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Efficient Cities

Title: Efficient Edge Cities of the Future

ABSTRACT: A "story-format" roadmap is provided to reduce edge city per-capita energy consumption by 50%. The roadmap provides an integrated vision combining: multimodal transit, ridesharing, demand management, land use, market forces, policy, technology, and paradigm re-thinking. Changing away from an auto-centered, petroleum-based lifestyle represents a lifestyle change, but not a sacrifice.

Web and GPS cell phones help create a "comprehensive new mobility" system to make green transportation seamless and hassle-free. "Paid smart parking" reduces solo commuting by 25%. "Low Miles residential communities" foster green culture, where residents help each other to reduce carbon dioxide. This green culture is created using the same powerful sociological marketing principles that drive consumer society. Housing preference policies are used to select new residents who will travel less and use green transportation. Two-car families sell one car. As the real-estate gradually changes, asphalt-dominated superblocks are transformed into walkable, New Urbanist locales. Walking, biking, electric scooters, and Personal Rapid Transit enable more than 50% of trips (commute, errands, recreation, etc.) to be made without driving alone. Each of the nation's 200 35,000-employee edge cities can be transformed into huge transit villages of two square miles or more. Through this simple step-by-step plan, you'll save money, shed pounds, meet neighbors, hang out in more lively places, and pay lower taxes. Housing affordability, diversity, and un-housed-ness are grappled with.

Full paper: http://www.cities21.org/TRB_Efficient_Edge_Cities_4.pdf