Q: Has any city come to realize that building expensive light-rail lines is not a good idea?

A: One is Buffalo. They built one line and it shattered their transit ridership. They lost a lot of riders and they said, “We’re not going to build anymore.” Here’s the problem with rail transit: It’s so expensive -- and it almost always has cost overruns; cost overruns average 40 percent but in some cases they’ve been over 100 percent. So transit agencies end up cutting bus service and raising bus fares to help pay for the high cost of rail transit. The result is, you get fewer riders.

When Los Angeles was building its rail system, it lost 17 percent of its bus riders. They were sued by the NAACP for building rail lines into white, middle-class neighborhoods at the same time they were cutting bus service in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

Q: That’s what’s going on here. Our light-rail line goes into middle-class neighborhoods and bus service is being cut back and fares are going up.

A: It’s happening in Washington, D.C., in Chicago, Philadelphia, San Jose, Portland, Sacramento -- the list is endless. Because of the lawsuit, Los Angeles had to restore bus service and pretty much has stopped building rail lines.

Q: Has any city either resisted the kind of planning you want to see ended, or already ended it themselves?

A: There’s been a lot of cities resist, but most of the cities that are doing this kind of planning are in states where the state legislature has mandated it -- Oregon, Florida, about 10 states have mandated it. They call it “growth management.” There’s a Florida growth-management act. Oregon has its land-use act, which is growth management. Washington, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire. Hawaii passed theirs in 1961 -- they were the first. California’s is unique in that they didn’t have a law called a growth-management act; they had a law that gave cities control over the rural areas. You could not build a housing development outside of a city’s limits without the permission of the city, essentially. That meant that the cities could deny all development outside their boundaries and force all development inside their boundaries and that way keep all the taxes from such developments for themselves. So they just said, “Hell, why should we bother to annex land? We’ll just keep all development in our boundaries.” Now California has the densest urban areas in America. The top three densest of the urban areas are in California and 11 of the 20 densest are in California. On average, California urban areas are 80 percent denser than those in the rest of the country. Los Angeles is the densest urban area -- it’s 25 percent denser than New York (“urban area” only includes a city’s urbanized land and not rural land or parks).

Q: Are you optimistic or pessimistic cities will ever see the light or learn from their mistakes and end planning as we know it?

A: I’m optimistic that they will learn from Smart Growth and Smart Growth planning. It’s a generational thing ... . It seems to take one planning generation -- that is, 30 years -- for the planners who come in and say, “We’re going to do this great new idea to finally retire and be replaced by other planners who are willing to admit that the original planners were wrong.” Planners will never admit they were wrong, but they will admit their predecessors were wrong.

So today, urban planners will say, “Oh, we don’t believe in that urban renewal, high-density housing-project stuff. That was the mistakes of bad urban planners of the past.” But then they make other mistakes. Whether cities are actually going to give up on planning, that's a tougher nut. I’m hoping that we can persuade people that Smart Growth is so bad that we’ll just never try planning again.

Between urban renewal and Smart Growth, we had about a 20-year hiatus when graduates from planning schools were declining, cities were not doing all that much planning, and it looked like the pendulum was swinging the other way. But now it’s swung back much harder than before, so I’m hoping that we can use a backlash against that to kill it off completely. Am I optimistic? It’s going to depend on a lot of things.