Try out the Abogo tool for yourself and discover how transportation impacts the affordability and sustainability of where you live.

The latest in the snazzy series of useful tools and research on housing and transportation published by the Center for Neighborhood Technology is called Abogo.  It works like Walk Score: you enter an address and the site produces a GIS-coded map and data for that address, including the average amount of monthly spending per household for transportation in the address’s neighborhood and the average monthly amount of carbon emissions per household, in both cases compared to regional averages.

For example, the location of NRDC’s Washington office (marked on the Google Earth image above in green) has a very high degree of regional accessibility, being located right in the center of the DC metro area, where walkability is high, transit plentiful, and average driving distances relatively short.  We would expect it to perform well compared to regional averages and other locations.  My house (blue), in a residential neighborhood northwest of downtown, is still walkable and relatively centrally located.  We would expect it to perform well, too, compared to the regional average, though not quite as well as a downtown office.  But my sister-in-law lives in an outer suburb (red), far from the regional center.  We would expect her location to perform poorly compared to the regional average (she has to spend an insane amount of time in her car, shuttling her kids around) and to the two locations in DC.

Abogo indicates that, according to the data, all of our expectations are confirmed.  Here is NRDC’s office and its scores:

Note that a household residing in NRDC’s neighborhood would generate only about a third the transportation emissions of an average household in the region.  Now here’s my house:

At the risk of being self-congratulatory, I note that our emissions and transportation costs are well below those of the region as a whole.  But look at my sister-in-law’s location:

Unfortunately, she and her neighbors average over a thousand dollars per month in spending for transportation, and generate a whopping 40 percent more carbon for transportation than the regional average, and over four times the amount that an average household in NRDC’s neighborhood generates.  Why?  Longer distances to drive to do most anything, little to no transit, few destinations within comfortable walking distance.

CNT explains its methodology here including, in part, the following:

“We estimate total transportation costs for an average household from your region living in your neighborhood, including commuting, errands, and all the other trips around town. We count money spent on car ownership and use, as well as public transit use.  For CO2 emissions, we count car use only.  We use data from the Housing + Transportation Affordability Index, a project of the Center for Neighborhood Technology.”

Much more on the site, of course.  Well done.  Go here to try it out for yourself and for more information on Abogo.

A battle between governmental agencies pits the Obama administration against the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Babylon, New York, a city of a little over 200,000 people on Long Island, is fighting to save its recently adopted energy retrofit program from being killed by an independent federal agency at odds with the Obama administration’s Energy Department.  Now why are you scratching your head trying to grasp that?  I don’t blame you, to be honest.  I’m still trying to sort it out.

An innovative concept recently adopted in many places across the country called PACE (for Property Assessed Clean Energy) applies proceeds from the sale of bonds to loans that help commercial and residential property owners finance energy retrofits (efficiency measures and small renewable energy systems).  The borrowers then repay the financing over 20 years via an annual assessment on their property tax bill.

PACE bonds can be issued by municipal financing districts or finance companies and the proceeds can be typically used to retrofit both commercial and residential properties.  The concept emerged with the passage of enabling legislation in California in 2008, and many other states have since followed suit.  And so has the federal government.  Mostly.

According to a story written in the New York Times by Todd Woody, the federal Department of Energy had signaled its intention to promote the programs, and the green jobs they foster, through $150 million in stimulus funds that would be used to help communities defray program administrative costs.  But there has been a serious setback:

“Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government entities that guarantee more than half of the residential mortgages in the United States, have different priorities. They are worried that taxpayers will end up as losers if a homeowner defaults on a mortgage on a home that uses such creative financing. Typically, property taxes must be paid first from any proceeds on a foreclosed home.”

Fannie and Freddie are apparently responding to their own regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which has told the two mortgage giants to “steer clear of the program,” according to a news story on NPR’s Morning Edition.  (FHFA is an independent agency not subject to direct executive control.)   As a result, Fannie and Freddie sent letters to mortgage lenders in May stating their position that government-supported PACE liens cannot take precedence over basic mortgage repayment, and the two have refused to approve loans on properties with outstanding PACE assessments.

The effect has been to pit the Obama administration against the FHFA and the two quasi-independent mortgage insurers and put a major chill on state and local programs.  PACE supporters are now turning to Congress for relief so that the loans for energy retrofits can resume without interference from the two mortgage entities.

