Conspiracies and 15-Minute Cities
The ongoing conspiracy theories about 15-minute cities make me think about the issue of conspiracies and extremism more in general. The difference between what the conspiracy theories say and what the actual program is is vast. This is true even when there is lively critique of the program by non-conspiracists, critique that the conspiracists seem unaware of, or at best indifferent to. This set of facts about conspiracists – they are wrong even when the things they oppose happen to have serious problems; they are uninterestingly wrong; they do not cooperate with serious critics and often react violently against them – is general.
It’s relevant here for two reasons. First, because there’s a growing amount of anti-environmental and anti-public transport extremism, in which the possession of a large, polluting car is treated as an identity market. Such extremism never seriously interacts with any real critique of public transport construction programs or any kind of critique of urbanism. And second, because I have a lot of readers who come from a rationalist or Effective Altruism background and like doing what they call steelmanning: finding the strongest argument someone could make for a stance even if they didn’t make it, and arguing with that. I beseech my rationalist readers: please stop steelmanning – if extremists refuse to engage with any serious critique even when it argues against the same thing they argue against, it’s not to their credit and you should make inferences from that instead of acting as their lawyers.
But first, what are 15-minute cities and what’s the conspiracy theory?
15-minute cities
For some background, there is a trend in the urbanist world of calling for urbanism that enables people to make all their regular travel needs – retail, recreation, child care, social spaces, work – within a 15-minute travel radius by public or non-motorized transportation. Some versions of this vision drop work from these needs, due to the realization that people in cities travel 30-60 minutes each way to work and not 15. Parisian urban politics tends to believe in this vision, with work included: the city tries to spread work places around the city as isotropically as possible, creating jobs in residential neighborhoods rather than in city center; when I critique the vision, I usually focus on its implementation there, since the city’s political leadership adheres to it, and global adherents of the model generally think highly of Paris and of Mayor Anne Hidalgo.
The conspiracy theory is that it’s really a conspiracy to confine people into a 15-minute radius and prevent them from traveling further.
This conspiracy theory is not just the usual opposition to transit-first or pedestrian- and bike-first cities from drivers. Drivers who oppose bike lanes and prioritization of public transport and resent cities that don’t expand highways speak of a war on cars. The conspiracy theorists who think 15-minute cities are a confinement attempt love cars and love driving, as an anti-environmental identity marker, but care little about highway expansion; they think they’re being literally imprisoned and spied on.
There is an extensive critique of 15-minute cities from within the world of urbanism. I’ve long complained that it’s a consumption-centric model of urbanism; I think little of Hidalgo. I’m fairly neoliberal about the primacy of work over consumption, but Marco Chitti, who isn’t, points out that these 15-minute cities exist by the grace of service workers who commute in from elsewhere taking far longer than 15 minutes to get to work. Paris itself has long been critiqued for its museumification.
And none of the conspiracy theories about 15-minute cities comes close to touching any of the serious critiques. The critique that 15-minute cities center consumption over production is a YIMBY line, YIMBYs generally backing production theory in which people choose where to live based on access to jobs, not consumption amenities. But the conspiracy theorists tilt NIMBY, viewing developers as part of the conspiracy to make their lives worse (by making it easier for other people to live nearby); the conspiracy theorists who want to be more developmental and have heard of YIMBY are busy complaining that YIMBYs don’t back developing more single-family housing on the fringes of urban areas.
Likewise, the more social critique of Marco and others talks about inequality. The conspiracy theorists once again don’t care about any of this. They identify in opposition to anything that reeks of socialism. (There are of course far left conspiracy theorists, but these aren’t the ones saying that 15-minute cities are about confinement.) They hate the state and, for all of their hate of the idea of government by lawsuit, they hate the idea of government by bureaucrats more; one of them told me that the concept of an ambitious civil servant is scary and it’s good to force civil servants to keep their heads down.
I bring up the notions of social equality, the state, and upzoning to point out that the solutions to the real problems of Paris today are the exact opposite of what the conspiracy theorists who think 15-minute cities are confinement want. There’s no point in discussing those real problems around extremists, because the extremists at best don’t care, and at worst negatively care.
Other examples
The example above of how conspiracy theories about 15-minute cities have nothing to do with the real problems of that kind of urbanism, and there isn’t even a kernel of truth, generalizes outside urbanism and transportation. Much of it concerns anti-vaccination extremism, but there are other cases.
For example, there have been Jihadist conspiracy theories that vaccination is a Western plot to sterilize Muslim men. Based on that theory, Jihadists have attacked vaccination drives in Pakistan, murdering aid workers. Far too many organs steelman those theories, arguing that they were a natural byproduct of CIA meddling, citing in some cases a fake vaccination drive set up by the CIA to harvest people’s DNA. The truth is that, first of all, it was a real vaccination drive, in which a single doctor was trying to send over DNA to find Osama bin Laden (and didn’t). But second and more importantly, this anti-vaccination sentiment predates this episode, going back to the mid-2000s. The primary grievance the Jihadists have about vaccines did not mention anything about the CIA harvesting DNA; the Jihadists appeared completely unaware, having developed their theories completely independently.
For another example, in 1980s Germany, there was a public dispute over how to commemorate the Nazis, called the Historikerstreit. Historians on the right, like Ernst Nolte, charged that Germany ought to be prouder of its past, that Hitler was just concerned about the crimes of communism, that the Holocaust was just an overreaction to the gulags; right-wing publications like FAZ published Nolte’s popular writings on this. To Nolte and others, the anti-Semitism was just an unfortunate byproduct of how many Jews were communists. The right lost that debate; historians on the left, like Eberhard Jäckel, pointed out that Hitler in fact underestimated the Soviet Union because he thought Jews and Bolshevism were weak. The rat cage torture, which Nolte said Hitler was most concerned about, appeared nowhere in Mein Kampf, whereas anti-Semitic conspiracy theories did; the only quote from Hitler about it is ambiguous and from 1943. Moreover, far from centering communism as the great evil, Hitler also called capitalism a Jewish conspiracy to produce social alienation. Nolte was in effect steelmanning the Nazis, inventing an argument that they were not interested in to distract from what they were interested in and what they did.
Pedestrian Observations 
>the conspiracy theorists who want to be more developmental and have heard of YIMBY are busy complaining that YIMBYs don’t back developing more single-family housing on the fringes of urban areas.
This seems like a correct take not limited to conspiracy theorists, sprawl is perfectly acceptable as long as it isn’t subsidized (some subsidy is arguably justifiable in the name of reducing insect suffering). It is true that more sprawl wouldn’t actually help in a lot of places due to geographic (SF) or commute time (Texas) constraints, but in e.g. London, sprawl is good.
…insect suffering?
In London, opening up the Greenbelt is good, yeah. There’s also not much conspiratorialism about YIMBYism in the UK. The anti-YIMBY conspiracy theories are more American, rooted in how single-family developers in Oregon have convinced themselves the urban growth boundary is communism, to the point that they opposed the Oregon upzoning bill on the accelerationist grounds that it would reduce the political impetus to expand the UGB.
I believe the “insect suffering” is a comment on higher levels of urban air pollution–due almost solely to motor vehicle traffic–is detrimental to insect health.
There’s some weird horshoe-theory stuff around housing development in Portland. Some on the far-left end up being NIMBY because any development, at the moment, would necessarily be private sector-led, and so wouldn’t immediately decommidify housing, making it unacceptable even if they concede that the present (with essentially no public housing AND little private development due in part to dense regulatory structures) is untenable. And as you say, the far right is NIMBY because anything that led to redevelopment of existing SFH areas, or anything at all that caused development of housing that wasn’t single-family could only be because of government interference of one kind or another.
With the appropriate apologies for putting the question here: what would a decommodified housing market (nonmarket?) look like, how would it work? My previous attempts to learn this ran into muddles along the lines of “it wouldn’t work, the proposal(s) would thoroughly kill the rental market in particular and usually any kind of construction in general”.
Well, from my own Marxist analysis, it’d mean removing the exchange value of housing. I.e., there should be enough of it in the right places that owning so much of it that you can lend some at interest (as opposed, perhaps, to renting rooms in one’s own lived-in home) has no value.
The best thing I can think of for comparison, really, is healthcare in countries with universal public healthcare. There is the difference in them being goods vs. services. Healthcare, being a service, isn’t subject to depreciation, even if the capital goods used to produce it are; ergo, there is low marginal cost to providing healthcare publicly to everyone. The greatest product of its provision–healthy people–isn’t meaningfully owned by the public (it IS the public), so despite what can be a high cost of “production”, there can’t be any reasonable attempt to directly recoup the cost of “producing” it that isn’t just peonage, i.e., effective ownership of a person. By contrast, the state’s cost of healthcare is recouped in not having annual pandemics or a workforce that needs replacing every 20 years due to early mortality. This is obviously all the more essential as countries move up the value chain and producing a workforce takes about 20 years, in the first place.
Housing does depreciate, and therefore can become a genuine debt after long enough, and unlike healthcare’s “product”, it doesn’t “reproduce”, so needs further investment over time, but that ought to incentivize high-value investment: high-density housing/infrastructure of high quality which needs investment infrequently and can be used by many people in the meanwhile, rather than the low-density, low-quality housing (and transportation infrastructure) that the American private market/governance/regulatory structure currently produces.
Housing produced at scale in this manner should be able decommodify housing insofar as no one who needed it would want for it, and no one looking to make money off of others’ desperation for it would be wise to try to use it to do so. It’s not very market-oriented of me, but it OUGHT TO kill the rental market; that’s kind of the point. I don’t ultimately think that housing should be subject to the whims of market forces. No one ought–and I use that in the moral sense–to be able to make money off of someone else’s need of means for living.
It’s the same way I feel about transportation. Almost everyone has either a necessity of or yearning for travel; there are many such reasons for which we’ve spread around the globe. Most significantly, for all of these things, there are significant positive externalities to be gained for their free or nearly-free provision.
