The New Transit Town: Best Practices In Transit-Oriented Development
272
The New Transit Town: Best Practices In Transit-Oriented Development
272Overview
Transit-oriented development (TOD) seeks to maximize access to mass transit and nonmotorized transportation with centrally located rail or bus stations surrounded by relatively high-density commercial and residential development. New Urbanists and smart growth proponents have embraced the concept and interest in TOD is growing, both in the United States and around the world.
New Transit Town brings together leading experts in planning, transportation, and sustainable design—including Scott Bernstein, Peter Calthorpe, Jim Daisa, Sharon Feigon, Ellen Greenberg, David Hoyt, Dennis Leach, and Shelley Poticha—to examine the first generation of TOD projects and derive lessons for the next generation. It offers topic chapters that provide detailed discussion of key issues along with case studies that present an in-depth look at specific projects. Topics examined include:
- the history of projects and the appeal of this form of development
- a taxonomy of TOD projects appropriate for different contexts and scales
- the planning, policy and regulatory framework of "successful" projects
- obstacles to financing and strategies for overcoming those obstacles
- issues surrounding traffic and parking
- the roles of all the actors involved and the resources available to them
- performance measures that can be used to evaluate outcomes
Case Studies include Arlington, Virginia (Roslyn-Ballston corridor); Dallas (Mockingbird Station and Addison Circle); historic transit-oriented neighborhoods in Chicago; Atlanta (Lindbergh Center and BellSouth); San Jose (Ohlone-Chynoweth); and San Diego (Barrio Logan).
New Transit Town explores the key challenges to transit-oriented development, examines the lessons learned from the first generation of projects, and uses a systematic examination and analysis of a broad spectrum of projects to set standards for the next generation. It is a vital new source of information for anyone interested in urban and regional planning and development, including planners, developers, community groups, transit agency staff, and finance professionals.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781597268943 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Island Press |
| Publication date: | 06/22/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Sales rank: | 732,141 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Hank Dittmar is president and chief executive officer of Reconnecting America, and former executive director of the Surface Transportation Policy Project.
Gloria Ohland is a professional journalist and senior editor with Reconnecting America; she was formerly Southern California director of the Surface Transportation Policy Project.
Reconnecting America is a national organization that seeks to build connections between and among transporation networks and the regions and communities they serve in order to generate lasting public and private returns, improve economic efficiency, and give consumers greater choice.
Read an Excerpt
The New Transit Town
Best Practices in Transit-Oriented Development
By Hank Dittmar, Gloria Ohland
ISLAND PRESS
Copyright © 2004 Hank Dittmar and Gloria OhlandAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59726-894-3
CHAPTER 1
An introduction to oriented development
Census figures for the year 2000 and research by the Brookings Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy and the Fannie Mae Foundation show that this urban rebirth is driven by demographic changes, including the rise in immigration, the aging of baby boomers, and the increase in nonfamily households. These changes add up to a growing market for smaller homes, and the increased popularity of cities. Urban centers are once again seen as attractive, lively places in which to live and work, and as hubs of intellectual and creative capacity.
> The second, and equally powerful, trend is the continuing growth and emerging maturity of America's suburbs, many of which are struggling to become cities in their own right. Suburban areas are increasingly diverse in race, ethnicity, and income, and are increasingly experiencing the pangs of rapid growth. Suburbs need to diversify land uses in order to build more solid revenue bases; they need to create urban centers and address the problem of traffic congestion along overtaxed suburban arterials. In addition, they need to respond to the desires of many suburban residents who have chosen not to move back into cities but who nevertheless want some urban amenities in their towns. In short, suburbs are increasingly being challenged to become more than bedroom communities.
> The third trend is a renewed interest in rail travel and rail investment. Virtually every major city in America is planning some form of urban rail or busway system, and states are joining together to plan and build high-speed rail systems linking metropolitan regions in the West, Midwest, Northeast, and South. In fact, the competition for limited federal funds is so intense that the wait for federal mass transit funding for a new project is estimated at almost fifty years. New rail or rapid bus systems have opened in the past ten years in such nontraditional places as Dallas, Denver, San Diego, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake City, with substantial system expansions underway in virtually every traditional rail city.
