Sprawl is not the worst thing that ever happened to U.S. cities. In fact, by many measures, it’s been beneficial.

Despite the cliché among some academics and intellectuals that sprawl leads to unattractive and traffic-clogged cities, the reality is that sprawl has benefited many people over many years. Many Americans today, including suburbanites, are happy where they live, work and play.

So what explains the crusade against sprawl? How could a recent book on urban planning have opened with the unqualified – and ludicrous – assertion that “sprawl is America’s most lethal disease”? How has the campaign against sprawl – and the American car culture that goes with it – become a political force across the country?

I would argue that worries about sprawl and traffic have developed not because our situation is so bad but because it is so good.

In good economic times, expectations run ahead of what is possible. Soaring expectations, rather than actual problems, are responsible for a good deal of our contemporary discontent.

A good example is the din of complaints about traffic in Los Angeles. From one perspective, this reaction is bizarre. Even when speeds on the freeway decline to 20 mph, drivers move more quickly than they do at the center of almost any large, older city in Europe or the United States.

The problem is not that congestion is worse in Los Angeles. It is that the highway builders of the 1950s and 1960s were so successful in building their way out of congestion that people became used to driving across the entire metropolitan area and made choices about where they lived and worked based on that reality.

When it comes to automobile travel, Los Angeles, perhaps more than almost any other large city in the world, suffers from deflation of raised expectations. The residents of Paris, New York or Tokyo never entertained the possibility that they could drive through the center of the city at 60 mph.

In recent years, it is true, L.A.’s congestion has gotten worse. But that is actually less the fault of sprawl than it is the result of misconceptions about sprawl. Today’s anti-sprawl and anti-highway consensus emerged in the 1960s, as a reaction against urban renewal and highway construction.

But rather than confine themselves to the damage that freeway construction did to urban neighborhoods, the anti-auto activists claimed that the program hurt central cities by encouraging suburban growth.

They argued that constructing new roads was useless to reduce congestion because the highways themselves “induced” traffic by generating new demand. Their most convincing proof was the observation that new highways quickly filled with automobiles. Hence, the aphorism: “You can’t build your way out of congestion.”

The only way to break the vicious cycle of new roads, more traffic and sprawl, the anti-auto forces claimed, was to stop building roads and create more mass transit. This would turn the vicious cycle on its head, creating instead a virtuous cycle in which more people riding on urban mass transit would create more demand for work and housing in areas convenient to transit stops.

This is the logic that has undergirded public policy in Los Angeles and many places in the last decades. It has led to the expenditure of billions of dollars on new transit systems, such as the new light-rail lines and subway in Los Angeles.

Despite this expenditure, transit’s share of trips has fallen and traffic has continued to get worse in almost every market in the country. In the Los Angeles region, for example, mass transit, which accounted for 1.94 percent of trips in 1983, dropped to 1.64 percent in 2003, according to figures compiled by transportation consultant Wendell Cox.

Why? Because so many people are locked into unrealistic assumptions about the way transit worked in the past or could work in the future.

Given the success of the anti-highway lobby, it is not surprising that there has been a lack of taxpayer support for building new roads and increasing capacity on existing roads.

The fixation on sprawl has also taken attention from the scenarios that might help build effective new public transportation systems. It is quite likely that this will involve the replacement of both the train and the gasoline-fueled automobile. Both are, after all, 19th-century means of transportation, and very inefficient ones at that.

Because cities are so dynamic, it is difficult to know whether our future urban areas will be lower or higher in density than today. In either case, new modes of transportation that combine the adaptability and personal comfort of the auto with the efficiency of the train or bus are more likely to satisfy the needs of most Americans.

We can do it and enhance mobility for everyone. But only if we put aside the old battles over sprawl.