Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues.

Brookland recently got the news that Dwellings, a home furnishings store and one of our most promising main street retailers, was closing due to slow growth in sales. The announcement touched off a neighborhood discussion on what was wrong, exactly, with the shopping environment in the leafy, residential neighborhood. Many locals noted that low residential density made running a retail business a challenge, and they pointed toward potential growth around our Metro station as a way to boost the local population. The city is well on its way toward approving a Metro area development plan that includes dense, walkable, and mixed-use buildings around the station, but at public meetings and in public discussions like the one over neighborhood retail troubles, a number of residents have repeatedly made their opposition known.

Traffic is a concern for these opponents, but one also hears with considerable frequency the belief that development of the grassy lots around the station, and a small stand of trees near its parking lot, will negatively impact the neighborhood’s quality of life, making the area less green, and less environmentally friendly.

The argument is a bit absurd—the greenery around the station is a minute share of the trees and plants in the neighborhood as a whole—but it’s dreadfully wrong-headed in another way, as well. There are a limited number of Metro stations in the Washington area, representing a limited number of opportunities for development catering to people who rely substantially, if not primarily, on rail as a form of transportation. That, coupled with the importance placed on walkability in typical transit-oriented development, means that the land around the Brookland station, if developed, should manage to eliminate hundreds or thousands of car trips daily. Failure to develop that land will mean that more Brookland shopping trips will involve a car and that potential residents will have to find other accommodations farther out and probably farther from rail.

Why is it so important to reduce the number of car trips we take? Traffic, obviously, remains a serious problem throughout the area, though it’s far less troublesome in the District than in suburban counties. But as a new report on the emissions footprint of the Washington area reveals, eliminating car trips is one of the best ways to cut carbon output. And District neighborhoods are the best equipped in the area to achieve the goal of reducing per capita automobile use.

Picture taken by brents pix.

The Post write-up of the emissions report, which was put together by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, comes across as a bit dire. It compares per capita emissions in the metropolitan area with European nations of similar population, and the results are not favorable. Relative to other parts of this country, however, the Washington area does very well. Area residents produce 13.2 metric tons of carbon annually, far less than the national average of 20 tons per year. In all likelihood, the District brings the area's average down—a similar carbon audit done earlier this year for New York City alone (not the metropolitan area) showed that Big Apple residents produced only a third of the carbon output of the average American.

The reason big cities are so much cleaner is easy to grasp. By far, the two largest sources of carbon are tailpipes and power generation. In our area, transportation is the single largest contributor to our carbon footprint; cars and trucks spew out about 34 percent of all carbon emissions. But it could be much worse. The Washington area has one of the highest rates of public transit use in the nation, and the ability to shift significant numbers of workers onto transit provides us with our advantage over the rest of the country.

The heart of our transit network is in the District, and it shows. About 39 percent of Washingtonians take public transit to work, a far higher rate than that of other counties in the area (higher, too, than most counties across the country, where the rate is often close to zero). Another 11 percent of Washingtonians get to work using only their own two feet, a feat made possible by compact and mixed-use neighborhoods.

Still, emissions in the area are growing. While the city center is adding people, public transportation is adding riders, and suburban counties are adding transit service, the rate of growth of each is slower than the pace of Greater Washington’s outward expansion. And the more distant are new area neighborhoods, the more likely commuters are to use a car, and the longer they’ll end up sitting in it.

This is a problem our area has to address. So long as the Bush Administration is in power, the best we can hope for from the White House is aspirational carbon reduction goals, and amorphous plans to develop technologies that might be workable decades down the road. It’s difficult, in the absence of better federal policy, for local areas to address emissions from power plants and for most cities to begin developing transit networks—the policies and funding are simply not there, it’s unfortunate to say.

But places like Washington have a framework ready right now, which helps us reduce our carbon footprint right now. We need to extend it, and we need to maximize our use of it. Along those lines, we have to be extraordinarily pleased with plans to develop light-rail in suburban Maryland and Virginia, along corridors that don’t currently have easy access to Metro. These developments will put transit within easy reach of thousands of residents who didn’t previously have such access.

We should also be very happy with the Maryland Transit Administration’s plan to significantly extend MARC service, adding stations and capacity, and boosting train frequency. Given the rapid pace of outward growth, regional rail extension is vital to extending transit service to far-flung exurban towns. In Virginia, where exurban growth stretches west from Spotsylvania County into the Shenandoah and out to West Virginia, rail extensions and improvements are an absolute necessity. And so, too, are congestion tolls such as those planned for a number of Northern Virginia highways. Tolls will help shift workers off roads and onto trains, and will discourage some residents from moving outward. This is a necessary part of improving area settlement patterns.

And Washingtonians have to do their part. The simple truth is, every resident who decides to settle in the District instead of a suburban county reduces metropolitan per capita carbon output. The greater Washington’s share of local population, the cleaner the region will be. That means we can’t waste development opportunities around Metro stations. We can’t allow neighborhoods without good transit access to languish, underserved. And we absolutely cannot allow development in the city to follow suburban models, with low densities and big parking lots.

The good news is, the kinds of things that make for green neighborhoods also make for pleasant ones. I’ll take window shops and sidewalk traffic over big box any day of the week. It’s fine and appropriate for neighborhood communities to weigh in on development designs and hold developers to high standards, but there must be a limit to NIMBYism. These issues are too important for petty concerns to dominate the discussion. An undeveloped grassy lot next to Metro is a huge loss for the city and the region, not just in revenue or in lost commercial energy, but in our effort to reduce our total environmental impact.

Cities and states are learning that they’re going to be on their own in fighting climate change, at least for the next 16 months. Without the muscle of the federal government, we’re limited in what we can do to be cleaner and greener. But one thing we have is control over development, and we must make the most of that. In a discussion where many of the proposed solutions won’t yield results for years, our urban structure is making a difference this very day. We need to do as much with that available tool as we possibly can.