A road sign mentioning zones is evidence we are being prepped for 15 minute cities.
The road sign in question has mentioned zones since at least 2009. The local county council says it refers to delivery zones. The local district council says there are no plans for a 15 minute city in Kidderminster, where the sign is located.
A post on Facebook which claims an image of a road sign that references zones is evidence the authorities are “prepping you for the 15 minute cities (prisons)” has been shared over 500 times on Facebook.
There’s no evidence the sign, which mentions several numbered zones, has anything to do with the urban planning concept of 15 minute cities.
The photograph was taken in 2011 of a road sign in the town of Kidderminster, near Birmingham. A spokesperson for Worcestershire County Council told Full Fact the sign is referring to “delivery zones”. We have asked the council for more information on what this means.
According to Google Street View, the sign has been there since at least 2009 and was still there as of October 2022.
A spokesperson for Wyre Forest District Council told Full Fact there were no plans for a 15 minute city in Kidderminster.
The concept was developed by Panthéon Sorbonne University’s Professor Carlos Moreno in 2016.
Full Fact first wrote about 15 minute cities in December 2022, when false claims that Oxford was dividing the city into ‘15 minute districts” were spread online, conflating plans for a new traffic scheme with the idea that residents would be stopped from leaving their local areas.
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Fifteen minute cities (sometimes referred to as 15 minute neighbourhoods) are an urban planning concept with the aim of creating an area where residents can reach basic essentials, like shops, healthcare and parks, within 15 minutes on foot or by bike.
Full Fact has written a lot about 15 minute cities before. False claims about limits to people’s personal freedom are likely to cause unnecessary worry, and may harm public debate about real local traffic and planning proposals if people are not well informed.
Image courtesy of Rept0n1x
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as partly false because the sign mentioning zones has nothing to do with 15 minute cities, which are not planned for Kidderminster, where the photo was taken.
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