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!

Oh no, imagine life being convenient

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.

Oh, look. The Torygraph.

"every opinion different than mine is stalinist!" said the chugs with their mouths full of mcnuggets and cheap beer.

Does this also come with universal health care, free education, 100% employment, and housing as a right? If not, it's not very Stalinist.

"[...] “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.

Fuck the torygraph.

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.

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.

When they argue in bad faith, they’ll say anything and never waver from it to further their agenda.

Today you can walk to the shops.

Tomorrow you're in a Siberian gulag.

Slippery fucking slope.

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.

Maybe tankies are the way they are because they live in some bastardized allegory of the cave where all they've ever learned about Stalin is from Duncan White, director of the Alliance of British Drivers.

"Journalism opens the door to writing articles after a frontal lobotomy"

They clearly never been to Moscow, they would love it though, a car hellscape.

least obvious bias.

Is the Telegraph a tabloid? What the fuck is that?

so says a voice for the ‘stall in traffic’ demographic