OTHER FORUMS:$mart Growth and Global Warming also used to beat up on cars/roads

Transp Partners is by no means the only channel through which USEPA is campaigning against new roads. Go to www.smartgrowth.org It is the web page of something called the Smart Growth Network. It sounds like a bunch of enviro groups, lots of stuff on livable walkable communities, sustainable development etc

It introduces itself this way: “The $mart Growth Network is a growing coalition of developers, planners, government officials, lending institutions, community development organizations, architects, environmentalists and community activists all stakeholders in the development process. By building coalitions and partnerships, developing information and analytical tools and programs and establishing dialogues among development stakeholders, the Smart Growth Network hopes to encourage more environmentally and fiscally responsible land use, growth and development....”

Being an “org” not a “gov” suffixed URL you might think it was a non-governmental outfit. There is no label there saying who is sponsoring it, though it is associated with the Sustainable Communities Network (SNG). The only contact was an email link to the webmaster. I asked the webmaster in an email: “Please inform me who controls the content of this website and give me their telephone number?”

I got back an email: “I recently was assigned that position. Michael Brannigan My phone # is 202-260-7569 Branagan.

Michael@epamail.epa.gov” I told Brannigan I thought it was secretive and deceptive for USEPA to be sponsoring a website without any labeling, just as if it were publishing anonymous documents.

He responded: “The SGN is an EPA initiative, headed by Harriett Tregoning (202-260-2778). The SGN webpage is written and funded by EPA. Content is provided via collecting articles from services such as GreenClips. SGN provides funding, as best I understand, to various organizations. If you want more detailed information, I suggest that you call the above number.... It is my understanding that the site was originally established via a grant to the Sustainable Communities Network. I doubt there has been any intention to hide EPA’s role. So I doubt that the word ‘secretive’ may be entirely accurate in this case. If the SGN page was placed on the EPA HomePage, then the association with EPA may have discouraged/alienated potential users from even entertaining any ideas, article, etc. that were posted on the site from the start. Hence, there was a decision to provide grants for this site and similar or related projects... the idea was to neutrally encourage dialog in the ideas on the site. As far as mention on the site of EPA sponsorship, we are in the process of revising the site and I’ll pass along this idea.”

The SGN is all about transp “alternatives,” transp “choices”, transp “reform” and “efficient” transp which invariably means something other than cars/roads and involves support for expensive subsidized transit or other green schemes to reduce car/road use, and it is accompanied by simplistic anti-roads propaganda at every point.

Sample: “Advertisers have been saying for years that automobiles signify freedom and social acceptability. Many Americans are discovering that automobiles also mean pollution, congestion, increased commuting time, frustration and road rage...Creating transportation choices reduces demand for road construction, improves community livability, increases energy efficiency and reduces air pollution.” So it is advertisers who have misled Americans about cars being useful and manipulated them into spending that $2 trillion+ on 200 million of these evil devices! Poor innocents, they were conned. But now they have USEPA who know the way to redemption.

You can read Helen Tregoning, director of the EPA’s Urban and Economic Development Policy Division in an article “Becoming Regional: A Federal Role.” She says that undesirable low-density development is a product not of people’s choices or of the working of markets but is heavily driven by federal support for highways: “federal policies have helped drive this pattern of spatial and economic decentralization. Federal public policies that support low density development include the underpricing of transportation. Even today the federal subsidy of highways is at 44% of total capital spending, and it has been higher in the past. That subsidy allowed cheap access to suburban and exurban development locations. Federal policies also keep gas prices lower than the true cost of driving, which includes pollution and congestion. Other implicated federal policies include the capital gains tax on home sales, tax-free employee parking subsidy, and mortgage underwriting criteria that favor single family detached homes, as well as the tax deduction for home mortgages, especially the deduction for...vacation residences far from central locations.”

The “federal subsidy” of 44% that Tregoning mentions is the use of highway trust funds money from gas taxes etc to build roads. The federal share is 44% of the cost, the remainder being state and local spending. Federal spending on roads is “subsidization” in Tregoning’s formulation, but no such negative term is used for spending gas tax funds on green modes.

“Nearly all major regional problems facing our cities today transcend the

jurisdictional boundaries of existing institutions,” says Tregoning in justification of federal intervention. “The federal government has a critical role to play in the development of new approaches to regional and metropolitan problems....We try to solve congestion with more freeways, dispose of air pollution with cleaner fuels and tail pipe emission controls and address fuel consumption with more efficient engines, rather than making our communities less reliant on cars... This recognition (of the need for new forms of collaboration to suppress cars/roads) seems to be driving us in new directions - toward partnerships with localities, toward policy solutions at a metropolitan scale, and toward a set of federal incentives and rewards for local efforts at regional cooperation. (see www.smartgrowth.org)

USEPA programs to mobilize support for the unratified Kyoto treaty on global warming is also being used also to advance the anti-car/road cause. The USEPA’s Climate Information Outreach Team is producing scaremongering literature that warns of heat waves, storms, droughts, migrations, flooding, over-crowding, and epidemics of tropical diseases and infectious parasites, and attempting to mobilize support for planned reductions in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.