**Self-organized urban planning and parking

Can the principles of self-organizing systems be imported into urban planning?

Could it apply to such a mundane topic as parking?

Self-organizing systems are understood to consist of lower-level component parts that interact to produce  system-wide order.

Self-organization is a process where some form of overall order or coordination arises out of the local interactions between smaller component parts of an initially disordered system.

One point of interest is how simple rules or limited stimuli and input at the local level produce the complex behavior of the whole system.

A classic example of this would be the simple reactions of fish within a school. As a body, they move with dazzling dexterity and apparent coordination.

In this podcast on urban parking policy, the UCLA professor of urban planning Donald Shoup makes a bold statement: NO FREE PARKING!

SHOUP: Everybody likes free parking, including me, probably you. But just because the driver doesn’t pay for it doesn’t mean that the cost goes away. If you don’t pay for parking your car, somebody else has to pay for it. And that somebody is everybody. We pay for free parking in the prices of the goods we buy at places where the parking is free. And we pay for parking as residents when we get free parking with our housing. We pay for it as taxpayers. Increasingly, I think we’re paying for it in terms of the environmental harm that it causes.

This would seem to be a classic case of the tragedy of the commons, where the desires of each individual undermines communal resources.  

The tragedy of the commons is an economic theory of a situation within a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently and rationally according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting that resource.

This is also a story of mass gambling addiction. The most powerful form of reinforcement is intermittent, the variable ratio schedule found in the use slot machines and participation in lotteries. In a sense, we are all addicted to the idea of finding that free parking space in the perfect location -- which we have found on occasion (gloriously).

Shoup suggested three solutions:  finding the lowest parking price that leaves one or two vacant spaces on each block – around 85% parking space occupancy, returning meter revenue to the neighborhood that generates it, and removing off-street parking requirements when a building’s land-use changes.

Here part of the famous op-ed by the urban planner Donald Shoup, in which he argues that much of traffic congestion is caused by drivers looking for parking spaces. He made very detailed observations about traffic patterns caused by free street parking.

Several studies have found that cruising for curb parking generates about 30 percent of the traffic in central business districts. In a recent survey conducted by Bruce Schaller in the SoHo district in Manhattan, 28 percent of drivers interviewed while they were stopped at traffic lights said they were searching for curb parking. A similar study conducted by Transportation Alternatives in the Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn found that 45 percent of drivers were cruising.

When my students and I studied cruising for parking in a 15-block business district in Los Angeles, we found the average cruising time was 3.3 minutes, and the average cruising distance half a mile (about 2.5 times around the block). This may not sound like much, but with 470 parking meters in the district, and a turnover rate for curb parking of 17 cars per space per day, 8,000 cars park at the curb each weekday. Even a small amount of cruising time for each car adds up to a lot of traffic.

Over the course of a year, the search for curb parking in this 15-block district created about 950,000 excess vehicle miles of travel — equivalent to 38 trips around the earth, or four trips to the moon. And here’s another inconvenient truth about underpriced curb parking: cruising those 950,000 miles wastes 47,000 gallons of gas and produces 730 tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. If all this happens in one small business district, imagine the cumulative effect of all cruising in the United States.

Ultimately, because the cost of street parking is artificially low, drivers are incentivized to cruise around looking for a free space. This creates traffic congestion.

What causes this astonishing waste? As is often the case, the prices are wrong. A national study of downtown parking found that the average price of curb parking is only 20 percent that of parking in a garage, giving drivers a strong incentive to cruise.

Underpriced curb spaces are like rent-controlled apartments: hard to find and, once you do, crazy to give up. This increases the time costs (and therefore the congestion and pollution costs) of cruising.

 Some places are already doing something about this.

To prevent shortages, some cities have begun to adjust their meter rates (using trial and error) to produce about an 85 percent occupancy rate for curb parking. The prices vary by location and the time of day. Drivers can usually find a vacant curb space near their destination, and the search time is zero. Cities can adjust the price of curb parking in response to demand to keep roughly one out of every eight spaces vacant throughout the day. Right-priced curb parking can eliminate cruising.

