Research Shows TOD Works

"The best compilation on the research connecting urban form with greenhouse gas emissions is Growing Cooler, a reader-friendly volume edited by Reid Ewing. (By the way, this is an extremely well-known book in the business and it's perplexing that the authors would be unaware of it.) Another classic is the report Measuring Sprawl and Its Impact, also edited by Reid Ewing. Here's a wonderfully readable -- and recent -- summary, The Greenness of Cities, coauthored by professors from Harvard and UCLA. (Bonus: here's a blog post I wrote based on separate research from one of the authors, Matthew Kahn.) And then there's the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, where Todd Litman keeps an exhaustively cited summary of the research on transit-oriented development and its environmental and social impacts. There's also what is perhaps the magnum opus on the subject, Sustainabilty and Cities, a comprehensive look at density, driving and other topics in cities around the world by Newman & Kenworthy. If that's not enough, you might check out a longer technical review by the US EPA, as well as a boring technical report prepared by ICF International."