Compact Development without Transit: Life-Cycle GHG Emissions from Four Variations of Residential Density in Vancouver
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Numerous studies have shown that compact, mixed-use, transit-oriented developments contribute to reduced use of automobiles and in turn contribute to lower greenhouse gas emissions. When everyday destinations are within walking distance, people are more likely to walk or cycle, and if transit is within walking distance people are more likely to use it. Other studies have shown that compact development enables reductions in building energy consumption that contribute further to emissions savings. The reduced emissions are assumed to rely on the combination of compactness and transit connectedness. However, this combination requires an extensive transit network covering large areas both of residential and of employment destinations. Such networks often do not exist and are too costly to construct. When they do exist, the transit networks often do not reach those outlying neighbourhoods with the greatest potential for future growth and densification. This paper therefore asks what emissions savings compact development can achieve in the absence of high-frequency transit. In an examinination of the life-cycle emissions of four variations of density in three different neighbourhoods in Vancouver, none of which is well served by transit, we found a wide range of emissions profiles. A mixed-use new urbanist development produced 22% fewer emissions than an adjacent development of large single-family homes, both of which were in a transit-poor area on the far edge of a suburban city. A high-density neighbourhood adjacent to a suburban city centre, and one adjacent to a central city centre, produced 50% and 67% fewer emissions than the neighbourhood of large single-family homes. Findings suggest that, while compactness may be most effective when it is coupled with high frequency transit, decoupling the pair and building compactness before or without transit can still yield considerable household emissions reductions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".