Will suburban sprawl ever slow down? For several years anecdotal evidence has suggested that smart growth policies -- such as mixed-use residential and commercial communities or neighborhoods built around light rail transport -- are on the rise. But now some hard numbers are coming in, and they are encouraging.

Public transportation use has grown 32 percent since 1995, according to the American Public Transportation Association. Compare this to vehicle miles traveled, which increased only by 24 percent and whose yearly growth rate is now less than 1 percent.

The Environmental Protection Agency recently completed a study of residential building permits issued between 1990 and 2006, which showed that in 26 of the 50 biggest metropolitan areas, the proportion of new construction in urban cen­ters as opposed to suburban areas more than doubled. In Atlanta, Chicago, and New York, the increase was roughly threefold. These trends aren’t universal -- cities in the West continue to spill outward -- and more data crunching is needed to show the precise reasons for these trends. But the signs are that Americans may, at last, be getting smarter.