Buried deep in its profile of the smart-growth plans percolating in Tysons Corner, Virginia, TIME highlights an inconvenient projection about a land-use plan that’s designed to fight the area’s traffic congestion:
Urban-design experts like Williamson insist that adding homes reduces traffic, as long as things like mass transit, supermarkets and dry cleaners are within walking distance. “It’s not so much about how many people have cars,” she says. “It’s about how they use them.”
But in February, Cambridge Systematics, a transportation consulting firm in Massachusetts, released a traffic study based on the land-use plan and concluded that despite the mass-transit options, the proposed influx of residents, plus an expected 100,000 new jobs, will result in more congestion.
Now why might an “urban-design expert” push a plan that would do nothing to address a purported problem?
