It's impossible to think of ways of curing our overwhelming addiction to oil and other fossil fuels or significantly cutting our greenhouse gas emissions just through altering the source of our primary energy production. If one truly wants to achieve greater efficiencies and demand reductions, you have to start including two important policy areas: Transportation and Land Use.

We recently discussed New Jersey's Transit Oriented Development projects in local communities - the Transit Village program that encourages mixed use development around mass transit hubs.

Today, Jeff Zupan of the Regional Planning Assocation and Martin Robbins and Scott Weiner of Rutgers University calculate the efficiency difference of workers commuting to suburban office complexes, versus those that commute to downtown business centers. They write about it in today's NY Times opinion section:

A recent Rutgers study documented the energy benefits that derive from commuting to cities by public transit versus commuting by car to suburban work sites. We found that driving to a suburban office campus in Morris County's Parsippany-Troy Hills area consumed 57 percent more energy than taking a train or a bus to downtown Newark. If the substantial job growth predicted over the next two decades was in downtown Newark and similar cities instead of in distant suburbs along highways, New Jersey would see huge energy savings. Nearly 11.5 million gallons of gasoline a year would be saved by increasing the number of jobs in downtown Newark, essentially doubling them, instead of locating them in the suburbs.

This shows that energy, transportation and land use policies are all connected. So, how can we change the path of job creation and development away from the suburbs and closer to denser population and mass transit hubs?