 Finding the right price for parking can be tricky.

The balance between the varying demand for parking and the fixed supply of curb spaces is the Goldilocks Principle of parking prices: the price is too high if too many spaces are vacant, and too low if no spaces are vacant. But when only a few spaces are vacant, the price is just right, and everyone will see that curb parking is both well used and readily available.

But finding the right price has financial benefits for the city.

Beyond the transportation and environmental benefits, performance-based prices for curb parking can yield ample revenue. If the city uses a share of this money for added public services on the metered streets, residents and local merchants will be more willing to support charging the right price for curb parking. These funds can be used to clean and maintain sidewalks, plant trees, improve lighting, remove graffiti, bury utility wires and provide other public improvements. Returning the meter revenue generated by a district to the district can persuade residents, merchants and property owners to support right-priced curb parking.

Shoup is argues that each street should typically have one or two parking spaces available, and that parking prices should be adjusted for the locale and the time of day to achieve that.

The typical street has about ten spaces. Hence, an 85% occupancy rate is Shoup's norm.

Redwood City, Calif., for example, sets its downtown meter rates to achieve an 85 percent occupancy rate for curb parking (the rates vary by location and time of day, depending on demand). Because the city returns the revenue to pay for added public services in the metered district, the downtown area will receive an estimated $1 million a year for increased police protection and cleaner sidewalks.

In a nutshell, that is a kind of principle of self-organization, a simple, non-arbitrary rule that transforms the entire dynamics of a system.

(Here is Shoup's classic paper, "The High Cost of Free Parking", which explains his theories in detail.)

But ending free street parking is just one strategy of Shoup's agenda, which is anti-automobile.

The other strategy is ending the requirement that homes and businesses have their own private parking.

Because cities with fewer cars will need fewer parking spaces, city planners can abandon their most expensive zoning regulation: off-street parking requirements. Requiring all new buildings to provide ample off-street parking spreads the city over a larger area, reduces density and makes cars the default way to travel. Parking requirements also undermine public transit and make life harder for people who are too poor to own a car.

These parking requirements have a cascade of unintended negative effects.

I argue in “The High Cost of Free Parking” that minimum parking requirements subsidize cars, increase traffic congestion and carbon emissions, pollute the air and water, encourage sprawl, raise housing costs, exclude poor people, degrade urban design, reduce walkability and damage the economy. To my knowledge, no city planner has argued that parking requirements do not have these harmful effects. Instead, a flood of recent research has shown that parking requirements have these effects and more. We are poisoning our cities with too much parking.

 The rich tend to get richer, and the poor, poorer. Thing like mandatory off-street parking tend to benefit the affluent.

City planners cannot do much to counter the inequality of wealth in the United States, but they can help to reform parking requirements that place heavy burdens on minorities and the poor. Removing minimum parking requirements may be the cheapest and simplest way to achieve a more just society, and will produce a cascade of benefits for cities, the economy and the environment. Best of all, cities don’t need to wait until cars disappear before they remove their unwise parking requirements. They can remove their parking requirements now.

 Now, back to self-organizing systems. What we see with Shoup's theories is the replacement of one rule (mandatory off-street private parking) with another rule (no free on-street parking).

The rules of the system are as minimalist as possible. But changing these few rules changes the dynamic of the system.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator versus the Big Five

Perhaps you are familiar with the emic vs. etic debate in the social sciences.

“Emic and etic, in anthropology, folkloristics, and the social and behavioral sciences, refer to two kinds of field research done and viewpoints obtained;^[1]from within the social group (from the perspective of the subject) and from outside (from the perspective of the observer).”

Historically, field workers would impose their own categories and theoretical framework to understand their subjects -- the etic perspective of outsiders.

 

In the 1970s, the 'cultural turn' championed by the likes of the (cultural) anthropologist Clifford Geertz argued that cultures needed to be understood on their own terms. This shift toward an emic insider perspective implied that the fieldworker's primary job was to understand and interpret -- in a sense, to translate for outsiders (Westerners, e.g.) -- the self-understanding of the subjects.