“there is low marginal cost to providing healthcare publicly to everyone”
Isn’t there a really high marginal cost, because healthcare cost is mostly labor? (I still support universal public healthcare though, because unlike most economic sectors healthcare is not and basically cannot become a real free market)
“high-density housing/infrastructure of high quality which needs investment infrequently”
I think evidence suggests you have this backwards. Japan is a notable example where housing is “low quality” and is in fact torn down and rebuilt every few decades, and yet it’s very affordable because they allow people to build a lot of it.
Eric2:
It’s not affordable where I or a lot of people who imagine they would love living in Tokyo would prefer. In some ways they have the worst of both worlds: very expensive housing (mostly apartments) in the most convenient (central) areas with affordable (but still not high quality) housing only where you have hours of commuting to those central areas, and with quite unacceptably crowded and expensive public transit.
As I have related here before, when I was a visiting scientist at Otsuka (northern side of the Yamanote line) there were about half a dozen people (scientists) sleeping in the lab for 3-4 nights a week rather than waste all that time on commuting. The others suffered their huge commutes, some still living with parents and some being carers for those parents. Only two (of maybe 30) in the lab actually lived in central Tokyo, an American post-doc paying a lot for a small studio and me, just staying in a hotel for my working visit.
………………
In a vaguely related topic: post-war Japan planted huge forests of cedar and cypress to provide building materials (and possibly paper) but then found it was more economic to import it. The forests are still there and now produce huge amounts of pollen, possibly aggravated by global warming, such that about 40% of people suffer hayfever. So bad they are now looking at cutting down these trees and replanting species that don’t produce the problem. Australia is having a related problem and it was a bad season this year, from all the European Plane trees planted as street shade trees. They can affect people who don’t normally get hayfever due to the spikiness (trichomes) of the pollen independent of the allergenic effect. Like Japan there is a plan to slowly replace the planes with native species that don’t have this problem.
Well, the marginal cost of healthcare is cost of labor for production minus cost of labor for not meeting demand. I admit the latter is hard to measure, being largely hypothetical until after the fact, but historically speaking, a lot of labor hours have been lost to not “meeting demand” for healthcare (i.e., premature death), determined in the past mostly by poor understanding of how to properly meet that demand. The follow-up there was not only lost labor hours, but more expensive labor of those laborers left alive; the spike in wages post-Black Death in medieval Europe is pretty widely acknowledged at this point.
Re: Japan, as Alon has noted, has very strong private property rights. That Japanese houses are made to be more-or-less disposable is evidence that capital (private property rights) doesn’t care much about material efficiency if it doesn’t need to. That may be fine in a wealthy, depopulating country like Japan; how usable such a housing market paradigm is in a poorer, growing country is debatable. A country like the U.S., which is unlikely to see any substantial leaps in national wealth with an expensive housing development paradigm (single-family sprawl), building the low-quality McMansions you see everywhere has no justification.
The only angle that works from that pops to mind is that building disposably is fine if it’s temporary. A country with lots of convergence space is likely to end up with demands for more space per person and more modern amenities and construction as it becomes wealthier. Determining what level of consumption of living space is ecologically sustainable when they’ve fully developed, and building THAT–however it ends up being defined; a moving target, for sure–to last, seems to be the key.
In a fast-growing country, houses can still be disposable, on the theory that you should limit construction costs now and rebuild later when you are richer and have higher standards. I’ve been told one of the reasons for Japan’s housing situation is that earthquake regulations keep getting tighter, so might as well just rebuild later.
Thank you for the answer. So, the idea is for the government (anywhere from municipal to federal) to build a massive quantity of housing — a deliberate oversupply — if I understand it correctly? Both “replacing” a large fraction of existing private developer-/landlord-supplied volume and beyond that increasing total volume to drive the market-clearing price down. (And perhaps selling/leasing/renting out the housing at below-market prices, but that is uninteresting because it doesn’t change the prices clearing the remaining private market.)
I would quibble somewhat with the comparison to healthcare. In that case, the problem is that if I’m about to die of untreated whatever, theoretically I’m willing to pay a price up to the NPV of the rest of my life for treatment, and I’m physically not very able to comparison-shop. (“My kingdom for a horse.”) I also really can’t tell in advance whether this is a legit surgeon or a quack. With housing, the outcomes are rather less catastrophic despite several of the cheaper options (rooming houses, SROs, etc.) having been mostly banned in the early 20th century. It’s somewhat more possible to check multiple offers, and to get at least some clue about the thing on offer.
I think you have it right. If housing is to exist purely for use value, instead of being built (as it is now, at least in the U.S.) for exchange value, there can’t be a meaningful exchange value; therefore, the market clearing price should be very nearly zero.
As someone working in emergency healthcare, I can attest that this theory of operation mostly works. By law, no one showing up to an emergency room in the U.S. (and I’d imagine most other countries, with/without universal healthcare, developed or not) can be flatly refused care, whether or not someone is willing or able to pay for it. Because of this, the legal repercussions for not providing emergent care are significant, and so there are ways of circumventing a scenario when it couldn’t be: if an ER isn’t equipped to treat someone, it is legally required to find somewhere they can be treated; if there isn’t presently sufficient staff to treat someone coming in via ambulance, they must be “diverted” to another facility.
The goal of providing care this way–similar to a decommodified housing market–is to prevent exactly the kind of situation where it’s bid-up by people without the time to become informed about what they’re buying.
Housing in poorer, growing countries is inherently better built disposable, as you’re expecting what can be built in the future will be much better than what can be built today. Even in wealthy countries, having a faster replacement cycle means better housing. The average floor space per person in Tokyo grew by like 50% over 3 decades of economic stagnation and population growth. My apartment in Tokyo is a small fraction of the price of my apartment in SF, which itself was a small fraction of the price of anything remotely comparable to the quality of my apartment in Tokyo.
Looking on suumo, you can find ~25m^2 apartments within biking distance of Otsuka Station affordable on full time minimum wage, and ~35m^2 apartments (if you live alone, you will have more space than is average in Paris or Paris + Petite Couronne) for ~1.2x full time minimum wage.
Despite being more known as a transit city with long commutes on trains, Tokyo is probably the leading “15 minute city, including work” as there is no other contiguous region of 40 million people that has a walk/bike commute mode share comparable to that of Greater Tokyo. And if you are very willing to sacrifice on space, you can live biking distance of a waitress job in the primary CBD and have enough money left over to occasionally eat at fancy cafes, like one of my friends does.
Even if the country isn’t growing there is a good argument for not making housing last too long: needs change. My house was built in 1970, and there are a lot of dated things about it that would be expensive to change. Some are just nice to haves a bigger kitchen would be really nice), but some are functional things; it was not built to modern insulation standards and so I spend more than a modern house on HVAC (read CO2).
If your house was built post ~1930 here then it’s energy usage will be very respectable with only relatively small changes that can easily be retrofitted such as filling in wall cavities with insulation, more loft insulation and double glazing.
Maybe if it’s a well maintained place, that was very nice when it was new, post-1930s. I lived in an apartment in the SF Bay Area built in the 1960s. Light would leak through the door frame, and the curtains would sway in the wind even with all windows closed. On hot days the AC would be constantly running even trying to maintain mid-70s F, and on cold nights, I just wore outdoor jackets inside. Based on my friends’ housing, that was pretty typical for apartments under $2000 in the mid/late-2010s.
Michael typically manages to project his vague impressions of 40 years ago with all the racism and NIMBYism of anglo-boomer who thinks racist NIMBYs like Hidalgo are the master caste. Mind you its not like other don’t do it (Sorensen good grief).
Disposability of Japanese housing has its costs, it means you can’t accumulate housing stock as you can elsewhere, it has real environmental damage as it consumes a lot of RC and wood. Some this is inescapable given the unacceptable risk of masonry and the damage humidity does to RC. Some of it is because of Inheritance taxes being so high. And some of it is as Alon and others say, simply the cost of doing economic development to 1st world standards plus rising demands for earthquake resistance. And the successes of latter should not be underestimated, 1997 saw 1000’s die on Kobe from collapsed buildings by 2011 it was down to hundreds (90.7% of causalities where drowning in the Tsunami). And the collapsed buildings were pointedly not in Sendai proper.
Part of the problem here is that we don’t have a good set of statistics that can properly sum up how good a housing situation is, because conditions are so particular. Japan, Taiwan and South Korea are playing on hard mode given the geology, climate, lack of buildable land, population-densities etc, with Japan doing best. France I’d say is playing well on easy mode. England is playing atrociously on medium difficulty, US badly on very very easy mode.
@Matthew Hutton
“If your house was built post ~1930 here then it’s energy usage will be very respectable with only relatively small changes that can easily be retrofitted such as filling in wall cavities with insulation, more loft insulation and double glazing.”
This is stupendously wrong. First, filling walls with insulation and installing double glazing are not “small changes” – they involve opening up every wall at least partially and replacing every single window or glass door. But there is so much more. The home will not have housewrap to seal leaks, the heater will use a wasteful pilot light, the heating system will not have a heat exchanger, etc. Energy use will be much higher than modern buildings.
Same for other systems, toilets and fixtures will not be low flow, electrical panel will use fuses (possibly exposed contacts) instead of circuit breakers, no ground fault circuit interrupters, etc.
But forget 100 year old homes, 50 years old homes have poor energy performance. Tyvek was first produced in 1967 but wasn’t common for a decade. Fiberglass insulation existed in the 50’s but spray in foams have better performance without gaps, to say nothing of aerogels. Everything about central heating performance (pilot lights, burner efficiency, exhaust air heat exchangers) has improved since the 70’s. Development of modern high performance envelopes (i.e. passivhaus) begin in the late 1980’s.
