Oh, no, you misunderstand! With any luck, Danielle Smith won’t be in power long enough to make that happen, and her spiritual mentor Donald Trump will never get another chance.

Gwee, of course not!! The idea of 15-minute cities was around, and thriving, long before conspiracy theorists decided to make it their latest pretext. (Since they can’t complain about mask mandates anymore, and no one gets fired up about carbon pricing the way they used to.)

The idea of a 15-minute city is to make life easier, not harder. The thinking is that if we can get access to more of the day-to-day amenities we need — groceries, supplies, a good coffee shop (you can tell what my day-to-day priorities are) — within a 15-minute walk, bike ride, or bus trip, we’ll spend less time in gridlocked traffic and get back more time in our day. The side benefit of leaving our cars at home more often will be cleaner air and lower carbon emissions (until cars are all electric), less wear and tear on our roads, and therefore lower road maintenance costs. But the main purpose is just to make life better.

The vicious, utterly false narrative we wrote about in this story imagines a 15-minute city as a place you can’t leave without permission. That’s nothing more than a false fever dream. Some cities restrict *car* access to even and odd days, usually because there’s only so much road space available and they have nowhere else to build, even if they wanted to. (And they shouldn’t want to — that new construction means permanent maintenance costs for taxpayers, and it’s well established that anytime anyone builds a new road to relieve congestion, more people take the cue to drive more and more often.) But when those rules are done right, and they usually are, they’re accompanied by other forms of access, including transit, so that it’s easier to get where you need to go (and see your grandchildren whenever you want to), not harder.

At the risk of over-sharing — we have this conversation at home all the time, ever since we moved to a location with about eight transit routes within a three- to five-minute walk. Given a choice between driving downtown, getting stuck in traffic, then losing another 10 or 15 minutes to find parking, and — worst of all — not being able to work on my next story for The Mix while I’m en route, I almost always prefer to take a bus or light rail. Others in our family prefer to drive. And that is precisely the point. Everyone gets to make that choice, because 15-minute cities are about more choices and more options, not fewer.