Ryan Avent

Lowering VMT through land use

Streetsblog, Sep 03, 09.

Tagged with transportation, urban planning, environment, energy, transit oriented development, smart growth, density, greenhouse gases, vehicle miles traveled

Experience with case studies has made it clear to many urban planners and environmentalists that to maximize the benefits of transit investments, and to slow growth in traffic congestion, vehicle miles traveled (VMT), and carbon emissions, you have to focus on land use.

This knowledge has begun working its way into the policymaking world, to the extent that local and state legislatures are beginning to craft rules that explicitly factor the carbon impact of land use effects into decisions about new development and infrastructure construction. In a few years time, the federal government may follow.

But there’s not as much in the way of hard studies of the effects of land use as we might like—mainly because it’s been a non-issue, so far as most of the country is concerned, for much of recent history.

Aiming to address this (and acting under a congressional mandate), the Transportation Research Board recently completed a study that has now resulted in a very large report: “Driving and the Built Environment: The Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use, and CO2 Emissions.”

...

No one is suggesting we rip down all of suburbia. Rather we, or at least I, am pointing out that between now and mid-century, the country will very nearly have to build itself all over again to accommodate population growth. In addition to the 100 million homes now in America, somewhere between 62 and 105 million more will be built.

The critical question is what the balance of that new construction will look like. The TRB report suggests that if 75 percent of this new construction is of a more compact variety, that emissions could be reduced 10 percent or more from the baseline scenario (and that is not taking into consideration the deployment of cleaner electricity generation and other potential sources of savings).

Full story: More People, Less Driving: The Imperative of Curbing Sprawl
Source: Streetsblog, September 3, 2009

Houston Tomorrow post on the study.

TRB report summary
Full TRB report: Driving and the Built Environment

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