Trip Planner Magazine, Summer 2009

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PO Box 1071 Thomasville, GA 31799-1071 8 5 0 . 5 9 7. 0 3 3 8 editor@tripplannermag.com

Vol II, No. 1 Summer 2009 Trip Planner Magazine is a registered trademark of: The Scheib Company Samuel L. Scheib PRESIDENT AND PUBLISHER P.O. Box 1071 Thomasville, GA 31799-1071 Trip Planner Magazine was born of the camaraderie and exchange of ideas found at transit conferences and is intended to enlighted, inform, and even entertain professionals in the field of urban mass transportation. We take a broad view of transit planning to encompass route structure, customer service, marketing and printing materials, service efficiencies, contracting, map making and many other related disciplines that make transit better for passengers, public agencies, and the built environment.

Trip Planner is published quarterly and mailed to transit agencies, metropolitan planning organizations, collegiate schools of planning, state departments of transportation, Federal Transit Administration offices, transit manufacturers, consultants, and other vendors, and other interested parties.

Subsciptions: send an e-mail request to: subs@tripplannermag.com

C o ve r in g Th e Ar t an d Sci e nc e of Tra ns it

Trip Planner accepts unsolicited manuscripts and queries.

Send hard copies to the above address or email: editor@tripplannermag.com All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited.

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=$#$#Q$%6/@&03$&%$8M& 9%.QM$# Driving is easy in a bust town, those western places where the gold or the oil dried up; traffic is light when there are few places to stop. For this reason bad economies are great for commuters; fewer people going to work means fewer people clogging the transportation network. Expensive fuel also has a depressive affect on vehicle miles traveled. Growing concerns over human ecology (my preferred term to “the environment”) has also shifted some people to walking, bicycling, and transit.

However those headwaters of green, gas, and gigs converge, you have probably noticed congestion easing a little bit in recent years; this will end soon. The economy is going to improve and people are going to head back to work, maybe even in Michigan. Someone will earn the automotive X Prize for creating a production car that gets 100 miles to the gallon; Michigan definitely gets back to work. New auto technologies will emerge: better batteries, advanced solar cells, hydrogen, or cold fusion may make the internal combustion engine obsolete. Or perhaps in the scariest scenario of all some Saudi prince with a Harvard geology degree will discover a massive deposit of light sweet crude and oil drops to $10 bbl. Per Doonesbury, GM rolls out the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, family edition.

Greener technologies, higher mileage vehicles or cheaper gas, and a resurgent economy will flood our nation’s roadways, and when this happens we will remember what the real problem is: at speed on an interstate, a Prius takes up just about as much space as a Hummer and parking spaces mostly come standard for every car. In the late 1990s and early 2000s TIME and U.S. News had cover stories on congestion; the planning buzz phrase at the time was “we can’t build our way out of this.” They were wrong.

We can build our way out, just not by building roads.

The coming congestion nightmare, I’ll call it Carmageddon, will be a boon to transit. In her outstanding 1997 book Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay described attending two conferences, one of neo-hippie granola types, bike-ped-transit advo-

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cates in Birkenstocks bemoaning the sorry state of the automobile; the other was a meeting of the Institute of Transportation Engineers and what were they discussing? The sorry state of the automobile. Construction costs were rising and moreover there simply was no room to build. They had spent decades building roads, then decades making them bigger and there was not much room left to grow and yet congestion was untamed.

It is said, “Transportation is everything.” I would add that land use is everything else with the caveat that the reverse might also be true. There is a vicious piece of circular reasoning that has fueled the long rise of auto-dominated infrastructure: the automobile takes us farther faster, so we need to build more and bigger roads to get us there. At the same time, the automobile is the reason we have so far to go and the better things get for cars (more lanes, long right turn lanes, right turn channelization islands) the worse things are for transit.

Transit’s modest 2% national trip share points to the age-old transit conundrum of the chicken and the egg. More people would use transit if it was better (more frequent, going to more places, using fixed guideway), but it is difficult to justify the additional expense for a mode with such a small share of trips.

Carmageddon will present us with the perfect opportunity to cut the Gordian Knot. Transit is the cheapest and easiest way to increase capacity and increased densities, especially for employment, directly correlate with increased transit use. Please find inside this issue of Trip Planner some strategies for fixing our broken landscape. I hope you find it useful.

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7%8/160&7691?&76#$&6/&4ST$M Some transit professionals have access to advanced planning software, but many still have to resort to using a spreadsheet, even if just to make a printed schedule for public consumption. Here are some tips for creating a basic time spreadsheet that can be copied and reused for very quick schedule making.

No doubt you already know to format a cell for time so that 8 reads 8:00. (If not got to FORMAT CELLS, select the NUMBER tab, the TIME category, and select 13:30).

To establish a headway of 30 minutes, in the cell beneath the start time, in this case, 8:00 in cell A1, use the formula A1+TIME(0,30,0); the numbers in parentheses mean hours, minutes, and seconds, so if you wanted an hour headway you could put (1,0,0) or (0,60,0). If you grab the lower right-hand corner and drag down you will have 30-minute intervals as far down as you drag.

If later you want to change the headway it would be cumbrous to go back and

change the 30 in each cell, so it is better to put a “headway cell” at the top and then reference it in the formula by placing a $ between the letter and number of the cell, in this example “A$2” You can then add stops. For schedules, time points are adequate but if for some reason you wanted to have the time of each stop (perhaps for a downtown circulator), that can be accomplished just as easily. At the top of the spread sheet put the number of minutes between each time point or stop, beginning in B1. If the first time point is 10 minutes after the departure time, simply put 10 in B1 and then continue in C1, D1, etc. In B2 type =A2+TIME(0,B$1,0). Then drag down to fill the cells below. Highlight all the numbers in column B and drag to the right to fill in all cells remaining.

At this point you should have a full schedule with half-hour increments vertically and 10-minute increments (or whatever you chose) horizontally. This schedule works fine if you are a European or a member of the armed forces; the rest of us use the 12-hour clock and those 13:00s after noon could be a problem. You could manually change 13:00 to 1:00 but then the formula will be deleted and any change you make later, say adding an earlier run, will mean having to change afternoon times again and this can easily lead to mistakes, namely phantom military times around the schedule.

As far as we know this cannot be fixed with formatting except to have “AM” and “PM” in every cell, but that would be cluttered. There is, however, a way to trick Excel into using the 12-hour clock: use an IF statement to tell the program that if the result of a calculation (i.e. adding 30 minutes to 12:30) is 13:00 or higher to subtract 12:00. It looks like this: =IF(A4+TIME(0,A$2,0)>=TIMEVALUE(“13:00”),(A4+TIME(0,A$2,0)-TIMEVALUE(“12:0 0”)),(A4+TIME(0,A$2,0))) The English translation is loosely: If (the result of adding the headway in A2 (to the 8:00 in A4) is greater than or equal to (13:00), (then subtract from that number (12 hours), but if not leave it alone.) Instead of trying to type this out, you can find a sample spreadsheet at tripplannermag.com. Good luck!

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Some thoughts on the inaugural issue from our readers.

KUDOS Trip Planner Magazine is great. I am a transit planning profes­ sional who focuses his practices on the next evolution of planning for communities. As a key component of progressive communities, transit is increasingly playing a role. Trip Planner speaks to that new genera­ tion of planners who are trying to make towns, cities and metropolitan areas more connected and accessi­ ble. You have hit the nail on the head by providing information that other magazines have had a hard time continually addressing. Many of the transit trade magazines do a great job discussing the traditional aspects of transit: bus design, maintenance and operational dynamics. Planning, however, has been largely ignored.

Trip Planner is the right mag­ azine at the right time in the transit profession. I look forward to the next issue.

Brad Sheffield, Charlottesville, VA !

I wanted to let you know that I loved your first edition. I read it cover to cover – great articles and very well written. I really like the practical focus of the articles – ex­ plaining the how and why of things vs. just the “buzz words”. Again, a great job with the first edition.

Jamie Cochran Atlanta, GA !

Good effort for a first issue. I enjoyed the writing style, choice of subjects and coherent and appar­ ently knowledgeable analysis. It’s re­

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freshing. Your Charter Rules article is a good example. Short of a research paper, most writers wouldn’t know about the evolution of UMTA/FTA attempts going back to the 1970’s.

Your parsing of the Charter Rules and application to football game shuttles is excellent.

Gene Eddy Sheveport, LA

ever, the simple truth is that mass transit can never be successful where populations are extremely dispersed.

I think Trip Planner is off to a good start, and I wish you the best in its future development.

Todd Gordon Charlottesville, VA "

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Great work, we were way overdue for our own magazine, now we need our own association! I am sharing the good news with transit planners in my region, South Texas.

Tom Logan Brownsville, TX !

I’m writing to thank you for producing an interesting and use­ ful new publication, and one whose appearance, I feel, is very timely.

Although we haven’t seen a major shift in transportation ideology in the US since the suburban migration following World War II, the events of 2008 have forced many to think about transportation in a new way. With gas prices cresting in the summer of 2008 at alarming levels, many drivers were left wondering what their op­ tions were. The unfortunate answer for many is that there are no other options.

As a planner and urban designer, I am constantly confront­ ing the interplay of buildings and the need to move to and from them.

From this point of view, perhaps my favorite part of the inaugural (fall 2008) issue was the promise of an issue on land use to follow. I think that too many people see transit as solely a transportation issue. How­

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I just wanted to send along a quick note to tell you that and I came away very impressed by the first is­ sue of Trip Planner. The articles are of substantial quality, the presenta­ tion is excellent, and the graphics are very nicely integrated into the text.

So kudos to you and the Trip Planner team for producing a magazine that I think will be of real value to transit planning professionals, and planning professionals more generally.

Dr. Tim Chapin Tallahassee, FL !

SORRY, BADGERS As an alumni of both Univer­ sity of Wisconsin­Madison (BA ‘04) and Florida State University (DURP ‘07) I thoroughly enjoyed this edi­ tion of your magazine. It was highly informative and I look forward to future issues. However, the Badger in me forces me to note an error in your article, “Getting to U”. As the State system’s flagship university, Universi­ ty of Wisconsin­Madison’s abbrevia­ tion is UW. UWM stands for a different university in the system, University of Wisconsin­Milwaukee. Not that big of a difference but an important one to the alumni of UW. Daniel A. Dargevics Blountstown, FL

>9580$?&-38%0$%&=$@1 In the Fall 2008 issue, Trip Planner addressed the recent FTA Charter Regulation and noted some confusion with Question 23 related to connectivity. Question 23 asks: “What if a university pays the transit agency to provide shuttle service that does not connect to the transit agency’s regular routes, it that charter? A: Yes. The service is provided at the request of a third party, the university, for the exclusive use of a bus or van by the university students and faculty for a negotiated price.” Our concern was that the question related to connectivity to the greater transit network but the answer dealt with exclusivity.