 

This debate seems recapitulated in the MBTI vs Big Five debate. 

 

The MBTI was based on an interpretation of Jungian ideas which Jung himself derived from studying traditional cultures -- in particular, his concept of introversion vs. extroversion (that came from things like Yin vs. Yang dualism). This is very much an etic, outsider understanding (again, it's Myers and Briggs outsider interpretation of Jung's outsider interpretation of diverse world cultures and what they have in common).

 

Big Five supporters argue that this is extremely arbitrary and subjective, even irrational.

 

The Big Five test, in contrast, derives its own five basic factors from a linguistic analysis of the English language. Using sophisticated computer analysis, it was found that definitions of personality traits in English-language dictionaries tended to cluster around five basic ideas: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. 

 

These factors are kind of a distilled version of the categories of thought on human personality circulating in the contemporary English-speaking world. This is cultural anthropology via supercomputers, and immensely emic (insider knowledge by the subject of themselves). Big Five supports argue that this is pure objectivity. 

 

However, the funny thing is that the Big Five factors -- by the standard theoretical account within the social sciences of insider emic self-knowledge -- is not really any more objective than anything else.The categories simply derive from a different source -- from the subject rather than from the social scientist. That is not objective.

 

In fact, what if the logic of the Big Five were brought to the DSM?

Psychologists could interview and survey all the most dysfunctional mental patients in the English-speaking world to find out what they thought ailed them, then use super-computers to refine and systematize their ideas.

 

Supposedly “arbitrary” categories imposed by psychologists, like “paranoid schizophrenic” would disappear.

 

Instead, the DSM would then state that people who believed that they were Napoleon should be understood to REALLY BE Napoleon Bonaparte, after all.

**Self-organized urban planning and autonomous buildings (and septic systems)

Before we look at urban planning and how it would be transformed by autonomous buildings, let's look at a big idea -- 'self-organization'.

Self-organization is a process where some form of overall order or coordination arises out of the local interactions between smaller component parts of an initially disordered system. 

What's missing from this rudimentary definition is that the rules or triggers of the direction of coordinated change are very simple, yet attuned to the local environment. A classic example would be a school of fish, with each component (individual fish) reacting to the movement of the group as well as to events outside the group without any great sophistication (the fish is a simple creature), yet with a resulting over-all sophistication (the school moves with a stunning agility and fluidity in the face of danger).

The process of self-organization can be spontaneous, and it is not necessarily controlled by any auxiliary agent outside of the system. It is often triggered by random fluctuations that are amplified by positive feedback. The resulting organization is wholly decentralized or distributed over all the components of the system. As such, the organization is typically robust and able to survive and, even, self-repair substantial damage or perturbations. Chaos theory discusses self-organization in terms of islands of predictability in a sea of chaotic unpredictability. Self-organization occurs in a variety of physical, chemical, biological, robotic, social, and cognitive systems. Examples of its realization can be found in crystallization, thermal convection of fluids, chemical oscillation, animal swarming, and neural networks.

The article notes how economists like Paul Krugman and Friedrich Hayek utilized the idea of self-organization, but there is no mention of self-organization in relation to urban planning.

But perhaps autonomous buildings, as the smallest of components of the urban fabric, could introduce the question of self-organization into the field.

More specifically, with the dramatic and on-going fall in the price for solar PV, the potential for an autonomous building to be self-reliant and self-contained depends on its capacity to house a functioning septic system. 

What is a septic system?

A septic system is an on-site method of treating and disposing of sanitary wastewater. A typical septic system often consists of the following:

• Buried tank - removes suspended solids from raw wastewater
• Effluent distribution system 
• Soil absorption area – provides for additional effluent treatment and attenuation through the processes of adsorption, dispersion, and biodegradation

Septic systems may also have grease traps or other pre-treatment technologies.  More sophisticated designs can include several small septic tanks that drain to a dry well, or connections to multiple absorption areas used on a rotating basis.
Septic systems are commonly found in rural and suburban areas where people often rely on ground water for their drinking water. Septic systems that are properly sited, designed, constructed, operated, and maintained pose little threat to drinking water sources. However, poorly designed, maintained, or operated septic systems can contaminate ground water or surface water.

