WHERE WOULD YOU RATHER LIVE? Bunyanopolis? Or WalterMondalia? Either way, mass transit won’t help much:

This troubles those who want a compact metro laced together by mass-transit. Which isn’t going to happen. Even if you did run a line down to Lakeville, the people in Lakeville aren’t going to be headed downtown every day. They’ll work in Lakeville, or some other community on the perimeter of the metro, and even if we build light rail from Lakeville to Blaine, those million people will be here long before it’s finished.

As I’ve noted before, the “mass transit” approach harks back to the Gray Flannel Suit era, when masses of commuters all went to more or less the same place — into downtown in the morning, back out to the ‘burbs in the afternoon. It’s not like that now. And at any rate, the complaints about “sprawl,” when looked at closely, seem mostly to involve worries that some people are getting above themselves. That doesn’t bother me much.