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Notes -
The concept of '15-minute cities' came up a few weeks ago, but since then it appears to have piggybacked off a local dispute in Oxford to become the locus of the latest so-called 'far-right conspiracy theory'. The proposed measure certainly codes as dystopian to me on this side of the pond, even as someone who is generally supportive of new urbanist ideas, but I can't speak to how it plays in Europe.
I've often felt that the culture war battle lines on these urban planning issues have not been as clearly drawn as those on gender, immigration, or abortion, mostly due to a lack of attention, but that time appears to be coming to an end. Though seeing as we already can't build anything, I suppose it isn't much of a loss.
What's the point of living in a city if I can't go places in it?
Currently, I have (theoretically) easy access to a few thousand businesses and a couple hundred thousand individuals. "Traffic Filters" would cut those numbers drastically, so I might as well leave and go live in the country.
As concrete examples, that implementation of traffic filters would've prevented me from:
working in construction, as the jobsites were too scattered for me to live near all of them
Comparison shopping for major purchases
Visiting specialty stores
helping a friend move
It's like they thought "We need better public transit and more attractive local neighborhoods" but set the baseline comparison to better than driving and more attractive than distant ones instead of comparing to the current situation. Under that framing, you can achieve your goals by making everything else worse. (Heck, you can even achieve that goal while making public transit and local neighborhoods worse, so long as you disproportionately affect driving and distant neighborhoods.)
The page says "vans" are in the list of exempt vehicles. Of course, people in construction don't always have work vans. And as far as I can tell, there's no exemption that would cover them. And there's probably other jobs that actually require driving other than construction and the ones they did think of: care workers and taxis.
Do you actually do those more than 100 days a year? Or even more than 25 days a year (i.e. about every other week)? if not, then this law wouldn't affect you for those cases.
But I agree this is a strange policy. Especially with the relatively low fine of £35 which seems more like an expensive toll/congestion charge than an actual attempt to stop people from driving. If they want their buses to flow better and are okay annoying car drivers... have they considered bus lanes? They do say they're waiting on a rail station to be completed before implementing the policy so they have some concept that transit should be better, but that seems like a low bar.
I just checked the camera locations and the permit areas, and it's stupider than I had imagined: You can just reroute your path so you drive ten minutes instead of two, even without a permit. It wouldn't have stopped me from doing anything, it just would've been annoying and caused longer trips.
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