We contacted FTA and in response they sent a recent ruling resulting from a complaint by John Miller, a local transportation provider, to a service provided by the Transit Authority of River City (TARC) to the University of Louisville (UL). Route 94 (aka “Cardinal Shuttle” and “Black Loop”) is subsidized

by UL through student fees and operates only on the UL campus. The route does appear on TARC system maps and its information appears with other routes in printed information. Mr. Miller noted in his complaint that route 94 was not part of the trip planning function on the website,

and more tellingly, the route had no connection points listed on the route map whereas every other route did. He claimed also that a pass was required to ride and although free it took 48 hours notice to obtain one.

Connectivity was the primary concern here and FTA found that the route 94 did not, in fact, share a stop with any other route and “in order to utilize the UL shuttle service in conjunction with one of the other routes that serves the UL campus, riders, in many cases, must walk significant distances.” FTA includes a handy definition for connectivity: “Connected [means] routes that share a bus stop or station that would allow a rider to travel easily between routes with a transfer ticket and without a significant walking distance.”

For good measure, FTA offered a definition of exclusive in the same opinion: “service that a reasonable person would conclude is intended to exclude members of the public.”

FTA issued a cease and desist order to TARC for route 94. Let’s take a moment to learn from TARC. If you are operating university shuttle services, you may want to review their connectivity to other “street” services.

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DENVER’S SKYLINE WITH UNION STATION IN THE FOREGROUND. THE MILE HIGH CITY HAS HAD GREAT SUCCESS WITH LIGHT RAIL

DENSITY, DIVERSIDESIGN DOWNTOWN.

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hen rail transit was privately run and large tracts of land were owned by a few tycoons (often the same fellows who owned the railroads), the development of railroad towns went hand in glove with the development of rail service. Train companies laid down their tracks and towns formed along them (or towns were built first by speculators hoping to entice rail lines their way). The dependence upon rail as the fastest mode of transportation – both long-distance and short – kept development huddled close to the lines, surrounded by open space and farmland.

Rail was king for about a century in America, reigning until

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the 1920s when mass production of automobiles and public investments in highways got underway.

After World War II, when Eisenhower put the wheels in motion to build the interstate highway system, new development was drawn to roads like flies to honey.

Suburbs, which had formerly been organized in self-contained, pedestrian-scaled grids around commuter rail stations, began to spread out along the expanding network of highways and arterials.

Transit in all but our largest, oldest cities appeared dead as a doornail, along with the highdensity, walkable neighborhoods required to support it. But a resur-

rection of sorts is beginning to take place. A growing variety of people, from young “creative class” adults to active “WOOFs” (Well-Off-OldFolks), are rediscovering old towns and urban centers as places where they can enjoy everything life has to offer without needing a car.

Meanwhile, suburban families are pressuring their elected officials to make their communities easier and safer to navigate by foot or bike, spurred by commuters seeking relief from skyrocketing gas prices and parents seeking ways for their children to get urgently-needed exercise. And making these automobile-oriented communities pedestrian-friendly is

Directions Providing safe and efficient public transportation options is a goal of communities everywhere. But selecting the best modal choice, securing funding and garnering public acceptance can be a daunting task.

HDR’s transit team can guide you in the right direction. In addition to traditional planning and design capabilities, our multi-modal experts are skilled in FTA processes, economic analysis and alternative delivery. Across the globe, we’re helping communities turn transit visions into successful mobility solutions.

No matter which direction you are heading, HDR can get you there. www.hdrinc.com/transit

“. . . the spirit of Animal House was in !"##$%&"'()*+,

TRANSIT Transit comes in many forms, including heavy rail, commuter rail, light rail, buses, and boats. Different types of transit require different mixes of “the four Ds” – density (e.g. dwelling units per acre and floor area ratio), diversity (mix of activities), design (scale and orientation of streets and buildings), and destination (proximity of locations) – as noted in the following summary.

Heavy Rail (aka subway or metro). The New York subway and the Chicago “EL” are among America’s earliest heavy rail systems; examples of post 1960 systems include “MARTA” in Atlanta, the Washington D.C. “Metro” and San Francisco’s “BART.” There are no new heavy rail systems planned in the U.S. or Canada, but some of the existing ones are expanding. They serve very high-density, mixed-use areas, running along fixed guideways (i.e., tracks) at high speeds. Stations are typically located anywhere from half-a-mile to two miles apart.

Commuter Rail. This is very heavy rail, usually diesel operated trains, focused on providing high-speed access between the suburbs and downtown. Examples include the Long Island Railroad and Chicago’s Metra. The suburban locations are usually fairly high-density, but not necessarily organized as mixed-use centers. For example, sometimes the station is just a

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the first step, literally and figuratively, toward making transit work.

From a planner’s perspective, our nation’s renewed interest in public transit presents a great opportunity to explore and promote development patterns that renew our communities. No doubt you’ve heard the phrase “transit-oriented development.” Here follows a brief introduction, word-by-word.

FROM TOP: HEAVY RAIL IN MOSCOW; LRT IN NEW JERSEY; VINTAGE PHILLY STREETCAR; MODERN STREETCAR IN PORTLAND; R ENO BUSES; UTA COMMUTER TRAIN

platform surrounded by parking.

Light Rail/Streetcar (aka trolley or tram). Older cities such as Boston and San Francisco have held on to their light rail lines, and newer lines have been built in numerous cities such as Dallas, Portland, and St. Louis. Light rail is all the rage for major cities – if they haven’t built one yet, they’re considering it. The cars run along tracks in the street or on separate rights-of-way, and can serve lower densities than heavy rail, but still need to be located in established urban areas to succeed. Light rail stops can be placed closer together than heavy rail stations. [there are differences between LRT and streetcar and these will be discussed in the next issue. Ed.] Buses (aka “old stinky” or “new spiffy”). Buses are by far the most frequently used form of public transit in America, accounting for two thirds of our nation’s transit trips. Buses serve all sorts of density levels, from the teeming streets of Manhattan to the suburban highway that leads to your local Wal*Mart. They run on existing roadways, and are thus much more flexible than rail systems–but also less reliable, since they can easily get stuck in traffic. Buses are not fixed-guideway (like trains) and as such are not as attractive for development.

Some cities are attracting more middle- and upper-class riders to their bus systems by upgrading the fleet. Clean fuels, sparkling interiors, brightly painted vehicles and easy-to-understand routes, like Boulder’s “Hop, Skip and Jump,” are important starting points to erase the often-held stigma that buses are only for the poor. However, traditional on-road buses must share the road with automobile traffic, which often impedes the frequency, timeliness, and predictability of service – critical elements for drawing potential transit rid-

ers out of their cars.

Bus Rapid Transit (aka “BRT,” “express-bus,” or “busways”). BRT is a popular, emerging blend of light rail and bus technologies. BRT vehicles, designed to look more like attractive rail cars than traditional buses, can run along fixed guideways or regular highways, offering both flexibility and speed. They can serve a variety of density levels, and stations can be placed about 0.5 to 1 mile apart. Curitiba, Brazil, is the poster child for BRT-based smart growth. Their system serves a suburban population base that was struggling with heavy freeway congestion. BRT has been the genesis for pulling together sprawling suburban development patterns into higherdensity, mixed-use centers.

Ferries. Before rail, communities accessible by navigable waterways were prime locations for development and they still are. Vancouver, Canada, famous for its livable, walkable design, attracts riders from numerous public and private ferries to its downtown waterfront transit station. By maximizing and coordinating all types of transit modes with development programs over the past 20 years, the city has decreased daily vehicle volumes by five percent, while increasing transit ridership by forty percent.

ORIENTED The critical thing about making TOD work is to ensure that development actually is oriented around the station. That means enabling people to walk easily between the station and the destina-

tions it serves. Sounds simple, but it’s amazing how often we get this wrong. The devil is in the details.

My esteemed, often irreverent, colleague Reid Ewing introduced me to TOD’s evil twin brother, TAD: Transit Adjacent Development. TAD features buildings near transit stops that have no functional relationship to transit. The diversity tends more toward single uses, and the design is anything but walkable. Much more land is dedicated to surface parking, for example, which is not usually hospitable to pedestrians. All this adds up to a worst-case scenario: all the density without any of the design.

Not surprisingly, it falls a “tad” short in promoting transit ridership.

Here are a few basics to keep in mind when planing TOD versus TAD: Locate the transit stop in the center of the neighborhood rather than on its periphery. Put major trip generators (offices, commercial retail, and high-density housing) and public plazas within a quarter-mile (5-minute walk) of the station. Gradually step down densities outside the half-mile circle.

Don’t waste an inch of land

LINDBERGH CITY CENTER, HOME TO TWO TOWERS OF THE BELL SOUTH CORPORATION AND A MARTA STATION HAS STRUGGLED TO GET TENANTS IN ITS GROUND-FLOOR RETAIL.

WHILE

THE DEVELOPMENT IS QUALITY, THE LAND USES AROUND IT ARE AUTO ORIENTED AND DO NOT CONNECT WITH

LINDBERGH. on surface parking. Put it underground or over top of the first floor.

Put park-and-ride lots outside the immediate station area, but still within a half-mile (10-minute walk).

Maximize the land around transit centers for a dense array of activities to which people can easily walk. No transit station is an island.

Plan out the entire transit corridor, complementing the spacing and design of stations with appropriate development patterns. The stations can feature different densities and diversities of development, but they must all have one thing in common: walkability.

Incorporate all the elements that promote walking. This includes: compact blocks; safe and attractive walkways (don’t forget shelter from rain and sun); continuous street fronts (no gap-

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ing holes between buildings like surface parking lots); well-marked, pedestrian-scaled signage and doorways; street furniture (movable benches, trash cans, etc.) and public art; and appropriate amenities such as public restrooms for tourists. Remember that walking is easy and comfortable in visually stimulating places.

Visit the Project for Public Spaces website (www.pps.org) for an extensive, research-based inventory of the good, the break a pedestrian-friendly place.

DEVELOPMENT Transit goes TO nowhere without the D. No transit system will do well if it attempts to serve development that isn’t suited to

the given market. A new transit station won’t invite development all by itself. The development market, especially for retail, is not dependent upon transit accessibility; it is dependent upon the right amount of customers within the right proximity. Lenders, investors, and developers want, first and foremost, the best possible “location, location, location” for the market they are seeking to attract.

