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The campaign starts with what we're already doing in dozens of places Ñ
stopping inappropriate roads and developments. Limiting sprawl is not
as simple as stopping roads, but it's a
crucial beginning.
 In Texas, Drusha Mayhue, Marge Hanselman and other Houston Group
members are fighting to protect the Katy Prairie, home to North
America's largest concentration of wintering waterfowl. They are
sponsoring birding trips and bicycle rides through the prairie,
promoting better mass transit and selling organic rice grown on the
prairie. But first they've got to stop a proposed new airport and
170-mile loop road around the city, which have already contributed,
even before being built, to the expansion of the suburbs toward the
prairie.
In Atlanta, Bryan Hager and other Georgia Chapter volunteers are
advocating redevelopment of the urban center. They've already defeated
a gas tax that would have funded construction of new roads. But they
still have to stop a proposed 200-mile-plus outer perimeter highway.
"We've managed to change the debate" says Hager, "from 'Where do we
need to build a new road?' to 'Do we even need to build a new road?'"
But fighting individual roads, necessary as it is, is only a stopgap
measure if underlying causes of development -- cheap land, subsidies to
roads and cars, politicians in the pockets of highway and subdivision
builders -- are not addressed.
Sprawl is not inevitable. Certainly the free market system has been the
primary culprit -- as long as it costs less in the short-term to build
out in the boonies than it does in the central city, it's going to
happen -- but the markets have been anything but free. Government
subsidies, investments, services, zoning, regulations and building
codes have encouraged, sometimes mandated, sprawl over the past 50
years, even if inadvertently. These policies can and must be changed in
order to encourage smarter growth for the future.
This year, Congress will be considering the reauthorization of the
Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (fondly called "ice
tea"), which could address some of those
concerns.
Originally passed in 1991, ISTEA authorized more than $100 billion for
transportation programs, but it expires this year. From the Sierra Club
perspective, this landmark law was too generous to highways, but it did
allow gas-tax revenues to be used for mass transit and other
alternatives to highways, like shuttles for the elderly in Boulder,
Colo.; port improvements in Columbus, Ohio; and bike lanes in
Minneapolis and New York City.
In anticipation of ISTEA reauthorization, highway builders and state
departments of transportation have initiated a campaign to eliminate
this allocation flexibility and to limit local authority and public
participation. The Club, meanwhile, is pushing in the other direction,
attempting to "brew a stronger ISTEA" -- one that improves conditions
for pedestrians and bicycles, better supports mass transit, eliminates
highway expansion and funds a federal study of existing subsidies to
motor vehicles. (See sidebar "Paying People to Drive Cars.")
It's not just roads that lead to sprawl. In Virginia, former Chapter
Chair Tyla Matteson and other volunteers are working with the Mattaponi
Tribe to stop construction of the proposed King William reservoir,
which would provide drinking water for anticipated growth along the
Newport News/Hampton peninsula. Less than a hundred miles north, the
Maryland and Virginia chapters are fighting a proposed 15,000-
person city at Chapman's Landing on the Potomac, using techniques
ranging from canvassing to staging canoe rallies along the riverfront.
"Stopping sprawl from paving over Chapman's beautiful riverfront forest
is critical to the Chesapeake Bay's continued recovery," says Joy
Oakes, Appalachian regional staff director.
More Sprawl
For contacts, publications and more information,
see the resource box
on the following page.
http://www.sierraclub.org/planet/199704/sprawl.asp
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