Other factors like mixed-use, street and intersection design, and block size prove to be less important than destination accessibility. Still, these factors are more important than mere density. Density is less important than land-use mix and having shops, schools, and workplaces near to where people live.

Not surprisingly, driving is found to have energy and climate implications:

The transportation outcomes . . .  vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and vehicle trips (VT), are critically linked to traffic safety, air quality, energy consumption, climate change, and other social costs of automobile use.

Figuring out a way to drive less – much, much less – is key to coming to grips with peak oil and to arresting global warming before we reach a tipping point beyond which Earth’s climate will spin out of control, resulting in an Eaarth we no longer recognize and which is no longer fit for human habitation.

The free-access analysis, Travel and the Built Environment, was authored by Reid Ewingab of the University of Utah’s Urban Land Institute; and Robert Cerverocde, University of California (Berkeley) Transportation Center, Institute of Urban and Regional Development.

Here’s the abstract:

Problem: Localities and states are turning to land planning and urban design for help in reducing automobile use and related social and environmental costs. The effects of such strategies on travel demand have not been generalized in recent years from the multitude of available studies.

Purpose: We conducted a meta-analysis of the built environment-travel literature existing at the end of 2009 in order to draw generalizable conclusions for practice. We aimed to quantify effect sizes, update earlier work, include additional outcome measures, and address the methodological issue of self-selection.

Methods: We computed elasticities for individual studies and pooled them to produce weighted averages.

Results and conclusions: Travel variables are generally inelastic with respect to change in measures of the built environment. Of the environmental variables considered here, none has a weighted average travel elasticity of absolute magnitude greater than 0.39, and most are much less. Still, the combined effect of several such variables on travel could be quite large. Consistent with prior work, we find that vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is most strongly related to measures of accessibility to destinations and secondarily to street network design variables. Walking is most strongly related to measures of land use diversity, intersection density, and the number of destinations within walking distance. Bus and train use are equally related to proximity to transit and street network design variables, with land use diversity a secondary factor. Surprisingly, we find population and job densities to be only weakly associated with travel behavior once these other variables are controlled.

Takeaway for practice: The elasticities we derived in this meta-analysis may be used to adjust outputs of travel or activity models that are otherwise insensitive to variation in the built environment, or be used in sketch planning applications ranging from climate action plans to health impact assessments. However, because sample sizes are small, and very few studies control for residential preferences and attitudes, we cannot say that planners should generalize broadly from our results. While these elasticities are as accurate as currently possible, they should be understood to contain unknown error and have unknown confidence intervals. They provide a base, and as more built-environment/travel studies appear in the planning literature, these elasticities should be updated and refined.

Study co-author Steven Davis of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology touts the study’s estimate that since 1961 higher yields per acre have avoided the release of nearly 600 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

“That’s about 20 years of fossil fuel burning at present rates. Our results dispel the notion that industrial agricultural with its petrochemicals are inherently worse for the climate than a more ‘old-fashioned’ way of doing things.

The researchers found that although the various inputs to modern farms require more energy and greenhouse gas emissions per unit of food output than did the lower-input methods of the past, crop yields have increased by 135%, reducing the amount of cropland needed to produce the same amount of food. Without these advances, the conversion of vast natural areas to agriculture would have caused much more greenhouse gas emissions—the equivalent of nearly 600 billion tons of CO2 since 1961.

As Davis explains, land conversion is the big culprit:

Converting a forest or some scrubland to an agricultural area causes a lot of natural carbon in that ecosystem to be oxidized and lost to the atmosphere. What our study shows is that these indirect impacts from converting land to agriculture outweigh the direct emissions that come from the modern, intensive style of agriculture.

We may have gotten ourselves into a predicament. Abundant fossil fuels have enabled both population growth and increased food production. Now fossil fuel production has begun to sputter at the same time soil fertility is beginning to succumb to years of assault by chemicals and synthetic fertilizers. And the population bubble has inflated to enormous proportions, and is still growing.

