Opinion: Spreading Out, Reigning In
Demographics are the reason for the increased governmental and political focus on environmental issues. The baby boomers who grew up on Rachel Carson’s description of the harm unregulated growth was doing to the environment are having kids and growing old.
Generation Y — today’s 2- to 10-year-olds — will be even more numerous than the baby boomers, Vance Johnson, director of business information and analysis for General Mills, Minneapolis, Minn., said at the ATA Foundation’s annual meeting in May. And baby boomers are turning 50 at the rate of 300,000 a month.
People want to be able to chauffeur their kids to soccer practice and the mall without throwing the cell phone out the window in frustration as their sports utility vehicle overheats from sitting in traffic and the kids whine, “Are we there yet?” They also want their kids to have clean air to breathe.
The news media are echoing Hansen’s warning. “Discouraged by the traffic” reads the headline of a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution story on a poll of business leaders, who ranked traffic congestion as the city’s biggest problem. Air quality, which was the city’s top priority in 1998, ranked third in the 1999 poll, just below education.
“Corporate Park’s bucolic appeal is lost in traffic,” headlined a New York Times report on complaints about rush-hour jams in once rural Research Triangle Park, N.C. And USA Today reported that rush hour begins in some cities as early as 5 a.m. as more people try to beat the traffic.
Hansen, who left the EPA last year to head the transit system in Portland, Ore., warned ATA Foundation members that air quality standards are going to get tougher, government is going to crack down on run-off from truck washing, and demand for increased transportation choices such as public transit is going to increase.
A May 14 federal court ruling overturning the EPA’s new limits on soot and smog throws the issue back to an increas-ingly partisan Congress. ATA led a coalition of businesses opposed to the rules, which the coalition said would cost $45 billion a year to comply with. If the Republicans controlling Congress don’t legislate new rules, Democrats can use the issue against them in next year’s elections.
Young children and senior citizens gasping for air make compelling campaign commercials. But so would advertisements saying that Al Gore is trying to take away the American dream of home ownership by pushing his “Livability Agenda.” Gore’s proposal calls for halting suburban sprawl by persuading Americans to live in cities or closer to mass transit lines.
Gore hopes to lure a new generation of urbanites back to the cities with $6.1 billion in mass transit spending, up 13% from current levels. Some in trucking, like Ken Bishop, president of Genie Trucking Line in Mt. Holly Springs, Pa., support increased funding for mass transit to help reduce congestion — which, he argues, would clear the roads for trucks.
But the Livability Agenda is doomed to failure.
New Jersey, for example, has been struggling with little effect for more than a decade to implement a statewide master plan that calls for channeling people into existing developed areas rather than the condominium and single-family home tracts that sprout like weeds along the highways leading to Philadelphia and New York.
While it is hard for anyone to stand up in defense of sprawl and congestion, it is doubtful that Gore’s proposal will get much of a hearing in Congress. The powerful voices of the home-building and highway communities — including trucking — will overwhelm mass transit supporters and environmental groups.
