Kaid Benfield's Blog: Moving Beyond Oil

How to go green, according to architects

2008-04-30T13:10:30Z

The American Institute of Architects has announced their annual “Top Ten Green Projects,” as chosen by the Institute’s Committee on the Environment (affectionately known as “COTE”).

Now I have to say that I personally like and am impressed by just about everyone I’ve met from AIA’s environmental circles. I was flattered that they asked me, even as a non-architect, to serve on one of COTE’s sister committees, the committee on Communities by Design. (We supply the “community” side, get it?) We’re meeting later this week in Los Angeles, and I pretty much love the group of people. I think one or two of them are delegates from COTE, which is where it may get interesting, considering the rest of my post . . .

If I were to give advice to a designer about how to win this award next year, I would say the following: Stick very carefully to modernist design, preferably with long horizontal lines and sharp angles; surround your building with lots of grass and landscaping; have razzle and dazzle; don’t worry at all about the pesky fact that buildings in remote or sprawl locations waste more energy for transportation than they save in building efficiency; locate on a campus if possible; don’t bother with re-using historic properties, notwithstanding all that already-imbedded resource efficiency; total automobile dependence is just fine; neighborhood-y stuff is for sissies, don't worry about it; and for heaven’s sake don’t even think about affordable housing, or really about housing at all, OK?

I guess COTE didn’t get the memo about how much transportation efficiency matters to the climate or the environment, or how much being in a diverse neighborhood with amenities, shops and services promotes public health by encouraging walking.

As I posted some time back, there is a crude but very useful tool on the web called Walk Score. It measures the proximity of a given address to various categories of diverse uses, such as grocery stores, restaurants, schools, parks, drug stores, and other retail. It paints with a broad brush, so I wouldn't rely on it for anything terribly precise or consequential. But it’s a pretty good indicator of whether a location is in a real neighborhood or not, as well as how automobile-dependent it is. If the base location is residential, a high score means a resident can likely reach a lot of common destinations on foot, or at least with short driving trips. If the base location is commercial or institutional, a high score means a worker or visitor can conveniently run errands and combine trips to the base facility with visits to other common destinations. Both suggest a location that has good regional accessibility, and both mean less driving and less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If the score is low, anyone who lives or visits is basically driving some distance to get there.

You may recall that I entered the addresses of NRDC’s four large offices in New York, Washington, San Francisco and Santa Monica in Walk Score’s calculator. It turns out that we’re awesomely located, with walk scores of 100, 98, 98, and 97, respectively. My home, in a more residential area of Washington, still does pretty darn well with a 72 (“very walkable” under the system’s scale), but my in-laws in an outer suburb don’t fare so well with a 43 (“not walkable”). Below are the walk scores for the AIA’s “Ten Greenest” projects of 2008. Remember, scores above 70 are considered “very walkable,” while scores below 50 are considered “not walkable” and are likely to generate very high rates of driving as well. Scores from 50-70 are in between, with “some walkable locations”:

Aldo Leopold Legacy Center, Baraboo, WI: ZERO
Cesar Chavez Library, Phoenix, AZ: 15
Discovery Center at South Lake Union, Seattle, WA: 100!
Garthwaite Center for Science and Arts, Cambridge School of Weston, Weston, MA: 43
Lavin-Bernick Center, New Orleans, LA: 71
Macallen Building Condominiums, Boston, MA: 86
Nueva School Hillside Learning Complex, Hillsborough, CA: 14
Pocono Environmental Education Center, Dingman’s Ferry, PA: ZERO
Queens Botanical Garden Visitor & Administration Center, New York, NY: 82
Yale University Sculpture Building and Gallery, New Haven, CT: 91

I count one residential building and nine educational or institutional facilities. You certainly can’t fault the jury for seeking diversity in a way that compromised their design standards.

