More than 1,600 trips have been made on the new e-bikes for hire in Leeds since they arrived in the city centre just over a week ago.

Initial uptake of the scheme has been positive, with more 1,200 users covering 375km in the first week. The figures have been released following an official celebration to mark the launch of Leeds City Bikes on Saturday (23 September).

Residents and community groups were joined at the launch event by Tracy Brabin, Mayor of West Yorkshire, Cllr Helen Hayden, Leeds’ Executive Member for Infrastructure and Climate, and Phil Ellis, CEO of bike operator Beryl.

People were invited to join a series of free led rides on Leeds’ growing cycling network, with more than 10km of segregated lanes in the city centre alone.

Leeds City Bikes is a fully electric public bike hire service delivered by Beryl in partnership with Leeds City Council and the West Yorkshire Combined Authority.

Councillor Helen Hayden, Executive Member for Infrastructure and Climate, said:

“It was a fantastic day on Cookridge Street with lots of different kinds of people interested in learning more about the public e-bike hire service which has been a long ambition of this council, and it’s great to see them on the streets being hired.

“We want our city to be one that provides a full and comprehensive transport network and an e-bike scheme is a crucial part of that - offering quick and sustainable journeys across the city centre. We want Leeds to be a city where you don’t need to own a car and a key part of that is expanding and supporting our cycling network.”

This first phase of the rollout this autumn will see up to 300 bikes at 40 docking locations across the city centre and along key routes to the south and north-west. Further bikes will be delivered in 2024, with numbers doubling to 600 by spring.

The £2.86 million scheme has been made possible thanks to funding secured through the West Yorkshire Mayoral devolution deal.

Tracy Brabin, Mayor of West Yorkshire, said:

“It’s been wonderful to see people using the e-bikes this week and I’m looking forward to seeing even more over the coming weeks and months.

“Changing our travel habits is about having access to different options – and e-bike hire is now one of those.

“A reliable and inclusive transport network, which puts cycling and walking at the heart of our everyday lives, is key to our plans for a stronger and better-connected region.”

Phil Ellis CEO of Beryl, said:

“Events like this are vital to the successful integration of any new shared sustainable transport scheme as they give people the chance to come along, ask questions, try out the service and learn about how it can benefit them, both individually and as part of a city region.

“It was great to see so many people come down and show their support and enthusiasm for what we are trying to achieve here; which is to break down the barriers to active travel, improve public health and decarbonise transport by reducing traffic congestion and carbon emissions.

“The e-bikes are not only convenient, simple to use and fun, they can also save you a lot of money compared to private vehicle use, removing the costs associated with fuel, parking, tax, maintenance, storage, parking, MOT and insurance.”

Dr Robin Lovelace, Associate Professor of Transport Data Science at Leeds University, said:

“Investment in active travel is a win-win-win for health, air quality and the local economy. The new bike hire scheme will let people in the University of Leeds and city communities try out cycling on a secure, well-maintained electric-assisted bike. Combined with investment in active travel and public transport measures, this will enable more trips to be made without the costs of cars.

“The scheme aligns with the University of Leeds Climate Plan and will enable more students to get around on their own steam at a pivotal moment in their lives. E-bikes are a quietly revolutionary technology that can increase transport equality. This scheme will accelerate their uptake across the city.”

https://news.leeds.gov.uk/news/more-than-one-thousand-six-hundred-trips-made-on-new-leeds-e-bikes-during-first-week

Simon Mason <swldxer1958@gmail.com> wrote:

> Initial uptake of the scheme has been positive, with more 1,200 users
> covering 375km in the first week.

> The £2.86 million scheme has been made possible thanks to funding secured
> through the West Yorkshire Mayoral devolution deal.

> https://news.leeds.gov.uk/news/more-than-one-thousand-six-hundred-trips-made-on-new-leeds-e-bikes-during-first-week

£2.8million for 375km works out at £7600 per km.

--
Spike

QUOTE: . We want Leeds to be a city where you don’t need to own a car and a key part of that is expanding and supporting our cycling network.” ENDS

Most people in London don't have or need a car either - just wait until Leeds gets HS2 as well! :-0

Simon Mason <swldxer1958@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> QUOTE: . We want Leeds to be a city where you don’t need to own a car and
> a key part of that is expanding and supporting our cycling network.” ENDS
>
> Most people in London don't have or need a car either - just wait until
> Leeds gets HS2 as well! :-0

Will the good citizens of Leeds be able to afford HS2 seat prices?