 A single septic systems can serve more than single household.

What is a large-capacity septic system?

A septic system is considered a large capacity septic system (LCSS) if it receives solely sanitary waste either from multiple dwellings or from a non-residential establishment and the system has the capacity to serve 20 or more persons per day.
In general, LCSSs may be found serving the following facilities:

• Apartment buildings
• Trailer parks
• Schools and religious institutions
• Office, industrial, and commercial buildings
• Shopping malls
• State parks and campgrounds
• Recreation or vehicle (RV) parks
• Highway rest areas
• Train and bus stations
• Hotels and restaurants
• Casinos

Apartment buildings, for example, can utilize both conventional and alternative septic systems.  The conventional systems consist of either basic systems that utilize gravity or the pressure distribution model that distributes wastewater throughout different areas of the drainfield simultaneously. The alternative systems consist of either 1) an aerobic treatment unit uses oxygen to decompose solid waste in the septic tank more efficiently or 2) a mound systems that are suitable for areas where apartment buildings have little or insufficient soil for wastewater treatment.

A sand filter system is similar to a mound system but incorporates a sand filter and pump.The most common aerobic treatment systems use a suspended growth process where oxygen is injected into the septic tank to help bacteria grow and act on wastewater solids. The mound system works in a way similar to a conventional one. However, it incorporates a pump and a small hill above ground level that provides a primary filtering process. This gives the water an extra level of filtering before it reaches groundwater. Sand filter systems integrate an extra sand-filled area that works as a primary filter for wastewater pumped out of the septic tanks before it reaches the drainfield and, subsequently, the groundwater.

Bored by all this talk about septic systems?

Theoretically, it is a game changer that apartment buildings can have their own septic systems, and that the technology continues to evolve.

Recall yesterday's post on autonomous buildings and zero net energy buildings. Such buildings would be game changers not only in terms of resource consumption, but the dynamics of urban/suburban sprawl.

Unfortunately, the discourse on sustainability seems to begin and end with the development and distribution of renewable energy sources, and does not broach the issues of water and wastewater inputs and outputs. So the potential for advanced systems of onsite wastewater management is crucial.

But it is also an intriguing topic in terms of the regulation of building size in urban planning.

Building height restriction laws are largely based on aesthetic and symbolic reasons, with only a few practical considerations (e.g., airport air space).

Height restriction laws are laws that restrict the maximum height of structures. There are a variety of reasons for these measures. Some restrictions limit the height of new buildings so as not to block views of an older work decreed to be an important landmark by a government. For example, In the Tsarist Russian capital of Saint Petersburg, buildings could not be taller than the Winter Palace. Other restrictions are because of practical concern, such as around airports to prevent any danger to flight safety.

For the most part, there are no practical reasons for height restrictions on buildings. The reasons seem to be primarily emotional and sentimental. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but as a motive it is hidden away behind urban planning rhetoric.

The idea is that height restriction laws would be relaxed or even waived with the condition that a building be autonomous in its resource production, consumption and disposal. 

This would not represent the elimination of zoning laws, but their rationalization. Buildings would still be restricted in their height, but not by arbitrary laws. Rather, the capacity for self-reliance and sustainability would be the primary regulating principle, along with market demand. That is, because of the need for buildings to produce much of their own energy and to process their own outputs, building heights (and sizes) would be limited, albeit in a non-random fashion.

This would be a form of self-organization. The urban fabric would evolve organically in response to the capacity to make a building autonomous in relation to the value of real estate (which is, of course, higher in the urban core than in the suburbs). The cost of constructing an autonomous building would place some rational limit on what gets built (as opposed to the ego-driven construction of skyscrapers by corporations).