Now, the five that score so poorly, including the two zeros (!), are not without merit as examples of good architecture and of good use of green technology. But to call them the greenest projects in the country is just plain ridiculous. That completely ignores the most important contributor of global warming emissions of all. (Transportation emits 31% of our greenhouse gas emissions; commercial buildings emit 16% and residential buildings emit 19%. The rest is industrial.)

I guess we should be glad that they at least got some of them right. I love the South Lake Union project, pictured above. As the description on the AIA site reads, the facility “is centrally located within an emerging neighborhood of residential communities, offices, and nearby private schools, and provides the only available green space suitable for field activities . . . The building is located at the intersection of two arterial streets and invites pedestrian interaction. In addition to hosting exhibit space showing the history of the neighborhood free of charge, the facility is available to residents of the community for private meetings and after-hours functions. The Discovery Center hosts summer block parties for the neighborhood and an outdoor film series during the summer months.

“The site is easily accessible via public transit with two bus stops at the corner serving numerous routes. The South Lake Union streetcar also runs along the Westlake Avenue corridor with a stop adjacent to the Discovery Center . . . The off-street parking area also includes a reserved space for a car belonging to a car-sharing program.”

Congratulations to the Miller|Hull Partnership in Seattle for the design, and to their client for selecting a site that delivers environmental benefits. And congratulations also to the designers and patrons of the Lavin-Bernick Center, the Macallen Building, the Queens Botanical Garden Visitor Center, and the Yale Sculpture Building, all of which are well sited as well as well designed.

You can read about all the winners and see plenty of pictures here.

Pay as you drive – too sensible for America?

2008-04-27T03:57:35Z

If you live in an average-sized household, and your household drives 20,000 miles or fewer per year, you are probably paying too much for automobile insurance. If, on the other hand, your household is driving more than 22,000 miles per year, you are being subsidized by those who pay car insurance but drive less.

This is because, with very limited exceptions, insurance premiums are based on a set of risk factors that do not account for the fact that risk rises with greater-than average driving and falls with less-than-average driving. (The average rate of per-household driving in the US was 21,252 miles per year, as of 2001.)

This is where the highly sensible concept of “pay as you drive” auto insurance comes in. Under PAYD, a large portion of your premium would be variable, depending on how much you drive, accurately measured by GPS devices or odometer readings. If you reduce your driving, you would get rewarded with lower premiums, and your gas-guzzling neighbor would have to start paying his fair share. My friend Allen Greenberg, one of the good guys at the US Department of Transportation, has been sending me emails about this for, literally, years. He’s relentless on the subject. And he’s right.

The best accessible analysis I have read on the subject appeared in the Sunday magazine of The New York Times last week, and can be found online here. It was written by the maverick authors of the best-selling book Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Here’s some of what they have to say:

“Imagine that Arthur and Zelda live in the same city and occupy the same insurance risk pool but that Arthur drives 30,000 miles a year while Zelda drives just 3,000. Under the current system, Zelda probably pays the same amount for insurance as Arthur.

“While some insurance companies do offer a small discount for driving less — usually based on self-reporting, which has an obvious shortcoming — U.S. auto insurance is generally an all-you-can-eat affair. Which means that the 27,000 more miles than Zelda that Arthur drives don’t cost him a penny, even as each mile produces externalities for everyone. It also means that low-mileage drivers like Zelda subsidize high-mileage drivers like Arthur.”

Rectifying this unfairness would, say the two, produce a societal benefit of $52 billion per year, because the properly aligned incentives would reduce driving and associated carbon emissions, congestion, and accident-related property and medical costs. Next month Progressive insurance will roll out a PAYD plan in six states and, if it goes well, eventually expand it. The authors allow that Progressive will be taking a risk because, if other companies do not follow suit, high-mileage drivers may go subsidy-seeking and sign with other companies. But, if low-mileage drivers flock to Progressive, maybe that’s OK. Then the laggard companies would have to adjust their rates upward anyway, because their client base would be a higher-risk portion of the market. Interesting, no?

