Among the public policy issues “smart growth” advocates often avoid discussing is the link between traffic congestion and economic growth. Their premise is typically that building fewer new roads or none at all, while devoting increasingly more tax dollars to mass transit, won’t reduce growth, it will only manage it more effectively.
But the results from everywhere “smart growth” development and transportation policies have been put into effect — which is to say in virtually every major U.S. city — are more people sitting longer in frustrating backups that cost billions of dollars in lost productivity. An important new study published by the Reason Foundation in Los Angeles puts cold, hard numbers on what previously was, at best, only intuitively obvious.