> At the convergence of these three trends is the potential for a substantial market for a new form of walkable, mixed-use urban development around new and existing rail or rapid bus stations. Changing demographics are resulting in a need for the diversification of real estate products, and the type of development known variously as transit villages or transit-oriented development is beginning to receive serious attention in markets as diverse as the San Francisco Bay Area, suburban New Jersey, Atlanta, Dallas, and Chicago. These transit-oriented developments have the potential to provide residents with improved quality of life and reduced household transportation expenses, while providing the region with stable mixed-income neighborhoods that reduce environmental impacts and provide real alternatives to traffic congestion. New research clearly shows that this kind of development can reduce household transportation costs, thereby making housing more affordable.
> Sadly, our review of the projects that are emerging across the country reveals that many of the first phases of these new "transit towns" fail to meet these important objectives. Somewhere between the conceptualization and opening day, many projects end up becoming fairly traditional suburban developments that are simply transit-adjacent. Issues include unfriendly zoning codes and parking ordinances. Difficulties in dealing with the institutional complexities are also prevalent, with the chief confusion being the relative roles of local jurisdictions and transit agencies. Financing is difficult as well, with a lack of understanding about how best to finance mixed-use projects, and a lack of intermediary assistance for nonprofits and localities that want to pursue TOD projects that include affordable housing and involve minority-owned businesses.
> The amount of hype around TOD far exceeds the progress to date, with many transit proponents selling new transit investments on the basis of future land-use changes. The result has been that transit opponents have begun to deride TOD as a failure by critiquing the performance of the flawed projects discussed above. This presents a particular challenge for the transit industry, because the long-term success of many projects depends on development trends over which the industry has, at best, only indirect control.
> This book is an attempt to bring clarity to the debate by placing projects in a historical continuum, by creating a performance-oriented definition, and by analyzing and confronting the challenges that have been encountered. The research, which has been sponsored by Reconnecting America through its national Center for Transit-Oriented Development, is an initial step toward bringing TOD to scale as a recognized real estate product in the United States.
> Over the past two years, we have been engaged in a collaborative effort with the Center for Neighborhood Technology, the Congress for the New Urbanism, Strategic Economics, and the Alliance for Transportation Research Institute to answer the question: What will it take to bring TOD to scale in a way that captures its potential economic and environmental advantages? Our work has involved a number of methods of inquiry, including a literature review, practitioner interviews, regional workshops, case studies, geographic information system analysis of travel survey and census data, and the evaluation of existing projects.
> We seek first to understand the challenges faced, then to document the state of the TOD practice, and finally to assemble the resources necessary to assist cities, transit operators, and community groups who wish to undertake these kinds of TOD projects. In particular, we review the first generation of projects, document the progress made in defining the field, and attempt to advance the practice by defining principles to guide the next generation of projects being planned all over the country.
> In our view, successful TOD needs to be mixed-use, walkable, location-efficient development that balances the need for sufficient density to support convenient transit service with the scale of the adjacent community. We intend to develop techniques to help assure that TOD also remains mixed-income in character.
Viewing TOD in Its Historical Context
Transit-oriented development should be viewed in a historical context. Transit has been around since the advent of the horse-drawn streetcar, and cities have always been at least partially shaped by their transportation modes—whether walking, streetcars, or automobiles. In fact, many of the urban design patterns that we seek to restore were common before the advent of the automobile; they simply arose spontaneously in cities for pedestrians. While TOD may not be a new thing, the challenge of adapting it to the auto-oriented metropolis is.
THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY: DEVELOPMENT-ORIENTED TRANSIT
The streetcar suburbs that existed before the 1900s evolved in a setting that no longer exists. Often, the streetcar lines and their adjacent residential communities were developed by a single owner who built transit to add value to the residential development by providing a link between jobs in an urban center and housing at the periphery, or by an entrepreneur who worked hand in hand with the developer. Indeed, the phrase "development-oriented transit" more aptly describes these places than does "transit-oriented development," since private developers built transit to serve their development rather than vice-versa. As part of this formula, streetcar stops often had small retail clusters to serve commuters as well as local residents. These small commercial districts are, to some extent, the precursor of modern TOD and represent a good balance between place and node.