Industrial agriculture enabled the population bubble to inflate. Now all these billions of people go about their mission of pursuing economic growth, emitting greenhouse gases in the process – especially in the rich countries. The argument that industrial agriculture helped keep greenhouse emissions at bay only makes sense if we ignore the totality of industrial system within which industrial agriculture is embedded.

Rural development patterns enabled by cheap and abundant fossil fuels have energy and climate consequences, as almost 40% of total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are associated with residences and cars. Changing development and transportation patterns can significantly impact energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Data that break down per capita CO2 emission rates along other important categories of the United States, such as by urban vs. suburban vs. rural, rich vs. poor, apartment dwellers vs. homeowners, or by ethnic/racial origin is hard to come by. But new studies are beginning to shed some light on the issue.

A 2008 report by the Brookings Institution found that the average American in a metropolitan area has a carbon footprint of 8.21 tons — 14% less than the average American living outside the city.

Edward L. Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard, reached a similar conclusion in a study titled The Greenness of Cities:  Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Urban Development. Glaeser and co-author Matthew Kahn found that cities generally have significantly lower emissions than suburban areas. The city-suburb gap is particularly large in older areas, like New York, which developed prior to the dominance of the automobile.

A new study titled Cities produce surprisingly low carbon emissions per capita appearing in the April issue of the journal Environment and Urbanization looked at cities in a variety of countries and, for the most part, affirms these findings. Analyzing the per capita emissions from 12 major cities in Europe, Asia, North America and South America, the study’s author, David Dodman of the International Institute for Environment and Development found that per capita emissions from cities were typically smaller, and often far smaller, than their nation’s averages.

For example, greenhouse gas emissions for New Yorkers are less than a third of those of the national average for the USA. Those of Barcelona residents are half the average for Spain. Londoners have little more than half the greenhouse gas emissions per person of the UK average. Brazil’s two largest cities, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have less than one-third of the greenhouse gas emissions per person of the average for Brazil.

Tokyo has considerably lower emissions per person than either Beijing or Shanghai, suggesting that prosperity need not inevitably result in greater emissions and that well designed and well governed cities can combine high living standards with much lower greenhouse gas emissions. However, the study cautions that emissions from manufacturing are currently allocated to the countries in which these greenhouse gases are produced, rather than to the locations in which the finished products are purchased and used.

The main driver of greenhouse gas emissions is unsustainable consumption, especially in the world’s more affluent countries.

Bolinas is a tiny town at the southern tip of Point Reyes in Marin County just 20 miles north of San Francisco, across the Gold Gate Bridge and either over or around Mount Tamalpias. Its water source is a tiny dam thrown across a narrow creek known as Arroyo Hondo, delivered to town by a pipe described as “no wider than a coffee mug”.

In 1971, the Bolinas Community Public Utility District (CPUD) declared a Water Shortage Emergency Condition and enacted a moratorium on new connections to the municipal water supply. CPUD still warns:

That moratorium is still in effect and should be taken into consideration when contemplating the purchase of undeveloped real estate.

The Pacific Legal Foundation filed legal challenges to the moratorium and the suit dragged on for years, costing the town’s 1,500 residents almost $2 million to defend – but the water shortage in Bolinas is no joke. In January 2009, due to the perilous status of the town’s water supply resulting from two previous years of low rainfall and historic low rainfall in the early 2008-09 winter season, EPUD declared a prolonged drought condition in the district; issued a water supply alert; and enacted immediate, mandatory conservation measures. All customers were required to limit their consumption to no more than 150 gallons (or 20 cubic feet) per service connection per day (average daily household water use in the U.S. is 350 gallons).

Despite the town’s water supply difficulties, some people still insist on blaming the moratorium on anti-development forces – which certainly existed, as evidenced by the history of Bolinas Border Patrol. The Bolinas Border Patrol was famous for taking down signs pointing to the town, until the state finally relented and stopped putting up new ones. The New York Times article says now there’s this sign:

Even now, a sign that should say “Entering Bolinas” says, “Entering a socially acknowledged nature-loving town.”

Heck, there’s always been a sign at the entrance to town, just past the sign advertising the “B & M Septic Service”. It’s just without a sign pointing the way to Bolinas at the turn-off from the two-lane Highway 1 that winds its way along the coast, outsiders will never get to the edge of town.