When it comes to planning the location, density, and mix of proposed stations and transit villages, planners need to work closely with developers to understand their market. If it doesn’t make sense from a market perspective to put in certain types of retail, don’t force the developer

to do it. Nothing is more depressing than a new transit village with shuttered stores. One final, but important, point about transitoriented development – it typically increases property values. Research findings point to an average 10 to 20 percent increase in value for development located close to a transit station – one more reason why TOD has become an increasingly popular acronym in cities across the U.S. and Canada, and around the world.

Hannah Twaddell is a Principal Planner in the Charlottesville, Virginia office of Renaissance Planning Group.

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long the northwest coast of Florida two communities, next-door neighbors, face the Gulf of Mexico: Seaside and Watercolor. Seaside was built entirely as private property because roads made to public standards did not fit with the developers’ concept. Public thoroughfares for cars, bicycles, or pedestrians, are narrow and usually in close proximity to something else like a fence, parked cars, trees, or a building, most of which are tightly spaced. It is an environment where drivers feel compelled to move slowly and everyone else feels safe. People comfortably walk to the beach or to the town center, the point from which the street network emanates.

The other development, Watercolor, is connected to the first by a multi-use path along the waterfront. It also has a commercial center, relatively high density, and bike/ped amenities, but it was built to code and its streets are ready to accept freight deliveries. Watercolor, built by the St. Joe Land Company, is the corporate expression of the same train of thought that produced neighboring Seaside, the original New Urban (NU) village from architects Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and thus demonstrating NU’s commercial viability.

New Urbanism’s stock-in-trade is tradition, realized with the front porches, picket fences, and rear alleys that are not useful to transit, and with the greater densities and gridded street networks that are. At the same time, the scale of these projects dictate that they be built on the fringe of the urban area where land is cheap so NU is distant greenfield development, the dread of transit.

New Urbanism is a market response to consumers who long for the cozy neighborhoods of the pre-war era experienced by most of these people as only images in a grandparent’s photo album. A review of contemporary New Urbanist communities

THE CLOSELY-SPACED HOUSES OF SOUTHWOOD LOOK GREAT AND ARE AT HIGH DENSITIES FOR SUBURBAN DEVELOPMENT. THEY EVEN HAVE SOME TRANSIT SERVICE. THAT LOOKS TO BE AN EXCEPTION. reveals that NU’s aspiration to recreate the compact neighborhoods of our grandparents has been realized with mixed results with regard to transit.

METHODOLOGY Over 20 years into the New Urbanist experiment, thinkers from various perspectives have defined New Urbanism differently. For the purpose of the current examination, I adopt a transit planning perspective and define New Urbanism thusly: greenfield development with relatively closely spaced houses, multiple polygons (i.e. a street grid vs loops and lollipops), and good pedestrian connections. To examine the degree to which these greenfield, New Urbanist developments have succeeded in achieving the nostalgic, cozy and compact neighborhoods of yore, I created a list of 375 “new urban” communities compiled from internet lists of NU projects. Using Microsoft Excel, I utilized the random sample generator to select 35 and then went through them to determine how they fit the above definition of NU. The resulting sample yielded seventeen projects summarized in the table below.

Analysis of these developments resulted in each one being placed in one of three categories: New Vacationism, Great Pretenders, and Transit Abled.

NEW VACATIONISM New Vacationism describes developments that are not part of an urban area and are thus primarily places of rest or retirement. To use our first example, Seaside is neither an old town nor an old

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neighborhood. Towns have jobs that support their own residents and neighborhoods are integral parts towns, like patches on a quilt. To be certain, Seaside is a resort, as is Watercolor next door; year-round residents are mostly retirees. Vacationers are paying for a bit of fantasy, a distilled version of the past, and that spirit animates 4 projects in the sample.

Pitchfork near Crested Butte, Colorado does not precisely fit the resort category. About 60% of the homes are occupied by residents and 40% by vacationers. The goal of the development is admirable: to provide affordable housing for resort workers. Larger units are 2,500 square feet, and

the small ones only 850. This is a western-themed version of Seaside and they do indulge in some of the silliness that characterizes such projects; some of the old timey houses with brand new rusty rooves have garages, but those that do not can use common “parking barns,” perhaps an appropriate place for all that horsepower.

Owl’s Head in Freeport, FL and Tannin in Orange Beach, AL are both on or near the Gulf of Mexico and follow closely the Seaside model. As a matter of fact, Owl’s Head is another Duany PlaterZyberk project. Cottages at Lites Woods in Pentwater, MI is a lake resort and one of the few NU places in our dataset not to have its own town center. That is good news for Pentwater, the type of !"#$!%&'$ small old community with a down%($)&*+,$-#./$ town that NU emulates. Authentic was meticulously small town downtowns have planned by masters of the Traditional Neighborhood much in common with NU It’s Development to ensure the about town centers in that sense of community that so driving less they tend to favor and doing more, many of us crave. Owl’s the boutique. It is where it’s easy to head features a “conceptditch the keys and lace up nice that Lites based design,” allowing the sneaks for a walk to school, the entire town to flow Woods is the coffee shop, the park, the golf organically through course, or the 9 to 5. . . Established not taking character and function. in 1997, =*3<$;4##8$is a 2200-acre, away From the wide range of mixed-use, master-planned commufrom nity 20 minutes south of downresidentail options to

downtown Pentwater.

In Th

eir W ords

GREAT PRETENDERS It is hard to begrudge people on vacation their druthers. If a man wants to chew saltwater taffy in his boardshorts with his children in a somewhat artificial “traditional town center” well, that is no different from Main Street in DisneyWorld or anything a tourist would do in the Bahamas. NU looses much of its luster, in the eyes of this author, when it is applied to urbanized, if not urban, areas because it is often too distant to reasonably be served by transit as is the case with 9 of 17 projects in the sample (13 of 17 if you include the resorts). Lites Woods notes on its website that this community is “ready for play and relaxation. All you have to do is get here.” [italics added]. That is fine for a vacation destination, but a different challenge for neighborhoods where people really live and getting there can only be accomplished in an automobile.

“Forget Your Car,” is the title of a video about Mt. Laurel near Birmingham, AL on its website.

Mt. Laurel has all the stuff that is expected of NU; you can “stroll . town Austin. Using New Urbanist the pedestrain-friendly . . tree-lined streets and five-foot principles, Plum Creek affords squares and walkways . . .

Welresidents to live, work, and sidewalks and take a step back in come to play in a walkable, time in all the right ways.” Town the award tree-lined comwinning !%&'$%($!9%:.

Commons in Howell, MI munity.

–where casual elegance, classic Cut advertises “The neighcharm and luscious green space into the land with It’s borhood store, just free you from the stresses of a new respect for nature, 01$2.34#*$offers daily life. Voted “Best Commuvillage. But in a short stroll all the comforts of small town life with nity of the Millennium,” this many ways it feels like the amenities necessary for living in away,” Traditional Neighborhood an old village, with a Main the 21st century. Stroll our tree-lined Development features streets and five-foot sidewalks and unmatched craftsmanship, take a step back in time in all the exquisite amenities and a right ways [with] comforts you ex- sense of community that pect and the extras you deserve. you’ve dreamed of calling

Tree-lined streets.

Picket fences and parks.

Front porches and sidewalks. Good neighbors and friends. The neighborhood store, just a short stroll away. A safe, good place to live, to raise a family.

A real community. That’s what !%&'$;%<<%', is all about.

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your own.

73,89'$-#9:"1, is a place for truly pursuing the art of life. A masterplanned, mixed-use community where life’s most frequent destinations are within walking distance. A place of winding paths and rolling hills, public squares and neighborhood gatherings, generous parks and time-honored architecture.

Street and an interesting mix of homes, shops, cafes and ;.:.'$ workplaces. That’s because it’s ;4%,,9':,, the built on the timeless principles Great American Neighof traditional neighborhood borhood. Imagine a whole design. These principles are town designed for walking - to common sense ideas about the store, town square and how to build a real community... gardens, library, restaurants, how to help people feel more and even an old fashioned connected to their neighbors ice cream parlor. A town and their neighborhood... and with all the perks of modern how to create lasting value. living, fashioned in the image What’s amazing is not that of small-town charm and 54./634'$embodies these convenience. principles - but that so many new neighborhoods have forgotten them.

and Plein Air (Taylor, MS) perhaps best summarizes the phenomenon: “The way it used to be before the automobile came to dominate our lives. Houses close together with front porches that encourage interaction with your neighbor. Sidewalks that make it easy to walk.”

Among the Pretenders, Ruskin Heights in Fayetteville, AR uses the greatest hyperbole, stating that “life’s most frequent destinations are within walking distance.” For most people, life’s most frequent destination is work and few if any residents of Ruskin Heights will be strolling there. Transit may not be the easiest way to go shopping at the grocery store or Home Depot, especially in the South and West where NU thrives and densities are low overall. But for the non-retail sector, the work trip will be at the same time, from the same origin, to the same destination, along the same path 240 times per year; the shear predictability of the work trip is perfect for transit and is a pity that these neighborhoods are not able to combine their density and accessibility with transit.

agement/planning/transit apparatus was at the table for this development but the project started in 1997 when gas was still under a dollar a gallon and GM was enjoying huge profits from selling SUVs; transit was not on the radar. Even still the developer was required to provide six bus shelters in the development order; a bus or some operating funding would have been better, but the shelters were something.

Service started in 2006, going right through the heart >##$?4./9':$@AB$C.:#$DE

TRANSIT ABLED There are some communities where NU has made the leap from cute neighborhood design to transit-functional land use, even if somewhat accidentally. Bradburn Village in the Denver area was built near an existing bus line, Route 112 (on 112th Ave). The developer and RTD did not communicate with one another about incorporating transit into the development but, according to Jeff Dunning at RTD the service was restructured in 2006 and moved from 112th to 120th Ave. “The level of development along 120th, including Bradburn Village, had increased enough . . . to support fixed-route transit service, and Route 120 is performing at a satisfactory level. While Bradburn was a factor in putting transit service on 120th Avenue, it was not the only one.”

So while transit is available here, it was not part of the concept for the neighborhood. “Bradburn may be New Urbanist, but it is not transit-oriented,” Mr. Dunning believes. “Little thought was given to how transit might actually serve the community, and even less effort made to provide convenient transit stops. Initially we did not have an ADA-compliant accessible bus stop, although this has since been retrofitted. Spring 2009 ridership at this bus stop (eastbound 120th at Bradburn) averaged 10 boardings and 8 alightings all day, which is not notably better than similar stops through this area.”

The record was a little better with SouthWood in Tallahassee, Fl. The entire growth man-

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hen he famously suggested that cows had “laid out” Boston, Ralph Waldo Emerson added, “Well, there are worse surveyors.”