--
Spike

On Sunday, October 1, 2023 at 7:33:31 AM UTC+1, Simon Mason wrote:
> QUOTE: . We want Leeds to be a city where you don’t need to own a car and a key part of that is expanding and supporting our cycling network..” ENDS
>
> Most people in London don't have or need a car either - just wait until Leeds gets HS2 as well! :-0

Brexit Britain at its brilliant best! :-0

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F7WQLEzWoAAl1-X?format=jpg&name=medium

Simon Mason <swldxer1958@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sunday, October 1, 2023 at 7:33:31 AM UTC+1, Simon Mason wrote:
>> QUOTE: . We want Leeds to be a city where you don’t need to own a car
>> and a key part of that is expanding and supporting our cycling network.” ENDS
>>
>> Most people in London don't have or need a car either - just wait until
>> Leeds gets HS2 as well! :-0

> Brexit Britain at its brilliant best! :-0

> https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F7WQLEzWoAAl1-X?format=jpg&name=medium

The UK isn’t in recession, unlike Vonda’s Germany…

PS: That is a very poor attempt by you at deflecting attention away from
the cost of tickets for HS2, or the current £7600 per km of the latest
bicycle scheme.

--
Spike

On Sunday, October 1, 2023 at 11:34:50 AM UTC+1, Simon Mason wrote:
> On Sunday, October 1, 2023 at 7:33:31 AM UTC+1, Simon Mason wrote:
> > QUOTE: . We want Leeds to be a city where you don’t need to own a car and a key part of that is expanding and supporting our cycling network.” ENDS
> >
> > Most people in London don't have or need a car either - just wait until Leeds gets HS2 as well! :-0
> Brexit Britain at its brilliant best! :-0
>
> https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F7WQLEzWoAAl1-X?format=jpg&name=medium

UK is even doing worse than Russia which has sanctions imposed on it - much like the Brexit sanctions the UK imposed on itself in 2016. :-0

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F7WgDRVWQAAV8sp?format=jpg&name=large

Simon Mason <swldxer1958@gmail.com> wrote:

> https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F7WgDRVWQAAV8sp?format=jpg&name=large

“Revised data indicates that the UK has seen faster growth than France or
Germany since the end of 2019”.

--
Spike

Spike <aero.spike@btinternet.invalid> wrote:
> Simon Mason <swldxer1958@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sunday, October 1, 2023 at 7:33:31 AM UTC+1, Simon Mason wrote:
>>> QUOTE: . We want Leeds to be a city where you don’t need to own a car
>>> and a key part of that is expanding and supporting our cycling network.” ENDS
>>>
>>> Most people in London don't have or need a car either - just wait until
>>> Leeds gets HS2 as well! :-0
>
>> Brexit Britain at its brilliant best! :-0
>
>> https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F7WQLEzWoAAl1-X?format=jpg&name=medium
>
> The UK isn’t in recession, unlike Vonda’s Germany…
>
> PS: That is a very poor attempt by you at deflecting attention away from
> the cost of tickets for HS2, or the current £7600 per km of the latest
> bicycle scheme.

Just think…

When the bicycle hire scheme hits 435,000km, the cost per km will be only
£7:60 per km!

Cheaper and cleaner to take a taxi…

--
Spike

More self harm by the Brextards:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F7XRD8bWkAALZyU?format=jpg&name=small

Simon Mason <swldxer1958@gmail.com> wrote:
> More self harm by the Brextards:
>
> https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F7XRD8bWkAALZyU?format=jpg&name=small

“The latest set of figures, means the UK's growth since the pandemic
exceeds that of 1.7% in France and 0.2% in Germany.”

--
Spike

QUOTE: Councillor Helen Hayden, Executive Member for Infrastructure and Climate, said:

“It was a fantastic day on Cookridge Street with lots of different kinds of people interested in learning more about the public e-bike hire service which has been a long ambition of this council, and it’s great to see them on the streets being hired. ENDS

Hope the local gammons didn't get "trapped" in their homes by the WEF stormtroopers or something.

Simon Mason <swldxer1958@gmail.com> wrote:
> QUOTE: Councillor Helen Hayden, Executive Member for Infrastructure and Climate, said:

> “It was a fantastic day on Cookridge Street with lots of different kinds
> of people interested in learning more about the public e-bike hire
> service which has been a long ambition of this council, and it’s great to
> see them on the streets being hired. ENDS

> Hope the local gammons didn't get "trapped" in their homes by the WEF
> stormtroopers or something.