Meanwhile, California attorney general Jerry Brown has sued FHFA over the issue, and so has Babylon.  The acting director of FHFA has issued a terse statement indicating that it will “defend vigorously” its position.  To see how the program has been working on the ground, and why Babylon believes it is worth fighting for, see this video produced by NRDC’s OnEarth magazine:

OK, this has got to be just about the best student assignment I have ever heard of. Thirteen students from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning have recently spent months – on location, mind you – helping the city of Recife, Brazil get ready for the 2014 World Cup.

According to the project’s web site, the students have been planning the redevelopment of a district surrounding the Av. Dantas Barreto, a key market street in the center of the city of Recife (see outlined area above and highlighted area below).  Located on the country’s east coast, Recife anchors the fourth largest metropolitan area in Brazil, with a regional population of just under four million residents.  The city’s Wikipedia entry indicates that, in addition to being an industrial, technological, educational, and medical center, Recife is “home to the frevo, a regional dance and music, typical in carnival, and mangue beat, a type of Brazilian rock with mixture of maracatu, ciranda, rap and other musical styles.  During carnival, downtown Recife holds one of the most authentic and democratic celebrations: every year more than one and a half million people open the festivities of the Brazilian Carnival at Galo da Madrugada.”  You can see part of the festivities at the top of the post, on the avenue that is the focus of the students’ efforts.

Recife is one of twelve Brazilian cities selected to host the next World Cup and as a result, writes Randy Simes on UrbanCincy, the city is looking to redevelop the historic corridor into a tourist-friendly, walkable, and culturally significant area.  Randy describes the students’ recommendations:

“The redevelopment plan calls for burial of utilities, business improvement loans, community policing strategies complimented by two small police stations, pedestrian cultural tours, establishment of a small business incubator, galleries to show and sell work of local artists, ‘major’ reconfiguration of traffic along the waterfront, streetscape improvements, composting and recycling programs, streets trees, green roofs, and entrepreneurship training among other things.

“The improvements are geared towards improving the traffic and parking conditions, enhancing the cultural heritage, enhancing and diversifying business activities, and increasing residential development in the corridor.”

You can see some of the spatial planning for land use, transportation, and cultural activities in images of maps prepared by the student team, shown above.  Both UrbanCincy and the project’s home site report that the city is close to adopting the UC plans.

Randy writes that Michael Romanos and Carla Chifos, both on the UC planning faculty, have led groups of students in international study and planning work in the past in other parts of the world, too – including Thirasia, Greece where a team of students worked to develop a plan for the small, largely uninhabited Greek island that is experiencing increased tourism.  All this strikes me as highly motivating, to say the least.

There’s lots more information on the project, including a downloadable full report and presentation, on the project’s web site.

But, notwithstanding their efforts, I find myself using DC’s Metro less and less these days, in no small part because it just doesn’t work as consistently well as I need it to in order to meet my needs.  Although our Metrorail system has never been perfect, it has always been a marvel of architectural beauty and engineering achievement, and once was the envy of the nation for its cleanliness, comfort and efficiency.

Sadly, that is no longer the case.  Today, access to the system is made difficult by broken escalators and elevators all over the system; service can be slow and unpredictable; cars are dirty and crowded; air conditioning systems sometimes provide mediocre cooling in DC’s sweltering summer heat.

I used to take Metro all the time for commuting and frequently for other trips as well.  But, while I still use the system several times per week, frequently to shuttle around downtown for meetings, more often than not I now drive to work, shelling out $20 for parking each day and putting up with traffic hassles when I do.  Part of this, I’m sure, is not just Metro’s age but my own.  Now in my (low!) 60s, I am less tolerant of hassles than I was in, say, my 20s and 30s when I didn’t particularly care if I got a seat or not or whether there was decently working a/c.  These things matter more than they used to.  If I am going to walk the half-mile to the station in the heat and humidity, I want comfort, efficiency and reliability when I get there.  Unfortunately, those are the things that Metro riders can no longer count on.

