Lack Of Viable Transit Plans Keeps Cars As Best Option

"Unfortunately, smart growth is mainly rooted in ideology that denies reality. This is to the great risk of people, cities and the future."

"Take, for example, the policy objective of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Smart growth says people will have to live at higher densities and use transit instead of cars. The reality could not be more different. A recent University of Sydney (Australia) study, for example, associated higher per capita GHG emissions with the highrise condominiums planners love, and lower emissions with automobile-oriented suburbs."

"The reality is that suburbanization and the car have been associated with an unprecedented expansion of wealth in high-income nations. Home ownership has risen from approximately 40 per cent before World War II to more than 65 per cent today. This has led to a virtual 'democratization of prosperity,' that would not have occurred without the suburban development on cheap fringe land that the planners demonize. Further, the cars have provided mobility to rapidly access virtually the entire urban area, something impossible when cities had only transit."

"The bottom line is that, despite all of their platitudes, no planning regime has ever proposed a workable transit plan that would replicate the mobility of the automobile or the urban economic productivity it has created."