Suspected members of the Bolinas Border Patrol would congregate at Smiley’s Schooner Saloon and Hotel, perched on the edge of Bolinas Lagoon. There, anybody could buy and wear a “Bolinas Border Patrol” tee shirt. Smiley’s was a haven after a morning of walking mist nets and weighing, measuring, and banding birds at the Point Reyes Bird Observatory (the Birdo, we fondly called it). You could down a beer and a dollar dog with the locals. From the bar, you could watch the local long hairs in tie dyes and sandals meandering up and down the street, going in and out of the co-op (named the People’s Store – what else, in Bolinas?), the bakery, the library.  Of course, everything was right across the street, in Bolinas.

The BirdO was housed just up the mesa in the old buildings of the Palomarin Ranch, run by the Church of the Golden Rule, refuge to draft dodgers during the dark days of World War II. Allergic to female proximity following the explosive dénouement of an ill-fated second marriage, I bunked in my van rather than share a dorm room with a gaggle of youthful postgrads.

Why is EPUD still cautioning the unwary about “undeveloped real estate”? Look no farther than the Bolinas “Gridded Mesa”. This is an area of about 300 acres on a bluff overlooking Bolinas Bay and the Pacific Ocean. The area was subdivided in 1927 into 5,336 20′ x 100′ lots – lots of less than 1/20 of an acre – in a grid pattern imposed over a former dairy farm without regard to drainage patterns, slope, bluff erosion, or any other natural features. The lots were sold as part of a subscription promotion by the San Francisco Bulletin.  The streets on the gridded mesa were never accepted by the county, and unless maintained by adjoining property owners, many are often impassible. Some have eroded into the sea and some have been abandoned, leaving lots with no public access. Only a few streets are now paved and maintained by the county. The entire area is served by on-site septic systems.

What a freakin’ planning nightmare. No wonder the Bolinas Border Patrol rose up to keep people out. No place in America was ever more in need of a building moratorium.

Now, the Bolinas Border Patrol is no more – at least not in name. The connotations of “border patrol” have become too ugly for counterculture types to stomach.

The shadowy rebel organization that tore down Bolinas road signs, misdirected tourists and confused the media for more than three decades took a politically correct step last month. The Bolinas Border Patrol members, whoever they are, will henceforth refer to themselves as “Bolinas Community,” so as to stop potentially offending Latinos.

The transition was announced in the Jan. 20 issue of the Bolinas Hearsay News by Bolinas mutineer and t-shirt designer, StuArt, who left ten phone messages unreturned and refused an interview on the top-secret matter. In his Hearsay story, StuArt credited a “no-bullshit” woman called Hawk with highlighting the unfortunate association between the Bolinas Border Patrol and the “brutal” United States Border Patrol.

“Border Patrol is way too ‘fascist police state’ for me,” StuArt wrote, agreeing with Hawk that the name had to change. “I thought about the Minutemen in Arizona, armed to the teeth, patrolling the U.S. border in SUVs.”

So while the logo remains a bespectacled quail (changed from a black widow spider in 1985), the name on all t-shirts, flyers and bumper stickers will be changed to the less controversial and arguably less virile title, “Bolinas Community.”

In the heyday of the Bolinas Border Patrol, members sawed, plowed and otherwise vandalized some 30 signs indicating the road to Bolinas. It was all part of a backfiring effort to keep the coastal hamlet out of public attention, tourist brochures and yuppie developer hands.

The quote above is from an article in The Point Reyes Light – no ordinary small-town newspaper. In 1979, with a circulation of only 2750, it became one of the few weekly newspapers to ever receive a Pulitzer Prize, winning the Pulitzer gold medal for Meritorious Public Service as a result of a series of exposes and editorials about the Synanon cult, infamous for (among other things) booby-trapping the mailbox of lawyer Paul Morantz with a live rattlesnake.

RIP, Bolinas Border Patrol. “Bolinas Community” just doesn’t cut it on a tee shirt.

Bolinas, a truly weird and wonderful place. Here’s a map – but please, don’t tell anybody else.

