Has the busybodies' 'Agenda 21' worked its magic?

I know. "Agenda 21" sounds like one of those conspiratorial rabbit holes like, say, Area 51 or the Bermuda Triangle. It is not. It is as real as is the havoc it has helped wreak.

As to whether that havoc was intended, I think not, but I could be wrong. After the last month or two, I would not be surprised to learn that Lucifer himself conceived Agenda 21.

Agenda 21 was the end product of the epic U.N. Conference on Environment and Development – more commonly known as the "Earth Summit"–held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

The "21" referred to 2021, the year by which individual governments around the world were to have achieved the Agenda 21 "action agenda." In 2015, the completion date was pushed back to 2030.

For the last 20 or so years, as the executive editor of a regional business magazine, I have moderated more than 200 industry roundtables, at least half of which have dealt in part or in full with urban development.

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Although individual business leaders might dissent, and I certainly did, in none of those meetings did I hear an urban planner offer a plan of action that differed in any meaningful way from that agreed upon in Rio.

At its core Agenda 21 asked all countries to "integrate land-use and transportation planning to encourage development patterns that reduce transport demand."

This meant specifically adopting "urban-transport programmes favouring high-occupancy public transport" and encouraging "non-motorized modes of transport." The British spellings should have been a giveaway.

For American urban planners, the gold standard has been Portland, Oregon. The goal was to concentrate the population in densely packed areas and move people around on public transportation just as Portland was so noisily doing.

The rationale for this plan changed over the years from air pollution to oil shortage to dependence on foreign energy to global warming to that shape-shifting, all-purpose hobgoblin, climate change.

The trick was to get people out of their cars, on to "high occupancy" public transportation and into new, high-density buildings downtown.

Experience had made me skeptical. For four years I commuted from New Jersey to my uptown Manhattan high school. This meant nearly 90 minutes each way on bus, train and subway.

In my four years riding the subway uptown I never once got a seat, not even close. I was happy just to shove my way in, there to be routinely sneezed on and coughed on, occasionally puked on and – this being New York – groped.

After the first week, I asked my mother why adults chose to live that way. She had no good answer.

Based on my own experience, when finishing grad school in pleasant small-town Lafayette, Indiana, my wife and I ruled out all major metros.

White men being a drag on the academic market even then, we took my wife's best offer in a livable city, Kansas City as it happened, and bought a house with a yard within walking distance of the university.

What makes the Kansas City metro livable in no small part is that it has more freeway miles per capita than any city of size in the world. I have never had to take public transportation anywhere.

I have always thought "space" an asset. It keeps our home prices down, shortens commute time and makes us "nice." At some urban planning sessions, however, I have been actually hissed for bragging about our freeway miles.

The meanest hate mail I get locally is when I criticize the city's newest and stupidest shiny object, one that causes more traffic problems than it solves: light rail.

You don't have to be an epidemiologist to figure out what is causing Americans to die from COVID-19. More than half the deaths have been in New York and New Jersey.

When I look at the maps, I can see the grim reaper following the commuter lines out of Manhattan. I don't blame New Yorkers for their plight. They have been stuck with their transit limitations for a century or more. There was no real way out for them other than to move away.

What I do not understand is why any sane person would want to mimic that model. In all the planning sessions I have attended, no one once mentioned the possibility that a pandemic could render public transportation unusable.

The Agenda 21 document mentions "pandemic" only briefly in reference to HIV and is otherwise silent on the subject.

The good Dr. Fauci should have seen this coming. He attended my high school. He rode the same subway. It was as crowded and as germ-ridden when he took it as when I did some years later.

If this crisis has a silver lining it is that every American city's "Blueprint for the Future" – and they are all the same – is headed for the shredder.

That done, let's fire all the urban planners.