Why "smart growth" is dumb.

Americans 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 soulless subdivisions filled with fat, lonely suburbanites. Al Gore called the automobile a "mortal threat" that is "more deadly than that of any military enemy."

But other thinkers extol the personal autonomy and freedom made possible by automobiles. Drawing on authorities from across history they 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 slums, lifted workers from company towns, and freed women to work.

They note that for most Americans, mass transit is impractical and irrelevant. Since 1970, transit systems have received more than $500 billion in subsidies, yet people have continued to vote with their wheels. Transit has been losing market share to the car and now carries just 3 percent of urban commuters outside New York City. It's easy to see why from one statistic: The average commute by public transportation takes twice as long as the average commute by car.

Aren't suburban drivers getting a free ride, thanks to highway spending? The answer is no. If you add up all the costs of driving, it works out to about 20 cents per passenger mile, and drivers pay more than 19 of those cents themselves. A trip on a local bus or commuter train costs nearly four times as much, and taxpayers subsidize three quarters of that cost.

Aren't we paving over paradise, though? Sure, cornfields around our major cities are being converted to residences. The big picture, though, is that more than 90 percent of the continental United States is still open space and farmland. The major change in land use in recent decades has actually been the gain of 70 million acres of wilderness--more than all the land currently occupied by cities, suburbs, and exurbs. Because agriculture has become so efficient, farmers have abandoned vast tracts of land that have reverted to nature.

O.K., but doesn't sprawl trap drivers in traffic hell? Actually, the nation's worst traffic tends to be not in "sprawling" suburbs and exurbs, but in densely populated urban areas that haven't been building new roads--the kinds of places hailed by "smart-growth" planners.

Suppose you have a choice between two similarly priced homes. One is an urban town house within walking distance of stores and mass transit; the other is in the suburbs and requires driving everywhere. Which one would you pick? If you chose the town house, you're in a distinct minority in this country. Only 17 percent of Americans chose that in a national survey. The other 83 percent preferred the suburbs. For all the bad press that suburbs get, polls consistently show that the vast majority of suburbanites are happy with their neighborhoods.