By Jerry Walters

Several new reports on the subject of transportation, land use and climate interactions, reach findings related to and/or directly refer to the findings of Growing Cooler- The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change, a 2008 ULI book co-authored by Fehr & Peers. This second of three posts will clarify the misconceptions and key differences between Growing Cooler and the most prominent of these studies:

• Last week: Moving Cooler – by Cambridge Systematics for ULI, EPA, US DOT, et al
• This week: Driving and the Built Environment – by a group of academics and national experts for TRB and the National Research Council.
• Next week: Travel Behavior, Residential Preference, and Urban Design – by the University of North Carolina

Driving and the Built Environment

This National Research Council (NRC) report finds lower VMT reduction resulting from land use strategies than did Growing Cooler and than were adopted into Moving Cooler. It estimates that the potential reductions in inter-urban passenger travel resulting from land use shifts and complementary transportation would be in the range of no greater than 8 to 11 percent by 2050, while Growing Cooler estimates the likely range to be between 12 and 18 percent.

The authors of Growing Cooler believe that the lower NRC estimate is the result of several questionable assumptions:

· The NRC study does not take into consideration the effects of more compact future commercial development and redevelopment, it only examines density increases related to residential growth,

· NRC assumes very, very slow redevelopment of residential properties, equivalent to about 500-year life-cycle for housing stock, compared to 170-year life-cycle projections that informed other studies such as Growing Cooler,

· The NRC analysis considered the effects of development density on VMT reductions but not the additional 4D effects of diversity (mixed use), design (walkability and connectively), destination accessibility (infill vs. spread sites), and development distance to core transit,

· The NRC study does not consider the synergistic effects that infill and mixed-use development has on its neighboring land uses, which can occur if it fills needs for complementary land use types. This may result from adding services and entertainment to homogeneous residential areas, or adding housing near pre-existing jobs or retail, or adding a more connected and amenable pedestrian environment to what may have previously been a gray-field or brownfield. It may also result from creating critical mass that generates additional transit investment in the area,

· Also, by working with national averages, the NRC study uses very broad averages of development form, unlikely to register on the benefits derived at a neighborhood or community scale. As reported the study works with average existing residential densities of only 1.7 to 2.9 dwelling units per acre, and then assumes that new development will only occur at densities of 1 DU per acre. As a result, their estimates of VMT reductions have little in common with the types of reductions likely to correspond with the local effects of compact, mixed use development on the vast amount of travel that takes place within neighborhoods and within communities.

In conclusion, the Growing Cooler authors believe that their own estimates represent a fully achievable estimate of VMT and GHG reduction.

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Coming up next…

- I will review UNC’s Travel Behavior, Residential Preference, and Urban Design: A Multi-Disciplinary National Analysis, which states: “We found that residents of neo-traditional developments make more car trips … than residents of typical suburban neighborhoods… We found no difference in vehicle mileage.”

By Jerry Walters

You may be hearing about several new reports on the subject of transportation, land use and climate interactions, that some may say rebut the findings of the 2008 ULI book Growing Cooler – The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change.  This first of three blogs will clarify the misconceptions and key differences between Growing Cooler and the most prominent of these studies:

• Moving Cooler – by Cambridge Systematics for ULI, EPA, US DOT, et al 
• Driving and the Built Environment – by a group of academics and national experts for TRB.
• Travel Behavior, Residential Preference, and Urban Design – by the University of North Carolina

Moving Cooler

Moving Cooler is an expansion and extension upon Growing Cooler, which primarily addresses the effects of coordinated land use and transportation strategies on reducing VMT and GHG generation. After addressing the degree to which greater vehicle fuel economy and cleaner-burning fuels can begin to address the needed levels of GHG reduction, Growing Cooler goes into considerable depth on which factors related to land use (the Ds) contribute to travel and GHG reduction and what the likely aggregate effects would be if planning policies shifted to meet the growing market demand for compact, mixed and transit oriented development.  It considers several broad complementary transportation strategies, including road pricing (fuel price, tolls, VMT fees) and transit investments.  It addresses policies and strategies that can be applied at the development level, city/county level, regional level, and statewide level. 

Moving Cooler is a national strategy piece.  It does little or no original research on strategy effectiveness but devotes a lot of effort to combining a long list of potential strategies into three “bundles” representing a future baseline or “expanded current practice”, an aggressive bundle, and a maximum effort bundle.  Each bundle contains a mix of land use, transit and non-motorized measures, system and driver efficiency measures, facility pricing, vehicle technology and fuel content.   For its land use effectiveness assessment, Moving Cooler relies on the analysis and assumptions from Growing Cooler, with only a minor exception.  Rather than comparing the future “business as usual” to the future with-action as does Growing Cooler, Moving Cooler uses “expanded current practice” as its baseline against which to compare its action elements.  As a result, its incremental percentage reductions in GHG from land use strategies appear lower than in Growing Cooler, even though both predict essentially the same end-state.

What Moving Cooler does to is to assemble an impressive list of TDM strategies and system efficiency strategies and to select from earlier research on each strategy to estimate its potential effectiveness.  It is not clear, however, whether they realistically accounted for the mutually reinforcing and mutually detracting interactions among groups of measures, as their efforts to consider the combined effects of measures within and between bundles is reported only to be a matter of multiplying rather than adding the effects of individual elements. 

Moving Cooler was sponsored by an important group of organizations, including EPA, FTA, FHWA, APTA, ULI and NRDC.  However, one of the original supporters, AASHTO backed out of the effort when it found that it could not support the findings related to the effects of roadway expansion.  

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 Coming up next…

-   I will review the recent TRB document Driving and the Built Environment which some believe finds the potential effects of land use strategies to be only about half of those estimated in Growing Cooler.

 -  I will then review UNC’s Travel Behavior, Residential Preference, and Urban Design: A Multi-Disciplinary National Analysis which, paraphrased, states: “We found that residents of neo-traditional developments make more car trips … than residents of typical suburban neighborhoods… We found no difference in vehicle mileage.”