I will never understand why people here hate the idea of walkable cities. Commuting from city to suburb and back by car everyday sucks.
There's a few key aspects to this.
1. The lefties are often trying to implement it in cities that already exist, and this is utterly impractical.
London with its 'Ultra Low Emissions Zone' and some other smaller British cities where they're trying to implement it more directly, are already having problems. Notably, this is in the UK, not the USA, where towns and cities are older, and their initial construction and layout was actually in the period when on foot or horse was the
only way to get around, so they don't have the broad spacing and sprawl a lot of American cities do.
Even there, people use cars for a reason. People walk sometimes, use public transportation sometimes, and use the car sometimes, for a very bloody good reason.
What is the primary way that the lefties are trying to create the 15-minute city?
By banning, fining so steeply as to be a functional ban, or barricade key roads so they can no longer be passed by, cars. It's just straight up 'we are going to stop you from doing this thing we don't like.'
It's not something they're trying to establish by incentive, making things so convenient you don't need to bother, it's something they're trying to establish via the stick.
2. Attempts to build new settlements based on this model tend to be done increadibly unethically.
Famously, Holland is dealing with their government trying to force farmers out so they can build their new model city, there's recurring word that the wildfire that swept through Maui, WEF-types are trying to buy up the land to build their new-model city there.
These aren't
inherent to the process, but a recurring thing we see is that authoritarians are trying to do this in places better suited for other things, where they can use unethical means to get the land, or similar. There may be some media bias about the nasty cases drawing attention, but given how many friends in the press the '15 minute city' crowd has, the failure to get good press for
other attempts, suggests that there are few or no other such attempts.
3. The idea of a 15-minute
city is nonsensical in the first place.
If there's a place where you can get everything you want/need within 15 minutes on foot, that isn't a city, that's a
town. If it's part of a larger urban structure, you're trying to carve a town
out of a city, and that's not going to work well, because the whole advantage of being in a major population center, is all the services and amenities that are available
across the whole urban area, not just one town-sized slice of it.
A
much more practical solution to the problem that 15-minute cities are ostensibly trying to fix, is something that already appears to be in the process of happening. Telecommunications and increasingly efficient high-speed travel capabilities, make it so that the financial advantages of high-density urbanization are much more marginal, so businesses are starting to move out of metropolises, into medium-sized cities and small towns.
4. The people pushing 15-minute cities are incompetent, ideologically-motivated socialists and communists.
Pretty much everyone involved in this movement is a card-carrying member of the political left. You generally find them supporting DEI, wealth redistribution, restrictions on freedoms, and a general attitude of 'if it makes the government bigger and more powerful, it must be a good idea.'
I like the abstract concept of a 15-minute city myself. I moved to a small town earlier this year, that I can bike across in about 15 minutes. It's pretty nice.
But
even if the basic concept has merit, the people who are trying to implement it are
known bad actors, and will absolutely use it to try to take more and more control of everyone's lives, 'for their own good,' of course.
Between these four issues, there's basically no way for such attempts at social engineering to turn out well.
Who know we live in an episode of 90s Outer limits.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
