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.”
Are you calling me a name???
You may disagree but the evidence is against you.
"The freedom of choice whether to smoke or not, regardless of the consequences, IS a matter of personal choice..."
Unfortunately the burden of providing medical care for such poor choices is increasingly falling on taxpayers. For that reason taxpayers are causing their lawmakers to restrain such activity. And, why shouldn't they?
The evidence is that we can put everybody in this country in a single-family-detached home on acreage in Texas and leave the rest of the country unpopulated if we wanted to do so.
The US Census Bureau classifies less than 4% of the land in America as "urban."
There is no "sprawl." The only sprawl that exists is that vast expanse of space between the two ears of the smarxist growth purveyors.
And if you want to preserve farmland or forest, buy it.
“They are in the process of bankrupting the people and government with lawsuits, social programs, financing the UN and foreign countries, environmental programs”
Read my home page.
Because it's been proven by studies that smokers pay for their own care through axtra taxes.
No anti wants you to hear that, but it's true.
More proof that freedom is as unpopular in our age as in any time in the past. Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty. Tyrants, petty and great are always eager to take things away from you for the common good, as they define it.
I will lay odds that Mr. Hylton has already "got" his.
Have you ever been to Long Island NY?
"Because it's been proven by studies that smokers pay for their own care through axtra taxes."
Whose studies?
No.
Why would I want to do that?
Different governments studies.
Why? If you visited Long Island you might have a different perspective on the matter we're discussing.
Long Island could be the "poster child" for antisprawl.
It has become a rather unpleasant place to live.
"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."
One man's sprawl is another man's opportunity. Man, you've been drinking the Kool Aid! Cut back, LOL!
I live in Dane County, Wisconsin. The liberals here are constantly telling us that our county is over-developed. In the entire COUNTY, only FOUR percent of it is considered "developed." And Dane County is the MOST populated (outside of Milwaukee County), as it holds our State Capitol, all the Hippies and the University of Wisconsin!
http://www.co.dane.wi.us/aboutdc/dcmap.htm
"Different governments studies."
The folks who collect, and spend the taxes. No bias there.
Have you ever been to Long Island, NY?
"There is no "sprawl." The only sprawl that exists is that vast expanse of space between the two ears of the smarxist growth purveyors.
And if you want to preserve farmland or forest, buy it"
****
Good point.
There are times when I think Mother Hubbard should have strangled all those starving brats.
Have you ever been to Montana?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.