Moving, slowly, away from cars

A thoughtful New York Times article, Is Happiness Still That New Car Smell?, looks into changing attitudes about cars. Many people are deciding they can live without one, whether because of environmental or financial concerns. The article misses a pertinent point: If you use your car a lot, perhaps a couple trips a day, each trip is not terribly expensive. But if you use your car only twice a week, each trip becomes very expensive. This is because the cost of insurance is the same in both cases, and because of depreciation. The value of your car goes down each year even if you don't use it very much. So a logical answer for many people is car-sharing, which is available in Portland with Zipcar or with U Car Share. A brief web search failed to locate any car sharing in Salem.

Here are some sections of the article:

Whether because of cost, convenience or environmental awareness, a small but growing number of people are making individual decisions to get rid of their automobiles and rely on public transportation, car-sharing programs and rental cars.

“There’s a cultural change taking place,” said John Casesa, a veteran auto industry analyst and partner in the Casesa Shapiro Group. “It’s partly because of the severe economic contraction. But younger consumers are viewing an automobile with a jaundiced eye. They don’t view the car the way their parents did, and they don’t have the money that their parents did.”

. . .

“People are questioning car purchases more than we’ve ever seen in recent history,” said Jesse Toprak, vice president of industry trends and insights for TrueCar, a company that tracks car-buying habits.

Young, cash-strapped consumers are delaying their first purchases longer, he said, robbing automakers of the chance to attract them early and keep their business as they move up in life.
Across the country, empty nesters are moving back into cities and shedding their cars. Toyota has identified 60 locales where it has seen this occur, according to James E. Lentz, the president of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., and it has begun thinking about whether it needs to open satellite offices to serve customers who’ve moved away from suburban dealerships.

Are you ready to give up your car for a Honda U3-X? It is referenced in the above NYT article.

Other new urbanist and sustainable developments

If you want to see an extensive listing of new urbanist developments, check out TND Town Paper's neighborhoods page. From the site: "the acronym TND stands for Traditional Neighborhood Development, a comprehensive planning system that includes a variety of housing types and land uses . . . educational facilities, civic buildings and commercial establishments to be located within walking distance of private homes."

As you can see, the TND definition describes walkability, but it doesn't put it in the context of saving energy, reducing ennvironmental impact, sustainability. The new urbanist movement and the green communities movement have much in common.
Both attempt to get us away from the suburban sprawl model of development. The new urbanist movement began with an emphasis on quality of living.

This Green Eco Neighborhoods' listing is more focused on the environmental aspect. It has only a fraction of the number of developments. Probably most of these eco developments are, like Pringle Creek Community, on both lists.

Give the people what they want

Atlanta is widely recognized as one of America's best examples of sprawl - but are home buyers really getting what they want? No, according to a new study by Georgia Tech. The study is the subject of this Atlanta Journal-Constitution article, Study: Demand for Walkable Communities Unmet (PDF).

Builders of expansive suburban subdivisions may say they're just satisfying market demand, but the market isn't satisfied at all, the study says. Instead, there is a significant, unmet demand for developments that make it easier to walk from place to place.

"In all, about a third of metro Atlantans living in conventional suburban development would have preferred a more walkable environment, but apparently traded it off for other reasons such as affordability, school quality, or perception of crime," the report says. It defines a walkable environment as one in which distances between destinations are comfortably reachable on foot, and the street network is well-connected rather than full of cul-de-sacs.

The researchers also looked for people on the flip side, who may have wanted more of a suburban environment, but that pent-up demand was insignificant, said study author Larry Frank.

People want more from their homes than square footage - 33% of home buyers are looking for walkable neighborhoods with different housing choices and a stronger sense of community.

Complete and compact neighborhoods

Here are a couple related items that demonstrate the great work being done by Sightline Institute (formerly Northwest Environment Watch), a Seattle-based think tank founded in 1993 by Alan Durning. First, from Sightline’s “Daily Score” blog, a post about new research that shows kids grow up healthier in walkable neighborhoods.

That item links to this item from Sightline’s sustainability toolkit, “Build Complete, Compact Communities:”

Growing in well-planned neighborhoods improves our health and economy, saves our time and farmland, strengthens our communities, and conserves our natural areas. Poorly planned growth wastes all those things.

Building complete, compact communities—the opposite of poorly planned sprawl—yields an impressive array of benefits. It multiplies transportation options, allowing northwesterners to rely less on private vehicles and imported fuel.