Britain's Elusive Eco-Town Dream

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The car continues to haunt the dreams of carbon-neutral town planners. Despite lower-carbon fuels, stricter emissions standards, and better fuel efficiency, CO2 emissions will continue to rise as long as the number of vehicle miles traveled -- VMT (or in Europe, VKT, for kilometers) -- continues to increase.

Steve Winkleman of the Center for Clean Air Policy in Washington, D.C., has found that even if average fuel efficiency in the United States increases to 35 miles per gallon, as it's required to do by 2020, the predicted increase in VMT would effectively negate any reductions in total vehicle CO2 emissions. The rise in VMT far outpaces population growth, and increased commuting is not the only explanation. Trips to and from work account for only some 20 percent of miles traveled. A growing proportion of these miles is made up of the distances that must be driven in the suburbs because one lives nowhere near where one shops or goes out to eat, drink, or see a film or where the kids go to school, play ball, take dance lessons, or get a haircut.

The United States may have invented sprawl, but now it's a problem in Europe too, and especially in fast-growing Eastern and Central Europe. In Romania, for instance, from 2006 to 2007, residential construction increased 29 percent and the number of cars 26 percent. Europe's compact cities, built before the automobile age, are now spreading quickly into low-density, high-VKT suburbs -- and this despite gasoline prices that can be as much as three times what they are in the United States. It's happening even in places where the total population is declining. Over the past 20 years, there have been four times as many new cars in Europe as new babies. VKT is expected to increase 40 percent by 2030, with a corresponding rise in CO2 emissions.

To get people out of their cars, says Steve Melia, a researcher at the University of the West of England, it will take more than reconfigured roads and new bus routes. He points to the town of Vauban, Germany, with 2,000 homes and 6,000 people, where cars now account for only 16 percent of local travel as a result of the prohibition on street parking except for pickup and delivery. More than three-quarters of residents bicycle to work on the town's and the region's well-established bike routes, although they can keep a car in an offsite parking garage.

Poundbury is very different. While cars are mostly out of sight, garaged, or parked behind homes, I saw many parked on the street, and the town square has a good-size parking lot, despite being no more than a 10-minute walk from anywhere in the village. Car use in Poundbury is high, whereas almost half the residents of Vauban don't own cars at all.

The British government's eco-town prospectus mentions Vauban as an exemplar of eco-development, but Melia believes that when it comes to cars, the eco-town formula falls far short. In his view, the government has to make a commitment to creating extensive bicycle networks as well as car-free neighborhoods, or "the skepticism of the critics will have proved well founded."

For Chris Twinn, director of the Building Engineering Sustainability Group of Ove Arup & Partners, a prominent design and engineering firm, the concept of direct incentives to reducing one's energy use and carbon emissions remains a hard sell.

We can design buildings to be energy efficient, Twinn tells me, but without incentives for people to consume less energy or drive less, things won't change. Twinn is consulting engineeer for China's planned eco-city at Dongtan, outside of Shanghai, where, he says, residents will receive an allocation of electricity for the month. If they use more, the price will jump by 300 percent.

"We can't expect to raise the cost of electricity [to U.K. residents] 300 percent, which means that we have to work that much harder to persuade people that there are choices they need to make," he tells me. That is the real challenge for eco-towns, Twinn says, and it requires long-term planning. In Asia, he says, "politicians are looking at a 20- or 30-year horizon. That gives you a different perspective on these things."

Over the next 35 years the world will have an urgent need for new housing. In the United States alone the population will increase by some 100 million, and some 70 million new homes will be built. If they are built right, they can achieve huge reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Give communities a new paradigm for growth and new, sustainable designs for living may follow.