Let Me “Just Ask Questions” of the 15-Minute City Haters
People get antsy when the concept of better urban design comes up, be it with the so-called “15-Minute City” or any method to make our society less dependent on cars. They scream that making cars not mandatory is a secret plot to herd people into open-air prisons/gulags. Not that any gulag I read about has amenities that better and denser urban design has to offer. Though maybe I should consult an Eastern European on that. Or that it’s all a secret plan by some nebulous group of elites (most of them Jewish) to implement a Christian-genociding New World Order.
Of course, anyone who calls them on the fact that this is nonsense gets told that they’re “Just Asking Questions.” And since no statistics or graphs will convince them, let me “Just Ask Some Questions” of my own.
Could Car Dependency Be a Tool of the “Elites?”
I keep hearing about shadowy “elites” whenever better urban design comes up. The elites want to corral us or whatever. But isn’t it equally possible that these so-called elites have far more reason to keep us car-dependent? There’s certainly more evidence for it.
Let’s remember that cars and fossil fuels are big businesses. Bigger than any renewable industry. The auto industry makes billions every year. And they’ve done everything possible to make their cars harder to repair. Not because environmentalists are mean but because there’s money in making your car as hard to repair as possible. The car-brained elites saw local mechanics and people fixing their cars in their own garages and wanted a piece of that action.
And let’s talk about oil. There is a lot of money in oil. Whole countries’ economies are based on oil. What if the West created a society where cars weren’t mandatory? A lot of highly elite people would lose a lot of money. Suddenly, people wouldn’t absolutely have to fill up two tanks of gas every other day if they wanted to participate in society.
And the elites have a lot to gain politically. Most people who aren’t actively engaged in politics vote on one factor: The price of gas. If the elites see people start shifting in a political direction they don’t like, the price of the vroom vroom juice magically increases. We have had consecutive elections where gas prices went up in October in a naked attempt to try and swing elections.
We have had oil-producing countries raise prices in an attempt to browbeat the car-dependent West into looking the other way when it came to Islamic theocrats attempting to genocide Israel in the 70s or more recently, theocrats in the Russian Orthodox Church trying to genocide Ukraine right now. They have every reason to believe this tactic will work.
But again, imagine if the West were to break car dependency. Suddenly a lot of otherwise backwater states wouldn't have a free hand to conduct genocides. The Arab theocracies would basically lose all leverage over anyone and be reduced to blaming everyone else for their self-inflicted misery.
But somehow the guys wanting to make life not dependent on cars are the ones in on an evil conspiracy?
What About Freedom?
One other thing I keep hearing about is how cars are a key, if not the key, to freedom. If we designed cities to not be dependent on cars, we’d all be corralled and controlled or whatever. But here’s the weird thing: Before we made our cities car-dependent, our cities were 15-minute cities. And most of the people whining about the concept today would have the same freedom they have now.
And are cars really that freeing? The whole “cars equal freedom” equation was first and foremost a marketing gimmick. So the equation has never been examined with any sort of critical eye. So let’s examine it.
Going back to what I said before, gas companies and petro-states have an insane amount of power over how you vote. If someone is holding a gun to your head and saying, “Vote how we want or we’ll make gas $6 a gallon” you’re not that free.
Then there are cars themselves. You need a car to get to work to pay for your house and your car. And here’s the “fun” thing. If anything happens to your car, you’re screwed. A lot of people, particularly the ones screaming that the end of car dependency is the end of freedom, are one car repair away from being homeless. Is automobile precarity really that freeing?
And “elite” employers are screaming for the end of remote work to force people back into their cars. The actual elites aren’t the people fighting to break car dependency. The elites are the ones fighting to keep car dependency.