It’s a racing cert that Councillor Helen Hayden, Executive Member for
Infrastructure and Climate never mentioned the £7600 per km cost in the
first week of operation.

--
Spike

On Sunday, October 1, 2023 at 5:06:55 PM UTC+1, Simon Mason wrote:
> QUOTE: Councillor Helen Hayden, Executive Member for Infrastructure and Climate, said:
>
> “It was a fantastic day on Cookridge Street with lots of different kinds of people interested in learning more about the public e-bike hire service which has been a long ambition of this council, and it’s great to see them on the streets being hired. ENDS
>
> Hope the local gammons didn't get "trapped" in their homes by the WEF stormtroopers or something.

It is the year 2049, and residents of the UK city of Oxford are unable to leave their neighborhoods. If they do, a network of cameras — installed years earlier under the guise of easing traffic congestion — track their movements. If they stray too far from their registered addresses, a £100 fine is automatically removed from their bank accounts. The only cars now allowed on the streets belong to representatives of the world government, who relentlessly patrol the city for anyone breaking the rules.

That’s the scenario conjured by adherents of a conspiracy theory that has emerged in Britain, triggered by plans to place restrictions on through-traffic and fed by the popularity of a largely unrelated urban planning concept — the pedestrian-friendly “15-minute city.”

The bizarre speculation burst into the real world on Feb. 18, when an estimated 2,000 demonstrators gathered in central Oxford. Five people were arrested during the demonstration, which drew groups of protesters and counter-protesters to the heart of the university town.

At issue was the proposed introduction of six new traffic filters intended to limit car use through residential parts of the city at peak hours. Monitored by automatic license plate readers, these filters would fine drivers from outside the county of Oxfordshire who entered central areas during high-traffic periods. Oxford residents will be allowed fine-free peak-hour access for 100 days per year, with residents of the wider county able to apply for a 25-day fine-free access permit.

Such efforts to limit vehicles have become increasingly common in UK cities, and many have faced opposition from drivers and residents. But the Oxford proposal took a weird turn when some protesters described the filters an effort to carve Oxford into six sealed-off “15-minute cities.” That’s a reference to the hyper-local planning model coined by Franco-Colombian professor Carlos Moreno and adopted by mobility advocates, developers and city leaders around the world. Its principle holds that daily needs like workplaces, schools and amenities should ideally be located within a short walk or bike ride from home.

Conflating walkability with a dystopian future of surveillance and oppression takes some work, but in recent weeks the term managed to get sucked into a maelstrom of British conspiracy theories. A British MP called 15-minute cities “an international socialist conspiracy,” while conservative self-help guru Jordan Peterson tweeted Oxford’s vehicle restrictions were the work of “idiot tyrannical bureaucrats” and referred his followers to the “Great Reset,” a 2020 World Economic Forum initiative that’s become a magnet for right-wing fantasies about a Covid-fueled plot to destroy capitalism. A British TV presenter also took up that theme, insisting that the street revamp was part of a push for “one world government.” Afterward, a leading UK Jewish organization and a group of MPs warned the network of indulging in dog-whistle anti-Semitism.

So out of proportion are the claims compared to what Oxford’s traffic-calming plan calls for that it takes some unpacking to explain how it happened.

Early misreporting of the issue helped throw oil on the fire. No local officials promised to divide Oxford into six “15-minute cities,” as some local media accounts implied. While the Oxford City Council does cite Moreno’s concept as a guiding principle for its 2040 local plan, it’s not involved in rethinking the city’s streets. That’s the work of Oxfordshire County Council, a different body that oversees not just Oxford itself but its large surrounding county, an area of just over 1,000 square miles. What the county is proposing — without mentioning the 15-minute city concept — is a street intervention known as a low-traffic neighborhood, or LTN, which has already been implemented widely across Britain.

LTNs date back to the 1970s, with the aim of making urban neighborhoods more walkable and bikeable by restricting car access to residential streets. They are a familiar source of local-level controversy, especially recently, since they proliferated immediately before and during the pandemic. Opponents have said that they slow down emergency services and displace traffic from affluent areas onto major arteries, where poorer residents are more likely to live. But recent research suggests that LTNs cut traffic within their boundaries by almost half without increasing it on boundary roads, while in London the most deprived quartile of residents are more likely to live within an LTN than the least deprived quartile. LTNs continue to be contentious, but support among London residents has been growing: 47% of respondents to a 2021 survey saying they were in favor of them and only 16% against.

