Commuting from U.S. Brownfield and Greenfield Residential Development Neighborhoods

Abstract

Whereas brownfield development is of widespread interest, there is scant literature on the environmental impacts of brownfield developments relative to conventional developments. We assembled a set of two residential brownfield and two conventional greenfield developments for a sample of U.S. cities including Baltimore, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. Using the travel time and modes of transportation information from the 2000 U.S. Decennial Census, we analyzed the long-term commuting impacts from the two types of developments. Relative to greenfield development neighborhoods, we find that the brownfield development neighborhoods are closer to center cities, have higher public transportation use for commuting, comparable average travel times to work, and lower energy and greenhouse gas emissions for commuting. Future work will extend these results to consider other differential impacts of the two types of developments.