The 10 Percent Solution to Urban Growth
27th February 2010
What if we achieved the urbanist dream, with people deciding en masse to move back to the city? Well, that would create a big problem, since there would be no place to put them. Many cities hit their peak population in 1950, when the US total was 150 million. Today it is over 300 million, with virtually all the growth taking place in the suburbs.
A similar problem arises with mass transit: If everybody shifted to using public transportation, as the Crust keeps insisting they must, it couldn’t handle the load — and the tax-funded subsidies necessary to prop up most mass-transit fare strutures would quickly break government budgets.