**Autonomous buildings and the Jevons paradox?

Autonomous buildings take energy efficiency to an extreme.

An autonomous building is a building designed to be operated independently from infrastructural support services such as the electric power grid, gas grid, municipal water systems, sewage treatment systems, storm drains, communication services, and in some cases, public roads.

But is this really appealing to most people?

The article mentions that food production can be done at home, that “intensive gardening can support an adult from as little as 100 square meters of land per person”.

But does a typical person want to be an amateur farmer?

Likewise, the replacement of sewer systems and storm drains with conventional septic systems and swales might be plausible; but most people probably don’t want to deal with something like composting toilets.

That being said, the value of autonomous buildings is not just environmental. There would be increased security in terms of civil defense (a neighborhood with autonomous buildings would better survive prolonged blackouts, storms, government paralysis, etc.). Also, in the long term, autonomous buildings lower the cost of living (probably especially important for senior citizens on a fixed income).

Advocates of autonomous building describe advantages that include reduced environmental impacts, increased security, and lower costs of ownership. Some cited advantages satisfy tenets of green building, not independence per se (see below). Off-grid buildings often rely very little on civil services and are therefore safer and more comfortable during civil disaster or military attacks. (Off-grid buildings would not lose power or water if public supplies were compromised for some reason.) Most of the research and published articles concerning autonomous building focus on residential homes. British architects Brenda and Robert Vale have said that, as of 2002,

"It is quite possible in all parts of Australia to construct a 'house with no bills', which would be comfortable without heating and cooling, which would make its own electricity, collect its own water and deal with its own waste...These houses can be built now, using off-the-shelf techniques. It is possible to build a "house with no bills" for the same price as a conventional house, but it would be (25%) smaller."

Does anyone want to live in a house that is 25% smaller? On the other hand, that might just be an excellent mechanism to get people to downsize.

 One might assume that the most flexible and robust building or home would be a hybrid of:
1) a zero-energy building connected to the grid, and drawing some of the resources (water, electricity) from the grid, but also producing and collecting such resources, and
2) an autonomous building capable of detaching from the grid for extended periods, which generally would have its own established waste disposal system (wastewater, garbage, etc.).

Not mentioned in any of these Wikipedia articles is the pyramid scheme-like nature of some land development.

In a Ponzi scheme, investors are rewarded not with dividends, but by the funds of new investors (who will themselves eventually seek payoffs).

Similarly, in order to pay for the maintenance of infrastructure and government services, governments seek to raise revenue by spurring land development – which would only lead to the creation of further infrastructure and government services.

Hemmed in by property tax limitations, cities were compelled to increase revenue by the easiest route: expanding urban boundaries. They let developers plow up walnut groves and vineyards and places that were supposed to be strawberry fields forever to pay for services demanded by new school parents and park users.

Autonomous buildings thus might help decrease the burden on public infrastructure and on some government agencies.Again, autonomous buildings would also lead to dramatically reduced resource consumption -- that is, reduced depletion of personal finances as well as environmental resources -- not only in terms of the reduction of grid utilization, but also in the embrace of smaller homes (with fewer items bought to be stored in the home).

But the political and economic system are not oriented toward the building of autonomous buildings. At least not yet.

There are moves toward developing 'zero-energy' houses.

With a combination of rooftop solar panels, smart thermostats, advanced water heaters and other high-efficiency features, the homes are all built with a similar goal: to make at least as much energy as they use over a year.

It’s a concept known as zero net energy, and the cluster of homes here represents one of the nation’s largest experiments to see if zero net energy can be put into wider use.

This is akin to an autonomous house. It's also become mandatory in California, and it is becoming more affordable as the price of solar PV continues to plummet.

“It’s not that it cannot be done,” said Ram Narayanamurthy, technical executive at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit utility-funded group that is conducting the study. “The question that we’re trying to answer is, ‘Can it be done for everyone?’”

