MAIN MENUPREVIOUS MENU---------------------------------Search CD-ROMSearch ResultsPrintLocation Efficiency as the Missing Piece of The Energy Puzzle: How Smart Growth Can Unlock Trillion Dollar Consumer Cost Savings Mary Jean Bürer and David B. Goldstein, Natural Resources Defense Council John Holtzclaw, Sierra Club ABSTRACT This report reviews recent research on location efficiency and uses these results to project scenarios for reductions in energy use, global warming pollutants, and consumer costs. It begins by reviewing the literature on location efficiency. Location efficiency reflects the average amount of car ownership and distance driven for a household located in a particular neighborhood. In the analysis the energy efficiency potential of smart growth developments (the type that are occurring in the US) are estimated using location efficiency research findings. The results show energy savings of a comparable magnitude after ten years to other major building energy efficiency policies, such as construction codes, appliance standards, and DSM programs. Consumer present value savings are an order of magnitude higher at $2.3 trillion. Policy options for expanding smart growth and realizing its potential are briefly discussed. Introduction The design of communities to provide better access with less use of automobiles – now commonly known as “smart growth” – can result in significant energy savings in the transportation sector and much larger savings in overall societal costs. These general conclusions have been claimed for over a generation, but generally have not figured heavily in analyses of energy savings or global warming pollutants reduction because reliable means of quantifying the results of different decisions concerning community infrastructure were not available. This is no longer the case. Recent research on location efficiency, corroborated by other studies looking at smart growth more broadly, provide a basis for predicting the results of specific scenarios for community development and transportation infrastructure provision in the United States; some evidence suggests that these results may be applicable throughout the world. We review the location efficiency research and corroborating evidence in Section II. We discuss in Section III a methodology for applying these results towards the evaluation of scenarios of varying level of “smartness” in land use planning and transportation infrastructure provisions. We apply this methodology in Section IV to real world examples of smart growth that are being developed in the United States, and project what would happen if the new construction market were to follow these models. We calculate results in terms of reductions in automobile ownership and use, reductions in energy use for gasoline, related reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and tabulate the results in terms of economic benefits to society. The calculations show that within ten years of initiating smart growth development, the efficiency potential can yield nationwide reductions of cumulative global warming pollutants of approximately 595 million metric tons of carbon dioxide or 162 million metric tons of carbon- 9-12(carbon, like carbon dioxide, is measure of greenhouse gas emissions). This equals about 10% of total US global warming pollutants in 2001. A contribution on this order of magnitude of carbon emissions is comparable to savings from other classes of measures that have been looked at in a number of studies that project what it would take to meet the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol (Geller, et. al. and others). In broad terms, these studies all find that policies such as improved fuel economy (CAFE) standards for automobiles, upgraded appliance and equipment efficiency standards, upgraded new construction energy codes, the provision of public benefits funds by which utilities or other administrators can promote energy efficiency in the utility sector, the provision of incentives for combined heat and power systems in the industrial sector and in buildings, the development of tax incentives or other long-term incentives for advanced levels of energy efficiency in buildings and vehicles, and the retirement of obsolete and highly-polluting coal-fired power plants, each account for roughly 10% of the Kyoto-required reductions in global warming pollutants. So together they predict that the entire emission reduction goal can be met by measures that are justified solely on economic or public health grounds. Smart growth has the same general order of magnitude of savings as these or other measures, but has not been discussed nearly as much. But in terms of economic benefits, the improvement in net present value savings from these policies cumulatively tends to be (depending on which study one cites) in the range of about $500 billion for the U.S. economy after 10 years (e.g. NRDC 1991). By comparison, the savings from enhanced location efficiency from 10 years of new construction are about $2.3 trillion1 all by themselves. Background on Location Efficiency Research Location efficiency research developed gradually beginning with studies of transit and auto use (Pushkarev and Zupan 1977), but a major beginning for this work started when Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy conducted a survey of 32 major cities around the world that found that the residents of American cities consumed nearly twice as much gasoline per capita as Australians, nearly four times as much as the more compact European cities and ten times that of three compact westernized Asian cities, Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo (Newman and Kenworthy 1989). Gasoline use varied as a function of density both within the subset of American cities and worldwide. Their data suggest that driving is reduced 30 percent every time density doubles. A travel survey in the Greater Toronto Area suggested that doubling density results in a decrease in per capita Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) of about 25 percent (University of Toronto, York University 1989). A comparison of cities in Washington state found housing density, population density, jobs-housing balance and retail-housing balance to co-vary and to be associated with reduced driving (Pivo, et. al. 1995). A 1990 study analyzed the effects of density, transit service and pedestrian and bicycle friendliness using neighborhood-scale data (Holtzclaw in CEC 1991). This study found that high residential