Is Sprawl by Another Name Any Greener?

Suburban neighborhood developers want a piece of the "green" market. They're building sprawling neighborhoods far from city centers and declaring them "green and sustainable" by virtue of the fact that the National Association of Home Builders says they are.

For example, the 95-acre "The Lakes of Orange" outside of Cleveland, Ohio boasts that it is "Ohio's FIRST Green Certified Residential Community." That means that it satisfied the requirements set by the NAHB's Green Building Program. But if you live there, and happen to work in downtown Cleveland, it's a 19-mile drive each way. There's a bus stop a 15-minute walk from the neighborhood entrance, but since the bus doesn't use the interstate, it takes three times as long to get downtown. It's also a purely residential and recreational development, so you have to drive to buy groceries or meet a friend for lunch. Is this really green living?

As Angie Schmitt points out in her blog, mixed-use developments like "Saxony" outside of Indianapolis are an improvement over the bedroom community model. But sprawl is sprawl. And so long as public policy makes it cheaper to build on farmland than in-fill locations in urban centers, these new developments will funnel more cars onto our already choking highways.

Changing Travel Behavior: Punishment vs. Reward

Being in the business of finding ways to change travel behavior, I have dabbled in both reward and punishment. Charging for parking as a tool to get employees not to park in on-street spaces is a form of punishment, while giving out iPods to those who carpool a certain number of days each month is a reward. I have never thought that one might be more effective than the other until I read Eric Jaffe's piece, "Should We Pay People to Drive Off Peak," in Atlantic Cites Place Matters.

He writes about a group of researchers led by Taede Tillema of the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, who recently designed a study to compare the effects of congestion pricing (punishment) to a Dutch program called "Spitsmijden," or "peak avoidance" (reward).

"In an upcoming issue of the journal Transport Policy, Tillema and colleagues report that a reward system like "Spitsmijden" may indeed be more effective than punishments."

The researchers combined data from a previous study and a previous survey and found that paying people not to drive during peak times changed behavior 37% of the time, whereas boosting tolls during peak times changes behavior only 15% of the time. A nagging question, as the author points out, is if paying people not to drive during peak times works best, who will pay them?

Online game lets you solve traffic gridlock

How many times have you sat in traffic and thought, "If they just synchronized the traffic lights, all this congestion would go away."
Well, a new game called "Gridlock Busters" from the University of Minnesota, Intelligent Transportation Systems Institute, allows players to do just that.

You can test your mettle in processing vehicular traffic through a network of intersections. As you begin at the bottom rungs of a city traffic department, you're encouraged and coached by a senior traffic group member to take on more challenging conditions as you climb the bureaucratic ladder.

If on your watch honking cars max out the so-called frustration meter, you lose your tenure in the city's traffic group, and it's back to the mailroom for you. Enjoy.