@aquaticko
“I can attest that this theory of operation mostly works. By law, no one showing up to an emergency room in the U.S. (and I’d imagine most other countries, with/without universal healthcare, developed or not) can be flatly refused care, whether or not someone is willing or able to pay for it.”
Yes, but people can be refused chemotherapy, hip replacement, and all other kinds of non-emergency medical treatment. Emergency medical care is only needed for a short time and not by everyone at once. Housing is just the opposite. That emergency care is mandated in no way means that the theory of de-commodifying housing would “mostly work”.
It’s completely false that countries with universal health care are “meeting demand” for healthcare. All systems ration healthcare, whether by cost, waiting time, quality, or simple denial of certain services. The availability of Abiraterone in Britain before 2018 and where Belinda Stronach had her breast cancer treated are proof of this. Universal healthcare systems generally ration them more equitably, but it is foolish to stay that the rationing does not exist or that similar tradeoffs would not exist for de-commodified housing.
You continually refer to housing for profit as a US system, but in fact housing is a commodity worldwide. There are a few times/places where housing has been widely provided publicly (the million program in Sweden, housing in Vienna proper, Singapore) but these are limited exceptions and public housing was never exclusive. Even then the million program was a mix of incentives for private builders and publicly built, and Singapore public housing is a means of authoritarian control as much as housing policy. Private housing production is the overwhelming model the world over, not just in the US.
@Onux
Sure, but housing needs also don’t change as rapidly as medical needs can. Once someone is provided a housing unit, their need of housing will likely change only every few years, if even that; some people will live in the same home adequately for their entire lives. I.e., keeping a unit “off-market” by keeping it publically-owned and lent to the same person doesn’t provide an obstacle to universal provision. There are provisos to this, sure, but not nearly as dramatic as those affecting healthcare, and so decommodifying housing poses a lesser challenge, because there are fewer external pressures to keep supply/demand in flux. It’s precisely that consistency of need that should make decommodification easier.
Healthcare needs can shift dramatically, not just over months or years, but over minutes, even seconds. This is why emergent care is, in a sense, free: the risk of high marginal cost for not providing it thusly is high. E.g., keeping a respiratory therapist in your pocket when someone needs emergent intubation even if they cannot pay for it is poor resource allocation: the therapist may not otherwise have work to do at the moment, the work may not be available to do later, the particular patient who needs the service is at risk of not needing it later (now dead, of course), and if so, that patient is likely not going to be able to do any other work themselves later, and the therapist will need to find someone else to whom they can provide service (logistical costs).
I don’t mean to imply that there is no rationing in universal healthcare systems, just that the rationing can occur in more efficient ways. Chronic healthcare, much like, housing, takes longer to set-up, but once the system is in place–oncology clinics, physical therapist offices, immunization clinics; apartments or townhomes–they exist whether or not someone uses them. The difference in the rationing of the latter from the former is that, as you note, the latter is always needed. The difference in their provision is that housing may be built to last a long time with fairly minimal maintenance; inputs can occur much less frequently, on the order of every few years at most frequent, but only every few decades is more common.
By contrast, healthcare, acute or chronic, requires constant inputs. In the case of emergent care, the “buyer” may not exist soon if the “seller” doesn’t provide it immediately; the opportunity cost of not giving it away for free or nearly free is high. Chronic healthcare’s “buyers”, by contrast, are subject to more change in external conditions–by simple virtue of time–and so rationing it such that it is made available when most needed (because it may not always be needed at all, unlike housing all the time, or emergent care at the moment) risks less lost opportunity cost.
@Onux, you don’t need to dismantle a house to insulate the cavities, you drill holes in the brick and squirt in foam, it costs like £1k. Double glazing costs more than that, but I am pretty sure a majority of houses here in the UK have had it installed.
My house has had these kinds of upgrades as well as thermal blinds or good quality curtains in all but one of the windows and is using less energy than my previous modern flat per square metre, and that flat was on the first floor.
Some modern “upgrades” are also pretty dubious. Low flow toilets don’t really save much if any water over high flow toilets as they are more likely to leak.
@MatthewHutton
I never said you had to dismantle the house, I said you have to open each wall. If a building is made of brick (much more common in the 1930’s) then you can’t drill holes and squirt in foam, because bricks are solid. If you mean cinderblock, then drilling a hole every 200mm along every exterior wall (on every floor) is not a small easy change like you suggest. Neither is removing and replacing every window and door for modern double-glazed and airtight standards. Even then, an older home will still leak more heat from drafts without a modern vapor barrier. And none of this addresses the inefficiency of old heating systems with parasitic waste from pilot lights, general inefficiency, and no exhaust air heat exchangers.
If you add insulation, replace every door and window, and replace the entire HVAC system with a modern efficient one, then you might get energy use approaching modern construction – but only because you have done several large changes and no longer have a 1930’s house from an energy perspective. You can’t say a 1930’s house has respectable energy use with “small changes.”
Low flow toilets are not more likely to leak than regular toilets. You may be confusing the fact that IF a low flow toilet leaks it is no different than a regular toilet, since a continuous leak uses much more water than the average number of flushes per day.
Housing needs are not at all static, people move all of the time. Detroit shed 1.2M of population in 70 years, a 66% decline, including 0.5M in just 20 years. That’s hundreds of thousands of empty housing units. According to you housing lasts a long time so you can easily give everyone a home they just stay in; what are you going to do, force a million people to live in Detroit with no jobs? Public housing that receives “minimal maintenance” (your words) turns into slums, something seen from public housing projects in Chicago and Detroit, to banlieue’s in Paris, to the “Vulnerable Areas” of Sweden that were part of the Million Program.
Emergency care is not “free”, it is hugely expensive. That’s one of the big arguments for universal healthcare in the US, that people without insurance use the ER for care instead of making a doctor appointment, costing the system much more than it should. The fact remains that the social choice to require emergency treatment regardless of cost has nothing to do with the economic or social viability of trying to de-commodify housing.
I can also question the notion that universal healthcare systems always save the marginal cost of not providing care. If you were a terminal prostate cancer patient in the UK in most of the 2010’s you died, because NHS wouldn’t fund Abiraterone, even though you could get it in the US. If you are a Canadian with certain heart conditions, or rare types of cancer, or expecting quadruplets, you (or some of your newborns) would die if the US had the same level of health care as Canada, because people had to come to the US for all those situations when Canada couldn’t treat them. According to you letting them die and missing out on their future productivity is a greater cost than not treating them, but the UK/Canada’s national healthcare systems didn’t actually make that evaluation and chose instead not to fund their survival.
Housing needs do not undergo shifts because of changes in personal needs for housing directly. Once someone has, say ~70 sq. m., and access to a bathroom and kitchen space, the basic need for housing is met. WHERE that housing is is, essentially, not a housing concern. People didn’t leave Detroit because their housing needs changed; they left Detroit because their need for employment required them to do so. Hence the importance of equalizing job markets as much as absolute advantage makes possible; this way, people can choose where they want to live based on other factors. The poor labor rights situation of the southern states (among other factors) is what changed Detroit’s housing needs; people didn’t suddenly leave the city because those needs weren’t being met. This is an argument for trying to equalize labor markets, not an argument about housing.
The fact that “minimal maintenance” in public housing has, in practice, meant essentially no maintenance is not a mark against the idea. It’s just revelatory of the fact that public housing has not been a historically valued thing, because it’s seen as mostly a service to the lower classes, instead of a universally-beneficial investment in social infrastructure of the kind that public education, public transit, etc. are.
“According to you letting them die and missing out on their future productivity is a greater cost than not treating them, but the UK/Canada’s national healthcare systems didn’t actually make that evaluation and chose instead not to fund their survival.” This is an error they made, if not one immediately visible. The long-term repercussions of creating social infrastructure that neglects to address basic social needs undermines state credibility, and that, of course, has major costs in public trust. I hope I don’t need to explain to someone on this blog what those costs are; that is also the sense in which emergency healthcare is “free”.
On that note, I don’t see where I said that emergency healthcare is literally free. The origin of the justification of providing emergency healthcare for free at point-of-service was moral, obviously; I don’t think Hippocrates had concerns of efficiency in mind when he planted the seed of modern Western medical ethics. That doesn’t mean that concerns of socioeconomic efficiency don’t/can’t play a role in defraying the material cost of providing care, only that it wasn’t the original motivating factor. Likewise for decommodified housing; we might do it for reasons of social justice, but providing “free”/low-cost pubic housing has benefits in efficiency, too.
The shift in American economic production from the North to the South is exactly the equalization of job markets you talk about. Previously, the South had been far poorer than the North, beset by racism, poor infrastructure, racism, pellagra, racism, boll weevil, racism, an anti-developmental rural elite, and racism. Efforts like the TVA, placing the CDC in Atlanta, opening military bases in and after WW2 in the South more than in the Northeast, and heavily subsidizing freeways in the South were all intended to economically develop an underdeveloped region.
Sure, but how much of the shift was abetted by weak labor rights and exploitative working conditions? Direct investment by the government may have encouraged movement by reducing up-front investment costs for private companies, but the opportunity to significantly reduce labor costs by paying workers far less despite growing productivity isn’t something a for-profit enterprise will pass up.
Note, too that despite those infrastructural developments, the general level of development in the south lags (most of) the north. Public education and health outcomes are poor, unionization rates are still lower, most states south of the Mason-Dixon line are still at the poverty-spec federal minimum wage….Despite mid-century efforts, these are still unequal labor markets.
There are also things like NAFTA that confound a direct comparison, but the point of the issue vis a viz the discussion of housing needs remains the same. People only NEED so much house; anything else that makes them change homes specifically due to a change in that need is likely either a change in income or household size. It stands to reason therefore that ceteris paribus, it should be possible to provide a bog-standard type of housing unit at such scale–assuming modularization and mass-production–that housing at least CAN exist first and foremost for its use value, and not its exchange (commodity) value.
