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.”
Mr. Hylton,
I just read your recent column equating the fight against smoking with the fight against urban sprawl.
I do agree with you there are similarities. Both issues pit people minding their own business and freely associating against those with authoritain impulses and an insatiable desire impose their vision of utopia on others. You, and those like you, are truly frightening and a far bigger threat to all that is good than any number of cases of lung cancer or one acre lots could ever be. The world you are pushing us toward is a cold soul-less place. Shame on you and your tyrannical crusade.
I've learned that folks with a weak argument, and/or weak debating ability, resort to insults. You have no idea what I've done or not done, and no idea about the realities of sprawl.
Nice wording. They are too, and are trying to rewrite the laws of every municipality and state to get everyone to conform to their idea of what's right.
"And once good farmland is put under asphalt it is gone forever.":
You're another one that doesn't have clue what you're talking about.
My property, once developed 120 years ago, is now leaving the juvenile stage and heading for mature over the next 50-75 years.
What that means is that the poplars are dying and the oaks and maples in the understory are about to take over. The evidence of civilization remaining is chunks of concrete and railroad track scattered here and there. About 90% has been buried by nature's floods, storms, snow and sun.
elkfersupper, what you're saying is correct, but it flys over the heads of some people here.
A FRiend of mine calls that type, "convenient conservatives".
Only conservative when it suits them.
Amen.
"I'm pretty sure I own firearms that can launch a projectile all the way across Long Island and still go through a Volvo at the end of the trajectory."
And that would prove...?
Don't know what your point is, but some of us wish that the concept of central planning had died along with the old Soviet Union.
Well, I know you're not a farmer and haven't tried.
That's a fact.
And I know you complain about sprawl, a typical tactic of wrong-headed liberals.
That's a fact.
And nothing I said is an insult, just a statement of facts as I see them. Apparently you can't refute them so you lay down and shout: victim. Another liberal tactic.
"The problem with your argument is that FARMS are being converted to urban plots. Not every plot of land can be planted because of terrain or just poor soil.
The country has a limit amount of GOOD farmland and it it the flat well drained acres that developers love most cause it is easier to cram lots of crappy houses upon.
And once good farmland is put under asphalt it is gone forever."
How right you are! And notice how some folks here, who consider themselves "conservatives", seem to have no interest in conserving our nation's precious farm land.
I know it's Christmas and all, but you're the best at pointing out that this is all Robert Wood Johnson Foundation bullcrap ping.
I have, Glen Cove, Great Neck, Oyster Bay, Stony Brook, Hamptons, etc are just urban sprawl run wild.
That Long Island is not the vast agricultural preserve you think it formerly was, that has now been despoiled by greedy developers and homeowners.
I am simply not comfortable unless I am somewhere I can see 10,000'+ mountain peaks from 100+ miles away.
"Don't know what your point is, but some of us wish that the concept of central planning had died along with the old Soviet Union."
You're right about that, you don't know what my point is.
And the way I see it, you don't care to try to find out.
It is enough for you and your pals that since I don't like what urban sprawl has been doing to our land that therefore I must be a liberal or worse.
"I have, Glen Cove, Great Neck, Oyster Bay, Stony Brook, Hamptons, etc are just urban sprawl run wild."
Thank you. It's nice to hear from another person who speaks from experience.
"I am simply not comfortable unless I am somewhere I can see 10,000'+ mountain peaks from 100+ miles away."
I know what you're saying...
What area of the country do you live in?
I traveled thru Denver last month (the airport) and what a great sight, those big old mountains staring down at my small self.
Absolutely gorgeous. And flying over those mountains to Sacramento showed how much open space (no people, no buildings) there is in America.
"That Long Island is not the vast agricultural preserve you think it formerly was, that has now been despoiled by greedy developers and homeowners.
I am simply not comfortable unless I am somewhere I can see 10,000'+ mountain peaks from 100+ miles away."
I'm the last of three generations on Long Island. I remember farms right on the outskirts of NYC. You are right that it is not "the vast agricultural preserve you think it formerly was...", but then, that wasn't what you meant to say, was it?
Why don't you admit it, you have absolutely no idea what Long Island was like, or is now?
I don't think that at all.
I think you are either an architect, a city planner, or simply someone that has bought into this propaganda.
In the interest of full disclosure, I make a living giving people what they want by paving paradise and putting up parking lots.
I also hunt, fish, and there is a family farm in the picture.
These interests are not mutually-exclusive.
Central New Mexico - God's country except for the politics.
Central New Mexico - God's country except for the politics.
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