Check out the article. Personally, I think it’s a swell idea, though if it catches on I’m not sure if my email volume from Allen will go up or down. :)

Another vote for small-city smart growth

2008-04-06T22:37:24Z

Matthew Yglesias on theatlantic.com points out that it is not just large cities and metro areas that can adopt smart growth practices. He correctly explains that there are plenty of places in America that will never have, for example, sophisticated public transportation systems. Nevertheless, "better planning and land use policies would help the cities in question maximize their assets and increase the sustainability of the enterprise without radically altering the character of the place or the lifestyle of the people who live there." Morgantown, West Virginia, is his example.

Applause, please. This, of course, was the point I was trying to make about my original hometown of Asheville (pictured to the left in Jeff Pittman's painting; read my posts here and here), and again about Charleston, SC. Big-city living isn't for everyone, and neither is taking the bus, sometimes, when the economics are such that it doesn't come by very often or go where you want to. But, by reviving legacy Main Streets and older parts of communities, and building more sensibly and compactly when we create new places, we can enhance community livability while saving a lot of environmental resources.

I was taken aback by some of the challenges lodged in the comments on Yglesias's sensible, modest argument. While he had plenty of supporters, there were also those who felt that walkable downtowns and neighborhoods would never happen in most of the country and, even if they did, they wouldn't change people's driving habits and consumption.

Um, perhaps they are unfamiliar with what's going on is Asheville, or Charleston. Or Boise. Or Breckenridge, Colorado. Or Greensboro. Or Winooski, Vermont, for goodness sakes. Smart growth is happening, quickly in some places, more slowly in others, but just about everywhere, because it works and because there is a market to support it. And while, no, it won't get everyone out of her car (I'm not giving up mine, either), it will provide choices to a significant number of people, so that some of their trips - such as to the dry cleaners, the library, the elementary school, the 7-11, even the office - might be made on foot. And, with thought to how we can grow inward, not just sprawl outward, even our trips by car can be made shorter, saving gas and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, by reducing the need to sprawl, we help save watersheds and the rural landscape.

Nice work, Mr. Yglesias. You're riding the right horse.

Many thanks to my colleague Andrew Wetzler for pointing me to Matthew Yglesias's post.

The infrastructure crisis: fix it first, fund it, and be strategic

2008-03-25T22:06:13Z

The nationally syndicated writer Neal Peirce has a great column out this week on the nation’s infrastructure woes. It basically confirms what we all have thought as we drive over ridiculously broken roads, try to crowd into too-few buses or subway cars, or read horrifying stories about a bridge collapsing, not to mention the tragic levee failures in Louisiana.

Peirce quotes Pennsylvania governor Rendell as reporting that “in 1960, 11.2 percent of federal non-defense spending went for infrastructure; today it's 3.5 percent. In 1987, America spent 1.17 percent of its gross domestic product on infrastructure; most recently it's .057 percent.”

This has led Rendell, California governor Schwarzenegger, and New York City’s mayor Bloomberg to join in a new “Building America’s Future” campaign to address the issues. Meanwhile, Sens. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) have proposed a National Infrastructure Bank to replace the ups and downs of year-by-year funding with long-term, self-financing bonds for major projects proposed by state or local governments. Preference would go for "fix-it-first" projects and require that they provide broad economic benefits, respond to the new challenges posed by climate change, and include a focus on the growing importance of urban areas.

Even better, the America 2050 coalition (in which NRDC has been participating) has been advocating a bold new national vision for infrastructure that would comprise, among other things, dramatically improved intercity and commuter rail, rapid broadband expansion, and conscious protection for natural landscapes, estuaries and other “green infrastructure” that supports clean water and reduces carbon emissions. America 2050 is being led by the Regional Plan Association, which also has been championing the megaregion concept I addressed in an earlier post. House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.) and Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) are on board.

With the omnibus federal transportation legislation coming up for overhaul, these are right ideas at the right time. I couldn’t agree more that our infrastructure investment needs to be made more strategic and more accountable, with an emphasis on repair and maintenance, efficient performance, reducing consumption and pollution, and supporting sustainable development instead of mindless sprawl. Could the ingredients be falling into place?

