Integrating Life-cycle Environmental and Economic Assessment with Transportation and Land Use Planning

Chester, Mikhail; Nahlik, Matthew J.; Fraser, Andrew; Kimball, Mindy; Garikapati, Venu

doi:10.1021/es402985g

Cited by 42 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Transit-oriented development (TOD) is an urban planning strategy which can be paired with regional policies to enable reductions in energy use and environmental impacts of urban living and transportation (Chester et al, 2013a, Kimball et al, 2013.…”

Section: Integrated Transportation and Land-use Planning And Environmmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To this end, an integrated transportation and land use life-cycle assessment (ITLU-LCA) framework is created building on the work of Kimball et al (2013) and Chester et al (2013a) to assess the environmental and economic impacts of targeted mixed-use developments around the Gold and Orange Lines. The framework uses traditional building and transportation environmental LCA methods, but also incorporates an estimate of household behavioral changes.…”

Section: The Gold Light Rail Transit (Lrt) Line Opened In 2003 and Thmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The ITLU-LCA framework is used to assess proposed urban form changes around the Gold and Orange Line stations, the resulting changes in residential living, commercial activity, automobile travel, and transit use and the associated energy use, air emissions, and costs of the system (Kimball et al, 2013, Chester et al, 2013a. As LA's population is expected to grow from 9.8 to 11.6 million (California DOF, 2013), shifting the next household into a new residential unit with walking access to high-capacity transit has the potential to change travel behavior and building energy use.…”

Section: A Life-cycle Framework For Assessing Todmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Transit-oriented smart growth can reduce life-cycle environmental impacts and household costs in Los Angeles

Nahlik

Chester

2014

Transport Policy

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i ABSTRACTThe environmental and economic assessment of neighborhood-scale transitoriented urban form changes should include initial construction impacts through longterm use to fully understand the benefits and costs of smart growth policies. The longterm impacts of moving people closer to transit require the coupling of behavioral forecasting with environmental assessment. Using new light rail and bus rapid transit in Los Angeles, California as a case study, a life-cycle environmental and economic assessment is developed to assess the potential range of impacts resulting from mixed-use infill development. An integrated transportation and land use life-cycle assessment framework is developed to estimate energy consumption, air emissions, and economic (public, developer, and user) costs. Residential and commercial buildings, automobile travel, and transit operation changes are included and a 60-year forecast is developed that compares transit-oriented growth against growth in areas without close access to highcapacity transit service. The results show that commercial developments create the greatest potential for impact reductions followed by residential commute shifts to transit, both of which may be effected by access to high-capacity transit, reduced parking requirements, and developer incentives. Greenhouse gas emission reductions up to 470 Gg CO2-equivalents per year can be achieved with potential costs savings for TOD users.The potential for respiratory impacts (PM10-equivalents) and smog formation can be reduced by 28-35%. The shift from business-as-usual growth to transit-oriented development can decrease user costs by $3,100 per household per year over the building lifetime, despite higher rental costs within the mixed-use development.ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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Section: Integrated Transportation and Land-use Planning And Environmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Gold Light Rail Transit (Lrt) Line Opened In 2003 and Thmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Life-cycle Framework For Assessing Todmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Transit-oriented smart growth can reduce life-cycle environmental impacts and household costs in Los Angeles

Nahlik

Chester

2014

Transport Policy

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“…To simplify the environmental impact assessment as an example of sustainability assessment, we followed the life-cycle environmental and economic assessment results of transit-oriented neighbourhood designs reported by Chester et al (Chester et al, 2013). The details of transit-oriented neighbourhood and conventional suburban community for 3200 housing units are shown in Table S2 (Supplementary material, available online).…”

Section: Environmental Impact Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

An integrated framework for managing the complex interdependence between infrastructures and the socioeconomic environment: An application in metropolitan Atlanta

Crittenden

Southworth

et al. 2016

Urban Studies

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In this study, we introduce an integrated framework for managing the complex interdependence between urban infrastructures and the socioeconomic environment within which it evolves, in pursuit of sustainable and environmentally cleaner urban living. The framework addresses the nature of individual preferences for more sustainable urban infrastructures, and how we can use this knowledge to improve urban form in ways that reduce environmental impacts. Using metropolitan Atlanta as a case study, we developed a survey that focuses on the preferences of Atlanta residents for low-impact development (LID) and transit-oriented development (TOD), with responses collected on the Mechanical Turk crowed-source platform. Using these responses we developed a latent-class residential community choice model for four distinctive classes of respondents that revealed heterogeneous preferences for community amenities. Next, we integrated the results of these individual choices into an agent-based market diffusion model, to predict land-use pattern, and to explore policies that drive greater adoption of more compact development. Finally, we used the results of this data collection and modelling to estimate the carbon emission reduction potentials from more compact development driven by LID and TOD. In the future, we will continuously refine the steps and address the issues including survey sample bias to make the framework more reliable and useful for sustainable urban infrastructure planning, design and implementation.

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“…Studies of how buildings across cities systematically result in demand for energy and result in GHG emissions are sparse. Studies that do evaluate buildings across neighborhoods or larger areas in a city tend to focus on questions of density tradeoffs [ Norman et al , ; Chester et al , ; Jones and Kammen , ; Nichols and Kockelman , ]. This multiscale research is valuable but does not contextualize energy use within the historical growth patterns (and influencing policies), socio‐economic drivers, and granular geospatial outcomes across the urbanscape [ Reyna and Chester , ].…”

Section: A Typology Of Ghg Emissions Assessments Of Engineered Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Positioning infrastructure and technologies for low‐carbon urbanization

et al. 2014

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The expected urbanization of the planet in the coming century coupled with aging infrastructure in developed regions, increasing complexity of man-made systems, and pressing climate change impacts have created opportunities for reassessing the role of infrastructure and technologies in cities and how they contribute to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Modern urbanization is predicated on complex, increasingly coupled infrastructure systems, and energy use continues to be largely met from fossil fuels. Until energy infrastructures evolve away from carbon-based fuels, GHG emissions are critically tied to the urbanization process. Further complicating the challenge of decoupling urban growth from GHG emissions are lock-in effects and interdependencies. This paper synthesizes state-of-the-art thinking for transportation, fuels, buildings, water, electricity, and waste systems and finds that GHG emissions assessments tend to view these systems as static and isolated from social and institutional systems. Despite significant understanding of methods and technologies for reducing infrastructure-related GHG emissions, physical, institutional, and cultural constraints continue to work against us, pointing to knowledge gaps that must be addressed. This paper identifies three challenge themes to improve our understanding of the role of infrastructure and technologies in urbanization processes and position these increasingly complex systems for low-carbon growth. The challenges emphasize how we can reimagine the role of infrastructure in the future and how people, institutions, and ecological systems interface with infrastructure.

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Integrating Life-cycle Environmental and Economic Assessment with Transportation and Land Use Planning

Cited by 42 publications

References 15 publications

Transit-oriented smart growth can reduce life-cycle environmental impacts and household costs in Los Angeles

Transit-oriented smart growth can reduce life-cycle environmental impacts and household costs in Los Angeles

An integrated framework for managing the complex interdependence between infrastructures and the socioeconomic environment: An application in metropolitan Atlanta

Positioning infrastructure and technologies for low‐carbon urbanization

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