This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 27th, 2007. I'm Caleb Brown. By controlling

growth can local governments control traffic congestion and pollution? Cato Institute

Senior Fellow Randall O'Toole says cities governed by urban growth boundaries

and other restraints on where people may live end up making many problems of cities worse.

His new book is entitled The Best Laid Plans,

How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life,

Your Pocket Book, and your future.

It's available at our website Cato.org. Urban growth boundaries are supposed to limit urban sprawl.

Urban sprawl is supposed to be a bad thing.

The Russians say that Americans don't have real problems and so they make

them up. And urban sprawl is one of those made-up problems. All the urban areas

in America cover less than 4% of the land area of the United States.

Urban Sprawl is not a threat to farmlands, it's not a threat to rural open space, it's not a threat

to forests, it does not generate more pollution, and in fact the densest cities

tend to be the ones that are the most polluted. So the problems around urban

sprawl are mostly imaginary and what problems that do exist can easily be taken care of through other means other

than drawing urban growth boundaries and otherwise using urban planning to try to impose some central planner's idea of how we

should live on us. But it does sort of have an intuitive, make an intuitive sort of

of sense that is you would be physically closer to a lot of

things and that people stacked up on top of each other in tall buildings might

reap some sort of economies.

Well, one of the arguments in favor of limiting sprawl

...