We’re making a difference: sprawl is slowing as smart growth catches on

2008-03-18T19:52:29Z

One of the things that has challenged me as an advocate of smart growth is that, while we see substantial evidence of smarter development around us, we also continue to see a lot of sprawl. So it can really be hard to tell that we’re making any progress in our efforts to stop paving over every acre of our countryside and spending more and more time in traffic, emitting greenhouse gases and getting frustrated. Statistics have been hard to come by.

But now we have some, and I’m here to report that they do, in fact, show that smart growth is starting to make a difference. In one of the most encouraging data sets I’ve seen, central cities are now starting to grow again, while the rate of growth in outer suburbs is declining. This is a huge change: when my colleagues and I were researching our 1999 book on sprawl, the trends could hardly have been more disheartening: we had statistics showing that the central areas of Atlanta, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, Baltimore and more were all losing jobs and population, while the counties around them were experiencing dramatic growth.

This is no longer the case. Fringe counties are certainly still growing, but the near-total claim they once had on regional growth has disappeared. New analysis of census data from Dr. John Thomas at the US EPA shows that, since the mid-1990s, the portion of regional growth (as measured by housing starts) that is taking place in central cities and counties is on the increase, while the portion that is going to the sprawling fringe is starting to decline. While John’s analysis is not yet published, he has generously given us permission to share it. In particular:

Cook County, IL went from roughly a 25% share of the Chicago Region’s new housing starts in the 1990s to over 40% in 2006
Fulton County, GA increased it’s share in the Atlanta Region over the same period from 18% to 27%
In the Washington, DC region, the District of Columbia, Arlington County and the City of Alexandria more than doubled their share of the regions housing starts (less than 10% throughout the 1990’s to over 23% in 2006.)
Denver County doubled its share to 20%
Multnomah County (Portland, OR) increased its share more gradually to roughly 25%

We’ve been saying all along that rebuilding the urban core takes development pressure off the countryside. Now we can prove it. Given that we as a country are continuing to grow in population, jobs, and households, imagine the additional sprawl if those central cities had failed to recover.

But wait, there’s more good news: use of public transportation is rising again after decades of decline, while driving rates are beginning to slow.

In particular, according to the American Public Transportation Association, public transportation use is up 32% percent since 1995, a figure that is more than double the growth rate of the population (15 percent) and substantially higher than the growth rate for vehicle miles traveled (VMT) on our nation’s highways (24%) for that same period. Americans took 10.3 billion trips on public transportation in 2007, the highest level in 50 years. The share of walk-to-work commuting has also gone up since 1995.

Meanwhile, although VMT continues to grow, the rate of growth in driving has significantly slowed, from 4-5% per year in the late 1980s and early 1990s to around 1% per year in the middle of the current decade. In 2005, the growth in vehicle miles traveled was less than 1% and less than the growth in population for the first time since the days of the OPEC oil embargo and block-long lines at the gas pump in the late 1970s.

Now, I could pull out a different set of statistics demonstrating that we still have a long, long way to go. Rates of land consumption and driving in the US are still far higher than in most countries; availability and usage of public transportation are still much lower; commute times and distances continue to go up; suburban congestion is horrible; the gap between where we are in greenhouse gas emissions and where we need to be remains immense; and so on. Even with respect to the new, more hopeful trends, you can make a case that not every increment of improvement is a direct result of NRDC’s advocacy (but do keep it quiet). ;)

But this is progress, people. Remember that the smart growth movement didn’t even exist in its current form until the mid-1990s. We didn’t even have a name for it until Maryland’s then-governor Glendening popularized the phrase in 1997. But we found the right cause at the right time. And the things we have been advocating are starting to work. Maybe I’ll take the day off tomorrow.

