Dear Editor:
Today's front-page story about traffic problems entitled "you can't get there from here" is missing a very important component of our national epidemic of urban sprawl -- population growth. US population grows by 3 million people per year due to both "natural increase" and immigration. This adds another California to our population every decade and will double our population, now approaching 270 million, to over one-half billion in the coming century. Can we ever expect to tidy up our problems related to lost open space, diversity, pollution, crowding, trash, "overfishing", or lost personal freedoms and higher taxes without stabilizing our population? Most of the scientific community and much of our population thinks not. Yet, your article never mentions increasing population as a factor.
We complain about the traffic. How come we don't want to acknowledge that there are people driving all those cars? Stabilizing our population would be relatively easy and inexpensive to do compared with just treating the symptoms. What will it take to make us acknowledge this underlying problem and REALLY act to save a reasonable quality of life for our children?
Michael G. Hanauer [Zero Population Growth Board of Directors] 6 April Lane Lexington, MA 02173