That question has particular urgency in California, whose goal is that all new homes be net-zero or the equivalent by 2020. But as the price of installing and operating once-rarefied technologies has plummeted, builders across the country are increasingly offering homes with the promise of comfort along with low — or almost no — electric bills.

This is not just the distant future of homes, but the new reality that governments and society need to somehow accommodate.

Since 2013, the Energy Department has certified about 700 homes as “zero-energy ready,” meaning that the addition of a renewable energy system, generally solar, would offset most or all of its annual energy consumption.

With thousands more in the pipeline, said Sam Rashkin, chief architect of the building technologies office, the department expects to certify roughly 1,000 this year and 3,000 in 2017.

“We’re on that inflection point on the growth curve,” he said. “We’re proving the business case to a growing number of builders in key pockets of construction around the country. It takes some really good examples by leading builders to showcase just how cost-effective and technically achievable these specifications are.”

Denver is a leading market, with thousands of zero-energy homes on the way in developments like Stapleton and Sterling Ranch, he said, although there are many others in New England, New York and the Carolinas.

 It represents a great challenge to utilities, accelerating the so-called "death spiral".

The proliferation of zero-energy homes comes as the power industry and its regulators struggle to adapt an old power system — in which large, centralized power plants distribute energy to thousands of homes — to new approaches and technologies. The explosive growth of rooftop solar in states like Hawaii, Arizona and California has upended not only utility business models but also patterns of supply and demand.

Solar power, by its nature, is intermittent, which places strain on utilities and grid operators that need to meet homeowners’ energy demands at night when the sun is not shining, while also taking in the excess energy rooftop solar systems produce during daylight hours.

Although the proportion of homes with solar is not yet high enough in most markets to cause major problems, industry executives and analysts say it is important to begin studying how that and other technologies affect the nation’s power grid now.

“We know very little about how all these devices interact — we have so much to learn,” said Mark Duvall, director of energy utilization at the Electric Power Research Institute. “Hopefully at the end of the day we can contribute to a greater understanding of how these technologies work together and what it really means going forward.”

What is appealing to home buyers is that they do not have to alter their behavior to save energy because the house does that automatically for them. "For buyers, part of the appeal of a home built to be zero-energy is that they do not have to change their behavior to save energy."

 If homeowners feel any effect, it is in the pocketbook, at least initially. The houses, all with three or four bedrooms, cost more than the $373,990 to $476,990 standard for the subdivision about 20 minutes west of San Bernardino. But because the cost is wrapped into the mortgage, and paid over an extended period of time, it is more easily affordable, and the larger payments are generally offset by the savings on energy bills.

“With this stuff thrown in you can afford a lot more house, and you get a lot more value,” Mr. Genau, 31, said.

Back in the East, where the Genaus’ previous house had a big foyer, their energy bills could go as high as $500 a month. “I’d rather be cold sometimes than see the bill,” Ms. Genau, 29, said. “It was ridiculous.”

Their energy bill now? About $10.

And they feel little effect, living in comfort and controlling the temperature in the different zones of their 2,800-square-foot, three-bedroom home from a smartphone.

There is, however, a potential dark side to renewable energy and sustainable development...

...Any money people save on their home energy bill would generally get plowed back into environmentally damaging wasteful spending (e.g., bigger houses). This is the Jevons paradox.

The Jevons paradox

The Jevons paradox, often known as the rebound effect, stipulates that increases in the efficiency of production lead to increases in product consumption and thus increases in resource utilization.

In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand.

Jevons could see this phenomena in his midst during the Industrial Revolution.

In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal-use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. He argued that, contrary to common intuition, technological progress could not be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption.

One would expect that the greater efficiency of factories and reduced price of the goods they manufactured would lead to less resource consumption and greater savings for consumers. Instead, consumer spending on the cheaper goods remains the same as when the goods were expensive -- the consumer simply buys more items as the price declines. In fact, consumer spending on such goods might actually increase in the face of this increased prosperity and consumerism. This counterintuitive reality is not something that policy makers often take into account.