“WHERE that housing is is, essentially, not a housing concern.”
Please tell me you are not serious and truly this foolish. Housing is fundamentally the most geographically focused goods you could imagine (have you heard of the three rules of real estate…) So if you go and build thousands of housing units in northern Maine, that will help the housing situation in NYC, because “where that housing is” isn’t a concern?
“this way, people can choose where they want to live based on other factors”
If people are choosing where to live, then their choices will be uneven. If their choices are uneven, then some of them will chose to live in some areas with less housing, while some areas with existing housing will go unsubscribed. At this point housing becomes a commodity again, since there will be some who need/want it who cannot get it. Or you will need to continuously build it (contra to your statements of housing being long term and not needing shifts) or you will have to build so much for there to be oversupply everywhere that you will waste a great deal of effort on wealth on housing that sits empty, which is far more wasteful than the McMansions you criticize.
If you think you can “equalize” job markets so that people won’t ever choose to live out of balance with the amount of housing present, then what you really mean is people CAN’T chose where they want to live, because every system that claims to equalize economic outcomes this way always falls back on forcing people where to live/work when it turns out the “equalized” outcomes don’t match what people would actually choose.
I’m not sure why you focus so much on the South, the population of Metro Detroit went up from 1950 to 1970 while Detroit city’s population began to decline; the Metro pop peaked in 2000 and has only fallen slightly since even as the city population has dropped by a third. Does the rest of Michigan have different and more exploitative labor laws than Detroit city?
Re your comments on basic housing needs, if all you are saying is there should be a lot of simple, inexpensive 1 bedroom apartments built so there is enough housing, then
1) This is a different argument than the nonsense about decommodifying housing or equalizing job markets so people don’t move.
2) This still wouldn’t decommodify housing. There have been a long line of idealists, architects, and city planners who have thought they could masterplan the perfect size/shape/layout of housing for everyone, yet it always turns out people want and or like bigger, or different, or differently located houses than what/where the basic plan is/will be. Those people will be willing to pay more for the larger, prettier, closer-to-work, closer-to-the-mountain-bike-trail, whatever house, making housing a commodity again.
3) The private market can do this just fine with housing still being a commodity. The places in the US with the lowest housing cost are the ones with the highest housing production, not the ones with the most social/public housing. Private developers built huge numbers of basic apartments in NYC before the 1961 zoning law made six-story buildings (economically built under codes dating back to the famous tenement “New Law” of 1913) illegal in most of the city. California built lots of housing until 1990 (I’m not sure why it stopped then) and despite the mythos of the single-family post-war suburb, in many of Cali’s boom years there were more apartments built than suburban homes. This happens today in Texas, with the “Texas donut” such a ubiquitous housing type it gets its own name.
“This is an error they made, if not one immediately visible.”
These weren’t errors they were choices. It wasn’t as if the NHS was unaware of Abiraterone, it was developed by Cancer Research UK, they just decided it was too expensive, which pretty significantly undercuts your argument that lifesaving treatment always pays for itself in the value of the continued work by those kept alive. If it hadn’t been for the publicity of the Lockerbie bomber living for years with “terminal” cancer while Britons were sent home to die because the terrorist was taking a drug in Libya that wan’t available in the UK, one wonders if it would even be available now.
Similarly, Calgary, with a metro pop of 1.4M, didn’t have sufficient NICU space for a woman to give birth to quadruplets, while Great Falls, Montana (metro pop 84k) did. It wasn’t as if the Canadians just forgot about the extra incubators in the basement, the system made a choice to underinvest in lifesaving treatment for newborns.
“On that note, I don’t see where I said that emergency healthcare is literally free.”
Your exact words were: ‘This is why emergent care is, in a sense, free’
It’s interesting to see how the Oregon UGB story has evolved. It started in the late 60’s-early 70’s with a coalition that included agricultural interests, mainly Republicans, concerned about being overrun by random developments and small-government local officials frustrated by “sagebrush subdivisions” popping up in hard to serve areas. Governor Tom McCall (R), who was most associated with this issue, grew up on a ranch. I was in on it from inner Portland at the beginning and I knew some real leftists. I can’t recall them being interested in land use planning issues then. Looking at it now from five decades and a thousand miles distant, I barely recognize today’s discussion.
I find it amusing that those farmers who are concerned about the city growing also oppose better transit for the city which would allow (and create!) a denser city that wouldn’t sprawl as much. Where I live the state doesn’t allow the city governments to add more subsidies to our transit system (I’m not sure what the details are), and as a result our transit system doesn’t work very well as they cannot afford to run good service.
Transit districts in Oregon are under a 1969 law that authorizes them to be formed in Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSA). The legislature can mess with them, but as it now affects four different regions there are a lot of people keeping an eye on them.
In Colorado, the Regional Transportation District (headquartered in Denver) was formed in 1969 under legislation that only applies to it and so the legislature has taken some dramatic interventions over the years. Measures under Republican legislatures have included traditional conservative mandates such as a requirement for a minimum percentage of operating cost recovery. They have included libertarian mandates (contradictory term?), most infamously for a measure shaped along Thatcherite lines for privatisation. That was reshaped to have contractors as operating units. Now that Democrats control the state, the minimum percentage of operating cost recovery has been abolished. However, that’s not so service can be improved — it’s so that fare revenue can be foregone in order to offer reduced fare or free ride social programs. Much of the Denver system is still running on reduced pandemic service levels.
Few people are as a tyrannical central planner than somebody who says they believe in Libertarianism/Laissez-Faire/”Free market”*.
*Whatever a “Free Market” is, its definitely not free of government interference because property rights are pretty usually a function of some Res Publica.
YIMBY groups in the UK will probably get some conspiracy theories as they succeed. The Left Nimbys do like “who funds you”? The right will probably do one about some immigration thing, although at this stage its not matured to a species of conspiracies although you do get “you can’t solve housing without solving immigration” whatever that means.
But perhaps the above is a little too kind. There is a de-facto flat-earth style conspiracy that hasn’t quite aligned politically which is “building homes doesn’t make housing affordable” which has a quack economists like Ian Mulheirn.
The semi-reasonable answer to that point is that developers/landlords have no particular reason to build/rent cheaper housing if it means lower profit margins. Of course, the answer to that is very often “accept low profit or get no profit”. Especially in a country with as many underbuilt markets as the U.S. has, I think what people often see is a small enough handful of projects built in a town/city/region that rents don’t move, and so people say “See? It doesn’t work”, instead of, “wow, we must be even shorter of housing than I thought”.
Corporate landlords could, likewise, be a problem, not for holding units off-market (always a stupid explanation), but for raising rents to compensate for the administrative costs of corporation. Likewise short-term housing, or any other form of landlordism, people could/would/might/do charge above their own cost-of-ownership so as to make a profit and not merely cover their expenses.
The answer to all of this remains, “do what you can to build enough housing so that people looking for quick and growing profits don’t see housing as a good short-term investment”. That likely necessitates public housing, but contrary to what a lot of “left”-NIMBYs seem to think, statistically no YIMBYs are against this idea. Issues like regulatory reform and local disempowerment, by contrast, are issues for which left-NIMBYs hold animus, as opposed to necessary first steps in positive change.
I should stress I said UK not US. US is so very different from the UK. It matters that most US cities can expand outwards into barely occupied territory, whereas average “rural” England is denser than many US suburbs.
“So much building is happening, rents are rising, therefore more building means higher” prices is definitely a thing. Especially since in the bigger English cities you have a lot of very high density development in urban cores that’s visible, but not especially large compared to the wider urban area.
Right now UK rental market is marked by low concentration if anything with lots of mini-landlords as Boomers attempted to cash in over the last decade and are being killed by rising interest rates. Having experienced corporate landlords in Japan i.e. good service from a company with a bad reputation, I’m very pro corporatism provided sufficient competition.
Part of the solution is Build-to-Rent. One of the best examples is Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan, and one of the biggest with 11,250 apartments for 25,000 residents. It was built in the 1940s by MetLife Insurance. There’s also the HLM/HBM in France which likewise were built by big insurance companies with special tax incentives from government. Not to be confused with the post-war HLM pure social housing because that can’t be done by anyone but directly by government, which also explains why most of it everywhere in the world is awful and mostly worthy of demolition.
BTR is for the middle-classes, perhaps lower-middle, so the insurance companies build to good quality because they need to protect their investment both in terms of keeping their middle-class renters and the capital value of the development. Stuy-Cooper is almost 80 years old and still doing the job. It even saw off the rapacious hedgefunders/private equity.
So, government initiatives to build social housing (better quality than before and not hi-rise) and BTR for those who can pay rent but not what the market wants in many places, with the rest left to the “free market” would go a long way to ameliorating the housing crisis in many places.
The solution to low cost in modern society is to go vertical (40+ stories).
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-11-01/mumbai-chawl-tenements-helped-build-the-megacity-but-they-are-under-threat?srnd=citylab
It’s bizarre to me that work should be included in the 15 minute city, when the only reason for cities to exist is for the agglomeration effects of everyone in the city being able to work together.
That’s because no one needs Marco Chitti to point out that these 15-minute cities exist by the grace of service workers who commute in from elsewhere taking far longer than 15 minutes to get to work. And those one billion plus commuters using the RER include Parisians working outside Paris as well as those travelling into Paris for work; the former included Monsieur Herr Docteur Levy for several years.
Obviously the 15 minutes refers to everything else, though a dense city that fulfils the 15-minutes necessarily will have plenty of local jobs. In fact for half my time in Paris I lived in an actual 15-minute city when I lived just 10 minutes walk from where I worked; other times I was within 30 minutes walk, at other times 30 minutes Metro ride. But then so do all those working Parisians–maybe 1+ million–who work in intramuros-Paris (and inner Petite Couronne too) due to the efficiency and density of the Metro and other transit.
