Moving the Needle? Understanding the Uneven Performance of State and Local Land, Transportation, Energy, and Water Conservation Efforts

There are precious few realms for which Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famous statement that “states are the laboratories of democracy” is more pertinent than state land use, transportation, energy, and water policy. Federal law is preeminent on federal lands and in the areas of clean air and clean water. However, when it comes to regulating development on privately owned land, building urban transportation systems and renewable energy facilities, or promoting energy and water conservation, by tradition, the ball falls squarely in the court of state and local government. State and local governments in the U.S. have been actively managing their physical and economic development since 1812, when the City of New York announced its intention to issue city-backed bonds to finance construction of the Erie Canal. 

Since then, their efforts have grown steadily. In 1926, the U.S. Supreme Court validated the use of zoning by state and municipal governments to regulate private development under their police power authority. This authorization was later expanded to include additional state and local growth management powers. The land trust movement, which, to date, has protected more than 60 million acres  nationwide, began at the local level. According to the Congressional Budget Office, state and local governments in 2023 spent $2.23 investing in the nation’s transportation and water infrastructure for every $1 spent by the federal government. In terms of operations and maintenance, the imbalance was even greater, with state and local expenditures outpacing federal spending by more than six-to-one. Beginning with the California Energy Commission in 1974, states have taken the leading role in energy conservation. The move to adopt Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS), which obligate states to shift a targeted percentage of their electricity-generating capacity to renewable energy sources, began in Iowa in 1983. Since then, 30 more states have adopted similar standards. With regional aquifers overdrawn and freshwater supplies threatened by climate-change-induced droughts, states and urban water districts are now beginning to take the lead in developing strategic water-conservation and recycling plans. 

How have these various state and locally initiated efforts worked out? Referring back to this report’s title, to what degree have they “moved the needle”? Are America’s urban communities and near-urban environments truly better off for their having been undertaken? This article attempts to answer this question by reviewing the last quarter century of progress in four urban and environmental planning domains (land conversion and conservation, auto travel and public transit use, residential energy conservation and the adoption of renewable energy sources, and domestic water conservation) using well-established metrics for which reliable data is available at the state and local levels. These metrics include measures of sprawl, land preservation, park quantity, auto travel, public transportation use, electric vehicle adoption, residential energy use, renewable energy generation, and domestic water consumption (Table 1). Together, they form the practical core of what is nowadays referred to as urban sustainability (Beatley, 1995; Campbell, 2016; Cohen, 2017), although I prefer the term “resource utilization efficiency and conservation.” Resource utilization efficiency means that resources such as land, energy, and water are used to generate maximum individual and social utility with minimal waste, and conservation means that resources regarded as rare and irreplaceable in their natural state are conserved.

Table 1: Summary of Performance Measures, Metrics, and Data Sources

Conceptually and methodologically, this work breaks no new ground. Instead, its contributions are entirely empirical and stem from its broad topical coverage, its timeliness, and its multi-pronged investigative approach.

Topical coverage first: While there is no shortage of place-level comparisons of sprawl, auto and transit use, energy conservation and renewable energy production, and domestic water consumption, this is the first study to bring them all together within a common performance assessment framework. Second, timeliness: To the extent data are available, this work covers conditions up to and including 2024 and, where feasible, back to 2000. This facilitates assessing the extent of progress as well as the more common single-period performance comparisons. Lastly, approach: This work relies on a three-step methodology to generate its findings. The first step is to identify a reliable metric to assess the performance of states and, in some cases, local governments. 

The second step centers on developing a regression model identifying key factors associated with better and worse performance outcomes. These models are not intended to be causal or predictive, but rather to highlight important commonalities among exemplary places and identify unusual cases that offer relevant insights. The third step builds on the first two to take a more detailed look at particular state and local examples based on their performance ranking and the degree to which their observed performance diverges from that predicted by the regression model. Where regression models identify key performance determinants and factors independently of one another, the use of state and local place exemplars enables us to explore how those factors interact in real-world contexts. This methodology enables us to identify transferable lessons for connecting particular planning and policy initiatives to better and worse outcomes.

Readers who hope to find one state or metro area consistently outperforming others, or to identify universally effective approaches, are likely to be disappointed. The U.S. is such a large and geographically diverse country, and how states and municipalities organize their governmental functions are so different by design that it is impossible to point to one set of places or practices and conclude they are universally preferable. What I can say is that carrots work better than sticks—that is, approaches that deliver tangible benefits to individuals and groups tend to work better than efforts to legislate individual or business behavior from on high; that programs that connect expanded opportunities, improved efficiency, and precious resource conservation tend to work better than programs that insist on making specific tradeoffs, and that transparency and political and institutional cooperation are essential ingredients to making any policy, program, or investment work better.