It Takes an Entire Village to Create True Transit Oriented Development
The Problem
Planners learn in planning school that land use and transportation are linked. Historically most settlements developed along transportation corridors, regardless whether transport occurred on water, roads or rails. Still, there is debate about cause and effect. Transportation planners like to say that they build only where people want to go, while land planners accuse misplaced transportation projects of fostering sprawl.
This chicken and egg argument turns into what should be built first in transit oriented development (TOD) where transportation is wanted as the driver for development. Beyond that there are plenty of other problems with TOD, even though everybody seems to want it. As a result, a lot of development winds up to be merely transit adjacent instead of oriented.
TOD isn't made easier by the fact that land use and transportation are typically handled by totally different agencies. While land use is always local, transportation is often not. It may be run by regional or state agencies. Whatever the reach of the transit agency, rarely doe sit understand development or even wants to deal with it.
This article will focus on urban transit and why fostering development around planned or existing transit stations is so darn difficult and what it may take to do it anyway.
Many say at this point, if you talk about urban transit, what is the problem? Any urban area should have density, mixed use, and walkability which, by definition, would make development "transit oriented" anyway. Cities transit oriented development per se, arent they? If it only were so easy!