Perhaps the most aggravating problem is the constant disrepair of the system’s many escalators, some among the longest in the world, necessary to access or exit the platforms.  The subject of an article in yesterday’s Washington Post, this is a problem that has plagued Metro from the very beginning but seems to be getting worse as the system ages and ridership has increased.  Metro officials say that, at any given time, about 10 percent of the system’s escalators are not working, but it sure seems like more than that on my routes.  Maybe the problem is worse in the stations in the central city, more heavily used than those in the suburbs?  (A recent major escalator failure in the inner suburb of Bethesda might suggest otherwise, though, as do breakdowns in other suburban stations.)  I can guarantee that the two escalators at the 12th & G Streets entrance to the Metro Center station – which happen to be the closest to NRDC’s office – have both been working at the same time less than half the total time since we first moved into the neighborhood fourteen years ago.

Outages caused near-riots recently at the Dupont Circle station, whose escalators are among the system’s longest and steepest but failed at rush hour.  My recently departed (and already missed) colleague Gaby Chaverria happened to be escorting her mother around town at the time, in near-100-degree heat, and managed to be caught in the resulting mess in both Dupont and Bethesda.  Gaby is a loyal city dweller who doesn’t own a car, basically trying to show her somewhat elderly mom what’s great about her city.  She was extremely discomfited and frustrated by the experience.

Here is an 16-second video of passengers struggling to walk up a broken Metro escalator at Dupont Circle:

(The video is by Twitter user @giveit2lloyd and you can view the original here.)

I get the impression that Metro and its contractors are more or less always working on the escalator issues, but the truth seems to be that their limited budget means that new breakdowns are occurring faster than repairs of old ones.  It is hard to feel confident that this problem is going away, since budgets aren’t going up and the system will only get older.  The elevators, which provide a poor alternative to the escalators in terms of capacity but are essential for disabled passengers, are constantly breaking down as well.  Every Metro passenger is familiar with the drone of announcements in Metro stations identifying elevator outages, which seem to go on and on.

The nadir of Metro’s problems has to have been the July 2009 crash of two trains that killed nine people.  That is genuine tragedy, not just inconvenience, and one’s heart goes out to the victims’ loved ones.  That crash (like other transit systems, Metro has suffered other fatalities over the years, but that was the worst single incident) prompted all sorts of investigations.  One result, unfortunately, is that service immediately got worse, as trains were slowed as a precaution and operators switched to manual braking rather than automatic.  This particularly plagued the Red Line, the system’s busiest and the one I use for commuting.  I don’t think service on the Red Line has yet fully recovered, over a year later.  Perhaps more alarmingly, the system’s safety record has gotten worse, not better, since the accident, a federal safety official citing ‘significant deficiencies in [Metro’s] safety culture.’

Slower service is one of many factors leading to overcrowding, as the system now operates at excess capacity much of the time.  That problem is only going to get worse if you prefer to sit down as you ride, since one of the ways Metro is dealing with it is to put new cars on the system that have more standing-room capacity but fewer seats. Budget shortfalls have also led to frequency and capacity of service being either stagnant or reduced (fewer cars and longer waits at some hours on some routes), when service really should be increasing to meet demand and to help reduce environmental problems caused by driving.

For some reason, Metro also seems to be plagued with door-closure problems, which cause further delay because an incident with any one door prevents the train from moving until resolved.  Usually this is the fault of a stray passenger who, because of crowding, has unknowingly gotten a strap or something caught in the doorway.  This problem seems actually to have gotten a little better over the years, since the days of the ubiquitous recorded ‘PLEASE stand clear of the doors!’ messages, supplemented occasionally by an operator announcement that ‘if you do not move clear of the doors, I am going to have to offload this train’ warnings.  But it still occurs, and I wonder why, when I never encounter the issue in other rail transit systems around the world.  And, although the immediate cause is usually an errant passenger, the underlying cause is overcrowding that forces passengers to stand pressed against the doorways.

As I have written before, one of the major shortcomings of the federal stimulus legislation is that it provided almost no assistance for transit operating expenses, the transportation area of greatest need and where jobs were (and are) being lost or endangered because of cutbacks.  There was nothing ‘shovel-ready,’ unfortunately, about operation of infrastructure that already exists.  That needs to be fixed in the next federal transportation bill.

