Vehicle CO2 emissions and Residential Development

Vehicle use and CO2 emissions have attracted substantial attention in recent years. According to the Energy Information Administration, CO2 has the largest impact on global warming of any of the monitored greenhouse gases. About 33 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are generated from the transportation sector, and among these, CO2 emissions represents 95 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from mobile transportation sources.

Concerns about these numbers and their possible implications for climate change issues have prompted states such as California, Massachusetts and Washington to require that developers quantify greenhouse gas emissions from vehicle use in large residential projects they are planning. However, these states typically do not provide any guidance on how to perform the calculations, and there is currently no well-established, verifiable method for estimating CO2 emissions or vehicle miles traveled (VMT) for households in a particular development.

This article estimates household gasoline consumption and associated CO2 emissions using the 2001 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), which is conducted by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) within the Department of Transportation. The article uses standard statistical methods to estimate gasoline consumption as a function of the geographic and household characteristics available in the NHTS data. Housing units per block group is used as a proxy for the compactness of a residential subdivision.

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