FWIW the Singapore version is 45 minutes, and obviously that does include work. That seems achievable and is almost certainly true today for millions of Parisians + Franciliens. But I think the 15-minute designation is more relevant because it is more important that everything in daily life, except perhaps work, is nearby. After all many American drivers could claim to be within 45 minutes of everything too, so it de facto gives them no reason to improve their appalling urban model.
The service workers can also live in 15 minute cities. Sure their 15 minute city is in a different part of town and probably poorer and higher crime, but that is inherent to their socioeconomic level. The 15 minute city does not solve the problem of inequality, but it solves many other problems, and also doesn’t make inequality worse (and might make it somewhat better).
Of course, this presumes that the 15 minute city concept excludes work.
15 minute cities is just the latest version of the recurrent fantasy of having modernity without big cities, the most influential being the Garden city and evolution in the “New Town”*. And you can see a lot of anarchistic and socialist movements before then (although Marxism is never into that).
No, it’s not just that. Everyone should be able to live within a 15 minute walk of a grocery store, shopping, restaurants, doctors/clinic, an elementary school, parks and various other services that repeat themselves with little variation across a city. In that sense the 15 minute city is a real and very important concept. But employment, specifically, does not fit into that concept.
You can see where the confusion would come from. For example, if a Modest Apartment is to evolve into a Spacious Apartment, it needs to be in walking range of a Courthouse. However, employment only needs to be within the range of some occupied housing; if the labor-seeker finds any, the employees will be drawn from the citywide labor pool.
(The context for the above is the City-Building Series. On the level of the city, it is extremely production-oriented, but its model of housing is fully consumption-oriented (and for that matter passive, with the providers of the various goods and services delivering coverage by sending out “walkers”, rather than the residents seeking out shops). It even has a Desirability mechanic. The residents cannot, of course, block you from placing something unsightly next to them, but it will cause the housing to devolve.)
Today’s “version” certainly doesn’t do that. In fact it embraces the bigness of cities. Whatever Garden Cities were intended to achieve if it was less car-dependence they failed:
However it’s true that density is essential and that the Brits, in fact most of the Anglosphere, just don’t want it. That is why I don’t support building the same old English sprawl on the Greenbelt where they’ll just be versions of Milton Keynes (bigger area than Paris but one tenth the population).
Couldn’t Milton Keynes have a tram running down the median of one of those dual carriageways?
Matthew Hutton:
Maybe. But don’t hold your breath.
Both cities I lived in, Brighton & Oxford, could benefit enormously from a tramway. Brighton has the wide seaside esplanade, and Oxford has stupid amounts of traffic (including too many independent buses squeezing thru the centre). I thought this many decades ago and still absolutely no sign of any action. In France both would have been candidates for a tramway under the scheme for cities of >250,000.
Kinda disagree with Oxford. The University has unknown stuff in the city centre making tunnelling challenging, plus the “dreaming spires” have to be visible and its a flood plain making more development challenging.
Reopening the rail line to Cowley and then onto Thame and either Haddenham or Princes Risborough and reopening the rail line to Witney however both seem sensible. As does a station at Kidlington, Redbridge Park and Ride and local stations between Didcot and Swindon.
Could also be why it hasn’t happened elsewhere. The politicians are more familiar with Oxford yet it makes less sense than other similarly sized cities.
Still effectively I am asking for an Oxford RER which normally you’d do in bigger cities.
Oxford is Sui Generis given the tourism, the two universities and its place as a rail junction and hub of western Middle England. It potentially can form the outer tail of regional rail services for Brum and London. Electrification and infill stations are the way to go. And given the geography of river floodplains east and west, a rail oriented North-South corridor is the way to go. Plus building a tram ontop of the only direct two lane road between central Oxford-Headington-Ring roads is a political non-starter. Better to pedestrianise more of the centre, in particular George Street to Cornmarket, Broadstreet and the Bodleian library.
Not an RER, there isn’t a really good comparison here unless the Germanic systems have one I’m not aware of. The closest would be the Kyoto-Nara axes linking up the universities and tourism sites.
Alon is correct: endless excuses. The whole point of building tramways in such medium-sized towns (as explicit in the French plan) is to decongest the centres of cars (and buses the bane of Oxford), but here you are using those cars as the excuse for not building it! A big part of the reason for the recent craziness in Oxford about the “15 minute city” thing was the logical step of making the whole of the centre essentially car-free. It’s like London’s Oxford street, simply beyond belief that such a vehicle sewer is allowed in a modern city run by notionally elected citizen bodies.
The excuses are lame self-fulfilling nonsense when you can see such modern tramways fitted into ancient cities like Seville and Bordeaux.
Incidentally, it would be useful for a tramway to service Oxford mainline train station because it is a bit out of the way. Given its relative compactness Oxford is perfect for a modern sleek tramway combined with a woonerf*. It would in fact be returning this ancient city back to its traditional form (walking & cycling) as it is only the last 60 years or so that it has become polluted and desecrated by vehicles.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/16/15-minute-city-planning-theory-conspiracists
In praise of the ‘15-minute city’ – the mundane planning theory terrifying conspiracists
The frightening prospect of greener, people-friendly streets and convenient amenities has sent the online right – and Tory MPs – into a tailspin
Oliver Wainwright,
16 Feb 2023
*https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/05/tories-15-minute-cities-sinister-rishi-sunak-motorists-woke
The Tories say 15-minute cities are sinister. That’s nonsense – here’s the truth
Rishi Sunak’s risible rhetoric about a divide between motorists and ‘woke’ spoilsports is easy to counter – but Labour shows little sign of wanting to do so
Kate Soper, Martin Ryle,
5 Oct 2023
The idea of less car-dominated streets is hardly new. It is almost 50 years since the woonerven acquired legal status in the Netherlands; they are areas in which pedestrians and cyclists have priority over motorists. Vehicles can move at walking pace in – but not through – the woonerf, which is above all a convivial space where people can stroll, meet, talk and play. Municipalities across Europe, and even some in the UK, have been implementing similar schemes for decades.
@Michael, I would argue that at this point the whole of the centre of Oxford is essentially car free to be fair.
Matthew Hutton:
You’re presumably referring to Cornmarket which notionally became pedestrianised and “car free” in the 90s when I lived there. But it filled with (private) buses instead and quite possibly became worse, certainly no better for pedestrians. For sure it didn’t fix the air pollution problem because they were forced into turning the air quality station off as it too regularly went into the red zone which notionally should have closed the street down until the air cleared. Yeah. The buses and their privatisation, by you-know-whom, is one of the worst things about Oxford (and doubtless many similar sized cities; certainly I include Brighton.)
Onux adopts the conspiracy theorists’ notions of exclusion from the centre of Oxford. No, it excludes them from driving into central Oxford which is the only sane thing. Incidentally those two tramway cities, Seville and Bordeaux both have ancient cores that are UNESCO-listed just like Oxford, and assuredly benefit enormously from it and being pedestrianised (or the equivalent of woonerf). The surprise is just how easily modern trams glide thru such pedestrianised districts without any fuss. Also, air pollution is only one thing. In most congested city cores it is the congestion itself that is counterproductive. EV will not change this situation and AV could well make it worse.
Onux also lists various activities that will always fall out of a 15-minute zone, yet all those things–with the exception of work–are relatively rare. The concept is to cater to the majority of the daily needs not the once-weekly or once-monthly visit to a specialist hospital, department store or specialist store, or cinema etc though all of these are within a 15-minute transit for Paris’s 2.2 million residents, in fact within a walk for many.
@Michael, Cornmarket and parts of Broad Street are pedestrianised, with George Street and queen street being buses only, and High Street only allowing cars in the evening and without through traffic.
Things have moved on – especially since the county stopped being Conservative run in the 2021 elections 😜.
@Matthew Hutton
Since 2021. Well ok, only almost 3 decades since I first lived there and it was totally bleedin’ obvious something had to be done. Incidentally, if I can scrape up the energy, I’ll take your “Cornmarket … is pedestrianised” on advisement because that is exactly how they described it back then and for the next decades even though it was utterly dominated by dozens of buses at any one time and the pollution metre freaked out all the time or was turned off so as not to scare the horses.
In fact, I believe in my last year (2000) there was (another) plan to close Broad street but with furious blowback from the usual suspects (including Rowan Atkinson who lives in Chipping Norton or wherever probably next to the world’s biggest petrolhead Jeremy Clarkson, and insisted on his right to drive his McLaren M1 into the heart of Oxford each weekend–and park illegally too, accumulating endless but unpaid fines).
I vaguely remember that the Broad street closure (at the Woodstock Rd/St Giles end) did go ahead. But are you truly sure about the rest, or are they just endless plans? Some of this (below) suggests it is still in the wind, and plus ca change.
More than ever I believe a tramway makes sense for Oxford. It is a relatively modest town but gets a large influx from all the towns around it, so it should be funded nationally. Running from far north in Summertown to Cowley and Headington (possible loop?) and to the main rail station, plus various Park & Ride (though these were labelled Park & Vandalise when I lived there). It makes equal sense for Brighton-Hove which is essentially a linear city that could be very well served by a single tramway along the front.
By the way it’s not the UNESCO bit that’s difficult, it’s the knowing what the fuck the Colleges have been up to under the high street assuming you want to put the tram in a tunnel under the very centre.
@Matthew Hutton
Of course I don’t want to put anything in any tunnel under Oxford! Are you an Elon Musk fanboi?
Have you been to any of the European towns, including UNESCO-listed Seville and Bordeaux, that have surface trams in their ancient cores? Even without catenary:
Bordeaux was the first such system (APS, Alimentation par le Sol) installed by Alstom. This link has a pic of the tramway in front of its iconic Grand Teatre.
https://www.francetoday.com/travel/travel-features/raise-a-glass-to-gironde/
Bordeaux and Seville both have much more amenable road layouts without just one road connecting the city centre to the bulk of the city. Perhaps they aren’t on a flood plain, or the banks of the river have been raised so it floods elsewhere.