While Emerson may have had a point about winding streets and hidden turns, another fact about Boston’s urban planning is considerably more compelling. Boston has been a leader in transit-oriented development (TOD) since long before the concept even had a name. !"#$#%&&1/2*,*0&#3&4#-+*(''

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Nicknamed “The Hub,” Boston is the economic and cultural capital of New England.

It earned that title a long time ago, but has kept it in part because the city still works well in the last quarter of its fourth century. One big reason is its transit system. Operated by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), Boston’s system is the oldest and fourth largest in the nation. With its network

of historic neighborhood centers, university and hospital campuses, and suburban downtowns surrounding that quirky, congested core, Boston simply couldn’t have arrived at its economic level of today, and couldn’t hope to sustain a prosperous future, without transit.

Besides being the birthplace of American liberty, Boston is arguably the birthplace of American mass transportation as well. Mass transportation began here in 1631, when the city was only a peninsula connected to the mainland by a narrow strip of land now known as the South End. Ferries to the surrounding harbor villages and a stagecoach across the neck to the mainland were essential to the city’s early growth. Horse-drawn streetcars appeared in the 1820s, followed by electric streetcars in the 1880s and the nation’s first subway—which still carries the downtown trunk of the Green Line—in 1897. Over a century, Boston, like other major US cities,

saw its elevated railway, street railway, and bus lines multiply, compete with one another, combine into a few larger enterprises, hit the “wall” of the post-War automobile era, and eventually pass into public ownership.

Since 1964, the MBTA has run the entire regional network, which is one of the nation’s half-dozen so-called “legacy” systems.

For well over a century, Boston’s urban form has grown up around transit nodes and corridors, from East Boston’s emergence at the transfer point between ferry and narrowgauge rail, to Brookline and the South End’s development as archetypal “streetcar suburbs”, to Harvard and MIT’s indispensable connection to the Red Line. The automobile era stretched and bent, but did not break, Boston’s ancient nexus between transit and development. And in the last quarter-century, the city has had an extensive urban rebirth, reinforcing and to a degree re-inventing TOD as

PARK STREET STATION, 1903. THE STATE HOUSE IS IN THE DISTANCE.

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the engine that powers the Hub. “Without a doubt, transit has played—and always will play—a significant role in Boston.

But there is also a generational component adding to the importance of TOD in the last quarter century,” explains James Keefe, principal and president of Trinity Financial, a prominent Bostonbased TOD developer. “We are deliberately a little ahead of the curve on our projects, because we believe the next generation of renters, buyers, and workers will be less car-centric than their parents and grandparents. They’re much more open to public transit.

“My kids walk and bike, and they take buses and transit and cabs. And I don’t think it’s really a “green” thing. I think the suburban cul-de-sac has just ! %&&1 lost its allure with this generaS TREETCARS ON WASHINGTON STREET, BOSTON, LATE 19TH CENTURY tion. Having shiny new vehicles cabulary at hand to bolster their opposition. in their driveways isn’t essential to But a stand was taken for social justice and their identity. But transit is part of their overthe quality of neighborhood life, and an urban all identification with the urban landscape. vivisection was prevented. Moreover, the cor“In Eastern Massachusetts, the existridors that were to have seen new expressing roads offer very limited opportunity for ways were shifted to rail projects instead, expansion. To accommodate growth, public and the Interstate Highway funds that were to transit must be expanded. So we’re talkhave fueled the wave of asphalt were reproing about expanding both light and heavy grammed—another national first—for transit. rail, and even reestablishing urban trolley As a result, the second development of systems. From a developer’s standpoint, lasting import was the wide-ranging moderntransit expansion will continue to generization and expansion of the MBTA, a process ate significant TOD opportunities.” that began in the 1970s and continues to this Stark differences are evident in day. The MBTA I rode as a youngster, highthe generational preferences in Boston— schooler, and college student was omnipresand in many other cities. But not every city ent and indispensable, but it was wearing out can take advantage of those preferences and some of its most strategically important as quickly as Boston has. Five elements corridors were still served by congested bus that began to coalesce about 30 years ago routes rather than higher-speed, higherhelped prepare the city for its urban rebirth. capacity rapid transit. Subway lines could Perhaps the most important event oconly accommodate four-car trains. The comcurred back in the early 1970s, when Boston muter rail network was all but dead. Combecame the first city in the country to reject a muter ferries were indeed dead. Bus Rapid large-scale highway master plan that would Transit hadn’t been invented. A visitor to have torn the city apart with expressways.

Boston in 2009 will ride an MBTA system that This was a seminal moment in Boston’s late goes more places faster, has much greater twentieth-century political history; an entire peak capacity, includes more transit modes, generation of us in city and state government cut our teeth on that battle. At the time, people and is vastly more modern in appearance and technology than the one I grew up on. didn’t have the “smart growth” or “TOD” vo"#$#

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The third big event was Massachusetts’ role as an early pioneer of what we now call smart growth. In the 1970s, eastern Massachusetts shared, at least in part, the automobile-driven, land-consumptive growth assumptions of most other American regions. But state government, under the Dukakis Administration, rallied a generation of citizens who understood that genuine economic growth, environmental protection, and a strengthened sense of community character could go hand-in-hand. Back then we worked for downtown revitalization. We worked on strengthening neighborhoods.

We began adaptively reusing old mills and schools. We argued for the efficiency of

DOVER STREET STATION ON BOSTON’S ORANGE LINE, THE CITY’S FIRST ELEVATED LINE. THIS WAS THE LAST OF THE ELEVATED STATIONS AND MARKS THE HEIGHT OF BOSTON’S

!"#$#%&&1/2*,*0&#3&4#-+*(''

FIRST WAVE OF TRANSIT PLANNING AND CONSTRUCTION

developing and redeveloping areas already served by infrastructure, including transit. In short, Massachusetts was assembling the building blocks of what we recognize today as smart growth; we just hadn’t defined the lexicon yet. Those concepts may not sound revolutionary today, but they were back then.

The fourth event that shaped Boston’s contemporary TOD history needs no introduction. Ask people inside or outside of New England about recent Boston transportation projects and one answer comes to mind—the Big Dig. Although generally perceived as a highway project, this $16 billion transportation undertaking was always intended to optimize and promote transit services and smart growth. In fact, the project’s architects tied the highway investment to a series of enforceable environmental mitigation agreements that included a number of MBTA extension,

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expansion, and modernization investments.

Not convinced of the Big Dig’s role in transit and TOD? Boston’s two historic downtown rail hubs—North and South Stations—sit astride the Big Dig, and it was the Big Dig that literally engineered their comeback as centers of transit and development. And the reemergence of North and South Stations is in turn helping to extend smart growth throughout the metropolitan region via the commuter rail system, whose northern and southern branches terminate there.

In addition, the Big Dig explicitly created one of the most ambitious planned TOD districts in the country—the 300-acre South Boston Waterfront.

So, counterintuitive as it may seem, if you examine the five biggest events to shape the contemporary era of TOD in Boston, one of them turns out to be the largest highway project in history.

The final TOD-shaping element is perfectly intuitive—it involves developers. For more than two decades, Boston has benefited from a development community peopled with sophisticated local players who have come to understand modern TOD and specialize in it. Current TOD projects are of sufficient scale to truly influence the region’s future. But effective, enduring TOD didn’t just happen. It took a concerted effort on many fronts. Here are three examples.

After President Nixon closed the Boston Navy Yard in 1972, the South Boston waterfront became mostly a collection of broken glass, weedy parking lots, and unused rail tracks.

About the only other elements of note were a couple of legendary waterfront restaurants— boasting all the surface parking you could want. But the 300-acre district just across Fort Point Channel from South Station and the financial district presented a perfect opportunity for a mixed-use extension of downtown.

To realize that aim, two things had to happen. First, the district needed direct access to the metropolitan highway system and to Logan International Airport. The Big Dig provided that, with a unique interchange that was built largely under the district—leaving the ground above clear for development. The other TOD building block was the incorporation of the Silver Line, an underground bus rapid transit (BRT) line connecting the waterfront to South Station and eventually to the entire downtown subway system. Thanks to the Silver Line, every developable parcel in the district is within a quarter mile of a transit station, with direct connections to South Station in one direction and the airport

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in the other. As a result, 13 million square feet of mixed-used TOD development are in the ground or in the pipeline today, with more to come.

The next example is the biggest single TOD project in the region: Assembly Square.

Strategically sited on the Orange Line—where a new station will be built with both public and private funds to accommodate it—Assembly Square is in East Somerville, just two miles north of downtown Boston. Once the site of an old Ford Motor Company assembly plant and more recently a mall, the 65-acre underutilized site was hotly debated for more than 20 years. Enter Federal Realty Investment Trust.

“Assembly Square is a 5 million–square foot, mixed-use project that will feature 2,000 residential units and 1.7 million square feet of office space,” explains Bob Walsh, vice president of development for Federal Realty. “We already have about 350,000 square feet of retail up and operating, and we’re going to build another 500,000 square feet of in-line shops. And there’s going to be a 300,000 square foot IKEA on the site.

“This site offers tremendous advantages: it has great highway access from Interstate 93, and terrific surface street access. But what really makes this project sing—and allows us to build to that kind of density—is the fact that the Orange Line tracks are already adjacent to the site. By building a new station, we can link this development up with the transit system. That helps make the market for office space, as workers will have ready access to everything the site offers.

It also helps us keep parking ratios down, which keeps cars off the streets. Assembly Square is a perfect example of Boston’s commitment to TOD. The fact that there are major TOD projects outside of the city core speaks to the value we place on TOD, and the support it has here.”

I couldn’t agree more. My third and final example has to do with housing. Boston has a number of sophisticated housing developers who do cutting-edge, mixed-income residential projects. One of them is Trinity Financial, whose portfolio includes several projects which are right next to (or, in one case, right above) transit stations.

Maverick Landing in East Boston is a federally-funded Hope VI project. It replaced a deteriorated post-War public housing development with a beautiful, award-winning, mixedincome complex that offers 410 units in newly constructed buildings. The complex includes 20 townhouse buildings, two mid-rise buildings, and a community center. Its success is directly related

BOSTON’S MODERN DOWNTOWN SKYLINE

to the proximity of transit services. Trinity’s “Avenir” project is a 10-story, mixed-use residential development that sits directly above the North Station stop on the Green and Orange Lines; its street-level retail environment includes a direct entrance to the two transit lines below as well as an underground connection to the regional commuter rail terminal at North Station. And Trinity’s 116-unit project known as “The Carruth” is in my old neighborhood of Dorchester. Its residents can walk from their breakfast tables to the subway, streetcar, or bus in 30 seconds, while its 10,000 square feet of retail space fills a decades-old hole in the fabric of historic Peabody Square. The Carruth is a joint development project, built on MBTA property and designed in tandem with the modernization of Ashmont Station, one of the system’s true work-horses.

