We live in an age when the most unobjectionable and necessary ideas for progress can give rise to paranoia and fear. If the most innocuous, unoriginal possible idea can fuel paranoia, how can we hope to have a sensible discussion about the future of our places?
I love transit and I live less than 15-minutes from a bus stop, but last night it took 2 hours and 15 minutes to get home by the bus that would have been around 30 minutes of a drive. Just having a bus stop isn’t enough to make people consider switching. It needs to be at least reasonably competitive in time or price.
Also car advocates always are sure to bring up their disgust with sharing their commute with nasty people or the homeless. That’s a tried and true method to drum up fear against a working, affordable transportation system.
if your public transportation has enough people living below the poverty line on it that it becomes distasteful to be on, then that’s separate issue and a disgusting reflection of the standard of living in the area. a person shouldn’t get a bus and feel like a social worker. however, this isn’t antithetical to good public transportation! it just recognises another social injustices that also need addressing.
15 minute cities can and should be seen separately to public transportation though, in that everything a person NEEDS is limited to a 15 minute walk/cycle. a person hopes that public transportation is almost redundant for any daily travel you make (for most people), and that it is still to a high standard for when we do need it.
We should have fast and slow buses. One bus that stops at every stop along a route, another which goes a distance in a city only stopping at a few. That would greatly speed up transportation in my area.
As for poverty, everyone should be able to go on the bus. IMO they should be free and taxpayer funded. I have no idea what to do about “undesirables” except that we need to fix homelessness and poverty.
We already do in many places, they sound good in theory, but in practice aren’t much better. The problem with “express buses” is that they still have to sit in traffic. Really we need different modes of transportation, such as light rail, subways, dedicated bicycle paths, and so on, which do not share the road with cars. Otherwise, it’s much more difficult to make a value proposition for public/alternative transportation to those who can afford cars.
i didn’t know there was objections to this, i read about this concept about 4/5 years ago and i’ve been obsessed with the idea ever since. i even moved to a sort-of 30 minute city. i was doing some searches online after reading this and without adding anything inflammatory to my search terms i saw a predominantly negative response to this in the UK. im baffled. british MP Mark Dolan called this a “socialist” and “dystopian” idea and said it would create “a surveillance culture that would make Pyongyang envious”.
15 minute cities don’t make an enemy out of anyone. being afraid of this is baffling to me.
You’re 100% right to be baffled. Where I live we’ve seen extreme push back against the concept. The anti-vaxxers from the pandemic have latched onto the message in my area, and are saying that it will create ghetto’s where it makes governments more able to enforce lock downs and restrict our freedoms. I don’t see how they connected those dots together. It’s actually crazy.
The first time I ever heard of 15-minute cities was through conspircy theories (I like learning about them) and you’re right that it is actually crazy. It’s the exact same anti-vaxx crowd, who also believe 5G is harmful and similar “theories”, lead by right-wing pundits and grifters whipping up outrage over nothing.
I can only imagine how awesome it would be to live in an area like they describe towards the beginning where it’s easily walkable and you can get to almost everything you need easily, safely, and without a vehicle. I’m so jealous of people who live anything close to being like that!
P.S. I always love seeing your posts here. You share such great articles! You’ve been killin’ it for quite a while now. I appreciate you!
Doesn’t seem like the author really offers any possible reasons for the rights reaction to responsible urban planning, so perhaps I will offer some.
Conservatism isn’t solely a political philosophy that a person decides to adopt. There are personally traits that feed into a person’s susceptibility to right wing thought. People who have low openness tend to be conservative. To paraphrase Buckley, their brains wired up to tell them to stand athwart history and yell STOP.
These people all grew up in a car centric world, where dad commuted in to the city from the suburbs and mom drove them to the school everyday. That, to them is the comfortable, natural order of things. Their psychology begs them to preserve that order at all costs.
Even though that model of planning is really new, only going back about 70 or 80 yrs, to them it is the natural way. Any alternative looks like change and progress, which they are psychologically predisposed to be suspicious of. All change to them, can be reduced to something that is being taken away from them. Something that disrespects their forefathers.
Not all change is good and some conservative thought is useful when a society is planning its future. But, it’s really dangerous when we have made mistakes.
In our modern political landscape, there are charlatans like Peterson and Jones who know how to pick at their audience’s psychology and pull dollars out of it. They cynically use the fears of their audience and package up any “new” ideas as existential threats.
The key when discussing progress with conservatives is to opening them up to the idea that we are going back. In this case specifically, 15min cities sounds scary but “returning to the urban planning ideas that motivated our great grandparents” might sound great. Same change different reaction.
