Here’s some excerpts from an interesting editorial in the National Journal:
"Energy policy and development policy must converge if the U.S. is to meaningfully confront the challenges of climate change and dependence on foreign oil.
"America would not look the way it does if our metropolitan areas had been built in an era of $4 per gallon gasoline. Plentiful and cheap energy, as much as plentiful and cheap land, has fueled the growth of the suburbs and exurbs encircling our major cities. That means energy policy and development policy must converge if the U.S. is to meaningfully confront the intertwined challenges of climate change and dependence on foreign oil. . . .
Americans won’t all live in high-rises or abandon the exurbs to tumbleweed. The question is whether future development will tilt toward closer-in and compact communities that better link home, work, and shopping. High energy prices already may be encouraging that shift: Home prices appear to be falling more in exurbs than in neighborhoods closer to major cities.
Both Carper and Ewing think that Washington could accelerate the transition to more-sustainable development in next year’s highway bill by equalizing the treatment of mass transit and highway construction. (Washington pays only 50 percent of the bill for transit projects compared with 80 percent for highways.) Both also want to promote smart growth with revenue from any future cap-and-trade climate-change legislation. These are small initial steps toward reassessing the gasoline-fueled, highway-enabled pattern of sprawling development that reshaped America during the last half of the 20th century, but appears increasingly incompatible with our energy and environmental needs in the 21st."
Read more in the National Journal or Smart Growth America.