The country’s best smart growth project – the Atlanta Beltline

2008-03-14T18:09:53Z

I’m a bit fickle about this. At first I was sure the country's best example of smart growth was Atlantic Station, in Atlanta. Then I thought it was one of the iconic transit-oriented developments in the west, The Crossings in Silicon Valley or Orenco Station outside Portland. We featured all three of those in NRDC’s book of smart-growth successes. Then I was really, really sure it was Highlands’ Garden Village, in Denver. Exciting projects, each one.

But my heart has been stolen once again. My friends, the best smart growth project I have come across yet is the Atlanta Beltline, an ambitious 22-mile proposed loop around the city’s downtown that will incorporate state-of-the-art transit, new parks and trails, workforce housing, and lots of smart, green neighborhood development, all taking place in the city rather than sprawling out on the fringe. The project takes advantage of an abandoned rail corridor and parcels of other abandoned and/or deteriorated property ripe for redevelopment, and it enjoys the support of nearly all the city’s civic and business leaders.

The Beltline also faces some significant challenges, and I’ll get to those. But first let me tell you about it. In its current state, the corridor largely looks roughly, and I do mean roughly, like this:

That’s abandoned industrial property, scrub land, a neighborhood needing a lift and, this being Georgia, lots of kudzu.

The Beltline has a short but rich history. Amazingly, credit for the project’s inspiration is given to a master’s thesis written in 1999 by Ryan Gravel, at the time a student at Georgia Tech. Gravel sent copies to various influential Atlantans and began to advocate the Beltline concept in earnest. By 2003-2004, the project’s enthusiastic supporters included Mayor Shirley Franklin and former city council president Cathy Woolard, and the project was formally approved by the city council, board of education, and Fulton County Commission.

One particularly instrumental leadership role was taken by the Trust for Public Land (my favorite conservation group), which undertook a study of existing and potential park space around the Beltline, releasing the influential report The Beltline Emerald Necklace. (Let’s forgive the mixed-metaphor title, shall we?) A result is that the Beltline will create an interconnected system of 40 new and existing parks, adding over 1,200 acres of new green space for residents to use and enjoy.

The city’s detailed, comprehensive plan for the Atlanta Beltline includes the following:

Parks—over 1,200 acres of new or expanded parks, as well as improvements to over 700 acres of existing parks;
Trails—33 miles of continuous trails connecting 40 parks, including 11 miles connecting to parks not adjacent to the Beltline;
Transit—22-mile transit system (streetcars or light rail) connecting to the larger regional transit network, including the MARTA rail transit system;
Jobs—more than 30,000 permanent jobs and 48,000 year-long construction jobs;
Workforce housing—5,600 new workforce housing units;
Streets—new and renovated streets and intersections including 31 miles of new streetscapes connecting neighborhoods and parks to the Beltline;
Environmental remediation—cleanup of contaminated sites;
Neighborhood preservation—preservation of existing single-family neighborhoods;
Tax base—an estimated $20 billion increase in tax base over 25 years; and
Industrial base—preservation of viable light industry.

(More history here, and a frequently updated blog here.)

The challenge is assembling the necessary funding. The overall budget for public investment is $2.8 billion. But the city had been planning to raise a little less than a third of the total by issuing bonds that would be repaid from increased property tax revenue due to increased property values. But the problem is that such revenues usually go to schools. In this case, the school board approved the plan because they saw the investment as increasing revenues available to schools in the long run. But last month the Georgia Supreme Court agreed with a sole taxpayer that the financing scheme was unconstitutional. Because the implications of the court decision go beyond the Beltline and threaten many other initiatives around the state, city leaders are hopeful that a legislative remedy can be found. In any event, they are fully committed to the project and vow that, one way or another, they will find the money.

If they do, the citizens of Atlanta will be able to enjoy the country’s best smart growth project.

Cities: a smart alternative to cars?