Conservative cruelty cannot be accepted or forgiven but the psychology that drives it must be understood and accounted for when developing communication strategies.
as I’ve grown older, one of the things I’ve realized is that the primary driving force behind a lot of people’s beliefs is, as pratchett put it, ‘the overwhelming desire that tomorrow should be pretty much like yesterday was’. It takes a lot, like a lot Lot LOT, to get people to be willing to risk the unknown. people have this weird ability to look back at all of history, see how much things have grown and changed, and think to themselves “thank god that I live here and now, where things operate in the only possible correct way that was ordained by god. the past is nothing but barbarians dying of infections and the future is a dystopia that no one could possibly want or understand, but the way I grew up with is comfortable and makes sense. it’s the natural order.” this isn’t a terribly unique thought, but the ability to think it without realizing that every generation that came before you also believed that very same thing with as much conviction as you did is…let’s say it’s uniquely human.
Your wording here clarified some of this stuff for me. My brain works like…if anyone suffered preventably yesterday, and change can improve total well-being, put me on the change train. I read about people thinking that way, but it’s really hard for me to conceptualize. Thanks.
I’m glad you enjoyed it. One of my favorite philosophers/psychedelic enthusiasts/all-around crazy people, Robert Anton Wilson, gave me a bit of a gift in understanding this. He said that you can gain a lot of insight if you’re willing to sort people into two buckets: neophiles, who are excited and drawn to new things, and neophobes who are inherently afraid of new things and will reject them, often with violence. Of course this doesn’t work 100% of the time and it falls under what he would call a “useful fiction”, but it does seem to add value to the discussion even if it is imperfect.
When I was a kid, the future was supposed to be awesome and full of amazing technologies and solutions to all our present-day problems. Now I feel like these right-wingers have taken that all away, and now the future is, yeah, dystopian. I’m glad I don’t have any children…
But the present is full of amazing technologies: we have smartphones, and we have Facebook, and Wikipedia, and mass state surveillance, and toy quadcopters dropping bomblets… ok, so maybe all of that creates problems at the same pace as it solves others… but the tech is amazing!
The key when discussing progress with conservatives is to opening them up to the idea that we are going back
Yesss, a kind of Positive Scripting, especially when tailored to a certain group of people,
These people all grew up in a car centric world, where dad commuted in to the city from the suburbs and mom drove them to the school everyday. That, to them is the comfortable, natural order of things. Their psychology begs them to preserve that order at all costs.
How are 15-minute cities a threat to them and their way of life? As far as I know, there’s nothing about a 15-minute city that precludes anyone from driving a car in it.
All change to them, can be reduced to something that is being taken away from them. Something that disrespects their forefathers.
What about the changes they themselves are causing? Women in their forefathers’ time had access to legal abortion, and now they have taken that away. That’s a change. A rather drastic and menacing change.
How are 15-minute cities a threat to them and their way of life?
More compact cities tend to have more people on the streets (stranger danger!), less space for the cars in which they feel safe, and often force them to park and leave (!) their car minutes (!!) away from their destination. Let’s not even speak of public transportation, where dozens (!!!) of strangers get crammed into the same box.
Women in their forefathers’ time had access to legal abortion
Ah, but what about their fore-forefathers’ time? Anyway, that’s not menacing… for those who can’t get pregnant (men, and celibate, post-menopausal, etc. women).
More compact cities tend to have more people on the streets (stranger danger!)
I thought that’s why they carry guns?
less space for the cars
Okay, that’s a problem if you need to drive somewhere.
often force them to park and leave (!) their car minutes (!!) away from their destination.
That’s a serious problem if you’ve got a bum knee or something. Not everyone who’s disabled can afford to get a diagnosis and placard, nor will they get one in a timely fashion even if they can afford it.
Let’s not even speak of public transportation, where dozens (!!!) of strangers get crammed into the same box.
That’s also a serious problem if there’s a deadly airborne disease going around. We just had one of those, and another one could happen at any time.
That didn’t stop people from flying during the pandemic, though…
Ah, but what about their fore-forefathers’ time? Anyway, that’s not menacing… for those who can’t get pregnant (men, and celibate, post-menopausal, etc. women).
That, however, I will not sympathize with. They are horrible people if they believe that.
They believe that the long-term intent is to force people to remain within their designated “15 minute” zones.
I mean, in the US there’s an entire movement of people whose sole driving ideology is objecting to everything that a different group of people is for in order to “own” them
