This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, July 8th, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown.

For urban planners, the problem is congestion and the solution, oddly, is increasing density and spending a smaller share of

transportation budgets maintaining roads. Randall O'Toole a senior fellow at the

Cato Institute and author of the new report, Paint is cheaper than Rails,

why Congress should abolish new starts, comments.

Sustainability has been a kind of a buzzword for a long time and supposedly sustainability is development that takes into account the needs

of current generations without reducing the options available to future generations and that's

a pretty broad term. The Obama administration

in the guise of the Department of Transportation or Housing Urban Development

and EPA decided that they would require all metropolitan areas in the country to do sustainability

planning, only their definition is much more narrow.

Their definition is reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

And that's all they care about for sustainability planning.

Now, California has kind of pioneered sustainability planning.

The state of California passed a law requiring every metropolitan area in California to do sustainability planning and they the

premise of the law as stated in the law is first of all cars are not going to be ever

going to be green you're never going to be able to make a

car that's green. And second, so therefore what you have to do is force people

to live in high densities and build a lot of transit so that people will stop driving because everybody knows the transit cities and

build a lot of transit is greener than cars and high density housing is greener than low density housing.

And so San Francisco is one of the first cities in the country, or the first regions in the country to do a sustainability plan.

And I had the privilege of reviewing that plan recently.

...