Efficient Suburbs of the Future

Thursday February 16, 12:30PM, U.S. EPA's Seattle Office, 7th Floor - Sign Up is Required (see below)

Here's how to create sustainable cities and regions, using advanced transportation as a means to bring about smarter land use. "Sustainable" entails: 1) Accommodating large-scale population growth, 2) Meeting the Kyoto protocol, 3) Stopping excess human consumption of land, 4) Dramatically curtailing auto use, 5) Reducing residential energy/resource consumption with vibrant (but smaller) stacked housing, 6) Lowering the cost of living, 7) Providing improved job access to lower income workers. Through this simple step-by-step plan, you'll also shed pounds, meet neighbors, hang out in public spaces, and pay lower taxes. After population, the second most important sustainability concept is: "human settlement patterns" (land use combined with trip-making distribution).

Here's the plan: Small square footage in-fill housing and retail, really tiny/inexpensive housing via beds that fold into the wall (Murphy beds), personal solo driving reduction contracts, "walk to work" housing priority policy, personal traffic mitigation fees, supportive "tipping point" culture, homeless integration, area-wide automated smart parking, folding shopping carts, and all the usual smart growth stuff. 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.

In 30 of the largest U.S. metropolitan areas, “regional visioning” exercises are underway. These exercises create 20 to 30-year regional transportation and land use plans. Almost uniformly, the regional visions forecast 50% population growth, and, in the best scenario, a 40% increase in regional annual VMT (vehicle miles traveled, the total annual accumulation of miles on each vehicle). That’s not exactly an inspirational vision.

Planning on being alive in 2030? Don't miss this talk.

"Our current transportation policy path in the U. S. is clearly unsustainable. Traffic, its environmental impacts and its impact on quality of life continue to get worse virtually everywhere in the country. Innovative new ideas and new approaches are badly needed. We need a portfolio of innovative approaches spread across the United States, with each one pushing the envelope towards a more sustainable future transportation system. Cities21 and its Suburban Silver Bullet should be in this portfolio. It is innovative; it is forward-looking; it addresses many key transportation challenges; and the potential benefits - if widely disseminated - are large." - Steve Offutt: EPA Best Workplaces for Commuters

Speaker: Steve Raney is founder of Cities21.org, a nonprofit advanced transportation & smart growth think tank. He holds three masters: business, software, and transportation from Columbia, RPI, and Berkeley. He is the Principal Investigator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s "Transforming Office Parks into Transit Villages" study of Pleasanton’s Hacienda Business Park (http://tod.hacienda.org/PRT/epa.htm ). He has conducted technology product research at Microsoft, Citigroup, and Silicon Valley start-ups. He was project manager for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system’s Group Rapid Transit study. He is the author of five Transportation Research Board papers. His "wireless carpool assistant," TrakRide, is patent pending. He served as Training Coordinator for Habitat for Humanity.

Eight-page Efficient Suburbs vision paper: http://www.cities21.org/efficientSuburbs2020.htm .

Personal Rapid Transit for Microsoft Campus: http://www.bettercampus.org/

Directions & Visitor Sign Up

Public seating in the conference room is limited. Sign up for the event via this SurveyMonkey survey (provide your name, affiliation, and e-mail address). Should the event fill up, we will contact you via the e-mail address you supplied. We will destroy the SurveyMonkey database after the event.

U.S. EPA's Seattle Office, 7th Floor

1200 Sixth Ave, Seattle, between Seneca and University Streets, in the Park Place building

The building is located within the Metro bus system's free ride zone; and many lines stop within a few blocks. Parking underneath is expensive; there are lower priced surface lots on 7th Ave, around Seneca. (But it's not very hip to drive to an EPA event [unless you carpool], and don't even think about bringing in coffee in a disposable cup. :)

Please arrive on the 7th floor by 12:20, in order to have time to get through security.

Map: http://maps.yahoo.com/maps_result?addr=1200+Sixth+Ave&csz=seattle&country=us&new=1&name=&qty=