2008-02-29T22:42:28Z

You have to know that smart growth is making more and more sense to more and more of the right people when it shows up in Business Week. And on the website of that venerable and most mainstream of publications, Alex Steffen writes:

The answer to the problem of the American car is not under its hood . . . The best car-related innovation we have is not to improve the car [although Steffen supports that, too] but to eliminate the need to drive it everywhere we go. In the US, we need to stop sprawl and build well-designed compact communities. The land-use patterns in our communities dictate not only how much we drive, but how sustainable we can be on all sorts of fronts . . .
We know we're capable of building dense new neighborhoods with plenty of open space, welcoming public places, thriving neighborhood retail, and a tangible sense of place. Just look at Vancouver, which has redeveloped its downtown core into a dense mix of retail, jobs, and housing. Not only is the result one of the most livable cities in North America, but 40% of all downtown Vancouver households are car-free . . .

He hits many of the right pragmatic points, citing the Growing Cooler report, which my NRDC colleague Deron Lovaas had a hand in. You can read the article in its entirety here.

Steffen is executive editor of WorldChanging, a provocative publication on sustainability and more. There is a longer version of his discourse on cars, community and the environment on the WorldChanging site.

tick tock, goes the (world) clock

2008-02-28T17:53:13Z

If you know anyone who is still in denial that growth is real and that we had better get our act together quickly in figuring out how to live and develop sustainably, send them to Peter Russell's World Clock. The site indicates, in numbers that change constantly in more or less real time, world births, deaths, net population change, oil consumed, carbon dioxide emitted, forest land cut, and more. It is startling to see.

There's other interesting stuff on Russell's web site, too.

The mortgage crunch is good for us. Really.

2008-01-02T17:27:08Z

Easy for me to say, I know. Sorry about that.

But the good news is that exurban development is slowing to a near-halt, while smarter, closer-in locations are holding their value. And, unlike the situation with previous problems in the mortgage market, this one is accompanied by higher gasoline prices. These forces are combining to favor smart locations over sprawl for future development.

So says Eduardo M. Peñalver at Cornell, and he may be on to something:

“With credit tight and the demand for housing drying up (sales of new homes fell last month to the lowest level in 12 years) new construction in the exurbs is grinding to a halt. The result is a decline in the building industry's appetite for rural land on the urban edge. The question now is whether that decline will last. In the past, a sudden drop-off in demand for housing in the exurbs would have represented merely a hiatus. Builders would have bided their time until the housing market recovered, and the outward push would soon have begun again.

"But persistently high gas prices may mean that the next building boom will take place not at the edges of metropolitan areas but far closer to their cores . . . as gas prices climb, long car commutes become a rising tax on exurban homeownership, and the price people are willing to pay for homes in remote areas will fall . . .”

Read the full article here.

Beyond the energy bill: on to transportation

2007-12-19T20:29:46Z

Warning: serious policy-wonk blog entry coming up.

This week’s enactment by Congress of a 35-mpg vehicle efficiency standard, using a formula that includes SUVs and other so-called “light trucks” (most of the SUVs I see aren’t hauling anything more than the driver and maybe some groceries, but whatever), is a very big deal for the environment and for making progress on reducing global warming emissions. I am incredibly proud of my NRDC colleagues for their role in making this happen, as well as their efforts on behalf of other good features in the new energy bill. It’s not perfect, but it is substantial progress, especially on vehicles and fuels.

It still won’t get us to where we need to be on carbon emissions unless we also address patterns of transportation. And these are directly connected with land use, since it’s no mystery to anyone other than a dwindling but still-formidable set of old-line transportation policymakers that more sprawl and more roads beget more traffic and emissions.

Over the next two years, we have a chance to rethink transportation policy in this country. That is because the federal omnibus transportation funding law, SAFETEA-LU (don’t ask; but, trust me, the last two letters are not for “land use”) expires at the end of September, 2009. I hope we can reconceive the whole thing around sustainability.

For decades, this huge and expensive legislation (scores of billions of dollars) was just known as “the highway bill.” From the late 1950s to the 1980s, it was primarily about completing the Interstate highway system.

