15 minute city lifestyle IS the carrot. When the zone is nice and convenient, one rarely cares about the sticks. Commerce reorients with land use patterns. Shops do magically relocate towards density. That's the default development pattern pre-car in human history. Pivotting back to less car-centric, walkable mix use doesn't mean no cars but less cars and different (smaller) cars in exchange for transit/pedestrian priority.
> When the zone is nice and convenient, one rarely cares about the sticks.
Trade my fundamental freedoms for the "convenience" of using services within my 15 minute zone, rather than the services I prefer to use, which may be outside the zone?
Or will all services be forced to be equally mediocre, so people have no desire to seek services outside their zone?
IMO fundmental freedom is being able to walk (for free) to get your daily essentials met, instead of requiring transportation that eats up 15% of household income. Nevermind people who can't afford car upkeep. Personal vehicles are more of a cowboy/frontier privilege, which is still important, but doesn't mean settlements/cities need to adapt to car usage patterns to the detriment of pedestrian patterns.
Transit linking multiple zones together enables shopping around for quality services. Car owners can still drive. Again this isn't about eliminating cars, but reducing reliance on them, especially for every day living. Yes it can be about settling for whatever is in your default zone, which frequently is enough on the convenience : cost ratio if there's enough density to attract commerce at scale.
15 minute development patterns does not prevent car ownership. Car centric development in NA have inhibitted walkability, while also getting indirectly subsidized by non car owners.
Funny you mention fundamental freedoms, when suburbia as we know it today is the consequence of severe government restrictions on everything from lot size and building height to parking.
This reads like a picture painted by an American mindset (apologies if I’m misclassifying). There’s nothing wrong with that – I’m not convinced that it would actually work there (I lived in CA for many years).
However, and this is crucial, there are already 15-minute cities. They’ve been around for many hundreds of years, before the US was even founded as a state. They are alive and well, and they come with some compromises that many Americans don’t like, and that’s ok. But they do not rely on surveillance at all (unless you count dense neighborhoods as privacy-invasive in and of itself). It’s also not an ideology, it’s just how cities were constructed before cars.
From what I understand about city life in the 19th century, I don’t think we should see that as any kind of target state.
Cars enable people to visit the countryside and the coast (not just the tiny fraction served by unreliable, expensive and limited public transport service)
Some rural areas would be completely disconnected without car ownership.
The kind of metropolitan utopianism behind “15 minute cities” paints a picture of a country where everyone and everything outside densely populated urban zones is irrelevant. It’s a gloomy and drab picture, rather like the oppressive and uniform concrete society envisioned by the Soviet Empire.
> Cars enable people to visit the countryside and the coast
No question that cars is an absolute necessity in rural areas, or at the very least a liberator for a decent life. Not to mention transportation of goods through trucks.
While I have seen a few city folks who are kind of oblivious around that reality, the vast majority of people, myself included, are talking about how to make an already urban life better for day-to-day life. In those cases both USSR and China just happen to share similar traits to the rest of the world, and are by no means representative. Cities in Europe, south east Asia, Japan etc are not modeled after communism – an ideology that came after most cities were already built.
The best path has been by countries who have recognized the importance of road transit in rural areas and for transportation while building ample and effective public transit for popular routes both within and between cities. It’s not a visionary idea - it already exists in most of the developed world.
