This is genuinely in bad faith. As far as I can tell, the “15 minute cities” are not some renaissance in urban development with dense housing and mixed-purpose residential and commercial spaces. It’s just slapping a steep fine on anybody who drives out of the neighborhood without bothering to check if they actually have access to an Aldi’s within their zone, much less where they might be employed. (Oh, don’t want to pay 38 pounds every day as a commute toll? Quit your office job and work at the corner store. We did it, we saved the environment!)
Traffic restrictions will promote getting where the fuck you want to be on any sort of schedule
A true Orwellian dystopia
Today you can walk to the shops.
Tomorrow you’re in a Siberian gulag.
Slippery fucking slope.
When they argue in bad faith, they’ll say anything and never waver from it to further their agenda.
Oh, look. The Torygraph.
“every opinion different than mine is stalinist!” said the chugs with their mouths full of mcnuggets and cheap beer.
Don’t drag cheap beer into this!
Expensive beer is Stalinist
There’s a conspiracy theory that what 15 minute cities secretly means is that you’ll be confined in a sector of the city and unable to leave without a permit or something.
Why anyone would think that, no idea!
I don’t think it makes any logical sense. It doesn’t need to, because that’s not the point.
Repeat the buzzwords (15 minute cities, WEF, replacement theory, etc) on Facebook or Twitter and the lunatic followers/bots will magically appear to follow, like and subscribe you up the social media pages.
Possibly because that’s actually what the fascists want.
Authoritarians are poor at distinguising “is allowed to” from “is forced to.” This is also why they hate gay people-- they think that if someone else is allowed to be gay, that’ll mean that everyone will be compelled to.
The reality is that they fear freedom. They like the taste of boot.
And why would a bunch of never-left-their-staters even care in the first place? They clearly don’t want freedom of movement
Yeah because in their dreams girls should be compelled to have sex with them, so it’s a kind of twisted but understandable logic I guess.
In car-centric American cities however, that would be impossible. You can’t just block the single street that leads out of the neighborhood!
Oh, wait.
Or like, why do they think this couldn’t happen in a city with cars?
They can just block the roads and cars are worthless.
Why anyone would think that, no idea!
Because that’s what Republicans would do, obviously.
Oh no, imagine life being convenient
It’s horrible. I’ve had to give up my beloved 90-minute commute, and if I want something from a shop, I have to got off my lazy arse and spend a couple of minutes walking over there, instead of wasting 20 minutes each way driving to some nightmarish big-box retail hellhole in the outskirts of the city.
And let’s not even talk about the clean air and nearly complete absence of road-raging premature-ejaculator drivers speeding along the city streets.
You seem to have skipped over the part where there’s no job at all without that commute
Does this also come with universal health care, free education, 100% employment, and housing as a right? If not, it’s not very Stalinist.
This is the UK, so we do actually have the NHS which is free at point of use for all citizens, provided you can wait the wait times, free primary and secondary education and university that costs £10k per year, and council housing for those who can’t access housing in any other way. That’s three out of four, at least.
You just need to re-open the coal mines to get the 100% employment.
Please no
Yesterday I headed out from the apartment for errands. I walked a total of about 8 blocks. I completed:
- A haircut
- Shopping for some house items
- Post office for mailing a letter and stamps
- Stopped to listen to some live music in a market hall
- Talked with a local community group about tech stuff
- Visited a library
- Hit up the bank ATM
- Snagged a couple bags of groceries
Total time: about 115 minutes
I LOVE living in a walkable neighborhood. Fuck car-only life. If you want it, fine, but don’t demand that we all live in your apocalyptic transportation hellscape.
I could have done all thos trips in 40 minutes with my car, if we ignore the time in traffic, the time fueling it, the time waiting for oil changes, and the time spent earning the money to pay for the car, the gas, and the insurance.
Don’t forget all that energy you saved by not walking anywhere. You paid good money for those calories and you’re going to hold on to them for dear life.
You also left out finding parking and then walking through spectacularly scenic parking lots to and from each destination’s front door. With bigger malls/box stores you’d walk further than I did going around the block just having to cross the parking lot.
Parking? All of those stops were drive thrus
Link to where you get your haircut via drive through?
Drive-thru haircuts sounds pretty weird imo.
Jokes on you: the city I moved away from in the US added a parking garage to the historic register. If you weren’t so focused on waiting in a line of cars for the drive thru, you could be enjoying 10 stories of historically crumbling concrete!