> Urban historian Sam Bass Warner's classic work, Streetcar Suburbs, characterized the way that transit and suburban real estate development worked hand in hand to decentralize the American city. The key to this was what Warner calls "a two part city: a city of work separated from a city of homes." Warner's study focused on Boston, but a similar model existed in Los Angeles as well. Planning professor Martin Wachs and others have chronicled the way that streetcar systems made the growth of suburban communities such as Glendale, Santa Monica, and Pasadena possible in Los Angeles between 1870 and 1910.
> However, the interdependence between housing, jobs, and transit inherent in the early streetcar suburbs was broken apart by the automobile and, starting in the 1930s, roads, including highways, became the preferred transportation infrastructure in America. Development was no longer dependent on transit, the link between transit and development was broken, and developers got out of the business of building—or even thinking much about—transit systems.
THE POSTWAR YEARS: AUTO-ORIENTED TRANSIT
The postwar period saw a precipitous decline in transit use and the dismantling and abandonment of many rail systems. Buses became the primary mode of transit in most regions. Bus systems are subservient to the automobile, because they use the same streets and contend with the same congestion, but don't perform as well. And in most cases bus service has less influence on land-use patterns than fixed-rail transit. Transit became the travel mode of last resort and ceased to shape development, except in some of the commuter suburbs around older cities such as Boston, New York, and Chicago, which continued to function reasonably well as transit-based communities.
> As congestion worsened, a new generation of transit systems was planned and built. The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), and the Washington (D.C.) Metropolitan Area Transit Agency (WMATA) all opened during the 1970S. These systems were built with a different rationale than their predecessors. They were built primarily to relieve congestion, their funding was provided entirely by the public sector, and little or no additional land was purchased by the transit agencies to ensure that there would be a link between these transit investments and future development patterns.
> These systems were also explicitly designed to work with the automobile, under the assumption that most people would drive to suburban stations rather than walk, bike, or ride the bus. What's more, they were viewed as primarily serving a regional purpose, and the individual stations were considered nodes within this larger system, with little concern about making them sensitive to the places in which they were located. Because of this, many stations were surrounded by large amounts of parking rather than being integrated into the neighborhoods they served; these large surface parking lots or structures created barriers between the station and the community.
> While these systems all play an important role—it is difficult to imagine Washington, D.C., without the Metro or the San Francisco Bay Area without BART—they are showing their limitations. Despite some success, they fall short of providing the full range of benefits that transit can stimulate. In general, they fail to contribute to neighborhood revitalization, to reduce automobile dependency significantly, or to encourage more efficient regional land-use patterns. In short, the idea that development should be linked to transit generally was not part of the philosophy of these systems.
TODAY: TRANSIT-RELATED DEVELOPMENT
Rail systems usually enhance the value of adjacent land, and transit agencies and the federal government see large-scale real estate development on property owned by transit agencies as a way to "capture" some of that value. While this return is not necessarily sufficient to pay the total cost of the rail investment, it at least partially reimburses public coffers. For this reason, transit agencies and the federal government have an interest in promoting intense development around transit stations. This "joint development" approach has been used with notable success in locations around the country, including downtown San Diego, Washington, D.C., and Portland.
> This form of transit-related development is problematic because it almost inevitably leads to a narrow definition of the relationship between transit and development. The emphasis of most joint development—which until the 1990s was virtually the only form of TOD pursued— has been on dense, profitable real estate development aimed at generating revenue for the transit agency and the federal government. Projects were predicated on a purely financial rationale rather than a broad vision of how transit could work in tandem with surrounding development. As later sections explain, the goal of maximizing revenue from ground rents often works at cross-purposes with other goals. In other words, the "highest and best use" in financial terms is not always the best for either transit users or the neighborhood.
