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 What's the difference between good transit-oriented development and great transit-oriented development? The answer is laid out in the new Center for Transit-Oriented Development (CTOD) report, "Connecting the West Corridor Communities: An Implementation Strategy for TOD along the Denver Region’s West Corridor."

The report was produced as part of a collaboration between the city and county of Denver, the city of Lakewood, the Denver Housing Authority and Metro West Housing Solutions. Known as the West Corridor Working Group (WCWG), the collaborators sought CTOD's expertise in creating a strategy for implementing successful transit-oriented development along the West Corridor light rail line operated by the Regional Transportation District (RTD) and scheduled to open in 2013.

“The WCWG recognized that to truly achieve affordable, mixed-income communities along the West Corridor, we had to work together to align our vision, policies and resources for positive change” said Ismael Guerrero, Executive Director of the Denver Housing Authority.

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. 

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.)