I have lived in DC long enough to remember a time before Metro.  Although bus service was arguably a little better then than it is now (more routes, more direct service since now many bus routes feed into Metro stations where passengers must transfer), Metrorail has undeniably been a wonderfully transformative accomplishment for our city and region.  It has, without a doubt, made the city work better in many ways, and spurred some very good urban development.  It is a huge part of why the city feels more vibrant and cosmopolitan than it once did.  But, if service has deteriorated to the point where Metro can no longer claim me, a professional advocate for public transit, as a loyal customer, it has a problem.

The number of walking trips taken by Americans has more than doubled in the last 20 years, from 18 billion in 1990 to 42.5 billion in 2009, according to a new report.  The number of bicycling trips has also more than doubled, from 1.7 billion to 4 billion.  Perhaps even more significant, the share claimed by walking and bicycling of all trips taken by Americans (below left) has climbed by 50 percent, from a combined 7.9 percent to 11.9 percent.

On June 16, federal transportation secretary Ray LaHood announced the findings of The National Biking and Walking Study: a 15-year Status Report, undertaken by DOT’s Federal Highway Administration.

On his blog, LaHood hailed the results and promised additional efforts to increase walking and bicycling in the US:

“I think the news is pretty good.  First and foremost, Americans are hitting the sidewalks and streets on foot and by pedal in record numbers . . .

“Americans want and need safe alternatives to driving. And by making biking and walking safer and more accessible, we’ll be able to provide Americans with more choices and help foster more active, more sustainable, and–yes–more livable communities.

“That’s why we recently announced a policy change that encourages transportation agencies to go beyond minimum standards and provide safe and convenient facilities for pedestrians and bicyclists.”

In addition to presenting survey data, the report examines a range of efforts to increase bicycling and walking in the US.  Included in the review are programs at the federal, state, and local levels, along with case studies on best practices, and the report makes recommendations for research, policy, and other measures that can be taken to meet increase walking and bicycling for everyday transportation.  In addition, the report includes safety statistics, which also show improvement.

The new findings are consistent with a wide range of data showing that, over the last decade or so, sprawl has been declining, central cities are growing again after years of decline, per capita rates of driving have slowed, and transit share has increased, among other trends.  We must keep our eyes on the prize, but we are on the right path.  The announcement also underscores the commitment of Secretary LaHood who, along with HUD Secretary Donovan, has become a true leader for sustainability in the current administration.

• An overwhelming majority (82%) of Americans believe the country would benefit from improved public transportation.
• Most Americans (57% “strongly”) would like to spend less time in their cars.
• An overwhelming majority of Americans find current public transportation either not available at all (47%) or not convenient (35%) in their communities.
• A strong majority (59%) see public transportation as the best strategy for reducing traffic congestion.

There is much more.  Here is an excellent slideshow summary of the poll results:

Read more detail about the poll here, and federal transportation secretary Ray LaHood’s statement about the results here.

Here’s an insight from relating human behavioral science to transportation:  people who use a particular form of transportation such as driving or taking transit sometimes misunderstand the motives of those that use a different mode.  We generally have a basic understanding of why we may take the bus, for example, but we make the assumption that the guy who drives is doing so because, well, he’s the kind of guy who drives.

In fact, it’s not that simple.  Except for those of us who are environmental purists – and I am not one – our behavior stems not (or seldom) from something intrinsic to how we feel about driving or transit but, rather, on our particular circumstances.  For most of us, how we get somewhere depends on how well each available mode meets our needs.  This sounds sort of self-evident, but unfortunately the fallacy – that people in [insert name of community] do not and will not use transit in the future, given evidence that they don’t use it now – still infects too many transportation planning and investment decisions.

Michael Druker, a student in behavioral neuroscience at Waterloo University in Ontario, and writer of the blog Psystenance, calls this “the fundamental attribution error.”  In a recent post, he explains:

“In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error refers to the tendency for people to over-attribute the behaviour of others to personality or disposition and to neglect substantial contributions of environmental or situational factors. (Actually it isn’t quite fundamental, as collectivist cultures exhibit less of this bias.) People are generally more aware of the situational influence on their own behaviour.

“Thus, the fundamental attribution error in transportation choice: You choose driving over transit because transit serves your needs poorly, but Joe Straphanger takes transit because he’s the kind of person who takes transit. This is the sort of trap we find ourselves in when considering how to fund transportation, be it transit, cycling, walking, or driving.