Recent studies agree that sea level will rise by roughly one meter over this century for a mid-range emission scenario. This is 3 times higher than predicted by the IPCC.

New research from several international research groups, including the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen provides independent consensus that IPCC predictions of less than a half a meter rise in sea levels is around 3 times too low. The new estimates show that the sea will rise approximately 1 meter in the next 100 years in agreement with other recent studies. The results have been published in the scientific journal, Geophysical Research Letters.

But it’s not that simple, as this chart posted at Climate Feedback shows:

As you can see, the lower range of estimates of sea level rise are converging at around one meter. The upper range of the latest estimates is now hovering around two meters.  And it seems that every year, as scientists’ understanding of ice sheet dynamics grows, estimates of future sea level rise are growing as well.

You’d think people who live along the coast would be beginning to get a little concerned, wouldn’t you?  Think again.

From Florida, Mark Schrope reports that coastal development continues virtually unabated in Miami in spite of its vulnerability:

Right now Florida is showing almost no leadership on responding sensibly to storms and to rising sea level,” says Robert Young, a coastal geologist at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. Orrin Pilkey of Duke University in North Carolina, a well-known proponent of greater constraints on coastal development, is even more forthright. “I call it an outlaw state,” he says. “Florida has been particularly irresponsible and it’s going to pay the price very soon.

As Climate Feedback points out, worse than just ignoring the threat of sea level rise, the state of Florida has taken drastic action to ensure that waterside properties damaged in storms can be rebuilt in the same locations time and time again.

Here in Oregon, plans by the City of Newport to redefine areas prone to landslides and erosion and to impose new rules governing how construction can occur in them are raising the outrage of property owners. Oregonlive reports:

Property owners here are furious over city plans to redefine areas prone to landslides and erosion — and how construction can occur in them.

Proposed building code changes for new construction in areas known as geologic hazard zones will cost property owners billions of dollars, they say, and are bound to trigger lawsuits.

Talk about the changes began circulating town this month. Angry locals swamped a Planning Commission meeting and quickly formed the Central Coast Home and Business Owners Association to fight the changes, which they accuse Newport officials of trying to sneak in.

At the heart of the battle is the city’s plan to adopt maps made by the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries in 2004. The maps show landslide and erosion zones, coding them in red, orange and yellow according to the degree of risk. Red is the highest. . . .

Opponents say the changes are naive and wrongheaded — and will cost everyone. They fear that under the changes, existing buildings in red zones would become “nonconforming” uses, making them nearly impossible to refinance, sell or insure.

The city has backed off some of the most controversial proposals, and “further revisions are likely.”

Better an inevitable “natural” disaster than what development interests call an “economic disaster.” In Oregon, as elsewhere, it seems our approach to an unpalatable situation is to bury our heads in the sand. Until we drown.

Similar studies conducted for the San Francisco Bay Area and the Washington, D.C., region have found average housing and transportation cost burdens of 59% and 47%, respectively.

“Drive until you qualify” make no sense when the transportation costs offset the lower house prices.

When gasoline prices rose to over $4 per gallon in 2008, the high prices hit exurban areas hard and magnified the housing bust in areas such as Riverside County, CA.

A news story in the Minneapolis -St. Paul Star Tribune now reports a reversal in the migration to suburbs and exurbs in Minnesota:

New estimates suggest that the movement into suburban and exurban counties within commuting distance of Minneapolis and St. Paul has stopped cold for the first time in recent memory.

For many years, the combination of robust growth, a multitude of freeways and plenty of open space helped ignite an explosion in exurban living. People were commuting for hours from towns such as Mora, Glencoe and Owatonna. National experts classed the Twin Cities as having the nation’s third-largest exurban flight from 2000 to 2005, ahead of even sprawling Atlanta.