What makes Trinity so effective at TOD? “This is something we’ve been doing since we started the company 20 years ago—urban infill projects that knit traditional neighborhoods back together,” explains Trinity’s Jim Keefe. “Some of the more blighted areas always seem to be in or around either railway stations or transit lines that have lost some of their vitality and glitter, becoming something of a detriment to the neighborhoods.

It was natural for us to look at these underutilized areas.

“Today, for anyone who has been burdened with the cost of an automobile and the hassle of getting from point A to point B, living in a place where you don’t need a car is a tremendous advantage. It’s extremely frustrating to drive across any major American city during peak periods. Factor in a little snow or a special event or a traffic inci-

dent and it’s even worse. And in most cities, there is no room to expand roads or highways significantly. Being able to walk out your front door and into a transit station is a very compelling option. TOD is compelling.

And TOD benefits extend well beyond individual neighborhoods; they enhance the whole city.”

The Hub is the economic, cultural, technological, educational, and medical capital of New England. But it didn’t get that way by accident, and it won’t stay that way by accident. Like Boston’s world-class educational infrastructure, transit-oriented development doesn’t just enhance the city; it helps define it. While TOD has been unofficially practiced in Boston for nearly 400 years, several factors have combined in the last quarter-century to make TOD an explicit model for the future growth of the city and region.

It may well be that cows had laid out Boston, just as Emerson suggested. But through TOD, Boston has managed, more than all but a handful of American cities, to build and now rebuild a downtown core and a series of neighborhoods where density, vitality, mixed uses, and walkability prevail.

Now the national practice leader in transit-oriented development for AECOM Transportation, which worked on several of the aforementioned projects, Raine was formerly the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Port Authority (1991–1993). He served as the Massachusetts Director of Economic Development under Governor Michael Dukakis from 1983-1990.

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ceans of legislative ink have been poured in the interest of good intentions and if good intentions are the devil’s asphalt, the Florida Legislature was the road crew. In 1985 the body adopted an ambitious growth management program to guide growth, ensure mobility, preserve the state’s natural beauty, and curb the runaway development then taking place. Part of this growth management act included the concept of concurrency, which requires that transportation facilities and other necessary infrastructure (schools, sewers and the like) be available concurrent with the impact of development.

It was a finger in the dyke.

The laws were supposed to make developers pay to widen congested roadways as they built along them, a mechanism that would keep the transportation system running smoothly. Instead, water flowed through new holes; concurrency made land along congested roadways even more expensive places to build and Florida still had ample citrus groves and other farmland where new things could be erected on cheaper land and with lower concurrency fees. Additionally, a developer who wanted to do a dense, transit/pedestrianoriented, mixed-use development in a congested corridor (i.e. where it would work best), would be slapped with huge concur-

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rency fees based on automobile trip generation rates. The laws that were intended to mitigate the effects of sprawl on infrastructure instead accelerated the outward pace of sprawl. It figures that the road to hell would be found in a place as hot as Florida.

Over the next decade the legislature made several attempts to fix the growth management laws, but the focus was still on moving cars. To facilitate concurrency, congestion management systems (CMS) were established in all Florida metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs). In 1997, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) evaluated the CMS plans and discovered that only 7 of the 25 MPOs had performance measures for non-automobile modes. In response, the legislature created the Transportation and Land Use Study Committee (TALUS) in 1998 to provide recommendations for improving community design, transportation concurrency and level of service, and land use impacts used to assess transportation needs. The committee also reviewed the roles of MPOs, local governments, and regional planning councils in addressing these areas. Utilizing some of the TALUS committee recommendations, the legislature passed the Urban Infill and Redevelopment Act of 1999, which amended the growth management

act. This statute encouraged the use of alternative transportation modes to the automobile through the establishment of multimodal transportation districts (MMTDs).

What is a Multimodal Transportation District (MMTD)?

Several years ago there was a scandal as Floridians learned of the new state slogan produced by a consulting firm at a cost of about $2 million to the taxpayers: “Florida: The Rules Are Different Here.” Was this an invitation to speed or to organize crime? Perhaps Floridians would drive on the left side of the street?

Needless to say, the slogan never made it onto license plates. It would, however, be an admirable slogan for MMTDs which are areas where normal concurrency doesn’t make sense. Because it would be so expensive and destructive to the urban fabric to widen roads, a different set of rules must apply or there would be no development at all. More to the point, there would be no redevelopment.

There are two primary elements of the MMTD identified in the legislation. The first is that a district should include the community design standards and mixed land use that ensure a good pedestrian environment and mobility, with convenient connections to transit. The second element is that the concurrency

determinations within a district should be based on the existing and future performance of bicycle, pedesmultimodal performance measures that consider trian and transit networks. The goal of this research all of the available modes of transportation, not just was to assist local governments in setting minimum cars. Of course, an MMTD only makes sense in an standards for these modes. The product was the area where greater densities are desired and thus Quality/Level of Service Handbook and corresponding they are intended for use in or near downtowns that ARTPLAN analysis software. Multimodal LOS uses are ripe for intensification and redevelopment. the same letter grades as the highway, but while the To assist local governments in developing MMTDs, the state estabPut your hands on some of the best articles lished special standards for development to mitigate its impacts on the published in the Planning Commissioners Journal – transportation system. For example, set out in two attractively bound booklets. when a new development occurs within a multimodal district, it must enhance the pedestrian, bicycle, and transit facilities rather than just the traditional improvement of widening roadways. Local governments 1 Transportation: Getting Started must also demonstrate support by An introduction to the improving transit service, adding transportation planning or widening sidewalks and making process, focusing on the relationship between land them comfortable pedestrian environments, and delineating bike routes. use and transportation. Plus an introduction to traffic calming techniques and The key component of an MMTD key elements of street and - Multimodal Level of Service sidewalk design.

Traffic engineers have a long and illustrious history of automobile 2 Transportation: level-of-service standards (LOS).

New Directions Beginning in 1965, the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) divided How to manage traffic, mitigate the impact highway quality of service into six of roadways, provide for the mobility letter grades, “A” through “F,” with needs of an aging population, and “A” being the best and “F” being the better plan for the role of parking in our worst. The goal was that with the communities.

Plus insights into how planners “A” through “F” LOS scheme, trafcan help create walkable neighborhoods that fic engineers were much better able better address the to explain to the general public and needs of pedestrians elected officials the operating and and bicyclists. design concepts of highways. The You can receive both publications handbook states: “…the LOS letG P L A N N I N at a specially discounted price.

O N E R S I S ter scheme caught on so well that it S I M M C O Orders can be placed by phone: is now used throughout the United (802) 864-9083 or online: States in transportation, as well ok Lo r plannersweb.com/ as other fields. Nevertheless, it is Taking a Close transportation.html – where you important to note that LOS is simcan also view a detailed table ply a quantitative breakdown from of contents. transportation users’ perspectives of transportation quality of service.”

Champlain Planning Press, Inc. After the Multimodal District P.O. Box 4295, Burlington, VT 05406 legislation was passed, FDOT emTel: 802-864-9083 E-mail: info@plannersweb.com barked on an ambitious research program to establish Multimodal Level of plannersweb.com Service (LOS) standards to measure

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highway analysis focuses mainly on automobile capacity, the multimodal levels of service focus more on facility design and ease of use.

At the planning level, the bicycle and pedestrian LOS focuses on the degree of separation of the bicyclist or pedestrian from motorized traffic. For the pedestrian, this translates primarily into the presence of a sidewalk but also specific factors like the condition of the sidewalk, lateral separation (like a strip of grass) from motorized vehicles, and the presence of physical barriers and buffers that give added safety, or at least the perception of it. The baseline for safe movement of cyclists is a bike lane but additional factors for bicycle LOS include the pavement condition and the presence of on-street parking. There are other statistically significant variables affecting bike-ped LOS including automobile traffic volume, speed, and percentage of heavy trucks.

For transit, the LOS measures the transit user’s trip both spatially and temporally. It incorporates bus frequency, span of service, load factor, the pedestrian LOS, pedestrian crossing difficulty, and sidewalk connections to stops within a field of residences and jobs.

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How are the different modes linked together in the Multimodal LOS? As with the Health Department’s restaurant inspection grades, it is tempting with LOS to brand a system with a particular letter grade. But when developing the Multimodal LOS, FDOT chose not to create an index that produces a single LOS grade for all modes on a particular roadway, because that single grade could mask the effects of the lesser-used modes and negate any of the efforts to produce a true multimodal analysis. Even though there is a dynamic linkage between modes, FDOT developed the ARTPLAN software such that each mode would have a discrete LOS output.

The ARTPLAN software simultaneously calculates the four LOS measures using the facility’s infrastructure, automobile traffic, signalization, and transit service as inputs. This allows the user to see the interconnected relationship between modes: as quality of service of one mode improves, it may have a positive, neutral or negative effect on the other modes. For example, as the speed of automobiles increases the LOS may improve for automobiles, but the LOS for bicyclists

and pedestrians may decrease.

What are some examples of a MMTD? Although the concept of a Multimodal Transportation District was developed in 1999, there initially wasn’t much interest by communities in using this legislative tool. However, with skyrocketing road costs since 2000 and with revisions in 2005 to growth management laws, more communities are seeing the MMTD as a way to address transportation concurrency and also allow infill in urban areas. There are now four MMTDs in Florida and two are discussed below as interesting examples: the City of Destin MMTD was the first MMTD, and the City the Tallahassee MMTD, currently under review, will have the distinction of being the largest in the state.

City of Destin Multimodal Transportation District In January 2006 the City of Destin was the first city to adopt a multimodal transportation district into its comprehensive plan. Even though several other cities have established MMTDs and the language used has evolved over time, the objectives and policies established

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TALLAHASSEE’S MULTIMODAL TRANSPORTATION DISTRICT, THE LARGEST IN THE STATE. in Destin still serve as the model for many municipalities in adopting their own MMTDs. It came as no surprise that the City of Destin was the location for the first MMTD. The timing and the location were wellsuited for this urban design initiative. Destin is a singular place, a beach community on a tiny peninsula very near the precious world of Seaside, the original New Urban development of Duany Plater-Zyberk made famous in the movie The Truman Show. Destin has only US 98, a four-lane facility as an east – west corridor through the city, severely limiting auto-mobility, but also vacationers on beaches that are often open to walking and bicycling. Destin seemed a very good fit.

In addition to limited automobile opportunities, Destin also had limits to business development. According to staff, there were no large pieces of property left for building, much less vacant land available to use for developing a parallel facility

to US 98. The advantage of the MMTD was that it allowed development in the city to go forward without having to widen US 98 to six lanes, requiring massive purchases of adjoining property and drastically altering the local character of the city.

