HRC Lecture: Transportation Energy and Urban Form

Transportation energy is a significant portion of the energy consumption of the US economy. While various policies such as changing the fuel mix and alternative fuels are proposed to make the system more efficient, the efficacy of the land-use policies such as changing the urban form and densification have been subject to considerable debate. In this presentation, Prof. Nikhil Kaza uses a rich dataset compiled from different sources to test the effectiveness of urban form on energy consumption in the transportation sector. He proxies the consumption with retail sales from gas stations for most of the conterminous United States at a county level. Using both demographic, economic and landscape characteristics of urban form, he teases out the effect of different dimensions on energy consumption. He finds that compact and contiguous urban form is modestly associated with lower energy consumption and is more important than demographic concentration in explaining the variance.

Professor Nikhil Kaza is currently Host professor at the EPFL Habitat Research Center. He is Associate Professor at the Department of City & Regional Planning and Adjunct Associate Professor at the Environment, Ecology and Energy Program of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (US).  Professor Kaza works at the intersection of urbanization patterns, local energy policy, and equity. In his research, he seeks to understand the motivations, intentions and plans of multiple actors endowed with limited capabilities, imperfect foresight and distributed authority, in urban settings. Lately, he has been studying these issues in the context of local energy planning. He routinely uses high cadence, large geospatial and temporal datasets and novel quantitative methods in my research. He is also a planning theorist, specializing in organizational decision-making, institutional restructuring and the role of plans. In addition to his faculty appointments in the City & Regional Planning and Environment, Ecology and Energy program at UNC, he is a faculty research fellow at Center for Community Capital and faculty fellow at the Institute for the Enviroment and Center for Urban and Regional Studies. Homepage: https://sia.planning.unc.edu