The Jevons paradox is perhaps the most widely known paradox in environmental economics. However, governments and environmentalists generally assume that efficiency gains will lower resource consumption, ignoring the possibility of the paradox arising. 

The issue has been re-examined by modern economists studying consumption rebound effects from improved energy efficiency. In addition to reducing the amount needed for a given use, improved efficiency also lowers the relative cost of using a resource, which increases the quantity demanded. This counteracts (to some extent) the reduction in use from improved efficiency. Additionally, improved efficiency accelerates economic growth, further increasing the demand for resources. The Jevons paradox occurs when the effect from increased demand predominates, and improved efficiency increases the speed at which resources are used.

The path to lower consumption might be a combination of efficiency increases and high prices. One can see this in Hawaii, where residential energy consumption declined each year from 1998 to 2008, prior to the 2008 Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative. This decline in energy consumption was due to increases in the efficiency of appliances (e.g., an LED consumes one-eighth the electricity as an equivalent incandescent bulb) combined with not only with the high prices of electricity in Hawaii (the highest in the US), but also a generally high cost of living.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/10/27/141766341/the-price-of-electricity-in-your-state

https://www.newsweek.com/most-expensive-place-live-us-hawaiitoilet-paper-costs-more-628977

One can see the effects of the Jevons paradox in the attempt to raise automobile fuel efficiency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy

The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards are regulations in the United States, first enacted by the United States Congress in 1975,^[1] after the 1973–74 Arab Oil Embargo, to improve the average fuel economy of cars and light trucks (trucks, vans and sport utility vehicles) produced for sale in the United States. 

Granted, without the CAFE standards, automobile fuel consumption would be 14% higher. But this reduced fuel consumption helps to suppress gasoline prices and thus encourages more driving (a 10% improvement in fuel efficiency leads to an average increase in travel distance of 1–2%).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy#Increased_automobile_usage

To get around the CAFE standards, automobile companies created SUVs and minivans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy#SUVs_and_minivans_created_due_to_original_mandate

What this article might have missed is how low mileage standards and lessened fuel consumption might have fed the popularity of SUVs and trucks -- a popularity that took American automobile manufacturers by surprise. The most popular vehicle in the US, the Ford F-150 series of multi-ton trucks, gets an astonishingly high 26 miles per gallon on the highway. This astoundingly excellent mileage is largely driven by the technology that was developed in response to the federally imposed CAFE standards.

The increased efficiency of vehicles ironically contributes to longer drives and bigger vehicles.

It may also contribute to larger home sizes, because the lowered cost of driving that is partly due to greater fuel efficiency means that people can move far from urban areas to places where land is cheap and bigger houses are affordable.

The only way of lowering resource consumption would be the promotion of greater efficiencies coupled with higher cost, which is what compels reduced electricity consumption in Hawaii.

That is precisely what is happening now. Home prices are going up because of less available land, higher construction cost and higher wages for construction workers, and so home sizes are shrinking.

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-new-home-sizes-are-shrinking-2017-10

What is interesting is that "shrinking home size" refers to floor area but not to lot size, which began to shrink decades ago.

IIRC, in the 1950s, home sizes (floor area) was half of what it is today and lot sizes were twice of what they are now. (Suburban life was seen as an escape into the countryside.)

The best thing to raise prices might be a carbon tax.

Carbon tax/fee

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax

A carbon tax is a tax levied on the carbon content of fuels.^[1] It is a form of carbon pricing. Revenue obtained via the tax is however not always used to compensate the carbon emissions on which the tax is levied (see implementation). Carbon is present in every hydrocarbon fuel (coal, petroleum, and natural gas) and converted to carbon dioxide (CO
2) and other products when combusted. In contrast, non-combustion energy sources—wind, sunlight, geothermal, hydropower, and nuclear—do not convert hydrocarbons to CO
2. CO
2 is a heat-trapping "greenhouse" gas^[2] which represents a negative externality on the climate system (see scientific opinion on global warming).^[2][3][4] Since GHG emissions caused by the combustion of fossil fuels are closely related to the carbon content of the respective fuels, a tax on these emissions can be levied by taxing the carbon content of fossil fuels at any point in the product cycle of the fuel.

