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NRDC - The Earth's Best Defense
Move America Beyond Oil
Let's take the road to a clean, secure energy future.
More Solutions: Smart Growth Neighborhoods Reduce Driving
A new philosophy is helping towns and cities across the country develop walkable, connected, healthy communities.
On average, each American spends the equivalent of 42 workdays every year stuck behind the wheel of a car. Suburban moms spend more time driving than they do feeding, bathing or otherwise caring for their children. That's because we as a nation have been spreading out rapidly and often irrationally with new land development during the past half-century, on the assumption that gasoline will always be plentiful and cheap.
Guided by the new standards, developers could create neighborhoods where people can walk or bike to the store, school, or a friend's house instead of spending time behind the wheel.
Suburban sprawl, a development pattern in which houses, offices and strip malls spring up at greater and greater distances from city centers, increases car use and air and water pollution, destroys open space and isolates people in far-flung satellite neighborhoods that lack both a sense of community and a fully functioning local economy. Smart growth neighborhoods, in contrast, are compact and walkable, have easy access to transportation, shops, and workplaces, conserve open space and promote social cohesion.
NRDC has partnered with the U.S. Green Building Council and the Congress for the New Urbanism to set new national leadership standards for the location and design of development at a neighborhood level. Guided by the standards, developers could create neighborhoods where residents can walk or bike to the store, their children's school, or a friend's house instead of spending time behind the wheel and churning out more pollution. Enterprise Community Partners and NRDC have also launched a major, $550 million campaign called the Green Communities Initiative to build more than 8,500 affordable, environmentally sound homes across the country for low-income families.
Improved public transportation and neighborhood access to transit systems are key components of greener growth. New developments should be built near commuter rail stations, bus lines and other public transportation hubs. Eliminating the need for suburban and exurban commuters to drive to work, wasting whole carloads of fuel to transport each individual commuter, can bring the country huge energy savings.