Unmanaged growth will overwhelm whatever progress has been made in cleaning up the Bay. Sprawl makes us use more land than we need. Sprawl produces traffic congestion and more air pollution. The car is the only form of transportation that can serve sprawl. Such a pattern induces twice as much road building, three to four times as many automobile trips per day, and a lot more air pollution than more compact patterns of development.
Sprawl is expensive.
On average, sprawling low-density residential development usually costs local governments more to provide public services than it returns to local coffers. This means sprawl produces less tax money for schools, police and fire stations, parks, and other public services. Sprawl accelerates the decline of cities and towns. Metropolitan areas are rapidly spreading geographically, even as central cities and towns decline. For example, while the City of Baltimore lost about 250,000 people over the past 25 years, its suburbs expanded by 67 percent.