Since, the definition of concurrency is that adequate public facilities must be in place at the time development impacts occur, traffic concurrency required that auto traffic or trips generated by a new development be counted on the existing roadway system. Therefore, once a roadway has exceeded its maximum capacity, the roadway is considered deficient and additional traffic or trips are no longer permitted. The fear throughout the city was that without the MMTD designation, which allows for concurrency exceptions, development was going to grind to a halt as the road system lacked capacity.

It is important to note that the MMTD is not a “free ride” on concurrency; the city still meets with FDOT and the Florida Department of Community Affairs to review the city’s progress in reducing congestion. In fact, if the city exceeds 115% of the maxi-

23

mum volume, the city has to reevaluate with the FDOT and DCA and work out a new strategy to alleviate the problem.

Currently, the city of Destin is in the final step of integrating the MMTD into its Land Development Code. This will allow the city to develop a more urban form rather than the typical suburban develop-

INFILL DEVELOPMENT IN THE MMTD. CAPITAL CITY BANK WAS THE SITE OF A SINGLE-STORY OFFICE BUILDING THREE BLOCKS FROM THE CAPITOL AND HIGH RISE CONDOS.

ONE PARCEL TO THE WEST, A FORMER GAS STATION, IS BEING REBUILT AS A FOUR-STORY WALGREENS PHARMACY WITH OFFICE SPACE.

ment pattern that currently exists. The greatest advantage of the MMTD is that it allows the city to re-focus transportation to the land use improvements already made.

The city had developed two Community Redevelopment Areas (CRAs) where the city has increased the density from 1.0 Floor Area Ratio (FAR) to a 2.5 FAR and concentrated on developing mixed-use areas. The benefit of the MMTD process to the City of Destin is that the city will be able to utilize its land use to foster the development of a MMTD, and the

24

MMTD to strengthen its desired land use.

The Tallahassee / Leon County Multimodal Transportation District Plan The goal of developing the Tallahassee-Leon County Multimodal Transportation District was to redevelop Tallahassee and create a vibrant “city within a city” where all daily needs – work, school, shopping, healthcare, recreation, etc. – can be accomplished without a car through walking, cycling or transit. Tallahassee is a very different place from Destin, the state capital and a college town with 60,000+ students spread be-

tween Florida State and Florida A&M Universities and Tallahassee Community College. The great intellectual leap of Tallahassee’s MMTD, ably led by city/ county planner Cherie Horne, was in looking beyond the boundaries of the relatively small downtown to incorporate the already dense and bike-ped-transitoriented institutions of higher learning into the MMTD, the state’s largest.

The City of Tallahassee focused on the MMTD as a redevelopment tool because it gives flexibility in concurrency and

allows for higher density. According to staff, the original conception of the MMTD was to preserve the urban area of a downtown, but cities have discovered that the real benefit is to expand the concept to areas which currently don’t have desirable pedestrianoriented design. The immediate downtown is typically the way you want it with multi-story buildings pulled up to the streets, wide sidewalks, and easy access to transit. Typically, that intensity can’t be easily expanded because concurrency costs would make the development project financially unfeasible. However, by basing concurrency on bike, pedestrian, and transit infrastructure, fees are reduced while mobility is enhanced, supporting well designed redevelopment of underutilized parcels in the central core of the city but outside of downtown.

The issue is that more and more in the urban areas the concurrency is full or at capacity, so no one can increase density. The MMTD was seen as the perfect way to match urban design and land use. The Tallahassee-Leon County Comprehensive Plan states that congestion is not necessarily bad and can in fact be a sign of a healthy urban environment. Urban redevelopment has been championed before in Tallahassee. The city has made prior attempts with sector plans and downtown redevelopment plans, but the MMTD allows the city to pull those initiatives into a focused, common plan.

One goal of the MMTD is to develop a cost per trip based on bicycle, pedestrian, and transit which would be lower than developing outside the MMTD area. This will allow the business community to have a clearer and more defined picture of the development costs. The City would determine the development cost by creating a formula that would have

developers pay a proportionate fair share for bicycle, pedestrian and transit improvements. Because of the simplicity of using a formula, the developer can easily calculate the fee compared to the existing method of running transportation models and negotiating a methodology and impact.

There was a substantial ideological change needed for this to occur. The city had to change the fee structure from requiring fees for roadway improvements to evaluating impacts and developing improvements to other modes.

The data and analysis gathered for the MMTD Comprehensive Plan amendment serves as the basis for making this switch.

The Comprehensive Plan amendment creating the Tallahassee-Leon County MMTD has been approved by the City and County and has been transmitted to the state. The state review was completed in March 2009.

Concerns about the larger size of the Tallahassee MMTD? The MMTD in Tallahassee is 18 square miles and is currently the biggest in Florida. There was some preliminary resistance to the larger size, but the justification for the size was to include the 3 colleges in the urban core, the regional mall, and several compact, older neighborhoods. These six activity centers will then be connected with transit super stops – enhanced bus stops where 4 or 5 routes cross, making transfers more efficient. The fundamental goal of the MMTD was to create an area where one could live without a car. The MMTD was delineated by identifying areas with 8 units per acre, the density needed for 30-minute transit headways, and then aligning them with major roadway corridors. The focus was on truly incorporating transit facilities into the MMTD area.

What does it all mean?

The Multimodal Transportation District along with the Multimodal Level of Service was a landmark planning tool that truly integrated land use and transportation. It was a revolutionary concept, even during its structuring and development, because it was a cooperative partnership between the transportation agency, the Florida Department of Transportation, and the land use agency, the Florida Department of Community Affairs. The MMTD principles are based on fundamentally sound planning principles, but still have the technical elements to meet concurrency requirements. It is a very flexible tool that has various applications from “Greenfield” development, to urban design preservation, and as a redevelopment tool. It blends many facets of transit-oriented development, mixed land use development, and urban design into a single plan.

In today’s economy, the acceptance and growth of the MMTD principles and the Multimodal LOS analysis is evident in the paradigm shift at the national, state and local level towards multimodal development. In fact, the Highway Capacity Manual, the fundamental cornerstone research publication concerning all transportation planning and engineering since 1950, is currently being updated to include the Multimodal Level of Service.

Michael Plagens is a transportation planner in the Tallahassee office of RS&H.

25

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H

ow can curb parking contribute to a great street? To help create great streets, a city should (1) charge performance-based prices for curb parking and (2) return the revenue to the metered districts to pay for added public services.

With these two policies, curb parking will help to create great streets, improve transportation, and increase the economic vitality of cities.

26

Performance-based Parking Prices Performance-based prices will balance the varying demand for parking with the fixed supply of spaces.

We can call this balance between demand and supply the “Goldilocks principle” of parking prices: the price is too high if many spaces are vacant, and too low if no spaces are vacant. When a few vacant spaces are available everywhere, the prices are just right. If prices are adjusted to yield one or two vacant spaces in every block (about 85 percent occupancy), everyone will see that curb parking is readily available. In addition, no one can say that performancebased parking prices will drive customers away if most curb spaces are occupied all the time.

Prices that produce an occupancy rate of about 85 percent can be called “performance-based” for three reasons. First, curb parking will perform efficiently. Most spaces will be occupied, but drivers will always be able to find a vacant space.

Second, the transportation system will perform efficiently. Cruising for curb parking will not congest traffic, waste fuel, and pollute the air.

Third, the economy will perform efficiently. The price of parking will

be higher when demand is higher, and this higher price will encourage rapid parking turnover. Drivers will park, buy something, and leave quickly so that other drivers can use the spaces. For parking, transportation, and economic efficiency, cities should set prices to yield about an 85 percent occupancy rate.

Local Revenue Return Performance-based prices for curb parking can yield ample public revenue. If the city returns this revenue to pay for added public spending on the metered streets, residents and local merchants will support the performance-based prices. The added funds can pay to clean and maintain the sidewalks, plant trees, improve lighting, bury overhead utility wires, remove graffiti, and provide other public improvements.

Put yourself in the shoes of a merchant in an older business district where curb parking is free and customers complain about a parking shortage. Suppose the city installs meters and charges prices that produce a few vacancies. Everyone who wants to shop in the district can park quickly, and

the meter money is spent to clean the sidewalks and provide security. These added public services make the business district a place where people want to be, rather than merely a place where anyone can park free if they can find a space. Returning the meter revenue generated by the district to the district for its own use can convince merchants and property owners to support the idea of performance-based prices for curb parking.

Suppose also that curb parking remains underpriced in other business districts. Everyone complains about the shortage of parking in these districts, and cars searching for curb parking congest traffic. No meter revenue is available to clean the sidewalks and provide other amenities. In which district would you want to have a business?

Performance-based prices will improve curb parking by creating a few vacancies, the added meter revenue will pay to improve public services, and these added public services will create political support for performance-based prices.

CARS CIRCLE THE BLOCK FOR FREE PARKING, OPPOSITE. SPACES ARE AVAILABLE AT METERED SPACES BELOW.

27

RENAISSANCE PLANNING GROUP charlottesville I delray beach I orlando I sarasota I tallahassee I tampa www.citiesthatwork.com I 407.487.0061

INTEGRATED APPROACHES TO

Whit Blanton, AICP, Vice President, Principal wblanton@citiesthatwork.com

Transit Oriented Design Multimodal Transportation Planning Transit Operations and Market Research

Parking Increment Finance Most cities put their parking meter revenue into the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s general fund. How can a city return performance-based meter revenue to business districts without shortchanging the general fund?

The city can return only the subsequent increment in meter revenue-the amount above and beyond the existing meter revenue-that arises after the city begins to charge performance-based prices. We can call this arrangement parking increment finance.

Parking increment finance closely resembles tax increment finance, a popular way to pay for public investment in districts in need of revitalization. Local redevelopment agencies receive the increment in property tax revenue that results from the increased property values in the redevelopment districts. Similarly, business districts can receive the increment in parking meter revenue that results from performance-based parking prices. More meters, higher rates, and longer hours of operation will provide money to pay for added public services. These added public services will promote business activity in the district, and

28

the increased demand for parking will further increase meter revenue.

Citation Revenue Sharing If curb parking is priced to make spaces available, the meters must be enforced. To increase local support for enforcement, the city can share with neighborhoods the revenue from parking citations. Citation revenue can, for example, pay to repair and maintain the sidewalks on metered streets. Instead of opposing enforcement, merchants and residents will see illegally parked cars as citation opportunities and will begin to support enforcement.

The city will manage parking more effectively, and the neighborhood will receive more revenue to make its streets clean and safe.

