15-minute city conspiracy theory: How Oxford’s traffic plan inspired a global right-wing freakout.

It’s a peculiarity of our viral media ecosystem. One day, you’re trying to manage traffic jams in a mid-sized English city; the next you are the foot soldiers of an international conspiracy to lock people in their homes on the orders of the World Economic Forum.

At least, that’s what happened to local politicians in Oxford, England, after Oxfordshire County Councilor Duncan Enright explained to the Sunday Times in October how the university town of 160,000 would try to develop a “15-minute city” of “low-traffic neighborhoods”—assuring that most residents can access goods and services within a short walk or bike ride of home.

Pundits railed against these “tyrannical bureaucrats,” (Jordan Peterson) with their “insidious” and “evil” (Andrew Vobes) “climate change lockdowns,” (Nigel Farage) and “surveillance culture to make Pyongyang envious” (right-leaning news channel GBTV). Last week, a Tory MP asked for an inquiry into the “international socialist concept” on the floor of Parliament, noting that “15-minute cities will cost us our personal freedom.” The power of the English-language meme-o-sphere carried the 15-minute city conspiracy to Canada, Australia, and the United States, and it has flourished on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, prompting two separate debunkings from USA Today and one from Reuters.

On Saturday, demonstrators will gather in Oxford to protest. The backlash is audible at different BS frequencies, but I will try to summarize the most extreme view: Having successfully implemented COVID-19 lockdowns and forced vaccination, local governments like Oxfordshire will now impose a Hunger Games-style district system that confines residents inside their own neighborhoods, nominally to stop climate change but actually to control the populace. This system—known as the 15-minute city, because that’s how long your leash is—is part of “The Great Reset,” a post-pandemic new world order developed by the World Economic Forum. “We are talking about city councils starting to take control and starting to herd people into carefully controlled spaces,” one typical bulletin warns.

As an American, I was initially unimpressed. Your conspiracy needs to go big to break through in land of the stolen election and the Jewish space lasers, and I wasn’t sure a WEF-led climate lockdown had what it takes. After all, the United States is three decades into a similar conspiracy theory, about a UN document called Agenda 21, which has been denounced in half a dozen state legislatures and by the Republican National Committee. The “idea” behind Agenda 21 is to abolish the suburbs, confiscate F-150s, and cram the population into bunker-like apartments—social control disguised as environmental conservation.

Like all the best conspiracy theories, Agenda 21 has its roots in something true—American liberals sometimes say they want to reduce sprawl, integrate the suburbs, and reduce American reliance on automobiles. But the gap between right-wing rhetoric and left-wing intentions on these topics—to say nothing of accomplishments, of which there are substantively zero—is so wide that it renders the whole thing a joke.

In Oxford, however, the urbanists’ ambitions are more serious. Next year, the city plans to implement a souped-up toll network on major roads. But it’s not to get cars out of the city core, which has had a hefty congestion charge since February. Instead, the city’s six new “traffic filters” will limit daytime car travel between Oxford’s neighborhoods, which stretch from the medieval center to its ring road like slices of a pizza. There are the usual exceptions for buses, taxis, emergency services, people with disabilities, freight, and so forth, but other drivers will face camera-generated 70-pound fines for motoring across town on local streets. The intention is to unstick the jams that slow the city’s major streets to 5 mph in the mornings by diverting traffic to the ring road and encouraging residents to use alternative transportation.

The result, they hope, will be faster traffic, a functional bus network, and cleaner air. The goal is to reduce car trips in Oxford by 25 percent; grow bike trips by 40 percent, and cut road fatalities in half by 2030. Planners project traffic downtown could fall by more than 50 percent.

Oxfordians will not, in fact, be banned from visiting their mothers, as the conservative provocateur Katie Hopkins suggested last month. You can take the bus or ride a bike. You can drive all you want for free, so long as you use the city’s ring road to cross town. You can also drive through the traffic filters after 7 pm. And locals are entitled to 100 free driving days per year. (This last part, I have to confess, seems like it might be both messy and annoying.)

Still, these “traffic filters” are pretty bold as anti-car measures go, and the controversy has not been confined to red pill anti-vax forums. They’re the talk of parties, a laugh line in community theater productions, and the subject of a widely distributed leaflet that begins, “Hello Guinea Pig.” Ironically, the authors of the leaflet campaign are the brothers Richard and Fred Fairbass, best known for singing the line: “I’m too sexy for my car.”

Meanwhile, Oxford politicians have received a “high number of abusive and threatening correspondence.” In a video intended to set the record straight, Liz Leffman, the head of the Oxfordshire County Council, gives a sense of the informational environment: “We have been receiving many calls and emails from worried residents in genuine fear that they might be locked in their own homes… We want to be absolutely clear, we are not planning a climate lockdown, or a lockdown of any kind.” (In response to a request for comment, Leffman directed me to the council’s fact-check.)

The Oxford plan is similar to one in the Belgian city of Ghent, which implemented a “traffic zone” model in 2017, including a lower speed limit, a free shuttle bus, more parking outside the city center, and escalating parking fees as drivers approach the pedestrianized core. “Before the Circulation Plan was introduced, around 40% of the traffic in Ghent was not heading to a destination in the city; now those vehicles have gone,” the city’s mobility director, Frank Vanden Bulcke, told Transportation Professional magazine in 2018. “We have also found that cutting the city up into ‘pizza slices’ has removed a lot of local traffic and there is better accessibility.”

So, where does the 15-minute city come into this? The idea has become broadly popular since Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo used it as a foundation of her 2020 re-election campaign. It’s one of the three big tenets of Oxford’s 20-year plan—compatible with the traffic control strategy, but not really the same thing. As proponents of the 15-minute city have pointed out during this controversy, their idea is about increasing local access to public services, health care, commerce, parks, and so on—not stopping people from traveling more, but making it possible for them to travel less.

The conflation between the “traffic filters” and the 15-minute city has been a gift to conspiracy theorists. The 15-minute city may be just a catchy new name for old ideas (mixed-use neighborhoods, missing middle housing, alternative transportation, etc.), but it really is a concept that’s been endorsed by international organizations like C 40 Cities, the global policy group of big-city mayors. In Edmonton, Canada, where the mayor has talked up the 15-minute city, activists have accused planners of trying to restrict their movement. Last weekend, an anti-vaccine activist breathlessly confronted a local planner in the street about his intentions: “Are they not removing parking spaces?” he yells.

In the end, the wackiness of the Oxford traffic plan’s opponents is a distraction. Strip away the exaggerations and they are fighting over a fundamental divide in the way people think about the shared realm that underlies all public life. They’re right that the traffic cameras will restrict their freedom to drive around town. They’re right that it will change the little routines that people take for granted, that residents who drive will come away with a different and more fragmented sense of the city, and that counting journeys via permit is a cumbersome compromise.

But there’s another kind of liberty at stake in Oxford: The freedom from people driving around town. For many people cars are the essence of liberty; for others, they’re an imposition that takes the form of a slow bus, dirty air, dangerous streets, a diminished public sphere, a honking traffic jam, and a melting planet. That’s true in Oxford in particular, where the medieval street network has been overwhelmed by car traffic for decades. That’s why the city’s largest employer, Oxford University, has endorsed the concept.

There’s the freedom to drive, and then there’s the freedom of being able to quickly get across town in an ambulance, of having your merchandise arrive on time, of having streets that are safe enough for kids to play in, and of riding a bike without worrying about getting crushed. Maybe the real conspiracy theory is being forced to buy a two-ton, dinosaur-juice-powered metal box from one of a dozen mega-corporations just to get to the damn grocery store.