Healthy Growth Calculator

Mileage
Sprawl	vs	Your Choice
		choose density or place
23,552.4		23,552.4
Average vehicle miles traveled per household each year

Driving and Traffic. Traffic brings congestion, frustration and pollution. Convenient neighborhoods reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT), give alternatives to driving (walking, biking, public transit) and shorten many driving trips. Other factors that are important to convenient neighborhoods, like nearby stores and restaurants, sidewalks and short streets, are absent in low density sprawl.

Source of Calculations
Calculations are based upon San Francisco data developed for the Location Efficient Mortgage‚ studies of the Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco regions by the Institute for Location Efficiency (Natural Resources Defense Council, Center for Neighborhood Technology and Surface Transportation Policy Project). The nearly 3000 neighborhoods are the Metropolitan Planning Agencies’ (CATS, SCAG and MTC, respectively) travel analysis zones, generally a census tract or two. This analysis applies to neighborhoods in metropolitan areas or within commuting distance of major job centers, not to isolated rural towns. Location efficiency lowers auto costs and can qualify you for a Location Efficient Mortgage. If the actual public transit service, proximity to job centers and pedestrian friendliness are also known, better estimates of vehicles and VMT can be made using the Location Efficient Mortgage‚ equations.
VMT/household = 16476 ( (9.548 + Hh/Res Ac)/19.432) to the -0.817 power). [R² = 0.625]