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Printable version by John Tierney -- Times's Washington bureau correspondent Relevance: Mark Delucchi, a cost-benefit analyst at the University of Cal ifornia, Davis, attempted to factor in social costs of automobiles and f ound that the car is still at least twice as cheap per passenger mile as public transit. When you drive into San Diego on Interstate 15, you can see the highway o f the future. In fact, you can see two different versions of it in the s ame lanes. In the center of each of the express lanes are faint black smudges, each a couple inches in diameter, spaced at intervals 12 meters apart. A car with the right equipment can drive down the road all by itself, guided by the magnets and radar that tracks nearby cars. Here at last is the automated road that futurists h ave been promising for so long. When engineers in San Diego sent a caravan of eight Buicks down I-15 at 65 miles per hour, the steady-handed computers at the steering wheels kept the cars spaced just 15 feet apart. By squeezing three times as many cars on the highway, this technology could drastically ease tra ffic congestion -- if only engineers could figure out a way to get milli ons of drivers to buy these systems. For now, the beam-control highway i s still in the future. Meanwhile, a much simpler technology is already eliminating traffic jams on I-15: a computerized gatekeeper that charges variable admission to th e express lanes, raising or lowering the toll every six minutes, dependi ng on how many drivers take the offer. If similar computers were chargin g variable tolls in other cities, they could not only ease congestion on existing roads but also generate the money to pay for new roads. Americ ans, liberated from bumper-to-bumper traffic, could rediscover the joy o f driving -- and that, paradoxically, is one reason why it would be so p olitically difficult to actually install this technology across the coun try. Any policy encouraging drivers to use their axles of evil is now su spect. Americans still love their own cars, but they're sick of everyone else's. The car is blamed for everything from global warming to the war in Iraq to the transformation of America into a land of strip malls and soulles s subdivisions filled with fat, lonely suburbanites. Three years ago, at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a ne w freeway just outside Los Angeles, Gov. Gray Davis declared that it wou ld be the last one built in the state. Standing at the cradle of car cul ture, he said it was time to find other ways to move people. I sympathize with the critics, because I don't like even my own car. I lived in Manhattan and pi tied the suburbanites driving to the mall. When I moved to Washington an d joined their ranks, I picked a home in smart-growth heaven, near a bik e path and a subway station. Most days I skate or bike downtown, filled with righteous Schadenfreude as I roll past drivers stuck in traffic. Th e rest of the time I usually take the subway, and on the rare day I go b y car, I hate the drive. But I no longer believe that my tastes should be public policy. I've been converted by a renegade school of thinkers you might call the autonomis ts, because they extol the autonomy made possible by automobiles. They call smart growth a dumb idea, the result not of rational planning but of class snobbery and intellectual arrogance. They prefer to promote smart driving, which means more tolls, more roads and, yes, m ore cars. Drawing on authorities ranging from Aristotle to Walt Whitman, the autono mists argue that the car is not merely a convenience but one of history' s greatest forces for good, an invention that liberated the poor from sl ums and workers from company towns, challenged communism, powered the ci vil rights movement and freed women to work outside the home. Their argu ments have given me new respect for my minivan. I still don't like drivi ng it, but now when the sound system is blaring ''Thunder Road'' -- Thes e two lanes will take us aaanywhere -- I think Bruce Springsteen got it right. Beautiful Sprawl Suppose you have a choice between two similarly priced homes. One is an u rban town house within walking distance of stores and mass transit; the other is in the suburbs and requires driving everywhere. If you chose the town house, you're in a distinct minority. Only 17 perce nt of Americans chose it in a national survey sponsored by the real-esta te agents' and homebuilders' trade associations. The other 83 percent pr eferred the suburbs, which came as no surprise to the real-estate agents or others who spend time in subdivisions. For all the bad press that su burbs get in books like ''The Geography of Nowhere'' -- whose author, Ja mes Kunstler, calls America a ''national automobile slum'' -- polls repe atedly show that the vast majority of suburbanites are happy with their neighborhoods. You could argue that Americans are deluded because they haven't been give n a reasonable alternative. Smart-growth advocates say that suburbs have flourished at the expense of cities because of government policies prom oting cheap gasoline, Interstate highways and new-home construction. Wha t if the government, instead of devastating urban neighborhoods by runni ng expressways through them, instead lavished money on mass transit and imposed high gasoline taxes to discourage driving? As it happens, that experiment has already been conducted in Europe with surprisingly little effect. To American tourists who ride the subways in the carefully preserved old cities, the policies seem to have worked. B ut it turns out that the people who live there aren't so different from Americans. Even with $5-per-gallon gasoline, the number of cars per capi ta in Europe has been growing faster than in America in recent decades, while the percentage of commuters using mass transit has been falling. A s the suburbs expand, Europe's cities have been losing people, too. Pari s is a great place to visit, but in the past half-century it has lost on e-quarter of its population. Consider some of the prevailing beliefs: Sprawl traps drivers in traffic hell. It's true that highways have gotten much more congested, but the worst traffic tends to be in densely popul ated urban areas that haven't been building new roads, like New York and Chicago -- the kind of places hailed by smart-growth planners but now a voided by companies looking for convenient offices. During the 1990's, t he number of suburban workers surpassed the number downtown. These commu ters still encountered traffic jams, but by not driving downtown they co uld still get to work reasonably quickly. The length of the average comm ute, now about 25 minutes, rose just 40 seconds in the 1980's and about 2 minutes in the 1990's. Critics complain that mothers in the su burbs are sentenced to long hours chauffeuring children to malls and soc cer games and piano lessons, which are tasks that do indeed require a ca r But so do most of their jobs. In his book ''Edge City,'' the writer J oel Garreau traces the golden age of sprawl to the surge in women enteri ng the work force in the 70's and 80's, when the number of cars in Ameri ca doubled as developers rushed to build office parks and malls for wome n who didn't have time to take the bus downtown. The only way to juggle all their responsibilities was to buy a car and find a job close to the stores and schools and day-care centers near their homes. If by ''landscape'' you mean t he pasture or forest near your home that has been paved, then sprawl doe s look like an abomination. Who wouldn't prefer to be surrounded by gree nery, especially when you're not paying property taxes for it? But if you look at the big picture, America is not paving paradise. More than 90 percent of the continental United States is still open space and farmland. You may not like the new homes being built for them at the edge of your town, but if preserving l arge ecosystems and wildlife habitat is your priority, better to concent rate people in the suburbs and exurbs rather than scatter them in the re mote countryside. Commuter trains and subw ays make sense in New York, Chicago and a few other cities, and there ar...
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