Abstract:
While a lot of progress has been made in Germany to reduce CO2 emissions in
the past years in almost all sectors of economy, however, the sector of transportation
shows increasing CO2 emissions in the same period of time. Likewise,
sustainability objectives of German land use policies have not been met
so far, especially with regard of the continuously high rate of greenfield land
used up for new housing development. In this paper, it is argued that environmental
issues of both sectors have to be addressed by integrating urban
housing development and transportation infrastructure planning policies. The
paper reports on a stated preferences survey among house buyers in Germany,
using a discrete choice approach, where parameters of sustainable urban design
and sustainable transport are both integrated into one model. Building on
concepts of behavioral economics, preferences are elicited for sub-samples of
different “environmental awareness”. Results show differences in tastes for
higher building densities to reduce land consumption as well as differences in
tastes for transport infrastructure development and frequency of public
transport parameters. In addition, a decision support system is developed to
analyze the impact of individual parameters on choosing one alternative over
the other. Form this, conclusions on potential market shares for sustainable
housing and transport development are drawn and recommendations are
given to implement integrated urban design and transportation infrastructure
policies.
