Potential Economic Consequences of Local Nonconformity to Regional Land Use and Transportation Plans Using a Spatial Economic Model

To achieve the greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets that are required by California’s global warming legislation (AB32), the state of California has determined that recent growth trends in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) must be curtailed. In recognition of this, Senate Bill 375 (SB375) requires regional governments to develop land use and transportation plans or Sustainable Community Strategies (SCSs) that will achieve regional GHG targets largely though reduced VMT. Although the bill requires such a plan, it does not require local governments to adopt general plans that conform to this plan. In California, it is local, not regional, governments that have authority over land development decisions. Instead, SB375 relies on democratic participatory processes and relatively modest financial and regulatory incentives for SCS implementation. As a result, it is quite possible that some local governments within a region may decide not to conform to their SCS. In this study, a spatial economic model (PECAS) is applied in the Sacramento region (California, U.S.) to understand what the economic and equity consequences might be to jurisdictions that do and do not implement SCS land use plans in a region. An understanding of these consequences provides insight into jurisdictions’ motivations for compliance and thus, strategies for more effective implementation of SB375

An Economic and Life Cycle Analysis of Regional Land Use and Transportation Plans, Research Report 11-25

Travel and emissions models are commonly applied to evaluate the change in passenger and commercial travel and associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from land use and transportation plans. Analyses conducted by the Sacramento Area Council of Governments predict a decline in such travel and emissions from their land use and transportation plan (the “Preferred Blueprint” or PRB scenario) relative to a “Business-As-Usual” scenario (BAU). However, the lifecycle GHG effects due to changes in production and consumption associated with transportation and land use plans are rarely, if ever, conducted. An earlier study conducted by the authors, applied a spatial economic model (Sacramento PECAS) to the PRB plan and found that lower labor, transport, and rental costs increased producer and consumer surplus and production and consumption relative to the BAU. As a result, lifecycle GHG emissions from these upstream economic activities may increase. At the same time, lifecycle GHG emissions associated with the manufacture of construction materials for housing may decline due to a shift in the plan from larger luxury homes to smaller multi-family homes in the plan. To explore the net impact of these opposing GHG impacts, the current study used the economic production and consumption data from the PRB and BAU scenarios as simulated with the Sacramento PECAS model as inputs to estimate the change in lifecycle GHG emissions. The economic input-output lifecycle assessment model is applied to evaluate effects related to changes in economic production and consumption as well as housing construction. This study also builds on the findings from two previous studies, which suggest potential economic incentives for jurisdictional non-compliance with Sustainable Communities Strategies (SCSs) under Senate Bill 375 (also known as the “anti-sprawl” bill). SB 375 does not require local governments to adopt general plans that are consistent with the land use plans included in SCSs, and thus such incentives could jeopardize implementation of SCSs and achievement of GHG goals. In this study, a set of scenarios is simulated with the Sacramento PECAS model, in which multiple jurisdictions partially pursue the BAU at differing rates. The PRB is treated as a straw or example SCS. The scenarios are evaluated to understand how non-conformity may influence the supply of housing by type, and holding other factors constant, the geographic and income distribution of rents, wages, commute costs, and consumer surplus

Equilibrium and the Core in Alonso's Discrete Population Model of Land Use

Conventional wisdom tells us that with no market failure and local non- satiation of preferences, the core is at least as large as the collection of competitive equilibrium allocations. We confirm this for a standard model featuring land. Next we consider the public land ownership version of the model. If the role of land ownership and rent distribution is assumed by a government that ploughs back rent (at least in excess of its agricultural value) to its citizens, the equilibrium remains efficient, but no longer need be in the core.Publicly Provided Private Goods, Equilibrium, Core

Equilibrium and the Core in Alonso's Discrete Population Model of Land Use

Conventional wisdom tells us that with no market failure and local non-satiation of preferences, the core is at least as large as the collection of competitive equilibrium allocations.We con.rm this for a standard model featuring land.Next we consider the public land ownership version of the model. If the role of land ownership and rent distribution is assumed by a government that ploughs back rent (at least in excess of its agricultural value) to its citizens, the equilibrium remains efficient, but no longer need be in the core.Publicly Provided Private Goods;Equilibrium;Core

Application of Market Models to Network Equilibrium Problems

We present a general two-side market model with divisible commodities and price functions of participants. A general existence result on unbounded sets is obtained from its variational inequality re-formulation. We describe an extension of the network flow equilibrium problem with elastic demands and a new equilibrium type model for resource allocation problems in wireless communication networks, which appear to be particular cases of the general market model. This enables us to obtain new existence results for these models as some adjustments of that for the market model. Under certain additional conditions the general market model can be reduced to a decomposable optimization problem where the goal function is the sum of two functions and one of them is convex separable, whereas the feasible set is the corresponding Cartesian product. We discuss some versions of the partial linearization method, which can be applied to these network equilibrium problems.Comment: 18 pages, 3 table

Optimal Control of Wireless Computing Networks

Augmented information (AgI) services allow users to consume information that results from the execution of a chain of service functions that process source information to create real-time augmented value. Applications include real-time analysis of remote sensing data, real-time computer vision, personalized video streaming, and augmented reality, among others. We consider the problem of optimal distribution of AgI services over a wireless computing network, in which nodes are equipped with both communication and computing resources. We characterize the wireless computing network capacity region and design a joint flow scheduling and resource allocation algorithm that stabilizes the underlying queuing system while achieving a network cost arbitrarily close to the minimum, with a tradeoff in network delay. Our solution captures the unique chaining and flow scaling aspects of AgI services, while exploiting the use of the broadcast approach coding scheme over the wireless channel.Comment: 30 pages, journa

A Case for Cooperative and Incentive-Based Coupling of Distributed Clusters

Research interest in Grid computing has grown significantly over the past five years. Management of distributed resources is one of the key issues in Grid computing. Central to management of resources is the effectiveness of resource allocation as it determines the overall utility of the system. The current approaches to superscheduling in a grid environment are non-coordinated since application level schedulers or brokers make scheduling decisions independently of the others in the system. Clearly, this can exacerbate the load sharing and utilization problems of distributed resources due to suboptimal schedules that are likely to occur. To overcome these limitations, we propose a mechanism for coordinated sharing of distributed clusters based on computational economy. The resulting environment, called \emph{Grid-Federation}, allows the transparent use of resources from the federation when local resources are insufficient to meet its users' requirements. The use of computational economy methodology in coordinating resource allocation not only facilitates the QoS based scheduling, but also enhances utility delivered by resources.Comment: 22 pages, extended version of the conference paper published at IEEE Cluster'05, Boston, M