Have you noticed that traffic congestion in your city
always seems to get worse and worse, year after year? Have you also
noticed that local governments rarely, if ever, do anything about it? Or
that the things that they do actually make it worse? If you have
noticed these things and assumed that it is yet another example of the
inherent ineptness of your typical bungling bureaucrats you may be dead
wrong.
The latest trend in “urban planning” is to intentionally
make traffic congestion as bad as possible. The main proponents of this
scheme are: 1) environmentalist extremists who hate and despise cars and the
freedom they afford their fellow citizens; and 2) local politicians who want
to corral as many people as possible in high-density condos and apartments in
their cities where they can be easily taxed. They call it “smart
growth.” It is a classic “bootleggers and Baptist” coalition, so named
by economist Bruce Yandle. Professor Yandle discussed this in the
context of the proponents of alcohol prohibition in the 1920s – bootleggers
who were in favor of prohibition for purely financial reasons, and Baptists
who supported prohibition for religious reasons. An odd political
coalition, indeed. Today’s environmentalist “urban planners” are the
“religious” fanatics here, worshipping at the altar of environmentalism,
while tax-hungry urban politicians and bureaucrats are the “bootleggers.”
A front-page article in the October 30, 2016, issue of the South Florida
Sun-Sentinel entitled “We’re Going to Make Them Suffer” explains this
latest urban central planning scheme. “Cities are deliberately making
your commute worse,” the authors write, “jamming development into urban areas
no matter how it affects traffic. The goal: Get more people to use mass
transit.” They quote a prominent South Florida “urban planner”
named Anne Castro (how appropriate), the chair of the Broward County Planning
Council, as saying: “Until you make it so painful that people want to
come out of their cars, they’re not going to come out of their cars.”
Therefore, said Ms. Castro, “We’re going to make them suffer first,
and then we’re going to figure out ways to move them after that because
they’re going to scream at us to help them move” (emphasis added). This
statement is reminiscent of Nancy Pelosi’s notorious comment about how the
Congress should first vote to enact “Obamacare” and then try to figure out
how it will work later.
Such words are typical displays of the resentment, if not
hatred, that government “planners” of all kinds have for their fellow
citizens. After all, their purpose in life is to use the coercive
powers of the state to bully us by forcefully imposing on us their
plans for how we should live our lives. Our own plans do not
matter a whit to them. They see us as nothing more than a large
collection of experimental rats waiting to be experimented upon with their
socialistic “plans.”
The authors of the Sun-Sentinel article
(Susannah Bryan, Emily Miller, and John Maines) write of how urban “planners
are creating neighborhoods in urban areas where gridlock is the norm” by
approving high-density housing “at a rapid pace,” which brings thousands of
additional vehicles into relatively small areas. Development projects
are typically allowed without even doing any traffic studies for fear that
such studies might wake up the citizenry to the potential of future traffic
nightmares.
Some cities are actually reducing the number of traffic lanes on major,
heavily-congested roads and replacing them with bike lanes and wider
sidewalks. It is the urban planners’ theory that thousands of people
(including the elderly in South Florida, apparently) will then decide to walk
or bike for miles to and from the store in all kinds of weather, including
South Florida’s relentless summer heat and humidity and world-record summer
lightning storms.
Having made life increasingly miserable for commuters,
some cities are now proposing increased sales taxes with some of the loot
earmarked for “mass transit” (primarily buses and perennially money-losing
commuter trains). The combination of intentionally-created, nightmarish
traffic congestion combined with thousands of additional pedestrians and
bicyclists in super-crowded cities sounds like a human catastrophe waiting to
happen.
If all of this “planning” succeeds, says one Nick Uhren,
executive director of the Palm Beach, Florida Metropolitan Planning
Organization (the Soviets would be so envious of that name), then “it will be
so busy that it’s not pleasant to drive here,” and “that’s a good
thing.” The Sun-Sentinal quotes other urban planners as saying
that “traffic in South Florida could mirror the gridlock now seen in Los
Angeles, rated the nation’s most congested city,” and that’s a good
thing. Yay! Success!
Well, at least until the next major hurricane in South
Florida, that is, with millions of people ordered to evacuate their homes and
getting stuck in their cars, out of gas, on the interstate, in gridlocked
traffic, while a catastrophic category five hurricane blows in. “People
won’t be able to get out. We’re kind of building a monster,” Ms. Castro
nonchalantly admitted.
The “bootlegger” perspective is given in the Sun-Sentinel article by
one Dick Blatner, the chair of the Broward County, Florida Metropolitan
Planning Organization (how Politburo-ish sounding!) who also “serves” on the
Broward Planning Council (so much planning, so little time): “Cities
must court high-density developments to avoid unpopular tax increases . . .
. They want development for the property taxes and to increase property
values.”
In other words, these self-described public servants are
all about the money and perks that will come to them with increased
property tax revenues. They want more taxpaying chickens to pluck, so
to speak, and are willing to inflict “suffering” (their word) on their fellow
citizens in order to guarantee their increased salaries, perks, and
scandalously-large public employee pensions. They make no mention at
all of the quality of life in their cities other than to say that they want
it to sharply decline so that they can haul in more tax loot for
themselves. Like all government “planners,” their plans are designed to
benefit themselves, first and foremost, the public be damned.
