An article in the Wall Street Journal points out that self-driving cars will give more people access to housing that is affordable, particularly in urban areas where growth-management regulation has driving up housing costs. Unfortunately, that’s not the overt message in the article, which is instead headlined, “Driverless Cars to Fuel Suburban Sprawl,” as if that’s a bad thing.

You’d think that a writer for the Wall Street Journal would realize that sprawl is a good thing, but it gives people access to more affordable housing and less traffic congestion, and most importantly allows people to live in the way most people prefer: in a single-family home on a private lot. But this article by technology writer Christopher Mims seems to assume that everyone knows sprawl is bad, even though it doesn’t say why. In fact, the article reports, in a shocked tone, that “half of Americans live in, and are perfectly fine with, suburbs.”

Mims admits that no one really knows how self-driving cars will change the world. But he joins others in assuming that nearly everyone will give up owning a car and rely on car-sharing instead. After all, he and others point out, cars are actually used only 5 percent of the time–what a waste! Hey, Mr. Mims, the toilet in your house is probably used only about 5 percent of the time. Are you willing to share it with anyone who can download a smartphone app?

Mims also quotes an MIT architect named Carlo Ratti who predicts that self-driving cars will so reduce urban congestion that even more people will want to live in dense cities. “There’s an advantage in being dense so I don’t think we’ll see sprawl like in the 1950s and 60s,” he quotes Ratti as saying.

Mims is skeptical on that, and on this the Antiplanner agrees with him. But it doesn’t really matter whether people prefer density or sprawl. If self-driving cars can help them realize their preferences, that can only be a good thing. People like Mims need to learn that all of these preferences are valid and they shouldn’t demonize some of them based on decades of poorly supported propaganda by anti-sprawl planners.