Urban Design, Environmental Consciousness, and Sustainable Communities: Can New Urbanism Reduce Driving in Auto Friendly Los Angeles

New Urbanism refers to a form of development that integrates shopping and housing in a pedestrian friendly environment that reduces the need for automobile usage and arguably impacts individual choices regarding commuting and other daily travel. New Urbanism is an increasingly “hot topic” in heavily congested regions, such as Los Angeles, where the wider, often meandering, tree-lined walkways New Urbanists adopt to evoke older, traditional neighborhoods, must be grafted onto existing, auto-friendly grid systems. We explore two central questions surrounding the efficacy of New Urbanism in this particularly challenging context: 1) Does New Urbanist design as a specific structural form reduce resident’s reliance on automobiles? 2) Or, do individuals who choose to buy homes in New Urbanist communities already share ecological attitudes that predispose them to use alternative modes of transportation? In response to these questions, we analyze data from recent surveys of Playa Vista a New Urbanist community in coastal Los Angeles, California and Mar Vista – a demographically comparable community in neighboring West Los Angeles. Consistent with current research on New Urbanism, we find that residents of Playa Vista both walk and drive more than their counterparts in Mar Vista. Moving beyond much of this research to examine its inherent problems of self selection, we find that residents of both Playa Vista and Mar Vista who are concerned about local environmental conditions tend to walk rather than drive, when that mode of transportation is reasonable. Consequently, we conclude that ecological attitudes may be more important than urban design with respect to modifying individuals’ behavior to protect and/or preserve the natural environment. Because neither Playa Vista nor Mar Vista boasts efficient and reliable public transportation systems, we also discuss the possibility that New Urbanism may work more successfully in larger, more controlled, environments rather than in urban infill situations.