About the same time another study says that sprawl is unhealthy, comes this from NY Times columnist, John Tierney: I’ve been converted by a renegade school of thinkers you might call the autonomists, because they extol the autonomy made possible by automobiles …These thinkers acknowledge the social and environmental problems caused by the car but argue that these would not be solved — in fact, would be mostly made worse — by the proposals coming from the car’s critics. They call smart growth a dumb idea, the result not of rational planning but of class snobbery and intellectual arrogance. They prefer to promote smart driving, which means more tolls, more roads and, yes, more cars.