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Why doesn't Albuquerque's leadership community talk about limiting factors affecting the city's growth? Because they won't admit such factors exist.

Cities are limited by two kinds of flows - flow of water and flow of traffic. Impede those flows, and a city becomes sick unto dying.

But Albuquerque doesn't talk about those problems, because a cheery veneer of 1950s boosterism hides from public view all troubling realities of growth.

We all might as well be driving big cars with fins and sprinkling our lawns in the middle of the day, as far as our public discourse is concerned.

Even in 2006, Albuquerque still confuses growth and prosperity with size. It's as if we'd confused obesity with blooming health. Beneath the happy talk, our traffic arterials are clogging up and our water is dribbling away.

Despite the engineering miracles that bring us San Juan-Chama drinking water, we'll only get 48,000 acre-feet a year to drink. We use some 110,000 acre-feet overall. That leaves 62,000 acre-feet still to be pulled from the aquifer, depleting it even more, threatening the city's roads with subsidence.

In the boom years between 1950 and 1960, Bernalillo County grew to 262,199. In 1966, as the county approached 300,000, traffic was backing up, and the Big-I was built to relieve the congestion. It took 38 years of increasing traffic nightmares, until 2002, for Albuquerque to get a new Big-I, to the tune of $291 million - the biggest public works project in the state's history.

But as we all know, the Big-I isn't really working as we'd hoped. A construction project or a wreck or just rush hour traffic stops it cold almost every day.

No amount of booster talk can change the fact that I-40 and I-25 are still basically the same highways they were 40 years ago. They couldn't handle the traffic all that well then, and they are often dysfunctional now, except under ideal conditions.

Take I-25 from Belen and Los Lunas any morning, and you will see bumper-to-bumper traffic for the better part of two hours. What happens if the metro area grows even more in the next five years or so? What happens to I-25 if new interchanges are built to accommodate tens of thousands of new residents at Rancho Cielo in Los Lunas and Mesa del Sol in Albuquerque? There isn't enough money or land that I can see, to expand those interstates fast enough to accommodate anything near our expected growth.

It's not only a matter of gridlock, it's a matter of economic health. A city that outgrows its traffic flow becomes almost moribund, unless costly transit systems are created.

Booster truth and ground truth are never the same in Albuquerque. When will our leaders get real?