Yes, we were very impressed by the results, especially the walking stats. What is also very encouraging is the gains from 2002 to 2007. People are actually changing their habits, it appears. Though I hasten to add, we need much more of this kind of research, and more details beyond stats like commuting.

I have stressed to Bruce (and to an Oregonian reporter who just wrote an article about Bruce’s research on Sunday the 18th) that the point of a community like Orenco Station is certainly not to pile everybody into light rail for commuting. (A long commute by light rail could be much worse, from a carbon point of view, than a short trip by car.) Rather, it’s to have a more balanced modal split between all modes, for all trips. That includes short trips (even by car) to Intel, which as you mentioned is right on the community’s doorstep.

So we need to keep the whole-systems perspective, including the need for jobs-to-housing balance, access to daily needs, walkability, mixed use, and other aspects of “location efficiency” (and “settlement efficiency”).

And as a necessary dimension beyond green building, we need to look more carefully at the effects of a more compact lifestyle on many other aspects of energy and other resource use – share of infrastructure, size of house and resulting energy use (anecdotal evidence suggests many people voluntarily downsized to live at Orenco), size of yard and amount of energy/resources used in its care, conservation of ecosystems and protection of their low-energy services, and other effects.

Vehicle Miles Traveled is one important stat that we need to investigate more fully – but it’s not the only one. There are many other impacts on energy and resource use beyond the tailpipe that are affected by land use and urban morphology. I haven’t even mentioned embodied energy per person, transmission losses, operating energy in pumping, lights and signaling, maintenance and repair of infrastructure, and many other effects.

Survey research (presented at the IARU scientific conference on climate change in Copenhagen this last March) suggests that all told, these effects of settlement pattern could account for a delta (meaning an available reduction over time) of fully one-third of current levels of greenhouse gas emissions. That’s a huge target to go after.

But this brings me to the final point: this will take time. People will not change their habits, or the patterns of their neighborhoods, overnight. But Orenco STation does snow that it’s possible. That’s why the trend from 2002 to 2007 at Orenco is so hopeful. (But again, more research is needed.)

But the corollary of that is, if we do nothing, the negative effects over time will be all the more powerful. This is particularly true when we consider that the American sprawl model is still being exported to places like India, China, Brazil, Eastern Europe…

The IMF projects that the global fleet of cars will increase from today’s about 650 million, to 3 billion by 2050. Even if these are electrics, the increased demand for this energy is likely to increase the construction of coal-fired power plants. A very bad idea. And again, the tailpipe (or the electric motor) is only the beginning.

So it’s critical that we get our own house in order. And that we develop an evidence-based approach, and look more carefully at what is working and not working, in places like Portland. Kudos to Bruce, but we need much, much more of this kind of work.

Best,

Michael Mehaffy
Former project manager, Orenco Station