SACRAMENTO, CA--I have in my hands the most thorough and useful analysis of the issue of urban sprawl and “smart growth”--Randal O’Toole’s new book, The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths: How Smart Growth Will Harm American Cities. At 545 pages, The Vanishing Automobile answers every claim and refutes each myth propounded by the smart growth movement, and does so with a wealth of data.

O’Toole’s most valuable contribution is exposing the fallacy at the heart of smart growth. The chief prescription of smart growth is higher density development: If we all lived in more densely populated communities, the theory goes, we would alleviate traffic congestion, reduce air pollution, and lead more neighborly lives, as well. An ounce of common sense will tell you that this is absurd: putting more people and more cars in the same space is a recipe for more congestion, not less. O’Toole runs the numbers, showing that higher density correlates with increased congestion and worse air quality. In other words, smart growth will deliver exactly the opposite of what it promises.

A number of right thinkers have been making this point for a while now, but O’Toole may have been the first to flesh out the numbers so thoroughly. Living in an old neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, Randal was able to watch first-hand what happens when the planners start to mark out your town with their hex signs and voodoo prescriptions. You can order your copy of The Vanishing Automobile from the website for O’Toole’s think tank, the Thoreau Institute, www.ti.org.

In a related piece of news, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has quietly released the “revised” 1997 National Resources Inventory (NRI). You may recall that when the NRI was first released in November 1999, Vice President Gore made great play about how the numbers showed that the pace of land development had tripled in the 1990s, proving that we were running out of farmland and open space. When I and several other experts (Wendell Cox, Ron Utt, Sam Staley, and O’Toole) pointed out that these numbers made no sense (they couldn’t, for example, even match up with other data sets the Department of Agriculture publishes), the Agriculture Department withdrew the NRI last April, citing a “computer programming error.”

Well, now the Dept. of Agriculture’s new NRI admits that its computer programming mistake produced a “systematic” error that overstated the amount of developed land in the U.S. by more than 1.3 million acres a year, or more than 30 percent overall. They have now restated 20 years worth of land use data that had previously been represented as accurate and authoritative. There is good reason to think that the new numbers still contain large errors, but this substantial correction represents a vindication for our side. Stay tuned for further analysis of the new numbers and other updates on a movement often at odds with the facts, but which still likes to call itself “smart growth.”

CORRECTION: My last Capital Ideas, on “The Legacy of the Cuban Missile Crisis,” neglected to acknowledge the reporting of Deroy Murdock of Scripps-Howard News Service. My apologies to Deroy for this lapse.

- Steven Hayward