Highways

A few days ago, I was looking at a regional planning document and saw something startling: an assertion that transit ridership in my region has been going down. Since transit ridership has been going up nationwide, I smelled a rat.

After digging around through a big pile of statistics, I realized that there are so many different ways of measuring transit ridership that one can easily prove either that ridership is going up or that ridership is going down. Some possible measurements include:

Some commentators argue that sprawl is an inevitable result of affluence, based on European development patterns. These pundits tell a simple story: European urban cores are losing population and becoming more automobile-dependent - just like American cities. So if Europe can’t beat sprawl, neither can America.

Technology creates new challenges and opportunities, and this came home to me a couple of weeks ago when I was previewing a rough cut of Gridlock: Hell on Wheels, a video on traffic congestion released by Reason Foundation today. In the video, Comedian Drew Carey makes the following off-the-cuff comment on a morning drive-time radio show: “I would love to own a freeway in LA.”

The Oscar-winning film The Lives of Others recalls that famous question about governments who spy on their citizens: Who will watch the watchers? (Answer: Alberto Gonzalez.) A similar, if less cloak-and-dagger question applies to planning: Who will zone the zoners? While governments use zoning to keep polluting uses away from homes, what if the biggest polluter in a city is a government use?

In most cities today, the most common polluting use is exempt from zoning: highways.