Raleigh suburbs are big carbon polluters
Blame the suburban lifestyle: The Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area of North Carolina is a real hotspot when it comes to transportation-related carbon emissions.
The Center for Neighborhood Technology has released a new series of GIS-based maps showing where carbon emissions from driving are the highest. While emissions on a per-acre basis are greatest in highly urbanized areas, the suburbs and outlying areas pollute the most on a per-household basis due to the driving-intensive way of life.
CNT looked at emissions of carbon dioxide attributed to household vehicle travel in 55 metro areas, including the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill region. Measuring those emissions on a per-household basis, it found that the transportation-related emissions of people living in cities and other compact neighborhoods can be almost 70 percent less than for suburban households.
In North Carolina's Triangle region, the lowest carbon emissions on a household basis are found inside Raleigh's Beltline, and in the center of Durham and Chapel Hill, as illustrated on this CNT map:
"If you’re deciding where to live, consider moving to an urban area," says CNT President Scott Bernstein. "You’ll help fight global warming by emitting less CO2. And you’re likely to drive less, so you’ll spend less on transportation, saving up to $5,000 annually."
Labels: global warming, greenhouse gas pollution, suburban sprawl, transportation
posted by Sue Sturgis @ 3:07 PM
6 comments
6 Comments:
Owning a home Inside The Beltline is simply not affordable for the vast majority. I see no point in throwing my hard-earned money away each month on apartment rent to enrich someone else, when I could be investing in my own home instead. Land and homes I.T.B. are just crazy expensive (except in a few parts of town that are far from safe), so that's why so many of us have to live out in B.F.E. and drive in to the city.
If there was usable mass transit and then some way to easily and quickly get to the office from the transit station without having to hike for a couple of miles (I am not sitting at a bus stop for another 30 minutes), I'd gladly use it. Unfortunately, there is not even bus service out to the Clayton / Cleveland area yet, let alone anything like MARTA or the Metro. I think too many real estate developers and paving contractors 'own' the local City Councils and County Commissions for real useful and usable mass transit to ever happen around here....
The blog post, and the anonymous comment, show that we need mass transit designed for a suburban area. This will require a large number of large "park and ride" lots around the city and through out the suburbs. I often ride the bus (and sometimes Amtrak) to downtown Raleigh. However, I have to drive 6.5 miles from my home in NW Cary to the Cary Train station to catch either the train or bus.
Current plans for mass transit are inadequate, and do not provide the large number of suburban park and ride lots and hubs that will allow residents in suburbs to easily commute by bus to the many employment centers around town.
who can afford to own a home inside the beltline? wish I could, but that's never going to happen. not interested in giving my paycheck to someone else as rent, I want to own my own home, which means I have to live outside the city. If there was mass transit, that would certainly help.
I agree that the Raleigh area needs more mass transit options, but the fact is there are affordable neighborhoods inside Raleigh's Beltline. I own a home in one of them -- and it happens to have a bus stop right out front. It's true that my East Raleigh neighborhood is not without problems related to concentrated poverty, but creating real change always entails sacrifice. If the price of sustainability means moving to a neighborhood with social problems and working to fix them, that's a price I'm willing to pay. It's time to stop with the excuses and make the necessary personal changes in our lifestyles to ensure a more sustainable future.
I think this is proof that affordable housing is as much an environmental issue, as it is a socioeconomic one. If people could afford to live in an urban core, more would.
In terms of cost effectiveness, New York City has the only mass transit system in the country that breaks even. The rest operate at a loss.
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