in case their comrades engage in criminal activities. cc: @TwitterSafety https://t.co/kPPe3MFG5w pic.twitter.com/1rWAs5ntl5
— Andy Ngô ???? (@MrAndyNgo) February 18, 2023
Urban planners don’t understand how cities work. They can’t imagine why people would rather drive a car that enables them to reach millions of economic opportunities within a reasonable amount of time instead of walking or taking transit. They refuse to learn from their failures. But urban planners are very good at one thing: coming up with misleading but attractive names for their wrong-headed ideas. Names such as smart growth, traffic calming, vision zero, road diets, and now the 15-minute city.
What can possibly be wrong with the idea that everyone should be within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from basic services such as grocery stores, schools, healthcare, and places of employment? To answer that question, consider groceries. A standard supermarket needs a pool of about 20,000 people to support it. Reasonably healthy people can walk about three-quarters of a mile in 15 minutes, which means about 1-3/4 square miles will be within 15 minutes of the supermarket. To fit 20,000 people in that area requires a population density of well over 11,000 people per square mile. Only a handful of cities in the United States are that dense.
So, instead of standard supermarkets, people in 15-minute cities are going to be shopping at limited assortment stores. While the average U.S. supermarket today carries 35,000 different items for sale, and some larger supermarkets may have well over 60,000, a limited assortment store typically has just 4,000 items. Their prices are also usually higher than many of the bigger stores.
That means people in a 15-minute city aren’t going to be able to get the foods they want. Yes, they can get the basics, but everyone has different tastes and wants different specialty items. To get them, they will get in their cars and drive to a big store. So much for the 15-minute city. Health care and many other services require even larger pools of customers and simply can’t be placed in every 15-minute neighborhood.
Oxford hopes that its policies will reduce driving by 25 percent. Dream on. No city in the developed world has been able to reduce driving by this much since World War II. It’s not going to happen. All that will happen is that it will annoy a lot of people and, most likely, increase traffic congestion and greenhouse gas emissions along with it.
It's often 40 bloody below in Edmonton. Who's going to bike? Your grandmother? I don't think so. These 15-minute cities are just another fad hijacked by wannabe authoritarians using threats of apocalyptic doom to mask their desire for power. https://t.co/8FwAZzW1QR
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) February 17, 2023
The people protesting Oxford’s plans tie them to Agenda 21. I’ve read Agenda 21 and nothing like this is in there. But that’s irrelevant. People like Peterson are correct: planners have decided they want to limit people’s mobility, and they are going to impose stricter and stricter policies until they succeed. I’m glad people are protesting now.
My only 15 minute city experience was a few days at Disney Land. A nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.
Too much walking — and I like to walk — and not enough variety.
i have the distinct feeling we’ve passed through the looking glass.
i’d thought about the grocery store issue, but what would happen to the rest of america if the limited number of doctors and nurses attempted to fulfill the 15 minute mantra?
in the six decades i’ve been on earth, i’ve never seen such ill-liberalism coming from liberals, with no apparent irony or self-awareness.
Even if you could lay out a city to place a grocery store within 15 minutes of everybody, remember you would only be 15 minutes from one grocery store. If you want a store different from the one you live near, too bad! You don’t really have the right to choose the store you prefer.
The farther you have to travel to your grocery store, the better the products are. Why do urban planners struggle so hard to understand this?
janehavisham–
Why do you think it is clever to purposely misstate what people say? The point isn’t the distance traveled. The point is choice. We all have personal preferences that we want choose what we like best. I am sure urban planners want choice for themselves but they seem to believe that other people’s desires are of no importance. We should all line up at our assigned grocery store and be happy with what we get, pleased to allow urban planners to make our choices for us.
a bit of devil’s advocate…with all the online food delivery options now available a store with say 6000 items or 8000 items would likely have stuff for most. boutique items are always harder and more costly to get. i order some bone broth items regularly and just get frozen veggies, noodles and canned meats to add to it easily at a small kroger. at 99k pop. roanoke va ( a place stuck at 99k for 30 years) i can get to a doc in a box by bike in 10 minutes, a major hospital in likely 15, numerous bars, liquor stores and restaurants and pharmacies. even workout gyms, parks and tennis courts. granted, many roads near here are, unwalkable…and i would feel sad for isolated young people wanting activities to do without having to get a vehicle to do it.
The grocery store thing is interesting. I’d guess in my town, the Anglos would cluster around the Anglo market, the Asians would move to within a 15-minute walk of the Asian market, the Hispanics would gravitate to the neighborhood near the Hispanic market, and the Muslims would live near the Middle Eastern market. This achieves Jimmy Carter’s ‘ethnic purity of neighborhoods’.