But the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest estimates — the first to reflect the impact of 2008’s $4-a-gallon gas — suggest that:

• With people abandoning foreclosed and unsellable homes, the two-state ring of exurban counties is hardly growing. For these counties as a group, 2009 marked the first time more people left than moved in.
• In the five big suburban counties closest to the center (Dakota, Scott, Carver, Anoka and Washington), new arrivals have slowed to a standstill. With a wave of baby boomers sitting on empty nests in older suburbs such as Eagan, and new construction all but extinguished in once-booming counties such as Scott, growth is half what it was a decade ago.
• The two big core counties of Hennepin and Ramsey, losing tens of thousands of people a year as recently as five years ago, are on the rebound. Growth is gaining by the year.

When gas is cheap, moving farther out as a way to get more space for less money can make sense. But there’s a trade0ff. Time spent commuting is time not spent with a spouse, a child, a dog. Distance can be a drag. When gas prices rise and housing prices collapse, being upside down on a mortgage can make it difficult or impossible to escape.

Ominously, gas prices are now rising again.

Glaeser cites studies that find each new federally-funded highway passing through a central city reduces its population by about 18%. Cities don’t benefit much from that highway infrastructure because dense areas already have good means of getting around – like walking.

Subsidizing home ownership is also anti-urban. Glaeser gives Boston as an example: 62% of Boston homes are rented; 78 percent of suburban Wellesley homes are owner-occupied. Cities are dominated by apartments, and more than 85% of homes in multi-unit structures are rented. Suburbs are dominated by single-family detached houses, and more than 85% of such homes are owner-occupied.  Multi-unit structures are generally both smaller and more energy-efficient than detached single-family dwellings considering both embedded and operating energy and emissions – at least up to a point.

Subsidizing home ownership, through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the home mortgage interest deduction, lures people out of apartments and cities, increasing their energy and emissions footprints.

The U.S. isn’t alone in promoting sprawl. Canadian government at all levels spends more than four times as much on highways as on transit, thus opening up suburbs for development. As in the U.S, Canadian cities and suburbs artificially limit density through single-use zoning that also imposes density limitations and minimum parking requirements.  Low density limits the number of people who can walk to jobs, shops or transit stops, thus making development more car-oriented. But overall, the Canadian government promotes sprawl less aggressively than the United States – and gets less of it as a result.

One consequence of “less bad” anti-urban policies, Canadian cities are healthier and more vibrant than American cities. Among the ten cities that were America’s most populous in 1950, eight have lost population- often by huge margins.  The most extreme example is St. Louis, which lost 59 percent of its population between 1950 and 2000.  By contrast, every single one of Canada’s 1950 “Top Ten” cities has gained population.

So how to reduce energy consumption and emissions? A good start would be to eliminate highway subsidies, to stop subsidizing home ownership, and to give more respect and provide greater rewards to renters.

As energy analyst Jeff Rubin points out, the U.S. will never regain pre-recession peak levels of oil consumption – and ditto for oil consumption in Canada, Western Europe, Japan, or anywhere else in the OECD economies.

But don’t expect oil prices to go down. Rubin says:

Back in the 1990s, that kind of demand contraction in the OECD would have foretold a big decline in oil prices, since those countries accounted for almost three quarters of global oil demand. Today, they account for barely half, and tomorrow they will account for even less.

In a world where oil supplies have most likely peaked, global oil consumption has become a zero-sum game:

As China moves from consuming 8 million barrels a day to 10 million barrels, and OPEC ramps up its own daily consumption from 10.5 million to 12 million barrels, somehow, somewhere else in the world, there must be a corresponding decline in oil consumption. That somewhere else just happens to be the U.S. market and the oil markets of the other OECD economies.

Automobile sales in the U.S. have also peaked, never to regain former levels. Calculated Risk reports estimated car sales for February 2010 at 10.4 million SAAR (seasonally adjusted annual rate).

The current level of sales are very low – far below the 17 million that were sold each year between 1999 and 2007 – and are still below the lowest point for the ‘90/’91 recession (even with a larger population).

All of our land use and transportation planning assumes that vehicle travel will continue to grow at historic rates. Based on those assumptions, reducing the historic rate of increase would require heroic efforts; reducing per capita vehicle miles traveled (VTM), even more.  Reducing overall VTM significantly enough to achieve even the modest emissions reductions goals that are currently on the table would be a Sisyphean task, especially if population were to continue to increase as projected.

