There is no doubt that some urban planners do not listen to the residents and build the community they want. This is not my experience, I have been surrounded by great planners works hard to implement the kind of city that there residents want.

“The world is run by those who show up”
It is so hard to get people to show up to planning meetings. The city I live in is updating their master plan. They arranged free daycare, food, and games to get people to show up to help plan the city. If anyone has ever watched the TV show Parks and Rec, in my favorite scene Amy Pohler was conducting a public city meeting and thanked the crowd for such a great turnout. I laugh every time I see it because there were only about 15 to 20 people in the audience and that was a great turnout.

There is no doubt that some urban planners do not listen to the residents and build the community they want. This is not my experience, I have been surrounded by great planners works hard to implement the kind of city that there residents want.

“The world is run by those who show up”
It is so hard to get people to show up to planning meetings. The city I live in is updating their master plan. They arranged free daycare, food, and games to get people to show up to help plan the city. If anyone has ever watched the TV show Parks and Rec, in my favorite scene Amy Pohler was conducting a public city meeting and thanked the crowd for such a great turnout. I laugh every time I see it because there were only about 15 to 20 people in the audience and that was a great turnout.

It is not suburban folks who seek to transform our cities. It is urban folks who seek to either transform or steal from our suburbs. In the Dallas-Fort Worth area they would use our taxes to subsidize their view of cities by providing incentives for transit-oriented development. They already use our gasoline taxes to subsidize mass transit oriented toward the remaining center city employers. In Texas, wealthy suburban school districts have been forced to subsidize less wealthy districts.

Cities such as Dallas have made themselves so unfriendly to families that we deserted them in droves. The tax base for those cities has seriously eroded. Liberals now scheme to confiscate funds from suburbanites to make up that shortfall. For many urban leaders, "sprawl" is a red herring. The real problem is declining tax base.

I'm sure we both agree that the personal automobiles made suburban living more economically efficient than before such transportation existed, and this opened up rural areas to suburbanization.

I also have no doubt that urban living causes you a great deal of personal disgust, and it's surely your right not to be forced to live in an environment you don't like.

The point of my argument has never been that suburbs make no sense at all, but rather that more people live in suburbs than otherwise would were it not for government interferences that favor suburbs over city. This seems to be the opposite of your contention that cities would not exist at all were it not for liberals forcing people to live there. It's not true that all people hate urban living, you are presuming that everyone else has the exact same likes and dislikes as you do.

"Exactly my point, forced busing is a government policy. Government policy created bad schools in the cities."

Sorry, Half Sigma, but I really do not understand what is your point.

Most suburbs built after World War II were the result of free market forces. Some were admittedly a reaction to government policies, such as forced busing. Some were the reaction to non-functioning local governments, such as lack of crime control. But long before the public so reacted to government actions and inactions, people of all incomes were moving to suburbs. The simple fact remains: most people do not desire congestion and high-density. They only put up with it for centuries because of limits on mobility and the need for commercial activity to be centralized. Technology, especially automobiles and computers, has finally freed man from the ills of congested living. Yet some folks would use government to take away that freedom.

Exactly my point, forced busing is a government policy. Government policy created bad schools in the cities. Government policy prevents the creation of urban school districts without poor people.

Crime is also caused by poor people, and once again that's a government policy creating areas where poor people can't live.

If there was actually a free market, poor people would live far away from the city where land is cheaper, leaving the more desirable short commute time areas to richer people.

I agree that urban traffic has increased because workers do not wish to limit job opportunity to the immediate area. That's especially true for two-income families. I appreciate your mention of that important factor.

I'm not so sure about your other point. Didn't expansion of metro areas (known by detractors as "sprawl") start before metro employment was decentralized? The first ring of suburbs around center cities was made up of housing developments. Joel Garreau explained in "Edge Cities" that it is the second ring of suburbs which contain the employers competing with the center cities for talent.

The point is that low density housing is what people desire in the first place, and neither government strategies nor employment opportunities create that desire.

Do you really believe this? Were you around in the 60's and 70's when first urban crime and then forced busing in many cities drove half the urban population out of metropolitan school districts? Excellent suburban schools are a product of the public's insistance, not some edict imposed by or strategy devised by government.

Half sigma wrote: "The schools are one of the major methods with which government has created an artificial incentive for people to live in suburban "sprawl" rather than in high rises."

It was and still is the people who push local government to place restrictions on housing density. The people in the suburbs know that low income families cannot afford low density housing. People like me do not want to live next to low income families. We do not want our children spending the schoolday with low income gangs. People like me do not want to live in crowded high rises on congested streets, regardless of whether our neighbors are rich or poor. The U.S. – and the world – is filled with people who believe like me.

In the nineteenth century, those who could afford it began moving to suburbs as soon as local trains allowed them to do so. They migrated before high rise buildings were possible and they continued doing so after. The only restriction on movement was the amount of land close to the railroad tracks. The automobile opened up much more of the land around cities, and developers created the type housing the public has always desired.

Please don't be fooled into thinking the government was the driver behind the expansion of urban freeways and low density housing.

As Ronald Reagan once said, there you go again.

"Excellent" suburban schools are an artificial creation of government, not the free market. School districts were zoned so that there was no poor people housing in the district. Without poor children, the school seem excellent.

One could do the same thing with dense living. Create a school district that is zoned only for "luxury" high rise buildings that poor people can't afford and you'll have the same excellent schools in the city.

The schools are one of the major methods with which government has created an artificial incentive for people to live in suburban "sprawl" rather than in high rises.

