It’s about time we looked at the flip side of Smart Growth, which is being sold as if it’s the best thing to come along for America since Dr. Salk and his polio vaccine.

According to its propaganda, Smart Growth is planning for the population of the future by concentrating people and jobs and support businesses in cities connected by light rail. People wouldn’t need cars because they could walk or bicycle to and from work and shopping centers.

Smart Growth is really Growth Management recycled, the original onset of politicians’ efforts to dictate where we may live. Leaders of that faction were onetime House Speaker Joe King and onetime state representative (now U.S. Senator) Maria Cantwell. Joining them were the pols 20 years ago who stopped the building of new highways, figuring the resulting congestion from more people and more cars on a static highway system would force people to move to the city and switch to transit.

It didn’t work. People still kept moving to the suburbs or the country and didn’t mind a bit having to drive back and forth to their jobs in the cities. That’s called urban sprawl, which the managed growth people soon made dirty words as they already had with developer, builder and Realtor.

They’d like to see a dozen if not six-dozen people per acre. Densification, or jam as many people as possible on as little land as possible, is what smart growth is all about.

At this point, says Randal O’Toole of Bandon, Ore., senior economist with the Thoreau Institute, and author of “The Vanishing Automobile,” 10 states, including Washington, are deep into Smart Growth, 20 are leaning toward it and the rest aren’t growing fast enough to be into it. I heard him speak the other day to a slew of property owners on what Smart Growth could do to them.

It’d be fine if it worked, he said, but it doesn’t because it’s a war on the American lifestyle, on life in the suburbs and on automobiles. Its twin goals are “grow up, not out” and “reduction of automobile dependency.” Impact fees and building quotas (only so many new houses per year) are used to make the cost of single family homes prohibitive and force people into high density, as pedestrian and transit-friendly travel space is aimed at discouraging car driving. People wind up immobilized in their no-car, high-rise, walk-to-work enclaves.

Smart Growth has a lot of parents, O’Toole said. “Essentially, the Washington Growth Management law. Downtown business interests, because people who live and shop in the suburbs don’t need a downtown. Consultants and construction companies that would build the light rail.”

As for traffic congestion, buses are expensive because not enough people will ride them, yet they have a higher capacity than light rail, which costs far more to build than an eight-lane highway. O’Toole’s answer is toll roads, accompanied by reduction in the gasoline tax.

He would eliminate government zoning, and let neighborhood associations do their own. “I trust my neighbors more than the bureaucrats miles away.” Higher density land use would increase crime, O’Toole said, and because it tends to attract lower income residents, on account of people really don’t want to live there. As soon as they can afford it, inner city residents move out.

What it boils down to is that Smart Growth is about power. Who gets to decide how you travel, where you live, work and shop and what your transportation taxes are spent on.

Just as it is the American dream to own your own home, it is an accepted dictum that when it comes to travel, every man wants to be the master of his own movement. We so love our cars that many households have two, even three. More cars per family are a congestion factor. Even when the buses are free, we prefer to choose our time and place of departure and return without depending on anyone else’s schedule.

Smart Growth may be fine in old, densely populated cities like New York, but this is the West. Not here. Not us. Don’t try to manipulate our lifestyle to accommodate urban planners. Accommodate our lifestyle instead.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, WA 98340.).