Michael Lewyn

<p class="MsoNormal"> William Lucy of the University of Virginia has written extensively on the question of whether outer suburbs are safer than cities or inner suburbs; he argues, based on traffic fatality data, that outer suburbs are certainly less safe than inner suburbs, and maybe even less safe than cities. (1)  </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> However, Lucy’s analysis is not particularly fine-grained: it analyzes data county-by-county, rather than town-by-town. What’s wrong with this?  Often, suburban cities within a county are quite diverse: some share the characteristics of inner suburbs (e.g. some public transit) while others look more like exurbs.  So I wondered whether there is any significant &#39;safety gap&quot; between inner and outer suburbs.  </p>

<p> After the Census Bureau released population estimates showing that core counties were (at least in some metro areas) growing faster than exurban counties, the media was full of headlines about this alleged trend.  An extreme example came from the Washington Post: &quot;An end to America&#39;s exurbia?&quot; (1) </p>

A couple of weeks ago, Todd Litman made a blog entry on logical fallacies in planning.*<span>   </span>After looking at the list of possible fallacies at the end of his post, I thought I would show some (hopefully not too common) examples of these fallacies: <p class="MsoNormal"> <strong>Ad hominem</strong> (arguing against the person rather than the argument) – “Smart growth is in the U.N&#39;s Agenda 21 so we have to fight it to stop the U.N&#39;s plan to socialize the world.”<span>  </span>“Concern about urban containment is just another example of Tea Party extremism.” </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <strong>Anageon</strong> (relying on inevitability)- “Sprawl is inevitable, so there’s nothing we can do about it.” </p>

<p class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: 'Century Schoolbook'">In <em>For A New Liberty</em>, libertarian intellectual Murray Rothbard writes that leftist intellectuals had raised a variety of complaints against capitalism, and that &quot;each of those complaints has been contradictory to one or more of their predecessors.”  In the 1930s, leftists argued that capitalism was prone to ‘eternal stagnation”, while in the 1960s, they argued that capitalist economies had “grown too much” causing “excessive affluence” and exhaustion of the world’s resources.  And so on. </span> </p>

<p class="MsoNormal"> If you run a google.com search for “The Death of Suburbia” you will find about 24,000 ‘hits.’   Some of the gloating over suburbia’s alleged demise is based on the facts that (some) suburbs have been hit hard by the current economic downturn, and that (some) city neighborhoods have become more expensive per square foot than than suburbs. (1)  But suburbia as a whole continues to gain population. </p>