Again, this is a perfectly good idea – Oxford is a medieval city, designed for pedestrians and horses, and anyone who’s driven through town during rush hour has seen its transformation into the kind of traffic jam Hieronymus Bosch might have painted on a particularly grim day. The organizers of the Oxford protests conflated the 15-minute city plan with another plan to restrict cars in the city center. Oh, not about 15-minute cities! The 15-minute city is a perfectly pleasant idea that mostly requires adding a few bus lanes, loosening single-use zoning restrictions, and sprinkling some bike-locking pillars in strategic locations. Here’s the thing: the swivel-eyed loons have a point. In America, this is called “the paranoid style in American politics.” In the UK, they have a far more colorful epithet: “swivel-eyed loons.”

So it’s weird that a bunch of people showed up to protest it, chanting slogans and waving signs decrying the World Economic Forum, the Great Reset, imaginary “climate lockdowns,” and “eating bugs.” The 15-minute city is an extremely inoffensive and commonsense idea, and moreover, Oxford is basically already a 15-minute city, because it is a medieval city, with a streetplan to match, anchored around a massive university campus (university campuses everywhere are pretty much all 15-minute cities). One of the more baffling events of the first quarter of 2023 was the mass protest in Oxford (England, not Mississippi) against the “15-minute city pledge,” a movement to get city councils to strive for cities where each neighborhood is a walkable place, with most amenities (groceries, schools, health care, employers, leisure activities) located within a pleasant 15-minute walk from your door.

Driven by kelley armstrong