Urbanism holds promise for reducing energy use

New Urban News Article with graphs, 7/1/2005

Researchers presented findings at the Congress for the New Urbanism annual conference that show substantial energy savings from higher-density urbanism — greater savings than can be achieved from the US government Energy Star program.

In a panel on Climate Change and the Built Environment, John Holtzclaw of the Sierra Club and Jennifer Henry of the US Green Building Council reported that density and transit connections could significantly reduce greenhouse gases and the nation’s use of gasoline. “New Urbanism is the magic that can bring about a substantial reduction in the driving that we do,” Holtzclaw said.

In a telephone interview with New Urban News, Holtzclaw explained, “it doesn’t require browbeating people into driving less. All you have to do is create the conditions so people can do things by foot — and they will do things by foot.” Density is a proxy for urbanism, Holtzclaw said, because most of the higher-density neighborhoods in the US were built prior to World War II, the watershed event between urban and suburban development. One hopeful conclusion from research by Holtzclaw and others is that even relatively small improvements in density and transit availability — a combination of factors sometimes called location efficiency — yield sizable reductions in auto use.