Past opposition to LTNs, however, didn’t take the current bizarre conspiratorial tack, nor have the essentially local debates over their implementation been a target for activists from outside the affected area. In Oxford, protesters pounced on the issue as a “lightning rod” for waging a broader culture war, says Milo Comerford, head of counter-extremism policy and research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a think tank that studies extremist movements.

Their arguments show a peculiar mix of international and homegrown tinfoil hat-ism. “A lot of the conspiracy’s hallmarks are very American, being at its core about a kind of freedom of movement that’s defined by automobile-friendly cities,” Comerford says. “The odd thing is that it doesn't really make sense in the context of Oxford. Its medieval center has always been pretty pedestrian and cycle-friendly. In fact, the conspiracy has slightly been imposed on Oxford.”

He cites the experience of the pandemic as a critical factor in the protest’s origins. As many people in the UK and beyond genuinely struggled with Covid-19 restrictions and fears of a dangerous-but-invisible force, their anxieties fueled a rich online ecosystem of misinformation. “Covid has been a Pandora’s-box-opening moment,” says Comerford, one that has forged “unlikely coalitions between people who were previously hardened conspiracy theorists and those who were scared in the context of the pandemic and got drawn in.”

A 2021 report from ISD tracked the rise of the “climate lockdown” conspiracy during the Covid crisis, which found broad buy-in among anti-vaccination and far-right groups. Amplified by conservative media outlets in the US and UK and threaded with antagonism for climate action, this narrative holds that Covid-19 was “merely a precursor to future ‘green tyranny,’” the report states, “and that both governments and global elites would curtail civil liberties under the pretext of climate change.”

Accordingly, some Oxford protesters see the town’s car-calming initiative as an extension of a sinister authoritarian agenda. In videos and memes dispersed via social media, their vision of the 15-minute city often references the extreme social confinement enforced in Wuhan and other Chinese cities amid China’s now-discarded Covid Zero policy.

The pandemic provided ready-made “architectures” of protest, Comerford says, “built to respond to any issue of the day. It’s important to know that these episodes are essentially issue-agnostic.”

It’s also important to know that the UK’s wave of 15-minute-city protest employs a very fundamental misunderstanding of the concept.

“We just applied a term to something that has been there all along.”

Many Oxford protesters fixate on the notion that authorities intend to break cities up into small, fenced-off zones within which citizens will be confined by physical barriers, facial recognition tech, or other means. These grimly totalitarian scenarios do indeed sound alarming, but they have nothing to do with the reality of 15-minute-city-style urban thinking.

The term doesn’t describe a discrete area with barriers — it’s a planning approach that tries to ensure that schools, health-care facilities, parks and other amenities are spread equitably across neighborhoods, limiting the need for lengthy commutes and expanding job access. The time span in the name refers simply to what a person can easily reach from their home. Every resident’s 15 minute radius is going to be different; a city of a million homes will have a million overlapping 15-minute cities.

If this idea sounds familiar — or very familiar — that’s because it is. The general concept reflects the dominant direction of urban planning for at least the last 20 years, in which cities have tried to move away from the rigid single-use zoning popular in the earlier 20th century toward a mixed-use template that integrates homes, businesses, cultural venues and workplaces within the same areas. Carlos Moreno didn’t dramatically innovate on this approach; he merely packaged it a very effective way, by placing the ordinary resident at the heart of the urban plan.

That doesn’t mean that the 15-minute cities framework doesn’t raise legitimate concerns. Critics of hyper-local planning policies have highlighted how they might displace less-affluent residents, as seen in Barcelona’s “superblock” system, where through-traffic is restricted to a small part of the city grid to cut pollution and increase car-free public space. Others dismiss the approach as hopelessly utopian for North American cities planned around automobile use, which are not just low density but have social and racial segregation operating at a far more entrenched level than zoning alone can address.

Simon Mason <swldxer1958@gmail.com> wrote:

> More than 1,600 trips have been made on the new e-bikes for hire in Leeds
> since they arrived in the city centre just over a week ago.

> Initial uptake of the scheme has been positive, with more 1,200 users
> covering 375km in the first week.

That’s less than 350 yards per round trip!

Was it worth all that public money?

> https://news.leeds.gov.uk/news/more-than-one-thousand-six-hundred-trips-made-on-new-leeds-e-bikes-during-first-week
>

--
Spike

Conspiracy theories aren’t a new thing, and for as long as they’ve been around they’ve ranged from the benign to the absurd. From the six moon landings being faked to the Earth being flat, or our ruling class being lizards, we’ve all probably come across them in one form or another.

