National Parcel Layer Climate Change Reversal Model

Everywhere public officials are under increasing pressure from above to meet carbon footprint reduction mandates. At the same time, everywhere the general public is screaming from below to remedy crippling traffic jams. Smart Growth principles abound offering remedy to both problems. The question is where to BEST locate workforce housing and family retail to expedite transition from auto-dependent to transit centric, pedestrian oriented communities.

2MAPS is a parcel-level Climate Change / Traffic Congestion Reversal GIS that assigns a Relative WALK and Relative TRANSIT Positional to every parcel everywhere. The results are fine grained engaging patterns of color that spell out at a glance where to encourage housing and retail most to get people out of their cars.

Recently the TRANSIT Layer was made far more useful by assigning total jobs <30 minutes from each bus stop developed as part of the Transit for America Report by the Accessibility Laboratory of the University of Minnesota. By adding 'intensity' to proximity it is now possible for 2MAPS to display 'hot spots' - areas in which transit oriented development would have the greatest remedial effect. But will it work (OR NOT)?

BSI is collaborating with local officials to assign trip generation reduction rates to each land use of each parcel in the town according to its Relative WALK and TRANSIT Potential color. This is proving not that hard now that the literature is overflowing with highly favorable findings on observed effect of Smart Growth on auto use. Arguably, the MV Housing Element states that IF just the multi-family housing stock were redeveloped for maximum workforce housing inventory under the current zoning, increased in pedestrian oriented consumers would cause the return of enough retail. This combined work and service trip reduction would return traffic to earlier free flow levels, despite adding 2,000 people to town.