OPINION/COMMENTARY

The EPA Withdraws Inaccurate Smart Growth–Traffic Congestion Report

In February 2004, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released Characteristics and Performance of Regional Transportation Systems,1 a report that purported to prove that communities built along 19th century urban designs experienced less traffic congestion than those built to design standards typical of the modern suburb. The report, however, proved no such thing. Indeed, the report was so contrived and lacking in analytical rigor and integrity that a formal complaint by another federal agency led the EPA to withdraw the report within two months of its release. To close observers of the EPA's traditional bias against cars and its recent cultivation of a fashionable dislike of suburbs, it was only a matter of time before the EPA would combine these two biases into a single document, and Characteristics was the unhappy result.

Ever since its creation in 1970 by President Richard M. Nixon, the EPA and its supporters in the environmental movement have conducted a vigorous campaign against the automobile, using the agency's clout to discourage road building and driving and to impose increasingly onerous and costly regulations on automobile owners and the residents of metropolitan areas that the EPA finds are not in attainment of current clean air standards. Reflecting its anti-automobile bias, the EPA's purported remedies often seem to be aimed more at reducing automobile use than at seriously improving air quality....