the Oxford scheme still allows for anyone to drive as much as they want within their 15 minute zone.
Well, (IIRC) it limits drivers to 100 days on which they can drive their cars
outside of their zone and anything over that will incur a penalty charge notice. So yeah, technically you can drive around as much as you like
within your zone, but that isn't what people are complaining about.
I think it's a great idea to provide everything anyone could want in a city within a 15 minute walk or cycle, but it's an impossible to achieve utopian dream which has no basis in reality for the vast majority of the general public.
I lived in Welwyn Garden City for 20 years and the original ethos and plan by Ebeneezer Howard (for WGC & Letchworth & Hampstead) was that the whole of the town would contain all of the facilities anyone would require so that everything was in easy reach. That was in the early 1920s so well before most people had cars.
The whole of the town had to be built 'from scratch' including all the parkland, shops, transport, entertainment, schools, doctors etc etc etc, and that everyone who lived in the area would be employed locally.
But times move on. Mass car ownership and an increasing population, plus the removal of branch lines, and then modern consumerism, and then online shopping destroying 'The High Street', has meant that people now have less available to them locally than they used to, not more. So people have to travel to other places, and also for employment will commute to other towns and cities, sometimes an hours drive away or more.
I can only imagine the problems that would be found (or created) in attempts to 'retro-fit' existing towns and cities with these ill thought-through ideologies, which would probably become obsolete anyway in a few years time, especially if we all get our flying cars.
Here in Flitwick they are about to close the last of the local bank branches, which means that if (like me and many others) you don't do 'online banking' then your nearest bank branches are in either Luton, Dunstable, Leighton Buzzard, Bedford, Hitchin or Stevenage. All of which are more than a 15 minute drive away on a good day.
The nearest hospitals? Again, Stevenage, Luton and Bedford.
And Flitwick is not a tiny, small 'one horse town'. And yet the only main shops we have here are a medium sized Tesco built in the 1990s, a small co-op, a Dominos pizza, a Costa, and a small number of independent cafes, estate agents, and various other small traders, plus 3 or 4 pubs.
Oh and they're building a Lidl on the outskirts of town.
There's no cinema, no post office, no 'nightlife' (except the pubs which are mostly awful).
There is a train station but I expect that is mostly so that people can
leave Flitwick.