Transportation and Land Use

While several reports (e.g. Lebergott, 1993; Moore and Simon, 1999; Cox and Alm, 1999) document stunning advances in health, longevity and material well being and while it is no longer disreputable to credit the market economy, most current discussions of cities and land use see only market failures. A representative example is a recent magazine article by Katz and Bradley (1999), ominously named "Divided We Sprawl." It blames most U.S. social ills on how cities are growing (especially suburbanization) and supports draconian interventions by politicians and planners to set the world right. Indeed, a flurry of growth management measures either passed by or being presented to voters across the land are unabashedly replacing markets with planning interventions. It is difficult to understand how acknowledged market successes and renascent statism can coexist side-by-side.