They are also not the right weight class given they are nearly 4x the size of Oxford. Yes places Le Mans have tram or two, but France barely outperforms UK on modal split despite vastly better infrastructure. Partly because France builds more car sprawal than the UK, but also because SNCF is bad at leveraging its legacy rail network for regional and urban service. Marseilles is particularly bad. Part of that is also refusal to redevelop city centres around stations and keeping city centre railyards (this is one thing the UK does better than most Europeans despite Greenbelts).
Secondary French cities like Marseille and Bordeaux have a modal split in the teens, same as secondary English cities. Lyon is 20%. Then Ile-de-France is 43%, which is a bit more than London plus its commuter belt. The reason France ends up having the same average as England and Wales – 16% pre-corona – is that its metropolitan areas are smaller. Ile-de-France is 20% of France whereas London plus its commuter belt are a bit more, maybe 25% of England and Wales depending on definitions; then the Met Counties (and also metro Edinburgh and Glasgow) are way bigger than their French counterparts. France just has atypically weak urbanization outside the capital.
This is a bit of a cop-out. The French regional intercity train services are laughably bad.
For example the Dorset mainline has hourly through service all day and half hourly service for part of the journey.
Out of London the first train starts at Axminster, then at Gillingham, then at Salisbury. This means places further down the line don’t have to wait for the London train to arrive.
https://www.southwesternrailway.com/plan-my-journey/-/media/24dc84fdd09d422e96071476d8cc6a36.ashx
On the Toulouse old line via Limoges there are 4 direct trains a day at the moment – two of which terminate at Cahors – and the first direct service from Limoges to Toulouse on a weekday is at 10am. The last service of any kind leaves at 5:30pm.
To be fair though Lille over-performs its size with some very impressive ridership figures. 7 million largely non local passengers at Lille Europe and 19 million at Lille Flandres really isn’t shit for a city of that size.
And yeah there’s perhaps as many as 1.5 million Eurostar passengers a year travelling on included in those figures, but still.
If you include its belgian side, Lille is not that far from Lyon or Marseille by size. And it has a mich larger hinterland. 3.8M live within 50km of Lille and 6.2M within 75km*, that’s more than any French city but Paris and more than Munich or Hamburg. Lille Europe and Lille Flandres are also major hubs for TGV and TER. It has also more than 100’000 students who mostly come from the region and don’t own a car. Nevertheless that’s much less than German smaller cities like Hannover at 90M/year or Nuremberg at 73M/year
* https://www.tomforth.co.uk/circlepopulations/
The original Garden City concept had nothing on cars. Trad-New Towns of the middle 50 years of the 20th century were very pro-car with the partial exception of Japan (because the biggest builders were rail companies). That includes France even Ile de France.
Who knows what “Brits” want? Polls and political discourse assume a semi-somewhere far away. Then you look at where people put their money and the densest parts of cities are no.1. The planning systems developed in 1947 is explicitly anti-density with greenbelts, but also more insidiously through its bureaucratic inhibiting redevelopment in existing urban areas and also its “planning gain” measures which encourage greenfield building.
For what its worth the UK as a whole now has weighted population density higher than the European average;
https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#2/70.3/12.7
UK has had unusually slow urban expansion since 1947 and even more so since 1979 (Thatcher’s massive expansion of Greenbelts and SSSI etc).
I went on twitter today (which is always a mistake) and it’s clear that a lot of the transport people are still banging on about HS2 and still aren’t ready to accept its costs got completely out of control. They also don’t seem to have accepted that the existing urban approaches into the big northern cities and Birmingham could have been used. Manchester is busy but only fully for the first 1km – especially with your plan for a sensible service level to Manchester airport.
I am also not convinced there are enough serious transport people in the north – I don’t understand how Northern Powerhouse rail which isn’t close to making sense is still in discourse. I don’t think Belgium or Switzerland could build Northern Powerhouse rail for an acceptable amount of money – let alone Britain.
There’s also a lot of bizarre excuses about Britain not building much rail. OK but that applies more to HS1 and that was much better value.
I’m pretty sure the Swiss could build for an acceptable amount of money.
There is nobody serious in the North, when I lived up there studying urban planning, people’s interest in levelling-up disappeared the moment I asked “so you accept that the North needs to have as many immigrants and non-white people as the Southeast”.
I met the head of Transport for Greater Manchester (ex-TFL) earlier this year, he was very curt and dismissive with me when I asked if he knew about Alon’s research or asked about the absence of shoulder stations in Manchester as alternatives to building more platforms in Picc and Vic. TfL don’t realise their limitations either.
The UK has such a lively industry of excuses. “Relative to our decision that we need to expand Euston, costs aren’t so high.” “Relative to all the tunnels that we built because of NIMBYs, costs aren’t so high.” Etc.
Alon, there are some unique things about the UK but it’s not exhaustive.
Manchester Piccadilly has 30tph off peak into it with 12 terminal and 2 through platforms. Birmingham New Street has 37tph off peak with 12 platforms and some terminating services.
I did do the UK counts at midday and it’s now 10pm, but looking at Bahnhof.de I doubt Frankfurt Main Hbf has 37tph on the main platforms excluding the S-Bahn, and it has twice as many platforms.
The London terminal stations are much fuller than those in France for example. The Home Counties is probably denser than that sort of area in other countries and the Chiltern Hills is an area of outstanding natural beauty which is a challenge.
Certainly though HS1 should very much have been an upper bound on cost, your research is super helpful to make that point.
And probably hitting 60-70% of the HS1 cost should have been achievable.
37 tph across Birmingham new street isn’t especially good. Meitetsu nagoya has just 2 platforms servicing its West Midland’s sized network and has more passengers per day.
Manchester Piccadilly wouldn’t be in the top 50 Japanese stations in passengers or trains per hour. And that’s not including just Tokyo super duper stations. I’m talking Manchester’s weight class with Fukuoka’s two main stations which service a smaller network than Manchester.
Europeans in general are platform gluttons who refuse to learn from places that manage more with less. I have had people tell me Japanese levels service are physically impossible and I have replied by telling them to ram their faces into Tokyo station’s Chuo line platforms at rush-hour or those of Tokaido shinkansen.
The British rail industry can only be failed, it can’t fail, which means it can’t succeed.
The UK is an Empire of excuses and scapegoating. That’s all its good for. Its not meant to work.
@Borners, Meitetsu Nagoya is impressive to manage that – but on the other hand it’s a closed commuter-only network.
Birmingham New Street is roughly half medium/long distance services that even if they are slow are going to another city. There’s a lot more interaction with the rest of the network.
Yeah on passenger numbers I’m sure plenty of Japanese stations are impressive – but they have almost complete separation between the long distance Shinkansen and the rest of the network which is almost all commuter or short distance services. Plus a 10 car commuter train in Tokyo can take a lot more passengers but isn’t much more operationally expensive to run than a 2 car commuter train in Manchester.
Majority of Meitetsu Nagoya services going through the bottlenecks are expresses of some sort, at that level its much of a muchness. Furthermore it actually does interact with the national network thanks to its having to share track with JR Tokai in Toyohashi plus subway through-running with Tsurumai line. And only one of its stations has more than 6 tracks. I think its a wash in terms service complexity.
The real critique is that all these systems are EMU whereas Brum’s network isn’t even complete electrified.
And to be honest I’m going easy here, the real insane timetabling in Japan is the Chuo line’s rapid core corridor, which includes not only commuter but intercity limited expresses with only a series of 2/4 platforms at all the station (just two at the terminus in Tokyo station). West of Tachikawa links include single branch lines and the freight carrying sections of the Chuo line.
I could also add Tobu and Kintetsu’s intercity networks here which also have far less track space and interface with branches and subway through-running systems.
Also remember Japanese rail systems thanks to both high volume of passengers but also an insane amount of level crossing by UK standards. UK rail lines have an insane of amount of fully grade separated double track by Japanese standards.
As I’ve said here before, we do have to go on interlining diet and learn that the number of passing loops isn’t set by Victorian signalling standards.
The importance of 15 minutes is there are a lot of things that people won’t go much more than that for. How far will to go for something? How often would you go bowling if you lived next door to a bowling alley vs if the closest was in the next state. Of course if you are a bowling fanatic you may figure out how to get there despite the distance, but for most of us it is one thing we might or might not do, and proximity is a factor. Instead of bowling you could roller skate, see a movie, play tennis, or any of a very long list of things. That list is not interchangeable though, there is only so much time, so if you put everything in an area something would have to fail for not enough people to keep it going.
Most people live within 15 minutes of groceries and a few restaurants. Food is a fundamental need, anyplace that doesn’t have something within 15 minutes will probably have something pop up just because when you are that close you will attract customers who don’t want to go farther. The exceptions are if crime is high enough to keep things out (a problem outside the scope of this blog but worth looking into), density doesn’t support it, or rent is so high the price you need to charge makes customers to go elsewhere.
Note that 15 minutes is a time based measure of distance. Different modes of transport have different speeds. If you live near a highway a car can go a long ways – many rural areas thus count as 15 minutes just because you can get in a car and get to a small town with good amenities in that time. If you are limited to only where you can get your wheelchair, many cities don’t have the density to support much in 15 minutes.
The real goal of 15 minute cities is to have enough in range of where people live that they can walk to do these types of things This is perfectly doable even at suburban density – but the typical suburban build form has zoning that doesn’t allow it, even if/where allowed it isn’t safe to walk, and because of fences and the way doors face often a crow can get there humans cannot. This observation means that if we make a few changes to denser areas (suburbs need too many changes at once) we could get a a good amount of people walking to basics. (Then once they are used to walking someplace we can put good transport there and get them to other places they also want to go that isn’t in 15 minutes – which is why this blog should be interested)
Yeah, it makes no sense–insisting that everyone live 15 minutes from their workplace is a fantasy that falls afoul of the fundamental geometry of multi-worker homes. (When A’s industry is in the west district and B’s industry is in the east district, either you give them a tiny little lens of space that’s 15 minutes from both, or you split up their family unit.)