By extension, the city can share the revenue from red-light cameras with neighborhoods.

Because the city wants to reduce vehicle accidents and increase pedestrian safety, it can offer to install red-light cameras at appropriate intersections and spend the citation revenue to repair and maintain the nearby sidewalks.

The cameras will encourage motorists to drive more carefully,

Kate Ange, AICP, Principal kange@citiesthatwork.com Brad Sheffield, AICP, Transit Project Manager bsheffield@citiesthatwork.com

and the few who do run red lights will pay to improve pedestrian safety. Except for those who run red lights, everyone will win.

Pilot Program Cities can use a pilot program to test Goldilocks parking prices for curb parking, combined with local return of the meter revenue. Any business district that wants a pilot program can request it. Because dirty and unsafe streets will never be great, the added parking meter revenue can initially pay for cleanand-safe programs. Many communities may value clean and safe streets more highly than free but overcrowded curb parking. Parking may not be free, but it will be convenient and worth paying for.

Donald C. Shoup, is professor of urban planning at the University of California Los Angeles and has written many books and papers on parking, including The High Cost of Free Parking (Planners Press, 2005), a Planetizen Top Book for 2005, which explains the theory and practice of parking management.

4ST$%90?&12,'3%&2'()+4')5'6-,,' !#-7%$&

`.N&#"T3&5.$1&98%L6/@&#800$%O&&E%,&!3."9&13.N1&03$&6/T%$56QM$&T.10& .C&98%L6/@&QK&T.#98%6/@&0N.&T./T$%0&38MM1&6/&-8M6C.%/68, Book excerpt from The High Cost of Free Parking Donald Shoup Planners Press (APA), Chicago, 2005. Reprinted with permission.

Parking at Disney Hall For a downtown concert hall, Los Angeles requires, as the minimum, 50 times more parking spaces than San Francisco allows as the maximum. These different priorities help explain the very different parking arrangements for Louise Davies Hall (home of the San Francisco Symphony) and Disney Hall (home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic).

San Francisco built Louise Davies Hall with no parking garage, while Los Angeles completed Disney Hall’s 2,188-space, $110 million parking garage three years before it had raised the $274 million needed to start building the 2,265-seat Disney Hall itself.

Los Angeles County borrowed the money to finance the $50,000-perspace parking garage, with the debt to be repaid from the expected revenues. Because the garage was completed in 1996, but Disney Hall did not open until 2003, parking revenues fell far short of the debt payments for seven years. As a result, the county had to subsidize the garage from general revenues at a time when it was nearly bankrupt.

In The Reluctant Metropolis, William Fulton relates the debacle of Los Angeles’s parking-first policy: “The pauperized county government is forced to subsidize the [Dis-

ney Hall] parking garage even as it lays off employees.”

At a price of $3 for every 15 minutes with a maximum of $17 a day, or a flat rate of $8 after 5 p.m., Disney Hall’s garage never fills even when Disney Hall is sold out, and it is almost empty for the rest of the year. The county’s lease for the site specifies that Disney Hall must offer at least 128 concerts a year during the Winter season. Why 128? The county needs enough concerts to generate enough parking revenue to pay the debt service on the garage. And how many concerts did Disney Hall schedule in its first Winter season? Exactly 128. The garage was intended to satisfy the parking demand for concerts at Disney Hall, but Disney Hall’s concerts must now satisfy the financial demands of the parking garage. Because of minimum parking requirements, Disney Hall has a minimum concert requirement.

Concertgoers can drive to Disney Hall’s six-level subterranean garage and take the “escalator cascade” directly to the foyer without ever stepping on a sidewalk in downtown Los Angeles. Many restaurants in downtown Los Angeles offer free parking for diners who attend a concert at Disney Hall, including free shuttle service to and from Disney Hall. It would be a great boost for downtown if more people ate there before or after a concert, and parked at the restaurants dur-

ing the concert, but the zoning code specifies that every building must provide its own parking. No matter how well intentioned, off-street parking requirements harm rather than help the CBD by undermining its unique qualities.

The difference in parking policy helps explain why almost everyone prefers downtown San Francisco to downtown Los Angeles. After a concert or theater performance in San Francisco, people stream out onto bustling sidewalks where all the restaurants, bars, bookstores, and flower shops seem to be open and busy, and where it is a long walk to your parking space, if you even drove. In Los Angeles, the sidewalks are empty and threatening at night. Even a spectacular new concert halls does not help to create a vibrant downtown if every concertgoer drives straight into its underground garage and feels the sidewalks a block away are unsafe.

Disney Hall’s architect, Frank Gehry, originally specified limestone for the building’s exterior, but to save money it was clad in cheaper stainless steel. By diverting spending from architecture to cars, parking requirements make great design more difficult. Disney Hall is now compared to the Sydney Opera House or the Eiffel Towers as the city’s icon, but it subtly shows the paramount importance of parking in Los Angeles.

29

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t has long been widely recognized by many city planners, urban designers, architects, landscape architects, and historic preservationists, that, among many other influences, a viable community has a balanced relationship between building mass and open space that gives it a sense of compactness, spatial definition, and is in human scale.

This concern is even more relevant presently, where the concept of transit-oriented-development, is receiving more currency in the light of increased public dissatisfaction with characterless, auto-oriented, suburban sprawl, and the recognition that transportation choices and land use choices are inextricably intertwined. This put transportation planners and urban designers at the same table and figure-ground is a mutually important working concept at this table.

Simply, a figure-ground, sometimes referred to as figure-field, it is a diagrammatic abstraction of the footprint of the built form of an area, building footprints shown in black for instance, and remaining open spaces in white. It is generally devoid of other detail that

30

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can confuse or obscure the spatial nature being examined.

The quality of the physical form and pattern of a community is influenced by the ratio of building mass (forms) and voids (open spaces). When the ratio of building mass is high in relation to exterior space, spatial continuity in the form of building mass and clearly defined â&#x20AC;&#x153;wallsâ&#x20AC;?, well defined linkages, and articulated public and private spaces, are possible. These are the characteristics of memorable places with vibrant, mixed-use activity that are attractive to people.

When the ratio of building coverage is low and disconnected in relation to that of exterior spaces, there is often little building mass continuity, emphasizing free-standing, disconnected and fragmented buildings.

In between there are undefined voids like surface parking with little spatial definition. Anyone who has ever been unfortunate enough to walk along a major suburban artery knows these conditions of auto-oriented strip development are unfriendly to pedestrians.

The employment of a figure-ground diagram

THE NOLLI PLAN, ABOVE, AND SIENA, BELOW RIGHT. has a long history. Probably one of the most famous uses of the figure-ground as an illustrative tool is the Nolli Map of Rome prepared by Giambattista Nolli in 1748, a portion of which is shown above. The map shows public and private spaces carved from the mass of building form that is so characteristic of the urban qualities that exemplify Rome. It has influenced architects and urban designers since. The figure-ground diagram of the Piazza Del Campo in Siena, Italy also makes clear the distinctive spatial pattern of spaces, narrow network of streets, and fluid geometry, of a typical medieval city.

ties desired are being met or not. It can be employed in sketch format during design deliberations as shown below, or more formally displayed. It does not replace intuitive design creativity or solid rational deliberations, but can supplement these skills and bridge differences with a common vocabulary.

It is also a useful communication tool because it can diagrammatically show the importance of spatial form and space in any proposal that is generally understandable to the public.

To illustrate, the example on the following page shows an air-photo of an underdeveloped, auto-oriented, urban corridor, and a figure-ground of its existing pattern, and a figure-ground proposal that encourages higher densities, building continuity, pedestrian linkages, and responds with densities that can support transit.

A figure-ground is, however, only one tool in the arsenal of planning and design and there are some limitations. It does not, for instance, replace a fully developed plan, thus orientation can be problematical; it also does not express the influence of building heights and topography well, nor articulate differing uses and activities. Figure-ground does not directly reflect the influences of transportation choices and the pedestrian environment, nor reflect the quality of design that is so important to support vibrant communities. It should be used in conjunction with many other tools such as floor area ratio (FAR), zoning, form-based zoning, density and ridership projections, etc. But figure-ground can be very useful as a supplemental ”shorthand” working tool, especially for demonstrating in public meetings or to elected officials how new development will fit in the built environment.

A figure-ground diagram can highlight positive visual characteristics, and conversely those that are

What a figure-ground is and isn’t.

A figure ground can be a useful analysis tool. One can quickly and unblinkingly assess the potential of a place; does it have the spatial qualities to make it appealing and vital for people and pedestrians – or does it not?

It can also be used as a quick and flexible planning and design tool, allowing one to examine, and verify during the design process, whether the spatial quali-

31

negative in a way that can predict the quality of the environment being transformed. It can also be a useful tool to help put land use planners, designers, and transportation planners on the same page.

Gary Okerlund, an architect, landscape architect, and urban design consultant, is principle

32

of Okerlund Associates and the Community Design Group in Charlottesville. His urban design plans and publications include Shaping Community with Transit, Alliance for Community Choice in Transportation and Public Improvements on Main Street for the National Main Street Center.

AERIAL PHOTO, FIGURE GROUND, IMPROVED FIGURE GROUND

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he much-applauded resurgence of transit-oriented development (TOD) projects has brought density and activity to transit stops in many major metro areas, particularly over the past ten to twenty years. Unfortunately, there are some signs that the formula of high-priced condos over street-level retail may be losing their appeal and viability following the real-estate bust. At least one developer is dealing with the situation by switching to moderately priced apartments.

One of the persistent criticisms of the most heralded transit oriented developments is that they often cater exclusively to the wealthiest homebuyers. An unexpected result of the real-estate crunch is that developments may start focusing more on moderately-priced rental units. Even when developers feel that they can still make a profit with the old high-priced urban condos model, it may not be possible to secure financing for a project because demand for high-end condos is so depressed.

With existing luxury units selling only slowly, financiers are reluctant to bankroll developments that are not â&#x20AC;&#x153;sure-thingâ&#x20AC;? investments. On the other hand, developers do not want to abandon their projects or their overall business strategy.

One company has ar-

CONNECTICUT AVENUE AND K STREET NW IN WASHINGTON, DC. ADJACENT TO AN UNDERGROUND HEAVY RAIL STATION, THE PROPERTY IS SURROUNDED BY HIGH-RENT LEGAL FIRMS AND LOBBYISTS, A MERE FOUR BLOCKS AWAY FROM THE WHITE HOUSE. THE LAND IS TEMPORARILY SLATED TO SERVE AS SURFACE PARKING.

rived at a welcome solution; rather than use their development mechanisms to build high-end properties, Donatelli Development is building a mix of luxury condos and moderately priced apartments on a parcel near the Minnesota Avenue heavy rail station in Washington, DC. Securing financing for lower-rent units in high-demand metro areas is easier because well-located units at more reasonable prices sell out nearly instantly regardless of the wider economic situation. This eases the concerns of bankers regarding return on investment, and

keeps the developer from having to lay off workers who had been occupied with luxury construction.

