A new report from the National Research Council shows that compact development, if done correctly, can result in reductions of VMT’s of up to 25% – over the next 40 years.
Requested by Congress and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Special Report 298: Driving and the Built Environment: The Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use, and CO2 Emissions examines the relationship between land development patterns and motor vehicle travel in the United States.
According to the committee that wrote the report, the most reliable research studies estimate that doubling residential density in a metropolitan area might lower household driving between 5 percent and 12 percent. If higher density were paired with more concentrated employment and commercial locations, and combined with improvements to public transit and other strategies to reduce automobile travel, household driving could be lowered by as much as 25 percent. By reducing vehicle use, petroleum use and CO2 emissions would also be lessened.
You can read the full report here. The long time horizon means that while compact development will play an important role in mitigating our carbon footprint in the long term, it will not be enough to slow the brunt of climate change in the short term.
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Its good to see stuff like this but was any of this ground breaking news. I find it hard to believe that this information was not known before they spent the money on the research for this report. It would have been better if they used the money on actually proving the theory in a contolled test market.