If you force people to do it, you've given the game away

Leave aside the innate stupidity of the plan for a moment and consider instead the ordering of it.

OK, actually, consider the stupidity of the plan first:

“Draconian” plans to divide Oxford residents into six climate zones have led to council chiefs calling in the police over "extreme abuse".

In a UK first, the city will be carved into six districts from 2024 and car drivers must apply for a permit to travel between them for a maximum of 100 days a year.

The “traffic filters” come as Oxford City Council and Oxfordshire County Council hope to become a “15-minute city”, with GPs, schools and shops in local clusters.

The entire point of cities is “agglomeration”. More folk packed into an area creates more interactions between folk. Interactions also have another name, the foundation of innovation and economic growth. We simply get richer when people move to the Big City and swarm all over each other in the Big City. Having the Big City without the interaction - the serendipity of the interaction - is insane.

We also have economies and diseconomies of scale. To entirely invent some numbers - entirely invent you understand, just for the example - we desire one GP per thousand people, one Alzheimer’s ward per 10,000 and one heart surgeon per 100k. We certainly don’t need one heart surgeon per 1,000 and one GP per 100k would only be slightly more efficient than the current NHS.

Where that sweet spot is between economies and diseconomies changes near daily as technology changes. So there’s no possibility of anyone planning to provide those varied things correctly, to scale. As, of course, the current NHS shows us and that’s government merely limiting itself to health care instead of the entire urban economy.

Divvying up a city in this manner cannot be planned and runs against the entire incentive to have a city in the first place. Which is stupid enough.

But now consider the order in which this is being attempted. The movement between sectors is to be limited first, hoping that the new ordering of services will then arrive. This is like building that socialist economy then hoping that New Soviet Man will turn up to make it work. This is also the wrong way around, as that earlier experiment was.

If the 15 minute city is so desirable - desired that is, by the only people who matter, the populace - then if the 15 minute city is created by allocating the services according to the plan then the movement restrictions are not needed. Everyone will be so ecstatically fulfilled by the new plan that they’ll all, entirely voluntarily - possibly even with Hosannahs of praise to the councillors - live within their little 15 minute neighbourhoods.

There are only two possible justifications for the movement restrictions. The first is that the councils will not manage to plan those services so that the 15 minute city exists. The second is that the populace will decide they don’t like the 15 minute city and so won’t stay within it. Neither of those are good enough justifications for those limitations - indeed, they positively argue against them.

As we’ve been known to point out before, if you’ve this grand new idea then great. Try it out. If people like it then they’ll voluntarily adopt it and you’ve succeeded in the only important economic task, providing more of what people want. You know, the way free markets work. The moment you’ve got to force people to do it you’ve given the game away - even you don’t think people will do it by choice.

Yes, yes, we do need to have politics and that does mean that some people will end up with political power. It’s just that we don’t actually want anyone to exercise it now, do we?