> There is increasing evidence that TOD can provide many other benefits besides capturing increases in land value. The last decade saw subtle but promising shifts in the landscape of transit and development, with the convergence of a number of trends: growing transit ridership, increased investment in transit (even in auto-dominated cities like Los Angeles and Dallas), frustration with congestion and sprawl, smart growth movements, New Urbanism, and, in general, a greater recognition of the advantages of linking development and transit.
> Architect and urbanist Peter Calthorpe, who brought together the notion of the pedestrian pocket with the idea of planning development around transit stations, largely sparked the new interest in development around transit. In both his design practice and his writing he advanced the concept of mixed-use development and density around transit, and was enormously influential among planners and local officials beginning in the 1990s. Calthorpe's book, The Next American Metropolis, written with associate Shelley Poticha, began to articulate the urban design principles associated with TOD:
• Organize growth on a regional level to be compact and transit-supportive.
• Place commercial, housing, jobs parks, and civic uses within walking distance of transit stops.
• Create pedestrian-friendly street networks that directly connect local destinations.
• Provide a mix of housing types, densities, and costs.
• Preserve sensitive habitat, riparian zones, and high-quality open space.
• Make public spaces the focus of building orientation and neighborhood activity.
• Encourage infill and redevelopment along transit corridors within existing neighborhoods.
> Sadly, many of the projects Calthorpe planned were either turned over to different architects or altered during the development phase, leaving much of his early TOD work frustratingly unrealized. Perhaps his efforts have most paid off in Portland, Oregon, where years of collaboration with Poticha and planner John Fregonese on regional and transit-oriented development planning have resulted in an impressive emphasis on walkable mixed-use development focused on the emerging transit and streetcar systems.
> The academic most associated with the concept of TOD is Robert Cervero, professor of planning at the University of California at Berkeley. Cervero's research has centered on the relationship between transit and metropolitan development, and he has consistently stressed the relationship between urban form and the type of transit best suited to serving a particular urban form. In two books—Transit Villages in the Twenty-First Century, written with Michael Bernick, an attorney and former member of the board of directors of BART, and Transit Metropolis— Cervero used a case study approach to gather much new evidence about both styles of transit and styles of development.
> Many of the projects in the United States that were studied and written about by Calthorpe and Cervero existed only as plans, or as transit-oriented zoning codes or design guidelines. Now, a decade later, we can look at the first generation of development projects around these new transit corridors to assess how well they lived up to their potential.
> A closer look at TOD projects around the country shows that most still fall short of providing the full range of potential benefits. Projects that clearly could take advantage of being adjacent to transit to reduce parking still use standard parking ratios, indicating an underlying assumption that these projects will primarily be auto-oriented. Projects that contain a variety of uses still lack an "appropriate" mix—that is, the specific uses have not been selected to create an internal synergism but have only responded to more general market conditions. Residential projects rarely include units targeted at a mix of income groups or household sizes, but are focused on one particular market segment, be it subsidized projects targeted to lower-income households or luxury units for young singles and empty nesters.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The New Transit Town by Hank Dittmar, Gloria Ohland. Copyright © 2004 Hank Dittmar and Gloria Ohland. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Tables, Figures, and PhotosForeword
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. An Introduction to Transit-Oriented Development
Chapter 2. Defining Transit-Oriented Development: The New Regional Building Block
Chapter 3. The Transit-Oriented Development Drama and Its Actors
Chapter 4. Regulations Shape Reality: Zoning for Transit-Oriented Development
Chapter 5. Financing Transit-Oriented Development
Chapter 6. Traffic, Parking, and Transit-Oriented Development
Chapter 7. The Arlington County Case Study: Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor
Chapter 8. The Dallas Case Study; Mockingbird Station and Addison Circle
Chapter 9. The Atlanta Case Study; Lindbergh City Center
Chapter 10. The San Jose Case Study; Ohlone-Chynoweth STation
Chapter 11. The San Diego Case Study; Barrio Logan's Mercado Project
Chapter 12. The New Transit Town: Great Places and Great Nodes that Work for Everyone
Index