TOD

Today the Center for Transit-Oriented Development released a pair of studies exploring the impact of job sprawl and the importance of linking employment centers with transit. 

American cities have experienced significant employment decentralization over the last 60 years as jobs have shifted from urban downtowns to suburban communities. This “employment sprawl” has helped to generate much of the traffic congestion experienced today, swelled infrastructure costs, consumed open space and increased the bite that transportation takes out of household incomes.

In a white paper entitled “Transit-Oriented Development and Employment,” CTOD discusses the relationship between transit and job concentrations and explains the importance of the destination side of the trip for both transit operations and land-use planning in station areas. 

The Center for Transit-Oriented Development has released a report that examines real estate development patterns along three recently built light rail lines. The findings of Rails to Real Estate: Development Patterns along Three New Transit Lines should help local planners and others considering new transit lines to maximize the benefits of new transit investments and foster transit-oriented development.

The three transit lines are the Hiawatha Line in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region in Minnesota, the Southeast Corridor in the Denver region in Colorado, and the Blue Line in the Charlotte region in North Carolina.

The analysis considers development patterns with regard to a number of factors, including proximity to downtowns and major employment centers, the location and extent of vacant or “underutilized” property suitable for development or redevelopment, block patterns that influence “walkability,” transit connectivity and household incomes.

Reconnecting America today released a new report, "2010 Inventory of TOD Programs: A National Review of State, Regional and Local Programs that Fund Transit-Oriented Development Plans and Projects."

"There are so many innovative programs in the U.S. that provide grants, loans, tax credits or direct financial incentives to TOD plans or projects," said Sarah Kline, Reconnecting America's policy director. "This report can be used as a resource by planners and policy-makers who are creating new TOD programs in their own jurisdiction and who will benefit from learning the essential facts about other programs that operate at similar scales and contexts."

Today the Center for Transit-Oriented Development released its "Performance-Based Transit-Oriented Development Typology Guidebook,” a hands-on tool for identifying the different conditions that exist around transit stations and determining how that influences performance on a range of metrics.

"The compositions of our communities and the quality of transit have a great influence on how people choose to get around and the choices they have in their daily lives," said Sam Zimbabwe, director of the Center for Transit-Oriented Development (CTOD). "The Performance-Based TOD Typology is a user-friendly tool that gives interested people around the country the ability to evaluate the performance of the transit zones in their neighborhoods and towns."

Whether working locally or regionally, the guidebook provides easy to understand information to help guide efforts to create high-quality TOD that reduces vehicle miles traveled (VMT), a significant generator of our national greenhouse gas emissions, as well as creating a host of community benefits. The guidebook builds off of the TOD Database, a web tool released in October that provides economic and demographic information for every existing and proposed fixed-guideway transit station in the United States. (See URLs for the report below.)