**AddOns** *Land-Use Add-On

**AddOns**

*Land-Use Add-On

2AC Land Use Addon

Railways are key to reduce negative consequences of land-use – solves top soil destruction

The negative consequences of land use are associated with three factors. Firstly, the actual space taken for infrastructure leads to the sealing of the top soil, as well as disturbances resulting from noise, resource use, waste dumping and pollution. _Secondly, transport networks which connect cities add to the fragmentation and degradation of the natural or urban landscape due to the “barrier” effects of the infrastructure. Finally, urban sprawl involves the inefficient development and use of urban land. Roads account for 98% of total transport infrastructure compared with rail. EU transport sector tomorrow Transport infrastructure investment should take into consideration the amount of land take and favour rail over road transport. This approach would be similar to that of the Trans European Transport Networks (TEN-T), which in the near future (2010-2020) will have the main proportion of its budget focussed on building rail infrastructure. Rail data Comparison of capacities in an urban setting is shown below. As can be seen from the graph, rail has the highest capacity when comparing throughput per hour and infrastructure width. This is mainly due to efficient traffic management in urban conditions, with many trains that have high carrying capacity passing per hour.

Soil erosion will cause extinction

John Ikerd, Professor Emeritus of Agricultural Economics at University of Missouri, 8-2001, “The High Cost of Cheap Food,” Small Farm Today, , http://www.ssu.missouri.edu/faculty/jikerd/papers/SFTcheapfood.html

All life on earth is rooted in the soil. As farmers destroy the natural productivity of the land, they are destroying the ability of the earth to support life. We are destroying the future of humanity to make agriculture more “efficient.” What is the value of the future of humanity? Are we in fact willing to risk the future of human life on earth just so we can have cheap food?

Solvency – HSR Solves Land-Use

HSR reduces destructive land use

Petra Todorovich et al, Daniel Schned, and Robert Lane, director of America 2050, associate planner for America 2050 and senior fellow for urban design at Regional Plan Association and founding principal of Plan & Process LLP, “High-Speed Rail International Lessons for U.S. Policy Makers”, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2011

Efficient land use: A typical highspeed rail line has the ability to transport approximately the same number of people in the same direction as a three-lane highway, but on a fraction of the land area. The right-of-way width of a typical two-track high-speed rail line is about 82 feet—onethird the width of a standard six-lane highway (246 feet). This difference in land use amounts to a savings of 24.3 acres per mile of high-speed rail. Such a savings could be particularly significant in environmentally sensitive areas that need protection and in urbanized areas where land for highway expansion is costly to acquire (UIC 2010a).

Solvency – Transit Oriented Development

HSR promotes economic development by condensing and increasing access to regional markets

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt and Arne Feddersen, London School of Economic, Dept of Geopgrahy and Environment and University of Hamburg, Department of Economics, “From Periphery to Core: Economic Adjustments to High Speed Rail”, London School of Economic Research Online, September 2010

This study evaluates the economic effects of high speed rail in the realm of recent economic geography research. As a distinctive feature, the Cologne-Frankfurt German high speed rail track, which is analyzed here, provides variation in accessibility along two intermediate stops that can reasonably be assumed as exogenous. This helps to circumvent endogeneity problems, which are among the key-challenges in establishing causal relationships between access to markets and economic development. Our findings, one the one hand, contribute to the vivid debate on the viability of HSR, e.g. in the US where President Obama recently announced a large-scale investment program. On the other hand, we contribute to the scholarly debate on New Economic Geography, which has reached maturity in theoretical terms, but still is in a comparatively early stage with regard to empirical evidence. Our hypothesis is that by driving economic agents closer together and increasing access to regional markets, HSR should promote economic development. We develop a treatment measure which compares a Harris-type market potential in the situations before and after an HSR has been made available. A non-parametric identification strategy suggests that the increase in market access led to economic adjustments in several indicator variables such as GDP, GDP/capita, employment at workplace within a four-year adjustment period. We find that counties adjacent to two intermediate Stations Limburg and Montabaur, which were exposed most strongly to the (exogenous) variation accessibility, experienced a 2.7% level shift in GDP, compared to the rest of the study area. This effect can be entirely explained by the market access treatment measure. The treatment effect is robust to a range of alternative explanations, e.g. convergence growth, economic density, primary geography, industrial composition, including turnover as well as construction and substitution effects, among others. Throughout our analyses we find a market access elasticity that indicates a 0.25% growth in GDP for any 1% increase in market access. Evidently, the reduction in transport costs in the subject case is driven by passenger traffic only and, hence, improved business, customer and employee relations, as the HSR line is not used for freight transport.21 For highway construction projects, which also facilitate the transport of physical goods in addition, the market access elasticity might be even larger. Our results indicate that the observed growth effects of the HSR line remained persistent as a) growth is not reversed during the subsequent years and b) there is a return to the local growth trends experienced prior to the shock. We do not, however, interpret this permanent level shift as evidence for multiple equilibria as predicted by New Economic Geography (increasing returns) theories. Instead, we argue that we observe a hybrid effect where economic adjustments are driven by mechanisms emphasized by increasing returns theories, but persistency of effects results from the permanent nature of the accessibility shock and hence a permanent change in location quasi-fundamentals. This is the distinguishing element compared to previous studies, which investigated purely temporary shocks such as war destruction and found little evidence for permanent shifts in economic activity.22 From these findings, a potentially powerful application of NEG models emerges. Empirically calibrated models may serve as a tool for predicting the economic effects of new large-scale infrastructure projects and help authorities to define priorities. More studies would be desirable to confirm the generalizability of the presented results qualitatively and quantitatively.

High demand for compact development

Urban Land Institute, nonprofit education and research institute supported by its nearly 30,000 members. “Land Use and Driving: The Role Compact Development Can Play in Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions – Evidence from Three Recent Studies”, 2010

Consumer Demand for Compact Development Will Help Determine How Much Is Built Compact development is a relatively low-cost yet promising long-range strategy to mitigate climate change and reduce energy consumption. Its promise, though, is dependent on how well it can leverage the momentum of changing market demand. To have a significant effect on GHG emissions nationally, compact development must make up a significant proportion of future development—at least 60 percent or even more. This would entail reversing decades-long trends of sprawling development patterns. All three studies are dependent on trends data that end in about 2000—and each study notes that little evidence through the 1990s indicates that Americans had changed course on sprawl. Whether recent trends have started the United States down the path of more compact development is still unclear. While the studies caution that research on recent trends is inadequate, they also point out reasons to believe that demand for more compact development is on the rise. Growing Cooler’s survey of changing demand and preferences in housing concludes that compact development is already undersupplied. Demographic and cultural trends, moreover, indicate that by 2025 there will be an excess of large-lot, single-family houses; demand for new housing will be defined by smaller houses on small lots, townhomes, and apartments.

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