Yet, in a surprise twist, the hottest conspiracy theory of 2023 comes from an unlikely corner: town planning. This relates to the idea of “the 15-minute city” and has even gone so far as to be mentioned in UK parliament by an MP who called the idea “an international socialist concept” that will “cost us our personal freedom”.

As town planning academics who have published research on 15-minute cities, we know this is nonsense. But what actually is the 15-minute city? And what’s the fuss about?

The 15-minute city itself is a simple idea. If you live in one, it means that everything you need to go about your daily life – school, doctors, shops and so on – is located no more than a 15-minute walk from your house.
Designed for people not cars

The concept, which originated from the French-Colombian urbanist Carlos Moreno, is the current zeitgeist in planning, and calls for city design that is centred on people and their needs rather than being designed for cars. It gained international attention when the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, announced her intention to make Paris a 15-minute city following her re-election in 2020, with the plan to enhance neighbourhoods across Paris while ensuring connections between them. The idea flourished in the wake of COVID, when lockdowns and working from home had more of us ditching the car and recognising the need for well-served local neighbourhoods.

Yet this connection to how our towns and cities are changing in the wake of COVID is also probably the reason that 15-minute cities are now a hot-topic in the conspiracy world. Among other things, the charge sheet against 15-minute cities is that they are a “socialist”, or even “Stalinist”, attempt to control the population by actively preventing citizens from straying more than 15 minutes from their homes.

However, the reality is that the 15-minute city does not seek to exclude people or to prevent them from leaving. Instead, the idea is about providing high-quality neighbourhoods so that you don’t have to travel further to get the service. Crucially, this doesn’t mean you’re trapped where you live.

Yes, if travelling by car, the 15-minute city might make the journey to leave the neighbourhood longer as the urban realm and roads shifts from car dominance to a more equal distribution of space for active travel. But this might also mean that other ways of getting about town (walking, wheelchair, cycling, bus or train) might make sense for most journeys, with the car used only when necessary.

It’s fairly easy to see how Moreno’s idea has been perverted here. Within this, it’s also equally easy to trace a line between this and the prevalence of conspiracy theories surrounding COVID and the role of government. In this world, encouraging us to use cars less is seen as a limitation of our freedom rather than an opportunity to live in more vibrant and less polluted neighbourhoods.

The thing is, like so many other conspiracy theories, it gets into trouble when it comes into contact with reality. In many British cities, the reality is that having most services within a 15-minute walk of your house is already closer than you might think – what matters more is the quality and equity of those services.

What’s more, these ideas are popular. Not only have organisations like Sustrans consistently shown that more than two-thirds of people are in favour of these sorts of interventions, they are also endorsed at the ballot box. For example, when some candidates attempted to turn local council elections into a referendum on active travel interventions, they largely failed to get this opposition off the launchpad.

If anything, the 15-minute city envisages even the most urban parts of the country as something quintessentially British: a small market town. Indeed, if harking back to the past is your thing, then the past 50 years of transport planning has done more to damage this British ideal than make it a reality.

In fact, you would imagine that the Conservative MP who raised this conspiracy theory in the House of Commons might regularly get correspondence from the public bemoaning the lack of high-quality services in their neighbourhoods.

After decades of car-dominated culture there is a “gear change” happening in which pedestrian and cyclist experiences do increasingly matter in city planning. There is still a long way to go to make our streets and neighbourhoods places for all, and movements fuelled by conspiracy theory risk slowing these transitions and spreading unjustified fears.

While the 15-minute city has nothing to do with creating ghettos where people will be locked in, fake news like this circulates broadly and quickly, making it crucial for policymakers to convey clear messages about what’s at stake.

Simon Mason <swldxer1958@gmail.com> wrote:

> Conspiracy theories aren’t a new thing, and for as long as they’ve been
> around they’ve ranged from the benign to the absurd.

That’s an ineffective attempt to deflect attention away from the bizarre
judgment of the success of the £2.8million Leeds City Bikes cycle scheme
that cost £7460 per trip for its first week.

When the cycles have covered 375,000km, which at the current rate will take
about 20 years, the cost to the public per km cycled will have come down to
£7:46.

In some universe this makes sense, just not in this one.

--
Spike

Cities where people can live a short walk from work, school and other daily essentials rather than braving traffic-clogged highways or long commutes: utopian ideal or dystopian nightmare?

In 2023, apparently, it depends on who you ask.

