Today's urbanists like the 15 minute city concept in which everything a resident needs for daily life can be accessed by a 15 minute walk, a 15 minute bike ride, or a short trip on mass transit. Somehow, the idea has permeated through the conspiracy theory network that the 15 minute city concept includes fees, tolls, or fines for residents leaving their 15 minute zones. As usual with this crowd, there is little if any documentary support for this, but that has never stopped them.
As usual, they have it backwards. What we have in most of North America today is "the other 15 minute city", in which everything residents want to do is preceded and followed by a 15 minute car trip. This situation already imposes a fee to leave your zone, only we're so accustomed to paying this fee that it has become invisible.
When everything you need to do in your everyday life requires a car then you have to pay the fee consisting of all the expenses involved in car dependency. Residents of the other 15 minute city pay this fee every day in the tens of thousands of dollars needed to buy cars, tens of thousands more to finance, insure, register, fuel, and maintain them, and tens of thousands yet more in the taxes needed to build and maintain the infrastructure for them. These are the direct expenses of the other 15 minute city.
The fee involves a lot more than just the direct expenses of car ownership. There are other, less obvious fees involved in the other 15 minute city, such as the expense of building and maintaining vast parking lots, which are needed because everyone has to drive absolutely everywhere. Further, because of these vast parking lots, all of the potential destinations are so spread out from each other that residents have no choice but to drive. All of these costs are hidden in the prices of the goods and services residents need, so they become invisible.
A further toll on leaving your zone in the other 15 minute city is the horrific carnage among pedestrians, bicyclists, and even other car drivers. The medical expenses from this toll of deaths and injuries drives up medical expenses for everyone, not just in the other 15 minute city, but everywhere.
All of these tolls are mandatory in the other 15 minute city. Over the past century all of these tolls have come to be taken as a normal part of everyday life. Next to these tolls, the supposed fees associated with the actual 15 minute city pale in comparison.
This does not touch the fact that the supposed fees for "leaving your zone" do not exist in any of the written material proposals for the 15 minute city, and exist entirely in the imagination of the people protesting the 15 minute city concept. The fees in the car dependent "other 15 minute city", however, are pervasive, inescapable, and invisible.
