Linear thinking.

• Author: Lynch, Michael W.
• Position: Seminars on urban planning and marriage

In which our man in Washington contemplates the virtues of urban planning, literacy, and marriage

Date: Sat, February 20, 1999 4:49:49 PM From: mlynch@reasondc.org Subj: TOD Declared DOA in D.C.

A few days back, I received an e-mail: "After reading Virginia Postrel's recent editorial on smart growth," a transit expert named John Niles cryptically advised, "I'm pretty sure you'll find this briefing...interesting."

"This" was a seminar on sprawl, sponsored by the Denver-based Center for the New West. So there I was at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (Metro) building, clutching a cup of Starbucks and staring down at a sign-up sheet listing names from the Federal Transit Administration, the American Planning Association, the Sierra Club, and a pile of unfamiliar acronyms, such as CUED and FHWA. No sign of Al Gore, America's new urban-planner-in-chief. I was thankful for that.

Sprawl, as you know, has become one of the hottest new national issues. In an era without a cold war, where everyone who wants a job has one and the government even takes care of the erectile problems of poor men by passing out Viagra, I guess it makes sense that hard-to-find parking places in suburban malls would catch the attention of the would-be next president.

Deconstruct the issue: People who complain about sprawl, insofar as they live in it, are people who have fled crowded cities, where they hated their small houses, had to fight for parking, disliked their neighbors, and couldn't stand the schools. Now they are upset that others, who hated their small houses, had to fight for parking, disliked their neighbors, and couldn't stand their schools, did the same. Why move to the suburbs if the problems of the city follow? It makes a sort of sense.

It's the "proposed solutions" that leave me scratching my head. We have plenty of open space. Anyone who ever climbs off a bicycle and boards an airplane knows this. So let's break out the dozers, scrapers, and backhoes, and build some housing pads and roads, and make this suburban thing work. Unthinkable.

Instead, the pony-tailed planning crowd wants to turn the suburbs into the city by building small houses, one on top of the other, with little parking and narrow roads. And since bus stations have long been the focal point of communities everywhere, they imagine people will gladly give up their suburban ranch houses for 19th-century row houses so long as they have a transit station in the neighborhood. This is called the New Urbanism or, in bureaucratic speak, Transit Oriented Development (TOD).

Hence yesterday's presentation, "Measuring the Success of Transit Oriented Development: Retail Markets and Other Key Determinants" As I waited for it to start, it struck me that I was covering not Washington politics but a city council meeting in some granola-infested town, like Davis, California, where I spent my childhood. The room was filled with 40 or so bureaucrats looking for any relief from their drab cubicles and busybodies who live to enlighten others through regulations A mustached man in a dark suit, his graying hair pulled back in a ponytail, pranced about the room, sporting a large white button proclaiming "Mass Transit." (This fellow owns a bike that folds into a G.I.style duffel bag and, I would later learn, has a broad vision for humanity: "We can be more than commuters.")

The presenters, Dick Nelson and e-mailer John Niles, were consultants from Seattle "We are not professional planners," said Niles, "but policy wonks....We are here for feedback." While they never actually came out and said it, Nelson and Niles had one message for this crowd of professional planners: Americans are a wealthy people, shops are located in many places, and we like to drive to them. So TOD, like most of your other bright ideas, will fail.

Niles' main evidence for this claim, which formed the bulk of the presentation, concerned the locations of popular retail stores. Only 20 percent of car trips are for work. So to cut out trips, one must locate everything on a transit line, which must also be located close to residential housing. Niles calls such things as good restaurants, price clubs, and Home Depot "trip...