This magazine is so far aware of only one project involving a mix of luxury and marketrate condominiums, but it seems an elegant means of adjusting the development industry to the current market conditions. As the economic crisis shows no immediate signs of abating, we will probably see more such creative initiatives. Developers who have opened condos oriented towards high-income buyers are now being forced to dream up

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33

!" # $ % & ' ( ) # * + % Transit property names make for a lean alphabet soup. Especially among older agencies, acronyms condense the lengthy and the specific (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, Northern Indiana What does southeastern Commuter Transportation District) Washington have to do with one of our founding into the pat and the convenient fathers? Not much; BFT (SEPTA, NICTD), monikers small serves Benton and Franklin Counties. enough to fit on tokens and double as logos. But there are only so many words available for describing a system and the gods of naming things have further complicated the matter by making the words of this limited lexicon begin with only a few letters: T (transit, transportation, trans, train), R (rapid, regional, rail), A (authority, area, agency, administration), and M (mass, metropolitan, metro) are the most common with C thrown in for good measure (capital, corporation, commission, county, connector, centre, city, central, commuter, campus). Just A, R, and T alone make up most of BART, DART, HART, SMART, MARTA, CARTA, TARTA, BARTA, NORTA, and SORTA and no fewer than 24 states have at least one RTA. So what’s in a name? Letters mostly, but also community identity, a bit of legend, and some fun. Here then is a breakdown of the larger transit agency names in the U.S.*

Omnibus + Transit = best portmanteau ShrevePORT

BC CT Pierce Sound Spokane Montgomery County Kitsap Intercity Long Beach Foothill Ben Franklin Santa Clarita Vallejo Gold Coast Monterey-Salinas AC Norwalk Chula Vista Bloomington New Jersey Wichita Lane Transit District Jefferson Chapel Hill Suffolk Tulsa Texas A&M Broward County Miami Dade Blacksburg Hampton Roads Tri-Delta Red Rose Wave Just right for America’s car racing capital

Grand Rapids, that is.

So much cooler until you hear it stands for Driving Alexandians Safely Home

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34

SamTrans Votran Leetran Palm Tran Lextran Omnitrans SPORTRAN Unitrans C-Trans Transpo

Do drivers ask

“Can I help ya, See Why Pace help ya, help ya”?

Everyone’s Caltrain Riding IndyGo CyRide SAMTD didn’t TriRail have the same The Ride ring to it.

The Rapid Cherriots Centro Dash

Virginia Railway Express Seattle Monorail Washington State Ferries Detroit People Mover Detroit Department of Transportation Fairfax Connector Port Authority The County Connection

Just “Metro”: LA MTA Formerly KINDA Mostly Metro: SORTA Valley Metro Colorado Springs Metrolink Houston StarMetro Santa Cruz More or Less Metro: Metro Transit (Kalamazoo, WMATA El Metro Minneapolis, Okalhoma City, St. Louis Metra Madison, Seattle) Buffalo The Metro TriMet Rock Island Sun Metro Valley Metro Capital Metro Call me M for short Tran(s)

14%

6% Noun Transit (Person, Place or Thing)

19% 6%

Metro RTA (Akron) LANTA Metro

Not Cats: CATS (Charlotte) CATS (Baton Rouge) CAT (Harrisburg) CATA (State College)

Hybrid!

How do they resist? Home of the Nittany Lions!

A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.S.

45%

Clever and Cleverly Descriptive

4%

Simply Descriptive

2% 4%

City Of: Gardena Glendale Tempe

Cats: CATA (Lansing) TCAT (Ithaca) CAT (Raleigh) CAT (Savannah) TCAT (Yuma) CATA (Little Rock) KAT (Knoxville)

Proudly Bus Only: Big Blue Bus Montebello Bus Culver City Bus City Bus The Bus Cambus

One for the Road: The B (Corpus Christi) The T (Fort Worth) T (Boston) The Alphabet Soup*: GBTA NICTD RTD RTD MTD MTS MCTS KRT WTA GRTC MTA DART UTA VIA JTA RTS MATA MAT CARTA CMRTA CARTA RIPTA LCTA BARTA RTS PTS DTA MTA SMART EMTA TARTA RTA COTA RTA WSTA MTA NORTA TANK TARC DART NCTD CTA MTD MARTA PSTA HART RTA AVTA FAX GET PVTA SRTA PATCO BAT OCTA DART MAX LADOT SFMTA BART PATH MTA CDTA ABQ RIDE RTC WHAT WRTA SCAT SEPTA NICTD *Duplicates removed Winter Haven Area Transit. The marketing possibilities are endless.

The biologist’s word for animal feces sort of lends itself to criticism.

35

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of the development and past the town center. According to Andie Rosser at Tallahassee’s StarMetro route 80x has a small, but very dedicated, following. “Ridership shot up at $4-a-gallon gas but has lowered some since. The people who use it love it and show up at public meetings to defend it against proposed cuts.”

I’On in Mount Pleasant, near Charleston, SC straddles the fence in the data set because service is about a half mile from the development.

The sidewalk connections are good and the path to the main road is shaded, but transit-oriented I’On is not. Peter Techlinburg at CARTA says that I’On’s !"#$#%&'()*(#%(+,-(.&+&(/-+ 0'&1;+(<&3"-'=(>#"9#%$,&9( @&%%#%=(!"&%$-(>-&1,( @"377:#''-(/A"#%$7=(@"377:#''637B#%(C-#$,+7=(D&E-++-:#''@,-&+"-(.#7+"#1+=(0-+&'39& 0#+1,I8"B=(F"-7+-4(>3++>"&4H3"%=(J-7+9#%7+-"( F3"+#7(0&"B=(.-%:-" >-'9&"=(<&B-K884 F&$&%(F"877#%$7=(F'-"98%+( /83+,K884=(@&''&,&77-!K'L7(C-&4=(D"--A8"+( @#8$&=(M&#%-7:#''-( F8''-$-+8K%(&+(J-7+(N%4=(?+'&%+&( G%#:-"7#+E(0&"B=(F&9H"#4$<&B-'&%47=(M&#+,-"7H3"$( ?'H-9&"'-(/O3&"-=(>&'+#98"?"+7(.#7+"#1+(CE&++7:#''M"--%H-'+(/+&+#8%=(M"--%H-'+( <-P#%$+8%(@-""&1-=(>&'+#98"-( /#':-"(/A"#%$(.8K%+8K%( F8++&$-7(&+(<#+-7(J8847=(0-%+K&+-"( @8K%(F8998%7=(C8K-''( 0'-#%(?#"=(@&E'8"( /&%1+3&"E(Q#''&$-=(D"&%B'#%( J-798%+(/+&+#8%=(J884S6#4$-( F83%+"E(F'3H(M&"4-%7=(@3'7& F"&KI8"4(/O3&"-=(0#++7H3"$,( 2L!%=(;83%+(0'-&7&%+( F-'#&(/&P8%(R-#$,H8",884=(F8'39H#&( C&"98%E=(M-8"$-+8K% R8#7-++-=(R8"+,(F,&"'-7+8%( <-$&1E(@8K%(F-%+-"( 0'39(F"--B=(UE'-(

36

residents are a bit well-to-do for transit; homes there go up to a million dollars. There is, however, a blind lawyer who lives there and is a regular rider of route 40 and a transit advocate (a good reminder that we are all an accident, an illness, or a few years away from being transit dependent). Mr. Techlinburg points out that there is another NU development from the same developer called Mixson in North Charleston (a separate municipality from Charleston). These homes range from $200-$600k and ridership is better there. CARTA adjusted a route to serve this neighborhood. “In the permitting Mixson was required to make transit

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part of the project, but there were no set requirements for operations or capital contributions. “ Charleston has strict transit-friendly ordinances, but because “North Charleston is still catching up” there was not a lot CARTA could do to get exactions from the developer.

Most of these NUs are outside the service area of the local transit agency, if there is one, because that is where land is cheap and large parcels can be assembled. Rather than a good excuse for not having transit this is the main criticism.

Developers build, it is what they do, and on balance NU is better than cul-de-sac development; but from the philosophical standpoint, were there not more pressing concerns for the planning community to address? To use a crude metaphor, NU is like a patient lying on a gurney, suffering from liver disease and bacterial pneumonia with Kaposi’s sarcoma sores all over his body. The best and brightest doctors are rounded up and brought in . . . to treat his hangnail. The pity of New Urbanism is that transit could fit so well into the NU environment if only it had been invited. Considering all the problems the planning profession faces—jobs/ housing imbalance, affordable housing, class segregation, air and water pollution, urban blight, traffic congestion and disconected land uses, to name a few—a fantastic amount of paper and ink, brick and mortar, timber and asphalt has been applied to the question of how to get people to wave at each other from the front porch.

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creative methods of getting their properties sold. Long gone are the days of condo “flipping,” when speculators would buy out entire buildings before construction on a project had even started. Today, developers outside the hottest districts must invest heavily in marketing efforts such as online advertising and ritzy lobby parties to convince young professionals that their properties are ideal residences for urban living. In this environment, an eager market of hard-working middle class renters must seem very appealing.

It would be forgivable to assume that this crisis might be not so harsh on transit-oriented development. With fluctuating gas prices still a concern for many households, moving to a home that requires less car travel should

be especially appealing for many trying to reduce their spending.

Despite this expectation many TOD projects are either delaying construction or altering their design in the face of changing economic conditions. In Brooklyn, NY construction work on the long awaited and highly controversial Atlantic Yards mixed use development is being delayed. Denver’s Belleview light rail station was also slated for a fifty-acre mixed use development, but the first phase of this project has also been pushed back. Smaller projects are not immune; a redevelopment scheme along Half Street SE in Washington, D.C. is now in doubt after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which was providing financing.

Other prime properties that were scheduled for quick devel-

opment are now waiting for better market conditions. Perhaps the most symbolic of these can be found in Washington, D.C., a mere four blocks from the White House and within eyesight of the American Public Transit Association headquarters. Adjacent to the underground Farragut North heavy rail station and surrounded by expensive office buildings catering to lobbyists and lawyers, the site is now planned to serve as a surface parking lot until construction starts. The developer claims that the delay in construction was planned for in the original schedule, but the sight of this empty parcel is symbolic of a nationwide problem. If a development cannot go forward in the heart of a thriving central business district, what hope do less valuable properties have?

37

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See samples of our transit thinking at thinkcreative.com/transit