“Let’s say you live in a suburban subdivision. You can afford to drive, and it’s the only way you can quickly and easily get to your suburban office and to the store, and pick up your child from daycare. How do you interpret the decision of other people to take transit? Is it something about the quality of transit where they are? More likely you are going to attribute it to something about those people themselves — they’re poor, or they’re students, or they’re some kind of environmentalists. It’s difficult for people to realize the effect of the situation, e.g., one with frequent transit service to many destinations along a straight street that is easy to walk to. (I’d also point out that students, the poor, and even environmentalists do drive as well.)

“Why do Europeans walk more, cycle more, and take transit more? Surely it is something about their culture? But this is an excessively dispositional attribution. I won’t deny that culture plays some role in transit use, especially in the decisions that lead to the creation of transportation infrastructure. But that infrastructure itself and the services provided on it are a strong influence on the transportation choices people make. The European infrastructure situation facilitates those other modes of travel much more so than does typical North American transportation infrastructure.

“Where our infrastructure gets closer to the European model, so does the transportation mode choice, and conversely, where Europe is more like the North American model, Europeans turn out to drive more.”

Read Druker’s entire post here.  Transportation planner and writer Jarrett Walker called it “the most important blog post you’ll read this year.”  On his blog Human Transit, Walker adds:

“My own work is built on the belief that people making routine trips will make reasonable choices based on their situation and options, subject to the limits of their information.  Everybody knows that they do this, but they need to be reminded that everyone else does too . . .

“When we say that Americans drive because they’re a car culture, we imply that that the choice of most Americans to drive isn’t a rational one, in light of each person’s situation, and therefore requires a cultural explanation . . .

“But in the places most Americans live, given the current economics of driving, and transit options being as they are, the decision to drive is rational for most of the people making it.   If most Americans are in situations where driving is the rational choice, we don’t need the ‘car culture’ to explain their behavior, and we can see a clearer path to changing it, by helping to change people’s situations.

“Conversely, car advocates who cite current car use as evidence that people want to drive cars are also making the attribution error; they’re implying that everyone who rationally chooses to drive is culturally committed to driving.  That’s wrong; some of the people driving cars would like to be in a situation where they didn’t have to.”

Sounds right to me.  If we want more people to use environmentally preferable ways of getting around, we need to build the kinds of communities and provide the kinds of convenient and comfortable alternatives that make the preferable choices also the rational ones.

As noted in DOT’s press release accompanying the announcement, “The TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) Discretionary Grant Program was included in the Recovery Act to spur a national competition for innovative, multi-modal and multi-jurisdictional transportation projects that promise significant economic and environmental benefits to an entire metropolitan area, a region or the nation.”

About half the money will go to transit and rail projects, including $83 million to fund the first phase of the long-anticipated “new Penn Station” in Manhattan.  The new facility will occupy the city’s huge Farley post office building across Eighth Avenue from the current Penn Station and Madison Square Garden.  It will be named for New York’s late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who championed the project while he was still alive.  Moynihan also was the principal author of the landmark 1991 federal transportation legislation that for the first time opened federal transportation funding to community and environmental projects.

What a great and fitting tribute to a giant among legislators.  And what remarkable evidence of this administration’s much-appreciated commitment to efficient, people-oriented transportation.

The group Friends of Moynihan Station hailed the announcement, which completes the funding necessary for Phase One of the project, which will include new entrances to the current, underground Penn Station from the Farley building, major improvements to passenger and visitor concourses, and new escalators, elevators and stairs to the train platforms.  Construction can begin late this year.  Phase Two will include, among other major improvements, an iconic, open train hall in the Farley Building.

Penn Station is the nation’s busiest transportation facility, handling over 600,000 passengers daily.

Those of us who use it, and that includes me when I travel to New York several times each year, know that the current Penn Station leaves a lot to be desired, to put it mildly.  Unlike wonderful stations in DC, Philadelphia, Paris, Berlin, and London, just to name a few, Penn station is cramped, claustrophobic, and completely devoid of natural light.  While there have been some heroic attempts at improving the place over the last 10-15 years, it is not somewhere you ever want to be if you don’t have to.  It doesn’t come remotely close to Grand Central, Manhattan’s iconic station on the East Side.

And that’s a shame, because Penn Station once was itself grand and inspiring (see photo of its interior, below).  It was demolished to make way for the current facility as a result of a litigated decision that was lost by the old station’s proponents but nonetheless galvanized the preservation movement in New York and elsewhere.

