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per square mile. Congestion will significantly increase if
the doubling of density is not accompanied by a 40 to 60
percent increase in road capacity.
Elsewhere, Transit and Urban Form says that a "doubling
of residential density more than doubles transit use." But
except in New York City, transit has no more than a 14
percent market share of commuter traffic (and a smaller
share of all traffic) in any U.S. metropolitan area. Even
with a doubling of transit use, doubling densities still
leads to significant increases in VMT per square mile and--
unless accompanied by new highway capacity--increases in
congestion. Transit and Urban Form is not an isolated exam-
ple; other DOT reports also support New Urbanism.75
Many of the planning techniques required by ISTEA or
endorsed by the Department of Transportation help a variety
of special-interest groups to dominate the planning process.
Those techniques include the legal requirement that planning
be done by a metropolitan planning organization (MPO),
"visioning" advisory committees, focus groups, unscientific
public opinion surveys, and various forms of grassroots
lobbying.
The MPO requirement has an important unintended conse-
quence. The central cities tend to dominate the MPOs even
though they have only a plurality of residents in a metro-
politan area. That gives the central cities an opportunity
to gain control over the suburbs--an opportunity previously
denied them by the suburbs' resistance to annexation, city-
county consolidations, and other efforts by the central
cities. Since the central cities are generally denser than
the suburbs, they readily embrace New Urbanist density
goals.
"Visioning," as defined by the Department of Transpor-
tation, "results in a long-range plan with a 20- or 30-year
horizon."76 Visioning, however, is inherently unrealistic
because no one can know future needs. Who would have known,
20 or 30 years ago, of personal computers, the Internet, and
telecommuting? Many people "visioning" the future during
the energy shocks of the 1970s would have assumed that auto
usage would decline and transit usage would increase. Yet
the opposite has happened. In practice, visioning has
merely become a way for idealists to impose their views on a
city rather than deal with the city's actual needs.
Nominally, citizen advisory committees include repre-
sentatives of a broad cross section of the public. In fact,
they tend to be dominated by special-interest groups--often