ABSTRACT
The challenge in creating a green community is to maximize convenience and livability for the community's residents, workers, and visitors while minimizing the burdens placed on the environment by the basic need to, as the Beach Boys put it, get around. The task is an especially important one, given the relative importance of transportation to energy consumption and corresponding greenhouse gas emissions. A 2007 study reported in Environmental Building News demonstrated that otherwise "green" buildings may turn out to be not so green at all if they lack transportation-efficient locations: in fact, the amount of energy used to run a typical office building is dwarfed by the amount that employees and visitors typically consume getting there and back. Consider the accompanying graph of per capita carbon emissions due to transportation from all locations in metropolitan Portland, Oregon, based on data from Portland's metropolitan planning organization.
