Ministers prioritised driving in England partly due to conspiracy theories

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Ministers began considering curbs on cycling and walking schemes in March this year, one document said, “in response to concerns about 15-minute cities”, an urban planning concept that Rishi Sunak’s government has repeatedly mischaracterised.

Devised by the French-based urbanist, Carlos Moreno, 15-minute cities are a broad planning concept based on people living within easy reach of workplaces and schools, as well as local amenities, gradually reducing the need for short car trips.

TAN, which is being assisted by Dale Vince, the green energy magnate and campaigner, has sought a judicial review of the decision to scrap government guidance to councils introduced during Covid to help more people walk and cycle.

The DfT documents also show that officials repeatedly warned ministers that other aspects of the plan for motorists, notably the idea of potentially forcing councils to remove LTNs, were unlikely to succeed.

A DfT briefing paper for Downing Street in August warned that a full review of existing LTNs “could entail a very large piece of analytical work”, adding that “there is an expectation among media” that the plan for motorists would nonetheless target them.

However, the adoption of the idea, even as a long-term aspiration, by cities as varied as Paris, Bogotá and Oxford has prompted a wave of conspiracies about a supposed transnational plot to block people from travelling beyond their local neighbourhood.

The original article contains 914 words, the summary contains 225 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

(US Here) Even my more progressive friends won't go downtown because every business doesn't have free dedicated parking. Street parking is free for the first hour and when I still drove I had lunch with no problems that way 1000 times, but nope unless where they're going has it's own dedicated parking lot, they aren't going.

@C4d

Original guardian article is
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/10/shift-from-15-minute-cities-in-england-partly-due-to-conspiracy-theories

So frustrating to see this, and the same has followed here in NZ.

Particularly frustrating when it could and should have been addressed head on: The pandemic has shown we can change how we live work and move, and in a constrained fiscal environment the cheapest way to meet health, environmental and transport goals is to allow those who can cycle and walk stop clogging up roads.

But of course the car is a virtue signal of its own.

Absolutely insane. We have serious dysfunction in our civilization that great concepts like this 15min city is being poisoned by social media with the help of algorithms trying to optimize for profit. This is the real conspiracy, that our systems of power are utterly rudderless and irrational.