There was substantial reform in 1991, when the concept of “efficiency” was introduced into the law. There was still plenty of money devoted to highway construction, but there was also more for public transit, and new programs were introduced to promote intermodal travel, air quality, transparent planning, and flexible funding accounts that could be drawn upon by state and local governments for things other than highways. Some funds were, for the first time, set aside for community enhancements projects related to transportation.

These reforms did make a difference, but only in the states and communities that chose to take advantage of them. And the highway lobby, which was a little asleep at the wheel in 1991, made sure that there was very little in the way of further reform in the next two bills, in 1998 and 2005.

A lot has happened since then, not least a shift in power in Congress, as the energy bill illustrates. Some of the forces that could set the stage for a more sustainable and equitable approach to transportation include the following:

The emergence of global warming as a much more prominent national and international concern
Increased citizen concern about sprawl, traffic congestion, and community livability
The “green” movement in buildings and industry
Significantly higher gasoline prices
Changing demographics that point to changing societal needs, with proportionately more seniors, smaller households, fewer households with school-age children, less demand for large-lot housing, and more societal diversity
More experience with the shortcomings of road-building as a cost-effective traffic-relief strategy
More concern over health, obesity, and walkable communities
Transit ridership now going up rather than down, reversing a longstanding trend
Better research on the effects of land use on transportation patterns and emissions
More models of success with smart growth and communities with transportation choices

Imagine a set of interconnected federal policies that respond to these factors by providing complete streets for walkers, buses and cyclists as well as for cars and trucks, encouraging transit-oriented development and walkable neighborhoods, establishing a set of performance goals for reducing greenhouse gases, respecting landscapes and historic resources, providing funding for smart growth planning, and strengthening regional thinking and community involvement in decision-making.

It could happen.

The coolest spots for neighborhood development

2007-12-14T21:16:01Z

Neighborhoods can be cool in more ways than one. We are on the verge of a neat new technology that can identify the particular places within a metropolitan area that have the smallest global-warming footprint.

In a previous entry I mentioned my friend Eliot Allen, who does GIS-based planning from his firm, Criterion, in Portland, Oregon. Criterion exhibits many impressive skills, and one particularly impressive one is assisting municipalities and others in sophisticated regional mapping to help them determine the best places for land development, as well as the places to stay away from.

Lately, like a lot of us, Eliot and his firm have been thinking about how all this ability to compile data-based maps can help us reduce per-capita emissions of greenhouse gases. And, with a little bit of help from NRDC, Criterion is working on a concept Eliot calls Cool Spots, where land use, transportation and energy data converge to create the best places for low-carbon development.

It works in a step-by-step process, like this:

Collect and import data in the region concerning energy usage and carbon dioxide emissions from building and transportation sources, delineated by location;
Scan the region’s transit routes and service information, identifying stations, stops, and corridors;
Map the area within comfortable walking distance of each transit node and corridor, as well as within walking distance of key neighborhood services such as food stores and parks.
Combine the information to suggest places for improvements in increasing the availability of transportation choices, as well as improvements in building and infrastructure energy efficiencies, within key walkable areas;
Implement them to attract new smart-growth development to the right places and make cool spots even cooler with logical neighborhood design.

You can get an idea of how this might work by looking at this map of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The areas in dark green represent land that either has been or should be set aside for conservation or agriculture rather than development. The lighter green areas are mostly rural land that is in parcels too small for legal conservation but that have been determined to be not needed for development within the next 25 years.

The purple areas are the cool spots, where conditions are most environmentally favorable for development because of transit and walking conditions. This is where infrastructure investment and residential and commercial development should go to minimize the global warming impact of new growth. This map represents the good work of Jay Hoekstra of the Green Valley (MI) Metro Council, who enlisted Criterion to help with planning for the region.

Eliot estimates that, by taking advantage of the opportunities presented in these places, CO2 emissions per capita can be cut in half in as few as three years for the residents and workers who inhabit them. Now that’s cool.