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![]() Attempts to cope with rising traffic congestion by luring more people to public transit will not work well enough to change this situation. Privately-owned automotive vehicles will remain the dominant form of ground transportation for at least the near future, and probably longer. The Continuing Dominance of Private Automotive Vehicles Imagine the road traffic if we keep adding more than one vehicle for each added person in our population! The Census Bureau projects a mid-series estimate of 393.9 million residents by 2050-a gain of about 119 million over 2000, or 43.4%. Over a longer period, future population growth will be even more enormous. ![]() So local anti-sprawl policies make sprawl worse. Residents of a specific locality can limit future growth within its own boundaries, but that merely moves the region's growth to other localities therein-farther out or in overcrowded city slums. Our challenge is to accommodate growth, not prevent it. These traits cannot be changed by local or even statewide policies. A region's growth rate is determined by such basic traits as its climate, its location in the nation, its topography, its natural resources, its demography, and past investments made in it by governments and businesses. Existing residents in any region cannot stop either domestic or foreign immigration into it by adopting anti-growth policies. Many existing residents facing greater congestion want to "limit future growth." But these sentiments are delusions. That would be a 24-28% rise in vehicles over the 2000 total of 214 million. That implies that, from 2000 to 2020, there will be 48 to 62 million more vehicles in the U.S. įrom 1980 to 1997, we added about 1.2 cars or trucks to our nation's vehicle population for every additional person in our human population. Average MSA growth will be slightly over one percent per year, but many MSAs will grow faster. This significant growth will occur mostly in the West and South, and in a small percentage of our metropolitan areas (MSAs). ground transportation systems must expand their capacity to cope with this large increase in persons and households and goods. And the first results of the 2000 Census indicate that future growth may be even greater than that. will rise by 48.2 million persons, or by about 12 million every five years. Even before receiving results from the 2000 Census, the Census Bureau estimated that, from 2000 to 2020, the total population of the U.S. The first crucial consideration is the likely future growth of U.S. Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution*
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