City Planners Want to Change Your Family Life
Now that fall is here, we’re happy to walk or ride bikes to local businesses. But mayors and city planners across the state are quietly setting the stage so eventually you’ll be forced to rearrange your life entirely—walking or biking to work, school, sports and errands—even in the middle of July! Or the alternative is paying fees for the ‘privilege’ to drive your car. Is this fair? Is there valid reasoning? How will this affect your every day?
BEWARE of the totalitarian travel proposals in your city. Show up at city and town councils, and VOTE for leaders who say NO to “15-Minute Cities” and “Vision Zero” initiatives (among other buzz words). Until recently, most people haven’t heard about these ideas, but Arizona Free Enterprise Club has been exposing a lot. Check out the links and the excerpts we share with their permission, and ask yourself…
How will this change my family’s time, access and opportunities?
Kids can’t go to the school best for them
Got to find kids sports, clubs or music close to home
Can’t shop at some stores beyond my radius
Gathering family and friends on weekends is restricted
Can’t volunteer much for causes unless near home
Work opportunities are limited
Please check out the powerful resources and easy-to-understand fact sheets from AZFree.org. ~ Kim
15-Minute Cities: Modern Dystopias
The "15-minute city" is an urban design concept that aims to provide people with every necessity for daily life within a 15-minute walk, bike ride, or transit ride. Advocates of this concept claim that they create people-centric communities that provide more choice and access, help save the environment due to reduced carbon emissions, improve public health, and enhance "equity."
In reality, 15-minute cities are a pipedream of central planning bureaucrats that rely on increasingly coercive measures to manipulate the way people live. These include car-free zones, limiting areas of travel, and punishing citizens for driving outside of any "permitted zones." Put into practice, 15-minute cities will crush industry, create a surveillance state, impede travel freedom, reduce choice and opportunity, and harm vulnerable people.
15-Minute Cities Restrict Travel, Choice, and Access
Though 15-minute cities are sold as providing more choice and access, by purportedly giving people "additional options" such as walking and biking, it is a ruse that always requires the diminishment of roads and comes at the expense of drivers…. Ultimately, 15-minute cities are incompatible with an economy and society self-organized around responding to individual choice and preference. It is the personal vehicle and the corresponding sprawl that provides people with mobility and freedom to access the schools, healthcare facilities, and churches of their choice.
The Truth About Vision Zero
Vision Zero implements road diets and traffic calming measures that reduce speeds, eliminate or narrow lane miles for cars, and create a "pedestrian scale" transportation network. Vision Zero tactics delay emergency vehicles and make drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists less safe.
Despite the stated purpose being to eliminate all traffic fatalities on our roadways, a deceptively worthy goal, Vision Zero is an anti-data, anti-engineering, and anti-car agenda. They don't always call it Vision Zero, instead it's masked with terms like "complete streets," "safe systems," "streetscaping," "walkable communities," "transit-oriented development," and many others.
Vision Zero = Zero Vision
The data collected and analyzed shows Vision Zero makes streets LESS safe in the cities that have adopted it.
VISION ZERO IS HERE IN ARIZONA
Cities including Prescott, Flagstaff, Tolleson, Scottsdale, Phoenix, Mesa, and Glendale have all received millions this year to fund Vision Zero projects to rip out and narrow roads, add bike and pedestrian paths and subsidize transit projects.
(Please share this blog and the resources from Arizona Free Enterprise Club with five friends each week. They’ll thank you for it, and so will your family. – Kim)