When the new project is finished, intercity passengers using Amtrak will be shifted to the Farley building, and local and regional commuters using New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Railroad will be given more space in what is now the current facility. While there is no doubt that the major upgrade to Eighth Avenue will spur additional redevelopment near the new station, the project will focus on its transportation purpose.  The New York Times saluted this decision in a recent editorial, noting that given earlier talk of an elaborate mix of major shopping, housing, and sports facilities in the project, its focus – and, given the recession, perhaps even the whole idea – was in danger of being lost.  New York’s senior senator Chuck Schumer has been credited with reframing the project to place the emphasis on the station itself, and with helping the project seek stimulus funding.

I had the pleasure of hearing Pat Moynihan speak a couple of years before his death, and it was one of the most intellectually impressive speeches by a politician that I have ever heard.  I was sitting at a large dinner with a seasoned lobbyist from the National Trust, who leaned over and said, “There will never be another like him.”  But now at least there will be a legacy.

Here’s a short video – now somewhat dated (Eliot Spitzer was New York’s governor at the time) – that was produced by the Municipal Art Society of New York, explaining the genesis of Moynihan Station and its proponents’ goals:

Principles for a Great New Penn Station from MAS on Vimeo.

Vancouver’s civic leaders believe that the athlete’s village built for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, and the planned neighborhood that will surround it, will be one of the very greenest neighborhoods in North America.  I am inclined to agree.

The village is the central parcel in a larger planned redevelopment of a section of the city’s old industrial waterfront called, somewhat awkwardly, Southeast False Creek.  When the Olympics and Paralympics are finished, the village will become a mixed-use community called Millennium Water, which sounds a lot more marketable to me.

I haven’t visited the site, but I have sifted through virtual reams of information about it, and I have paid particular attention to its plans and progress for some time now because Southeast False Creek is participating in the LEED-ND pilot.  (It hasn’t been evaluated yet but the development is aiming for a gold level award.)  The city’s summary information sheet explains the project’s goals:

“While maintaining heritage ties to the past, SEFC is being planned as a model sustainable development based on environmental, social and economic principles where people will live, work, play, and learn. SEFC will be a mixed-use community, with a focus on residential housing. This complete neighbourhood will ensure that goods and services are within walking distance and that housing and jobs are linked by transit.”

The 80-acre site’s mostly mid-rise buildings will provide ample density to support retail and walkability while still leaving 26 acres available for park land, including playgrounds and space for community gardening.  There will also be an elementary school and new civic center.  Some of the site’s historic buildings (notably including the Salt Building, shown in the photos) will be preserved, along with other reminders of its historic past.  Transportation options will include rapid transit, a “skytrain,” a streetcar, multiple bus lines, three new greenways with cycling facilities and, of course, a pedestrian-friendly atmosphere.  The site also needed and received extensive brownfield remediation.

Most of the development’s buildings will qualify for a  LEED-gold building certification (in addition to the LEED-ND goal for the project as a whole).  One of them has been designated as a “net zero” building that will have no net carbon emissions.   It will be converted to 64 homes for seniors after the Games.  And the developer is aiming for a LEED-platinum rating for the community center that will be the village’s focal point during the Games and the most publicly visible of the neighborhood’s buildings afterward.

Southeast False Creek/Millennium Water will also sport the city’s first renewable district heating system, which will provide heat and hot water to all the neighborhood’s buildings, including those in the Olympic village. It will be the first time in North America that heat recovered from wastewater will provide a primary source of energy for an urban neighborhood. The wastewater technology will be supplemented by solar hot water.

The city began planning development of the site in 1997 and committed to a vision of sustainability in 1999.  Eventually it will be home to 16,000 residents.  Close to 3,000 will be housed there for the Games.

The environmental accomplishments and goals of the Olympic village (officially Village A, since there is a second athlete’s Village B in Whistler, BC, where downhill events are being held) are summarized in an overview on the Olympics’ official site.  In addition to those mentioned above, they include ecological restoration of the waterfront; reintroduction of intertidal marine habitat and indigenous vegetation, and extensive green stormwater infrastructure.  As shown in the images, most of the buildings will have green roofs.  Other laudable elements include accessible design, job training and procurement for inner-city residents, and impressive (and sustainable) public art, including traditional and contemporary works by Inuit, Métis, and other First Nations indigenous artists from across Canada.

