15 minute cities coming to your area soon

Perhaps because I've never used a car, didn't learn to drive - and live where we have decent public transport, off-road cycle paths and good transport for the disabled - I see things differently.

Drivers are very keen to protect their 'rights' to free movement, individual transport and the obvious convenience of just hopping in their cars for (often very short) trips.

I'm worried about the future, the pollution (not just from fuels) and wastage of resources. I see the restrictions imposed on others by these 'rights' - the communities divided by busy roads, the children kept indoors with nowhere to play, the noise, damage, litter, ugly depressing neighbourhoods resulting from increased traffic.

It simply can't continue, we can't keep building more/bigger roads, provide even more parking - there just isn't room. Supply can never meet demand so demand has to drop. Free public transport, good local facilities, more working from home - and (sorry) higher costs are the only way. People change their habits when it saves them money.

Of course, those living in remote areas, those who cannot walk, cycle or hop on a bus, need consideration and their cars - yet still, I can't help wondering how many ruin their health by never walking anywhere.

Most people cannot work from home.

For people who work in offices it could be the way forward at least for part of the week, but for so many it is impossible.

LadyHonoriaDedlock

Doodledog I know about planning officers, I've chaired a planning committee in the past. My aim always was to ensure that developments were on a human scale but also minimised the need for car use. Doing my best to ensure that offices and shopping centres were easily accessible by public transport. It's not always possible when you have the likes of Tesco threatening you with very expensive lawyers if you reject their plans and try to impose conditions on them they don't like. Planning officers are annoying sometimes but they aren't the enemy. Their job is to try to steer a course between the big corporations and the needs of real people without landing the council with a huge legal bill when Tesco or Bellway go to court and win (as they usually do).

I think you have completely missed the point of my post, which was about the tone of the responses, not their accuracy, and that the posters you denigrated were responding to the OP, which clearly stated that fines would be imposed on people taking too many trips outside of their allocated zones. Not everyone is a planner, not everyone will know the detail of the plans, and that doesn't make them (us) any of the things you claimed.

LHD: If only planning committees always listened to planning officers - it’s when they don’t, and think they, as lay people, know better, that, in my experience, they land the council with a big legal bill because their decision is successfully challenged.

DoodleDog the thing is, the OP started off her question about 15-minute neighbourhoods, and then introduced the business of 100 car trips, recognition cameras and fines, which are not part of the 15-minute neighbourhood principle, Such an idea may have been mooted somewhere, maybe even in Oxford I don't know for sure, but the schemes do not need to have such things and most if not all probably won't. Even so, it's those ideas that are brought up by conspiracy theorists outwith Gransnet (and mostly in America but Nick Fletcher MP ran with it in Parliament) to try to bring down the whole idea. By the way, I have never used the term "right-wing" in this context, I'd be more inclined to call the conspiracy theorists "libertarians".

Somewhere upthread I did post a link to Oliver Wainwright's Guardian piece which said pretty much what I think only more eloquently. I suspect quite a few contributors missed it, there hasn't been much comment on it anyway. I'll repeat it here anyway.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/16/15-minute-city-planning-theory-conspiracists

I do apologise if I caused offence by my clumsy words, which were to be honest a description of the conspiracy theorists, not people here.

Germanshepherdmum it's the job of the committee chair to mediate between the officers and members. As you seem to know about the process I'm sure you don't need me to tell you about that but it's not as transparent a process as it ought to be. I would meet with the officers before the agenda was drawn up to discuss anything that might be contentious and persuade them to renegotiate anything I thought my committee would not accept. It was never easy. I didn't want my committee to be too conservative in outlook while at the same time being frustrated that the whole system was loaded in favour of the big developers. But sometimes planning officers are wrong, and more often they are overcautious. There's a right time and a wrong time to override officers' recommendations and I'm sure nobody wants a local planning committee to be just a rubber stamp for developers.

I used to act for big developers LHD, and imo the system is only loaded in their favour by the existence of planning committees comprised of lay persons. Frequently they appeal, successfully, because a committee decision has not been made in line with proper planning considerations. Personally I would like to see planning applications dealt with exclusively by professional planning officers. Planning committees were one of the banes of my professional life.

I do apologise if I caused offence by my clumsy words, which were to be honest a description of the conspiracy theorists, not people here.
Fair enough. We all post things that come across differently from how they were intended - I know I've done so before now .

Thank you Doodledog!

Everyone will be affected whether they think so or not. This is only the initial step in this kind of thing, and it is, indeed, an attempt at social control. We're having the same thing over here in the US, although we have successfully fought off that part of it so far. What they want to do now is to put high-rise section 8 or rent reduced apartments in every neighborhood of the country, meaning they want also feel economic groups to be mixed together and just sort of figure it out. It's an attempt at socialist type equitable housing, but instead of building good housing that matches the neighborhoods and finding people who can afford to live there, they will bring in a lot of social miscreants, people with not enough money to afford the lifestyle. But then, the goal is not really to find housing for poor people, the goal is to cause chaos in the neighborhoods and to disrupt white suburbs (although it really has nothing to do with skin color, it's socioeconomic). Plenty of black people with good educations and good jobs live in our area already. This is going to cause a huge weight to be placed on the school system, the hospital system, the road system, and the police. Much more crime happens around this type of housing where people have to live so densely.

happycatholicwife What you describe is the norm in the UK and has been for years.

Far from bringing social unrest and crime to low crime areas, it has had exactly the opposite effect. It has taken us back to the normal village living patterns of the past where large expensive houses would be mixed with cottages. Where the doctor's children go to school with the shop assistant's children and where people of all incomes live and mix in the same community, use the same services, and do not expected to be discriminated against because of their household income or its source. My DH grew up in just such a community.

We now live in what is a now a large village on the edge of a an area full of high tech research and also acres and acres of warehouses. In other words high paid and low paid jobs. In recent years the village has expanded and the community itself through its village council fought the planning authority to ensure that the new estates had a mix of housing from small to large and included social housing. We also stopped one developer from isolating the social housing from the rest of the housing and what we have is truly mixed development. Our housing is a mix of property size and tenure and you cannot tell by looking at a property on a new estate know whether the occupant is a warehouseman in a socially subsidised house or a young couple buying their first home.

I like you am a catholic and your post is shameful. It completely ignores catholic social teaching. Here is a link to the seven principles of catholic social teaching published by your own US Conference of catholic bishops. www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/what-we-believe/catholic-social-teaching/seven-themes-of-catholic-social-teaching.

happycatholicwife1

Everyone will be affected whether they think so or not. This is only the initial step in this kind of thing, and it is, indeed, an attempt at social control. We're having the same thing over here in the US, although we have successfully fought off that part of it so far. What they want to do now is to put high-rise section 8 or rent reduced apartments in every neighborhood of the country, meaning they want also feel economic groups to be mixed together and just sort of figure it out. It's an attempt at socialist type equitable housing, but instead of building good housing that matches the neighborhoods and finding people who can afford to live there, they will bring in a lot of social miscreants, people with not enough money to afford the lifestyle. But then, the goal is not really to find housing for poor people, the goal is to cause chaos in the neighborhoods and to disrupt white suburbs (although it really has nothing to do with skin color, it's socioeconomic). Plenty of black people with good educations and good jobs live in our area already. This is going to cause a huge weight to be placed on the school system, the hospital system, the road system, and the police. Much more crime happens around this type of housing where people have to live so densely.

Shameful.

Your post reads like a parody, hcw. Were you trying to be funny?