Earlier this year, "Searching around for a breakout issue ... Al Gore settled on 'sprawl' as one means of connecting with the voters," recalls Philip Terzian of the Providence Journal. "Everybody is distressed when farmland is consumed, and everyone agrees that those mile-long commercial strips on the outskirts of towns -- featuring fast-food restaurants, muffler shops and used-car lots -- are unsightly."
But "Almost as soon as the vice president raised the issue, he quickly dropped it," Mr. Terzian recalls.
Why? Mr. Terzian suspects that "one of his half-dozen pollsters suggested to him that running against 'sprawl' carries certain political risks, since 138 million people now live in the suburbs, a larger number than inhabit the cities, small towns or farms of America.
But even if Mr. Gore found himself with a political non-starter in his public campaign against suburbia -- a war, in essence, against the personal freedom conveyed by the dreaded automobile, our "locust on wheels" -- this hasn't stopped a powerful federal agency from continuing the same fight by underhanded means.
Although it's disguised as a "grass-roots" environmental movement, "The campaign to eliminate 'urban sprawl' and replace it with 'smart growth' has actually been financed with federal tax dollars," the Cato Institute reveals in its new study, "Smart Growth at the Federal Trough," compiled by Randal O'Toole of the Thoreau Institute and Peter Samuel, who edits "Toll Roads Newsletter."
The EPA's legal authority to engage in urban land-use planning and "centralized social engineering" rests on the extremely tenuous assumption that forcing folks to use bicycles, buses or trolleys will ever reduce air pollution. Yet, under this fig leaf, the federal agency "has been covertly supplying funds and technical support to the anti-automobile, anti-suburb agenda" since 1995, the folks at Cato report, shoveling more than $6 million in tax moneys to a consortium of lobbying groups under two grant-making schemes -- the Transportation Partners program and the Smart Growth Network.
The war against "suburbia" begins with cash-strapped but politically well-connected mayors who view the suburban exodus as an unacceptable reduction of their tax base, the Cato scholars find. The movement finds new allies in transit agency officials, who realize automobile commuters living in the suburbs are less likely to support funding for expensive mass transit schemes they don't need.
But in fact, the Cato study finds, the alternative goals and assumptions of the "anti-sprawl" campaign are themselves ridiculous. EPA estimates that installing a bicycle facility can reduce driving by up to 275,000 miles per year have proved groundless, since bicycles are used primarily for recreation in America, accounting for only 0.4 percent of commuting.
Nor have billions in government subsidies to mass transit systems -- which steadily lose market share to automobiles, anyway -- ever been demonstrated to substantially reduce air pollution. (And reducing pollution, remember, is the EPA's only tenuous justification for meddling in these areas, at all.)
The EPA's central planners would love to stop suburban development through Draconian "urban-growth boundaries," while "redeveloping existing suburbs to higher population densities; emphasizing multifamily dwellings and row houses instead of single-family detached homes," the Cato folks report.
Why -- in case you were wondering why "Environmental Impact Statements" for routine highway projects now seem to take years -- it turns out the EPA actually favors (start ital)increasing(end ital) traffic congestion, "slowing the construction of highways and spending more money on 'traffic calming,' " meaning measures that "reduce road speeds and capacities," all as part of their plan to increase public frustration and thus build more support for bicycle lanes and passenger-starved trolley lines!
"The EPA anti-automobile campaign is implicitly founded on the idea that 'the locals' cannot be trusted to determine their own fate and that the federal government itself should not only directly lobby municipal governments but should indirectly subvert local decisionmaking," the Cato researchers found. "Simply put, EPA's campaign fundamentally subverts not only the Tenth Amendment ... but the very concept of democracy itself. EPA appears to see itself not as the people's servant, but the people's master."
The war against the suburbs has failed everywhere. Even in Europe -- long help up as a model of quaint cityscapes preserved by harsh government land-use controls -- the race to the suburbs and the freedom of choice they represent is now in full flood, with private automobile ownership growing at three times the American rate.
America's skies are no longer darkened by choking pollution. The best long-term solution to this kind of bizarre scheming is to shut down the EPA and other "let's-find-something-new-to-do" ant farms, completely.
Till then, at the very least, Congress should specifically ban the EPA from forcing American taxpayers to fund "anti-sprawl" lobbying efforts against their own freedoms, wishes, and best interests.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His new book, "Send in the Waco Killers" is available by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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