Thing is, once you subtract work, socializing with friends in different industries, patronizing unique-quality healthcare and cultural/entertainment experiences, etc. from the “15-Minute City” idea, all that’s left is “people shouldn’t have to live in food/service deserts.” And how much attention can you get with a slogan like that?
Most people make friends with their neighbors. Yes you have more distant friends, but just by virtue of living near each other you are likely to become friends (or enemies if you don’t get along). The act of moving someplace causes you to make new friends and grow distant with others.
“Thing is, once you subtract work, socializing with friends in different industries, patronizing unique-quality healthcare and cultural/entertainment experiences, etc. from the “15-Minute City” idea, all that’s left is “people shouldn’t have to live in food/service deserts.” And how much attention can you get with a slogan like that?”
Exactly this. There are so many things people do in cities (from every day to very rarely) that cannot be met in a 15-min walk/bike shed (contra to Alon’s post, I have never heard of 15 min cities including transit time). Meeting friends across town, going to a museum, buying a particular book, having your child treated for cancer, as @henrymiller74 correctly pointed out there are many goods and services in low demand that cannot be provided in every neighborhood (to say nothing of things like travelling museum exhibits that cannot exist in multiple places).
@henrymiller74 is incorrect, however, in his comments that you will mostly be friends with your neighbors or that if bowling isn’t close you can play tennis instead. The whole point of cities is agglomeration lets people to do things (in work, research, play, education, hobbies) they can’t do in smaller groups because of low individual demand. Telling people not to travel to socialize, or just take advantage of the whatever recreation is close, is telling them to accept a lower quality of life.
Thus, the 15-min city is a terrible concept, regardless of conspiracy. There is a better argument for a 30-min city that includes transit/cars, both from a social standpoint (Marchetti’s constant) and a technological one. It is possible at various scales with current technology to make all/most of a metro area within 30 min of the center (Poissy and St Leger are both about 30 min from Chatelet via RER), and most of an urban area with all parts 30-min from any other (~18km dia urban area, 35 kph metro making center connections, ~1 station/km2 for walkshed coverage; this disregards station access time, adding 500m walk to each end means a ~11km dia urban area). Such a 30-min city should be seen as access expanding (a guide to drive transit improvements are needed so people can go farther) rather than the current 15-min city paradigm of consumption limiting (putting “everything you need” within 15 min so you don’t have to go farther).
That isn’t what I said. I said you will make friends with your neighbors, not that they will be all or most of your friends. The point of a city is all the things you can do in them. If you cannot bowl at anywhere in your city you won’t go bowling at all – but most cities have bowling (at least in the US, I’m not sure how worldwide that sport is). The closer you are to the bowling alley the more likely you are to do it often, but if it is in the city and you are fanatic you will go wherever the bowling is (often trying all the alleys in the city).
To read that as saying people should not travel elsewhere in the city is incorrect. I’m saying that people will preferentially take advantage of things closer to them when all else is equal. If you are not a fanatic then you will choose to do whatever is closer, but in this case bowling and tennis are equal and so you don’t have a lower quality of life for only have one of the two close. If you are a fanatic you will want to travel to all the different bowling alleys/tennis courts you can get to, and so the more in your city the better (but you will also make it a point to check out whatever is in cities you travel too, while non-fanatics won’t).
That’s what the WEF in Davos Switzerland wants. Take it or leave it.
They hate the state
They hate the liberal state. They are quite happy with wielding state power when it gives everybody the freedom and liberty to be exactly like they are.
Yes, but that turned into hating the state in general.
Take education. Conservatives who run the state for the benefit of governing the way they think is good would run schools with clear curricula and advancement based on what center-right and right-wing thinktanks propose (things like more curricular rigor in math, more traditional teaching methods in STEM, more premodern literary canon and less recent literature, etc.). Or else, if they didn’t believe in public education, they’d implement a voucher system; the Swedish right did that, with exactly the results you’d expect, but they like it that way. But they don’t do any of this; they pass laws enabling parents to sue school districts over trivialities. They don’t administer, they just scourge.
It depends what tradition of Conservatism you mean. Contemporary democratic NE Asia’s conservative parties
i.e. Japan and Korea almost completely lack anti-state ideologies. Its the left that’s anti-institutionalist if anybody is in those two countries. And Korea has alternating parties so I don’t think its simply LDP confidence-of-control. We could also point to the French right too.
Explicit State-degrading right-wing parties are a product of the triumph of social democracy and then the post-1960’s social changes on gender/immigration/age/work. Although the change of bureaucratic stereotypes from aristocrats cads to left-wing social engineers may have something to do with it.
The Nordic center-right privatizes some services, but isn’t anti-state in the same way as the American right, and that’s while facing a way more socialist center-left…
The right in America hates the state but is happy to accept all the Fed handouts that keep most of the red states afloat. The hypocrisy and stupidity is monumental.
The American Right has always had strong anti-state tendencies because it originated with a bunch of business people and frontiers people that wanted to do what they wanted with nobody to tell them no. European rightists have been more statist in origin for other reasons.
Confidence in government is very low in both Korea and Japan at the moment, probably because the historical pro-state parties in both seem not to have had any productive new ideas in the past 30-50 years. Yoon just had a meet-up with Park Geun-hye and promised to “revive the spirit of the Park Chung-hee era”, as if Korea were still a developing country with decades of convergence space and a booming population to work with.
Confidence in Japan/Korea in “the government” i.e. the faction in power at the top is distinct from “the state”, that’s why central bureaucratic jobs are very high in both countries social hierarchies (e.g. what parents desire their kids to be). Also that when it comes to administration of infrastructure projects they do relatively well.
Also like Moon wasn’t much different in being backwards looking and unable to grapple with the end of South Korea’s high growth model. He wasted 5 years on Confederation fantasies because he believed the Kim dynasty’s murder of 100,000’s of Koreas was better than what the ROK has been. The South Korean republic has real problems of legitimacy of the constitutional order, which is why both parties like doing a degree of anti-free speech, prosecutions/pardons of fallen bigwigs etc, but not of the administrative state.
No-one is as anti-state as the US republicans. I think its partly that US size and natural resources meant it could afford to have weaker than normal governmental institutions. Also US was a leader in democratisation and a good strategy to stop poor people from leveraging the state in their interests is to delegitimise the state. Of course its utter nonsense, Government share of GDP has either been stable since the 1970’s despite massive declines in defense and interest payments since then. And the US was the first society to have mass primary, secondary and tertiary education, national parks, comprehensive land use zoning etc etc, its a low welfare government not a “small government” government.
Its telling that the more anti-democratic the republican generally the more statist they become. As they dream of destroying their enemies in blood rather than ballots, they can look on the tools of the administrative state with greater relish.
At elite level, the most moderate Republicans are the ones who flirt with classical liberalism and talk about the need to bring back the state, but these often end up apostating from the party, like Francis Fukuyama. The extremists are the ones salivating over destroying the administrative state and replacing it with a system of party apparatchiks.
I agree, that’s why I said “statist”. USSR wouldn’t meet your standards of proper admin. “Classical Liberalism” and “Libertarians” are gateway drugs, the moderates are either New England local politicians or ex-Neocons with the occasional David French type. All powerless, since there isn’t a constituency for moderation in Republican primaries.
They want theocrats.
They love the power of the state, when it’s achieves their goals. Abortion bans. Don’t say gay. Zoning. There’s more. It’s the freedom and liberty to be exactly like they are and using the power of the state to enforce that.
Clear curricula etc was the conversation 20 years ago. 60 years ago too. Nowadays it’s about teaching the Ten Commandments etc. Want to see heads explode? Ask which version of the Ten Commandments they intend on teaching in the schools.
They kind of did implement a voucher system; charter schools haven’t become such a popular-on-the-right idea over the last two decades because right wingers have faith in public education.
The problem at this point is that the American elite right wing has totally lost control over the American populist right wing, and so they end up espousing opposed things based on what each thinks is possible. The elite right wing is working in honing their state control appariti (note all the fancily-shaped gerrymandered districts and voting rights restrictions), and the populist right is working on scaring everyone whose ears they’ve caught into completely dissolving the public and its representative state as an entity (e.g., doomsday preppers and anti-state militia groups).
The 15 minute city is interesting because it’s effectively recreating what existed in my grandparents day in the industrial northern cities in the UK. Everything you did was within 15 to 20 minutes of where you lived. Travel beyond that to the town Centre was undertaken on occasion. Now given that the vast majority of right wing conservatives who are the main objectors live in a previous age in their heads you’d think they would embrace it…..
Most of them are just stupid grifters unfortunately. They have no coherent sensible worldview.
There actually is a faction of retrvn trad-urbanism people in the UK.
At this stage the Tories are broken and have no idea what to do. Brexit is done and increasingly disliked, they have so failed to stop mass immigration that its being normalised, Starmer is simply unthreatening and they have raised taxes plus destroyed public services at the same time. Oh and they can’t play the English card since Gove made sure to destroy EVEL and all that’s left to play is an English Parliament which means the end of the UK and the end of the Tory party as they know it. Which is happening anyway because what use is a Boomer Conservative party when there aren’t enough boomers?
NIMBYISM and Anti-Climate opposition are probably the obvious cards to play but Labour has to be in power to play them.
I think the Uxbridge thing only really played well there at that time. Uxbridge is fairly unique.
I agree on that. But people point to massive majorities in favour of hypothetical climate action and miss how little action is being done because Sunak is a giant nimby. And its not a first tier issue. As we can see in Germany and the Netherlands majorities on hypothetical “make bad thing go away without consequence” can dissipate quickly.