Some conservative commentators and conspiracy theorists are increasingly convinced the concept of a “15-minute city” — an urban design principle recently embraced by cities ranging from Paris, France to Cleveland, Ohio — is the latest nefarious plot to curtail individual freedoms.

“You won’t be able to use your own car on certain roads and highways without the government’s permission and consent,” claimed one Instagram user in a recent video that’s been liked more than 5,400 times. “You will be constantly monitored by surveillance cameras to ensure that you don’t leave your designated residential zone without first being authorized to do so.”

But urban experts and city officials stress the idea has nothing to do with regulating people’s movements or taking away other freedoms. In some cases, they say, it’s being wrongly conflated with local plans to mitigate traffic-clogged roads.

Here’s a closer look at the facts.

CLAIM: “15-minute cities” are designed to restrict people’s movements, increase government surveillance and infringe on other individual rights.

THE FACTS: The urban planning concept is simply about building more compact, walkable communities where people are less reliant on cars.

The conspiracy theories took off late last year in the United Kingdom, as the concept was conflated with an effort to impose new traffic restrictions to ease congestion in and around the famous university community of Oxford.

The county government of Oxfordshire approved a system of “traffic filters” for six busy roads on which drivers will need a special permit to travel during daytime hours.

But Tony Ecclestone, spokesperson for the Oxford City Council, said the county’s initiative is separate from the council’s endorsement of the 15-minute cities concept, which is a key part of a city planning document it’s developing.

He pointed to a fact sheet the county and city governments issued jointly in December to set the record straight.

The fact sheet states that the filters aren’t physical barriers that will confine people to their local area, but instead traffic cameras that will photograph the license plates of any non-compliant drivers, who could then be subject to a fine. Drivers will still be able to travel to any part of the city at any time, but may have to take a different route.

The 15-minute neighborhoods proposal, meanwhile, aims to ensure that “every resident has all the essentials (shops, healthcare, parks) within a 15-minute walk of their home,” the fact sheet says. The goal is to “support and add services, not restrict them.”

Urban planning experts credit Carlos Moreno, a professor at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, with popularizing the 15-minute city concept. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has been one of its most visible proponents, making it a central tenet in her successful re-election campaign in 2020.

Dan Luscher, creator of The 15-Minute City, a blog devoted to the design concept, argues it’s “first and foremost” about choice, not coercion.

“It is about creating neighborhoods and cities with urban amenities close at hand, and with convenient and safe options for getting around,” he wrote in an email. “It is about enabling people to get their needs met within their own neighborhood, not confining them to that neighborhood. It is about mobility, not lockdown.”

Robert Steuteville, of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a D.C. nonprofit that advocates for walkable cities, agreed, adding the notion also isn’t all that novel: most cities built before 1950, when highways and suburbs became dominant, were 15-minute cities.

“The point is to provide more freedom of choice as to where a person can comfortably and affordably live in the city, not to prevent freedom of movement,” Nate Storring, co-executive director of the Project for Public Spaces, a New York nonprofit advocating for better urban design, wrote in an email.

Conspiracy theorists are tapping into COVID-19 pandemic-era vitriol against lockdowns when they falsely portray the concept as a “climate lockdown,” notes Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

They’re also drawing on far-right tropes about global-minded organizations pushing a “socialist agenda” and a “ Great Reset ” of society, he said. Indeed, a related conspiracy theory circulating online recently falsely claims the United Nations and the World Economic Forum will “forcibly remove” people living on polluted land and require them to live in “smart cities.”

“Even for those unversed in the vocabulary of the alt-right, the notion of distant elites ripping apart one’s way of life in order to conform to their notion of an optimal city can be a difficult one to stomach,” Ratti wrote in an email.

In Cleveland, Mayor Justin Bibb hopes his northeast Ohio city can become the country’s first to implement the planning framework.

But there’s been no talk of imposing new traffic regulations or restricting personal freedoms, confirms Marie Zickefoose, Bibb’s spokesperson. City officials have so far conducted a land use study and are working on updating city policies to encourage a better mix of amenities along main commercial and transit corridors, she said.

“The goal of the 15-minute city is to provide convenient and equitable access to necessities like healthcare, schools, grocery stores, jobs, and greenspace,” Zickefoose wrote in an email. “Our transportation system and neighborhood configurations currently provide this access to residents with cars, which leaves out almost a quarter of our residents..”

https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-15-minute-city-conspiracy-162fd388f0c435a8289cc9ea213f92ee