"Compensation" is a big issue here. Compensation refers to a "carbon offset", which is a reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases that is made in order to compensate for or to offset an emission made elsewhere. (One example would be the planting of forests to soak up CO2.)

This is an ideologically charged subject. Basically, conservatives insist that carbon tax revenues be used for carbon offsets (reducing carbon in the atmosphere) or to aid victims of climate change (e.g., Pacific Islanders who are losing their countries to rising sea levels). More specifically, the minimalist goal of conservative social reform would be the compensation of those who are victims of "negative externalities", that is, the activity of others (e.g., compensate people who suffer from air pollution caused by factories, but not compensate people who smoke cigarettes). In a sense, conservatives basically see a carbon tax as a user fee. In contrast, liberals would use carbon tax revenues to help people who would be hurt by a carbon tax (inevitably, the lower classes).

There is even a certain schizophrenia in the Wikipedia article as it toggles from a conservative to a liberal perspective. In the following paragraph, the first sentence articulates the common objective of reducing greenhouse gases; the second and third sentences seem more conservative; the fourth and fifth sentences sound liberal.

Carbon taxes offer a potentially cost-effective means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. From an economic perspective, carbon taxes are a type of Pigovian tax. They help to address the problem of emitters of greenhouse gases not facing the full social cost of their actions. Carbon taxes can be a regressive tax, in that they may directly or indirectly affect low-income groups disproportionately. The regressive impact of carbon taxes could be addressed by using tax revenues to favour low-income groups.

Thus, there can be no passage of a carbon tax because liberals and conservatives want to help different groups of people with the proceeds of a carbon tax. In fact, at a deeper level, liberals and conservatives seem puzzled by each other's commitment to a carbon tax. And deeper than this difference in ideology and worldview and conception of justice is a difference in temperament and character.

As a thought experiment, what exactly would happen in a liberal version of a carbon tax?

Working-class folks living in relatively big houses in the distant suburbs and commuting to work in big trucks and SUVs would be hurt by a carbon tax (it would impact the lower classes much more than the upper classes). The injury would be real, and there would be no real options. So liberal policy would justly and fairly compensate the working-class commuter for the impact of higher cost of living by distributing the revenues of the carbon tax to the lower classes (and the middle class).

Unfortunately, once compensated, these folks would then not change their behavior. They would still live large and drive long distances in giant vehicles. Ultimately, the cost of driving would have to rise for them to change their ways. This is a paradox to rival Jevons paradox.

In another thought experiment, what would be the result of a conservative version of carbon fees?

A conservative version of carbon fees would not compensate the lower classes for the impact of carbon fees. This would disproportionately hurt the lower classes, but fundamentally succeed at altering their behavior toward energy savings (owning smaller vehicles, living closer to work, living in a smaller abode). The revenues of the carbon fees would go to climate remediation programs like planting forests or helping Pacific Islander immigrants in the US who have lost their countries because of climate change. These benefits would be real. The working class would be hurt, but there would be no paradox of using carbon taxes to pay the working class to conduct business as usual.

If there is one problem with the conservative policy of carbon fees other than hurting the most vulnerable citizens, it might be that the policy might be perceived as too effective. A sense of complacency would sink in, and programs that subsidize the development of renewable energy might not be aggressively pursued (although such programs would not contradict carbon fees). There might be a growing sense that the marketplace, now corrected, would take care of the problem of global warming.

The policy that might bridge the gap between liberal carbon taxes and conservative carbon fees might be to "split the difference" in revenue distribution. Half the revenues could go to the lower classes as a form of remediation that would ameliorate the hardships that they would be expected to endure from carbon taxes. The other half of the revenues would go to compensating victims of climate change and preventing climate change. It would be a mutually dissatisfying policy, but successful policy-making is characterized by compromise.