Given the new reality of dwindling fuel supplies and collapsing vehicle sales, it may be wiser to devote our planning efforts to figuring out how people can live and get around in communities with far less fuel and far fewer vehicles. The new reality is, the era of car-dominated communities is drawing to a close.

Here’s the text of an email sent out by Planning Director Kent Howe:

All,

As part of the citizen involvement process for Lane County’s Long Range Planning Program, you have volunteered to participate in the Lane County Stakeholder Group that will be reviewing potential revisions to land use policies and regulations.

The Lane County Board of Commissioners has directed Land Management Division staff to facilitate this group process.

The first meeting of the Stakeholder’s Group is Thursday, February 25th, 6:00pm, Harris Hall, 125 E. 8th Ave, Eugene.

At the Feb 17, 2010, meeting the Board specified the Stakeholder Group review the first 6 policy issues in the Goal One Code Amendment Proposal, attached. These correspond to lines 1-24 on the Preliminary List of Code Amendments spread sheet, also attached.

We look forward to working with you. If you have any questions, please give me a call.

Thanks,

Kent Howe
Planning Director
Lane County
541-682-3734

The text of the amendments proposed by Goal One Coalition and LandWatch Lane County is available here.

So all of you Lane County folks who are concerned about figuring out a way to strong local economies that will be resilient enough to grapple with the challenges we are already beginning to face, here’s your chance to take on the developers who normally have their way.

See you Thursday!

Solastalgia: the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault; a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home’; symptoms include anxiety, despair, numbness, a sense of being overwhelmed or powerless, grief.

Solastalgia is a neologism coined by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003. It describes a form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change, such as mining or climate change. Solastalgia is a global condition, felt to a greater or lesser degree by different people in different locations but felt increasingly, given the ongoing degradation of the environment.

Wikipedia explains:

As opposed to nostalgia – the melancholia or homesickness experienced by individuals when separated from a loved home – “solastalgia” is the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment. A paper published by Albrecht and collaborators focused on two contexts where collaborative research teams found solastalgia to be evident: the experiences of persistent drought in rural New South Wales (NSW) and the impact of large-scale open-cut coal mining on individuals in the Upper Hunter Valley of NSW. In both cases, people exposed to environmental change experienced negative affect that is exacerbated by a sense of powerlessness or lack of control over the unfolding change process.

An article in the New York Times quotes Albrecht:

There’s a scholar who talks about ‘heart’s ease.’ People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country. If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.

Albrecht has found that this “place pathology” isn’t limited to natives or to the displaced. People can be despairing and depressed without being forced from their homeland. The land changing around them can bring about the same sense of mournful disorientation.

The researchers could have found evidence of solastagia by looking at me in Sacramento, California in the ’70s, as the paradise I was born and grew up in was devastated by rampant and uncontrolled “development.” It got so bad I fled in a desperate attempt to maintain some semblance of sanity. The Seattle area in Washington proved little better.

When at last I found a real home again here in Oregon, that traumatic experience provided the impetus to do everything in my power to prevent a repeat of the California and Washington experience.

In California, things have gone from bad to worse; it is now what Sasha Abramsky in an article in The Nation calls the “west coast wasteland.” California’s population has exploded from a little over 10 million in 1950 to about 37 million today. But as many have warned (including Eben Fodor in his landmark 1998 study “The Cost of Growth in Oregon“), growth costs a lot and doesn’t pay for itself. After 60 years of growth, the bills have come due.

As Abramsky observes, what was a gorgeous state with a terrific infrastructure built up over the past century now has no money or political will to keep the place running properly. Paradise is broken and in a perennial state of fiscal crisis as California threatens to become a failed state. And California is not alone.

My heart still aches for what once was and is now irretrievably lost. I still can’t bear to cross the border. Unfortunately, as the symptom of climate change shows, the disease of growth doesn’t respect borders. Growth now threatens to devastate the entirety of the globe.

Earth is the only home we have, there’s nowhere left to flee. As it succumbs to the ravishes of growth, are we not destined to see solastalgia spread and become a global contagion?