The village’s sustainability features are seen by the Games as part of a larger goal of sustainability throughout the Olympic venues and events, and by the city as consistent with its’ leaders vision of becoming “the world’s greenest city.”

As with any large development, especially infill and especially one receiving subsidies in the context of a recession, the project has not been without controversy.  This is well-documented on the Web and was succinctly summarized by Jonathan Hiskes on Grist.  The project was planned to be financed largely by Millennium Water’s investors and recouped by them after the Games as its units were sold.  But a major source of the developer’s capital collapsed with other financial institutions and the city had to come to the project’s financial rescue (to be repaid when the development sells).  There were also the usual construction problems and cost overruns.  The financial squeeze meant that, unfortunately, some of the project’s Phase I affordable housing had to be scaled back.  In addition, some Vancouverites have long resisted the idea of the city’s hosting the Games at all, and the village became a bit of a rallying point for the opposition.

But now the village has been completed and was handed over to the city on schedule, in November.  It has received glowing reviews not just from environmental writers but also from real estate observers who believe Millennium Water will be a huge commercial success when it is handed back to the developer (see, for example, here and here).  Based on what we can see, that’s hard to argue with.  I can’t wait to see it for myself.

Here are two really good videos about the project.  The first models the development’s progress from start to finish with very cool animation, and has an awesome soundtrack.  (Someone please tell me who that is; if you prefer Beethoven, by the way, go here.)  And the second provides a montage of the project’s construction with an excellent explanatory narrative and first-rate visual production.  Highly recommended:

For a short commercial for Millennium Water, try this one.  Let the Games begin!

The Center for Neighborhood Technology released a new series of GIS-based maps showing where carbon emissions from driving are the highest in the nation’s metro areas.  The maps demonstrate vividly that, although emissions on a per-acre basis are greatest in highly urban areas, it is in the suburbs and outlying areas where we pollute the most on a per-household basis.  This is because rates of driving are so much higher in spread-out suburbia than in places where homes, jobs, shops, and services are in more convenient proximity to each other.

Above left, for example, is the Tri-State area including and around New York City.  The map on the left shows that the areas with the highest emissions, in red, are those that are most heavily populated.  That much should not be surprising.  But the map changes dramatically when carbon emissions are plotted on a per-household basis, as shown on the right.  It is essentially a reversed image of the map on the left, showing that the most populated areas actually have the lowest pollution rates per household.

The differences show up even more dramatically in the sprawling Phoenix region:

CNT is a longtime collaborator with NRDC and many other organizations, and their GIS work is superb.  I have previously written about their excellent work on the geography of home affordability (for example, here and here) and have cited an early prototype of the CO2 mapping in a post about per-capita thinking in environmental impacts management.

Transportation accounts for 28 percent of all US greenhouse gases, according to CNT, and I believe it accounts for an even higher portion of carbon dioxide emissions specifically.  According to CNT president Scott Bernstein:

“Cities are more location-efficient – meaning key destinations are closer to where people live and work They require less time, money, fuel and greenhouse gas emissions for residents to meet their everyday travel needs. People can walk, bike, car-share, take public transit. So residents of cities and compact communities generate less CO2 per household than people who live in more dispersed communities, like many suburbs and outlying areas.

“If you’re deciding where to live, consider moving to an urban area. You’ll help fight global warming by emitting less CO2. And you’re likely to drive less, so you’ll spend less on transportation, saving up to $5,000 annually.”

I would add that the emissions savings come not only from a greater array of transportation mode choices but also from the shorter driving distances that are taken in more accessible locations.  And, in addition to cities, the traditional centers of well-established suburbs also can exhibit favorable per-household emissions profiles.  This is illustrated in the maps below of metro Cincinnati, where I was last week:

The carbon maps are part of CNT’s larger Housing +Transportation Affordability Index, which includes geographic data and mapping on housing costs, transportation costs, gasoline prices, and various customized variations thereof.  You can currently access the CO2 maps for 55 US metropolitan regions, and zoom in on particular neighborhoods or local communities if you like.  Later this year CNT expects to have 330 metro areas mapped on its site.