Transportation Planning: Reducing energy use in the transport sector through innovative community designs

Principal Investigators: Daniel Rodriguez and Sonia Yeh
City and Regional Planning and Center for Urban and Regional Studies

The Advanced Modeling System brings together expertise in decision-making, behavior, transportation modeling and environmental modeling to assess the sustainability of alternative community designs.

This suite of projects is designed to understand the ecology of energy consumption at the individual level, with an emphasis on transport. Behavior is influenced by individual-centered characteristics like personal and inter-personal attributes, and by higher-level characteristics like neighborhood, community, regional, national and international factors that promote or hinder behaviors related to energy consumption. A cornerstone project in this regard is the development of the Advanced Modeling System for Assessing Long-Term Regional Development Patterns, Travel Behavior, Emissions, and Air Quality. The project is testing whether development patterns, implemented regionally over a planning horizon of 50 years, can significantly influence the spatial characteristics and quantity of emissions from on-road mobile sources and rail transit vehicles, and hence reduce levels of tropospheric ozone and fine particulate matter. Key distinguishing features of the approach are:

Development and estimation of a cross-sectional equilibrium model to simulate the land market in Charlotte, N.C.;
Implementation of a multimodal behavioral travel forecasting model, including non-motorized travel modes and incorporating attributes of the built environment; and
Use of an emissions model based upon the conceptual underpinnings of EPA's Multi-Scale Motor Vehicle and Equipment Emissions Estimation System (MOVES).

The cross-sectional land market model allows communities to impose real-world land-market constraints and incentives (e.g., density bonuses, parking ceilings) on particular neighborhoods as the means for achieving development scenarios and measuring emissions outcomes.

Also included in this suite of projects is study of the role of technological change, economic and social changes, and public policy on future energy demand, air emissions, and environmental outcomes. Much of this work involves applying risk analysis, decision analysis, and uncertainty analysis to policy issues that intersect with energy, transportation, environment, and public health. A national energy-economic modeling framework has been developed to assess future technologies, patterns of technology adoption, and the effects of technological and social changes on criteria pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions; potentials pathways of hydrogen economy in the U.S., and the impacts on energy, transportation, and greenhouse gas emissions; international comparison of the diffusion patterns of alternative fueled vehicles; and learning.