On my errands I was subjected to walking past atone churches from the pre 1800’s, going through a park, and going through a market hall from 1900. It was horrible. I didn’t even get to wait at any traffic lights for a Micro Vacation during my travels. Sad. Just sad.
In Europe, 18th Century churches are new.
Yeah, though I’m also in Berlin so many were fully or partially rebuilt after the various wars. They’re old and new now. Still gorgeous. I love me a tall stone building!
Oh. Yeah, Berlin is definitely an exception…
I won’t lie, you had me at the first half.
It’s Stalinist to want to cut down on car dependency and actually have a livable place.
- Say the NIMBYs.
Really, the one thing we need to do is reduce car dependency to where you don’t have to drive everywhere, and make it to where driving is completely optional at the very least.
This is the Telegraph talking about Labour government plans. Of course they would present it like that.
I personally think the better way is to make people realize themselves that not driving is the better option. Linking omnipresent cameras with driver databases to implement a vague system of fines administered by the councils does not instill me with enough confidence either. I see contested fines clogging up courtrooms (or whatever legal recourse there must be) for years.
Raise parking fees, reduce parking spaces - at a relatively slow rate to keep predictable outrage local and small enough. Implement a system where every car purchase needs to be accompanied by a proof of parking like in Japan (owned driveway or rented spot). Invest in public transport and infrastructure for pedestrians and bicyclists. Tax breaks for infrastructure that’s missing (a supermarket, a clinic, a theater, etc.). That would make more sense to me than the threat of punishment through this somewhat Orwellian system.
East Germany was an authoritarian state without rule of law. This can be true at the time as the fact that in most cities they created neighborhoods that come close to this 15-min ideal. Childcare, multi disiplinary medical “poly clinics,” and decent public transport. Sure, long lines at the grocery store and an 18 year waiting list to buy a shit car. But it strikes me as extremely dumb to ignore useful lessons from that out of cold war principle.
“[…] “perverse” and “Stalinist” approach to social control, adding: “It is an encroachment on civil liberties, and it is a page out of the East Germany playbook. With the 15-minute city, you will have to, in effect, apply for an internal passport to go and visit your granny.”
That’s nothing new. Fossil fuel funded desinformation and their not-less-desinformation-loving right-wing friends have a long history of telling the fairy tale of 15-min cities as a kind of population control.
It’s all based on the basic premise that car-brains can’t understand that “you cannot go there freely by car” is not the same as “you cannot go there freely at all”. So when you tell them that you can only drive somewhere a limited number of times per year before paying a fee for using their car, their brain-damage automatically translates it to “I’m not allowed to go there anymore”.
PS: Bringing the “East-German playbook” into this story makes it even more absurd, given the (non-)availability of cars and thus the quality of public transport in the ex-GDR. But that’s another thing car-brains can’t understand, so they will not see the problem.
It’s called a train ticket and it should be subsidized too
Fuck the torygraph.
Living in a 15-minute city, it’s almost as nice as the previously screeched-about “Shari’a no-go zones” in Paris. I was in one of those when that hysteria started, drinking an excellent bottle of wine with a friend of mine and a charming French-Algerian couple.
And if my quiet little city’s modest efforts at pedestrianisation are Stalinist, then I’ve misunderstood Stalinism and maybe it’s not so bad after all (except the purges, the Molotove-Ribbentripp pact and the Holodomor).
Note for the paranoid: you can easily be tracked if you drive a car, though in-car telemetry and ANPR cameras. But you’re nearly invisible to the authorities if you’re a pedestrian or a cyclist.
the Molotove-Ribbentripp pact
Here’s a fun mostly-unknown fact about this one: the pact(s) included military technology transfers, with one result being that advanced anti-aircraft guns earmarked for the battleship Bismarck were instead given to the USSR. Bismarck ended up being fatally crippled by British biplanes.
I’ve misunderstood Stalinism and maybe it’s not so bad after all (except the purges, the Molotove-Ribbentripp pact and the Holodomor).
This is actually correct, Stalin did sign some awful stuff into law (although it’s not the examples you are giving: the worst things are the LGBT ban, restrictions on worker’s soviets, and NKVD “troika” trials), but also did some pretty solid stuff like industrializing the country, improving employment and poverty rates, and defeating nazis.
