Posted on 12/22/2006 12:20:39 PM PST by Namyak
Scranton’s recent decision to ban smoking in almost all public places — coming on the heels of a similar bans in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh — represents one of the biggest culture changes of our times. Such a ban would have been unthinkable 50 years ago, when cigarette commercials dominated the airwaves and glamorous movie stars lit up regularly on the silver screen.
In recent years, 17 states and more than 500 local municipalities have enacted smoking bans. Cigarette sales have dropped 20 percent since 1998, when tobacco companies agreed to pay $248 billion to the states to help cover the costs of treating tobacco-related diseases. Today, about 20 percent of Americans smoke, half the percentage of 40 years ago.
This not only represents an enormous victory toward eradicating America’s most deadly habit, it demonstrates that concerted public and private efforts can change negative social behavior, no matter how deeply ingrained.
That’s heartening for a number of reform movements, including attempts to protect Pennsylvania’s farms and forests from another bad habit —the low-density, drive-everywhere-for-everything lifestyle that has emasculated our cities and decimated our countryside in the last half-century.
Just as the Surgeon General reported in 1964 that smoking was the leading threat to individual health, the 21st Century Environment Commission appointed by Gov. Tom Ridge in 1997, concluded that sprawling development is the No. 1 threat to Pennsylvania’s environmental health.
Sprawl, the Environment Commission said, consumes enormous quantities of farmland, isolates the poor in our cities and towns, creates massive traffic congestion, worsens air and water pollution, and requires exorbitant amounts of tax dollars to build and maintain.
But efforts to curb sprawl have gone nowhere, mostly for the same reason that efforts to curb smoking floundered in the first two decades after the Surgeon General’s report. Despite all the evidence of societal harm, smoking was considered an individual lifestyle decision that people had a right to make in a free country. Health workers concentrated on prodding smokers to “kick the habit” rather than emphasize the enormous economic costs and substantial health risks that smokers were inflicting on everyone else.
It was only when anti-smoking advocates changed tactics — lobbying for smoking bans and higher taxes on cigarettes, suing tobacco companies to pay for the health care costs of smoking, and campaigning about second-hand smoke —that tobacco use plunged.
Cigarettes began to lose their allure when smokers were forced to stand outside their office buildings to take a drag during work breaks.
Just as it once seemed almost impossible to attack smoking when more than half the men in America were doing it, fighting sprawl is a daunting mission when the American dream still revolves around acre housing lots and three-car garages. But as Anatole France said, if 50 million people do a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
When John and Mary buy a new home that can be reached only by car, they are contributing to America’s dependence on foreign oil and increasing greenhouse gas emissions. They are helping squander Pennsylvania’s open space, and they are raising the cost of government by compelling an inefficient network of roads and utility lines. Unfortunately, no one has brought home to them the negative impacts of their decision. Meanwhile, government has been subsidizing such behavior, not penalizing it.
The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation is a good place to start changing the land-use paradigm.
Last month, a Transportation Commission created by Gov. Ed Rendell reported that an additional $1.7 billion is needed annually to maintain and improve the state’s highways and mass transit systems — about 40 percent more than Pennsylvania currently spends. The Commission recommended raising the extra funding through a combination of higher state fuel and realty-transfer taxes, driver fees, and local taxes.
While improving mass transit fights sprawl, building new highways does the opposite. Instead, PennDOT should expand its Home Towns Streets program that focuses on sidewalks and trails to encourage walking and bicycling as a means of transportation. Additional revenue should be raised by hiking gas taxes to discourage excess driving in the same way that higher cigarette taxes have discouraged smoking.
The Commonwealth Financing Authority, a state agency created two years ago to administer economic development programs, should cut funding for projects on undeveloped land and restrict future loans and grants to projects on recycled land in existing cities, towns and older suburbs.
The state Department of Education should eliminate state funding for sprawling new schools — like the proposed new North Pocono High School — and require school districts to pay the entire $1 billion annual cost of busing students instead of covering half the bill.
And just as former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop prominently campaigned for a smoke-free society, Mr. Rendell should use his bully pulpit to promote sustainable communities — ones that conserve resources, rather than waste them.
Pennsylvanians can be persuaded to adopt healthier lifestyles — but it will take a concerted effort to get their attention and make it fashionable as well as practical to walk instead of drive.
THOMAS HYLTON, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is author of “Save Our Land, Save Our Towns” and host of the public television documentary, “Saving Pennsylvania.”
Just wait till they start on fat people. We can aready see the fat police have startd on fast food joints.
I can see airlines charging double for fat people, or charging by the pound would be a way of getting around the discrimination rants we will no doubt hear from the Rosie O Donnels.
The irony is that many people who live in the suburbs would be perfectly happy to live in the city - if cities weren't the hellholes they are. And why are cities hellholes? Largely because of the policies espoused by this author and his ilk.
Surely he'll be going after practitioners of unprotected gay sex next < /sarc>
As one who formerly lived in an area overcome by "sprawl", I think the author is correct when he identifies it as a great problem for America.
We need to preserve the remaining farmland and forests or we will eventually be in the same position with their products that we are now in with imported oil.
Woohoo- we're becomming just like the taleban who dictates what every citizen can and cant do- Won't be long now. No wonder the dems hold the terrorists in such high regard- they've adopted their governing tactics to a tee! http://sacredscoop.com
Damn good point there!
Yes, you will find that just like there are anti-smoking gnatzies right here on Free Republic, there are also some anti-"sprawl" advocates.
The cities drove people away, instead of finding ways to attract and retain people they are looking to the government to force people back into the big city killing fields.
Thank you sir- I may be thick of skull, but I get a good one off every now and again just to throw people off track lol
Translation: "We need to de-populate all of those red areas on the map, and get everyone herded into those blue areas"
Translation: "We need to de-populate all of those red areas on the map, and get everyone herded into those blue areas"
This is yet another invented "crisis".
All you have to know is who and what is behind it.
"...what caused people to flee the cities in the first place,..."
"Policies" were not the reason people left the cities, which are NOT "hellholes" in any case. ECONOMICS is why the left. It was much less expensive to leave the city and move to a suburb because of lower land costs. This was essentially subsidized by governmental policies of building new highways and speeded up by integrationist federal court rulings.
Given that the most rabid anti-smokers I've ever met were grossly obese, I have to say many overweight people earned the monster turning on them. Maybe we should charge food by the calorie. A little "sin tax" for the public good. I'm sure overweight people will support it. They loved sin taxing smokers.
Yeah, right why just last night I got to see a women executed in a public stadium for outraging public morality.
Tonight we can watch music cassettes being seized and burned and non-Islamic statues blown up.
Wild assed exaggerations only appeal to wild asses.
If they can tell you how to live, they can tell you where to live as well.
If they can mandate you can't, they can mandate you MUST.
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