That said I don’t think it would destroy a Labour government on its own. In the first term the Labour government will live on die on the economy/housing/public services. People will latch onto climate action if Labour fails sufficiently on those 3.
British Isles wide enviromentalists suck balls both their lack of interest in utility scale hydrogen, undersea power cables or getting wind right especially onshore. Luckily these islands are such good locations for wind that New Labour and the Tories invested as it was the path of least resistence until the last two years when the Tories decided to ruin the wind power auctions and ban onshore wind.
Why have green issues become unpopular in the Netherlands/Germany?
That’s not quite what I was saying. NDL has had a new populist backlash against specifically attempts to rein in its massive agricultural lobby’s use of chemical agricultural inputs. And German Greens are getting hit for screwing up on energy and interfering with the sacred rights of drivers at a time of higher energy prices/disappointing economic performance. Plus thermostatic backlash against green parties in power.
Higher energy prices will be blamed on green policies. Plus the massive technological changes of decarbonisation are going to create backlash even if pretty much everybody is going to have better living standards out of it.
You have to factor in backlash politics and not just look at raw vibes polling. There are upfront costs to environmental/climate actions plus humans in general are risk-adverse and change resenting. The key is to focus on making renewable electricity super-abundant, not trying carbon taxes or banning ICE engines. You need to make fossil fuels obsolete.
Conspiracy theories are ultimately about fearing being forced to do what you don’t want to do. The conspiracy theories about the 15 minute cities is about people believing they will forced to give up their cars, single family homes with their yards, and made to live in dense cities and transit. Homophobics and transphobic people believe that they will be made to give up heterosexuality and that elementary school children will be given mandatory genderqueer education.
Not recognizing, of course, that the status quo of sprawl forces people to buy cars that aren’t necessary, at least to the same extent as in places which provide more alternatives.
I was in Oahu for vacation and used the public buses to get around the Island. Wikipedia states that around 10% of Oahu’s million plus people do this for their transportation needs everyday. This isn’t great but the buses were much more crowded going between the outlying towns from Honolulu than AC transit buses seem to be in Oakland. It was probably the best not totally urban bus system in the United States. Also based on the condition of some of the cars I see, plenty of people in Alameda County would rather do anything than get on bus or BART.
I’m 15 minute city agnostic or mildly opposed to them. I was born in 1980 which feels like the dark ages when you read some comments on the internet. The world I was born into feels a lot like the world 15 min city advocates want. However when given a choice people stopped using the local butcher, greengrocer or grocery 15 min walk from home and went to the big supermarket with everything under one roof and you could wheel it straight to the boot of you Mk1 Ford Fiesta. I don’t think it was a conspiracy on the auto industry that killed it, it was when an entrepreneur gave someone a choice they went for it, and I can’t see us going back to that world.
It continues to amaze that people persist in believing they had free choice in building the shit urbanism that the Anglosphere built post-war. Yet, so many visit France (and lots of Europe) and say why can’t we have this?
One can have both. As we discussed recently on PO, Paris actually has it all from street markets, covered markets, supermarkets, hypermarkets to thousands of small owner-operated retail like boulangeries and speciality food shops (cheese, épiceries, oil, chocolate, glaciers and more). Paris may be thought of as exceptional but all large French cities are similar and even bigger towns are similar.
15 minute cities already exist. It’s called driving to Walmart.
In addition to the economic problem of 15-minute cities defeating agglomeration (addressed above) the concept – and related ideas like London’s ULEZ and Oxford’s permits to enter center city – has a logical problem in being pitched as climate change response to reduce emissions. But the rapidly growing electric car segment defeats this because electric cars are zero emissions. Soon almost all cars will be electric, and arguments against cars as polluting won’t stand. The same goes for freeway widening, you can’t claim that a freeway is contributing to air pollution in nearby neighborhoods if cars don’t emit air pollution.
This will be a particular problem in progressive areas like California and the EU that are simultaneously requiring zero emissions vehicles while imposing vehicular restrictions to reduce emissions. Eventually the contradiction will become obvious and people will wise to the fact that many politicians were lying to them and in fact just don’t like cars but wouldn’t admit it, with future electoral implications in a generation.
In this sense the conspiracy theories may not be conspiracy theories in the limited sense of the policies being designed to limit freedom of movement for the benefit of elites. Right now rich people in central London/Oxford who can afford a Tesla or similar get to drive around without ULEZ fees/fines but with the advantage of less traffic. But when every car is electric, will those same people be ok with laborers from the East End or hairdressers from Oxfordshire getting unlimited access, and traffic going up? Or will the pitch be redesigned and all of that license plate reader infrastructure shifted to continue to limit movement for certain types of people?
This isn’t idle speculation, the history of zoning laws over the past century, certainly across the US, has been one of seemingly neutral regulations being used by the wealthy/elites to keep their communities exclusive and not permit types of construction that would allow people of certain race/class/income to move in. Zoning and building codes were pitched as health and safety and making cleaner cities, not as an exclusionary tool, but the results have been anything but. The various policies the conspiracy theorists complain about could end up the same way.
Some of the problem mentioned in this post are not actually about conspiracy theory. Yes as you mentioned those people oppose the plan from conspiracy angle love car and do not care about equality aspect of pronlem that the plan might generate, but that do not automatically mean the criticism can be ignored. It just mean they are criticizing with values and angles that are not common with those criticism that we are familiar. Of course when it get to the point where people started ignoring argument or logic and developing imaginary story they shouldn’t be given any attention to, but it is totally valid for a car driver to have question like whether any future planning will impact their ability to drive car, no matter how bad that question actually is.
When people say that 15-minute cities are a conspiracy to prohibit people from traveling beyond a 15-minute radius, that’s not “different values,” that’s “wrong about everything.” What Kate Wagner was pointing out about it, I think about a year ago, is that it’s a completely separate critique from that of pro-car people (represented by Kai Wegner and, as of late, Rishi Sunak), who complain about parking and think that the only obstacle to autopia is environmental advocacy, but campaign with language like “yes to cars” or “this parklet could be parking” rather than “you won’t be allowed to go outside government-mandated zones.” The Wegners of the world, and even the Andreas Scheuers, love the character of the ambitious civil servant dedicated to building roads efficiently; the conspiracists hate this character.
I suspect it was no coincidence that 15-minute-city conspiracy theories sprung up during the Covid pandemic. The conspiracy-theory version of 15-minute cities (where the population are forbidden from travelling outside their own neighbourhood) sounds to me a lot like Chinese urbanism during the “Zero Covid” era.
Just as the Zero Covid policies of Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand took advantage of their status as island nations which had no land borders and which (and unlike the islands of Europe) were already doing all their international trade by easily quarantinable means (ie container ships or aircraft, not trucks), so China similarly took advantage of its highly compartmentalized urban environment where individual neighbourhoods (xiaoqu) were surrounded by walls with only one way in or out, and were thus easy to seal off from the outside world.
No? The conspiracy theory didn’t mention corona at all.
(And the constant repetition that zero covid was only viable in island states has a bunch of one-line responses, such as “Thailand.”)
The conspiracy theorists almost certainly expected people to make the connection with the Chinese lockdowns that they’d heard about in the news, even without mentioning Covid explicitly themselves.
Zero Covid was only viable in countries which can enforce 2-week quarantines on 100% of persons entering their territory, and (for reasons of quarantine capacity) that meant in most cases that only returning citizens could enter.
In the specific case of Thailand, my thinking is that it is a relatively poor country that likely had few of its own citizens abroad, and which even pre-pandemic likely had little traffic across its land borders anyway: there are no major cities close to either side of its land borders, and all but one of its land neighbours speak languages totally unrelated to Thai, with the one exception (Laos) being extremely poor. It is thus likely that Thailand could seal its borders without having devastating economic effects (beyond loss of foreign tourist custom of course).
Also Western Europe had Eastern Europe where they were much less obedient on health issues due to soviet history.
Given that Western Europe (at least initially) was hit far worse than Eastern Europe I don’t think the latter’s suspicion of the state was a major issue.
It was more the extreme incompetence of Italy (which denied they even had community transmission of Covid almost up until the point where their health care system collapsed) along with the impossibility of completely closing intra-European borders (because the EU’s economies had developed under the assumption that point-to-point truck transit would always be available).
The excess death rate in Eastern Europe was a lot higher than in Western Europe, with almost all of Eastern Europe doing worse than even Spain and Italy.
AIUI most of Eastern Europe’s deaths were in 2021 or later, suggesting that anti-vaccination sentiment was the main culprit there.
And my point about Italy was more that their incompetence in early 2020 (or perhaps late 2019) screwed over the whole of Western Europe as well as the United States, as most countries in the world (except Italy itself and South Korea) managed to contain the direct-from-China spread only to be swamped by cases imported from Italy (and other European countries) which they had no idea were even a danger.
London and New York City in particular were both hit very badly in spring 2020 because they are major fashion centres, and had lots of infected returnees from Milan Fashion Week (which took place when Italy’s outbreak was raging but still essentially undetected).
A lot of places had more excess deaths in 2021 than 2020. With Eastern Europe, yeah, the first wave was usually light, but by the summer of 2020 the corona rates were already much higher than in Western Europe.
New York was not hit early because of fashion or because of Italy. Its ties with Milan are rather weak – look at the main international destinations from JFK by ridership. In the US, corona was already endemic by March, and if anything Seattle got hit first, directly from China. New York just responded atypically weakly, taking longer than other places to recommend masking and begin social distancing because Cuomo is bad.
There was pretty clearly community transmission in the UK in early 2020 if not 2019
Cuomo was hours and hours behind other places in the U.S. It’s too bad politicians aren’t as omniscient as you are.
Also it’s likely they would have lost the foreign tourism anyway, even Taiwan is pretty far and Europe is very far.