The public has twice shown how they will adjust to rising gasoline prices. They buy smaller cars, they re-prioritize spending, they devise more efficient travel patterns (multi-tasking trips, for example). Very few people opted for high-density housing after even a doubling of gasoline price increases. Even if gasoline prices increased fivefold, suburban America will not give up their excellent schools, their large backyards, and their freedom from all the ills that accompany high-density housing. They'll just reduce expenditures and carpool.

You may believe the cost of fuel for transport will increase more than five-fold. No one is betting money on such an increase.

I agree that defense was the reason Eisenhower and many members of Congress wanted an interstate highway system which connected all parts of the U.S. Robert Cote can confirm that I argued that point for two weeks on another forum. But defense was certainly not the only reason the interstate system was funded. Defense requirements had nothing to do with the huge expansion of urban freeway systems beyond the original plans.

You are correct that the representatives of the people decided to fund highways with a tax on gasoline. I am certain the citizens of the 50's wanted an interstate highway system. I clearly remember how proud we all were as it was built. I am certain the citizens of most states wanted the non-interstate highways converted to freeways. They want that today, so much so that they are creating tollways across the nation to speed up building of freeways. That's necessary to make up for the funds stolen for the rail transit fraud.

You can talk forever about modern highways depended on "subsidies" from the federal government. The truth is that U.S. citizens have always wanted high speed highways, and would have found ways to fund them if the national gasoline tax were not in place. Federal funding was simply a mechanism for reallocating funds from populous to non-populous states. It also guaranteed that freeways would be consistent in structure.

People call expansion of metropolitan areas "sprawl" because the liberal mainstream media picked up the derogatory term and force-fed it to the public for years. The expansion is realy just an accomodation of a rising urban population.

What is particularly irritating is how some people would deny citizens access to inexpensive housing and freedom from congestion because an expanded metro area does not fit with their view of what a city should be. My metro area, Dallas/Fort Worth, has mass transit, has clustered urban housing, and has powerful advocates for high density/mass transit in charge of the two newspapers. But its citizens continue to choose low density and auto transport by at least 20 to 1.

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2005/11/free_to_build_t.html

On a somewhat different topic, I'd bet that the majority of libertarians or folks on the right dismiss the idea of peak oil but what happens to the economics of sprawl if gasoline prices increase significantly faster than inflation for another 5 years? 10 years? At some point do the economics of denser development in urban areas become more compelling? I think that fuel prices are likely to continue to rise quickly and that the answer is probably yes.

Please don't tell me that the public made the "choice" to fund the interstate highway system when it was plainly a job creation act justified under national defense (sound familiar, anyone?) That would be like saying that the public made the "choice" to invade iraq when in fact all they did was elect someone who decided to make that choice.

This is not to make any judgement that the interstate highway system is good or bad in the 'grand scheme', just that iraq may or may not be good in the long run grand scheme, but that was a HUGE subsidy that plainly tilted the dynamics of the cost dynamic for city vs suburb. The annual TEA appropriations allocate about 30 billion per year, most of which gets funneled towards highway construction and maintenance. Do you honestly think that small exurban and semi urban areas would have the budget to build those highways that make it even semi-feasible to build residential development there without that initial investment and annual funding?

And trust me, go to a zoning or variance board meeting in any city, and you'll see what goes on – developers make concessions mainly for density in order to get projects approved. Whatever forced minimum density regulations that these planners that you speak so endearingly of are nothing compared to the subtle yet powerful interests in the other direction. They're both wrong.

All I'm saying is that the true market forces that would bring density naturally are scuttled and tamped down in every city and every county and virtually every development planned across this country. What you get at the end of that process is this thing that people have chosen to call "sprawl".

How are roads an interference in the economy? Except for a very few commodities, all goods in this country are transported at some point over those highways. Emergency vehicles of all sorts can reach any populated area and many other unpopulated areas of the nation via the highways. Private automobiles travelling along those highways allow citizens to drop off kids at daycare, travel to work, stop off at the grocery store on the way home, and do hundreds of other tasks that would be just about impossible if the highways weren't available.

Sorry, Half Sigma, but I cannot see how highways are an interference in the economy.

Trains, however, suck up billions in funds that would be more effective if spent on roads and buses. Trains interfere with highway and street traffic. Except in a few pre-automobile cities, trains provide very little of the benefits promised.

Where in the U.S., other than Manhattan, is population density so high that personal automobiles cannot be used efficiently? As Robert Cote pointed out, Los Angeles is a very high density city. And yet personal automobiles are the chosen means of transport for most of that city.

What are the powerful economic benefits of dense cities that you refer to? Throw them out there for our consideration. If such economic benefits exist, why is there no post-automobile U.S. city that evolved to even remotely resemble Manhattan?

Even if you are correct about high density development being efficient – and I believe that to be incorrect – why would rail transit make any sense? Bus transit is far more efficient, doesn't require the construction of rails, doesn't require the purchase of multi-million dollar trains, and doesn't interfere with any other traffic flows whatsoever. Before 1980, bus transit was working just fine for those who could not make use of personal automobiles. It would work fine today if we were not foolishly abandoning it to chase after this toy train fantasy.

If Minnesota citizens wish to fund mass transit, fine. Let them do it. But why should a portion of U.S. gasoline taxes be used mass transit? Highway users pay for their highways. Let rail users pay for their trains.

Light rail transit pays for itself nowhere in the U.S. Nowhere! Nowhere that I've read about – and I've read about most – does light rail transit remove enough cars from the roads to impact highway congestion. But planners continue to promise – despite all the evidence – that light rail will do both.

Light rail is a fraud.

Now even the governor and his chairman are supporting more light rail.

This was no thought experiment, but it looks pretty good.