American Dream

This was an op-ed that Rob penned in 2002 in the aftermath of the defeat of a proposed sales tax increase in Virginia to fund transportation improvements. You can see the full article here.

Quotes (emphasis added by me):

Leading the opposition were environmentalists and other anti-road advocates: what Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan calls the "congestion coalition." Those activists succeeded in convincing voters who face some of the nation's worst traffic that sprawl causes congestion and that more roads only worsen it. Tax supporters never seriously tried to rebut those contentions. That's why many well-intentioned voters with strong environmental sensibilities aligned themselves with conservative anti-tax forces to defeat the measure.

The Environmental Defense Fund asserted that "despite billions of dollars in investments in suburban expressways, congestion has gotten worse." It was citing the myth of "induced demand" -- that more roads only result in more driving. What's surprising is not that they constantly repeated that refrain, but that so many people seemed to believe it. Perhaps that was because opponents cited studies by advocacy groups such as the Surface Transportation Policy Project, the chief propagandist for the "congestion coalition." What motivates the STPP and its fellow travelers is an animus toward the kind of lifestyle most Americans have chosen. They think it is wrong for Americans to try to win their patch of suburbia. A better way to live, according to these social engineers, is in an apartment complex above a Metro stop. In short, while they claim they are anti-sprawl, they actually are anti-car, anti-suburbs and anti-growth.

Thus it's not surprising that when the STPP studied 70 metropolitan areas, it found no relationship between building roads and reducing congestion. However, the study conveniently failed to control for the fact that localities that expanded roads faster did so because they had faster-growing populations. As common sense suggests, once that is controlled for, places that added roads faster than population cut congestion.

Finally, the anti-growth proponents constantly reminded voters that over the past 20 years, road building kept up with population growth, yet congestion got worse. See, it's pointless to build more roads! However, commuting to work contributes most to congestion. Because of the rise of two-earner households and other factors, employment grew more than twice as fast as roads. No wonder congestion tripled.