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Posted On October 30, 2019

(Post 4 of 4 for Transit-Oriented Development)

Happy Sunday! Today is our concluding podcast and blog for the Transit Oriented Development topic. We will be providing a brief recap and a few Transit Oriented Development cases for reference. 

To provide a brief recap, let’s examine what we have discussed so far. Transit-Oriented Development or TOD is the creation of compact development near quality transit. The Last Mile Problem refers to the difficulty for people who desires to use transit but getting to the transit station is difficult without driving. The goal of this development effort is to increase access for everyone without the need to own private vehicles. 

Studies reference Benefits including improved competitiveness for the cities, financially viable transit systems, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, reduced household transportation costs, increased real estate values, and increased revenue for additional transit and other public services. For reference, housing demand in transit zones is expected to increase from 6 million households in 2000 to 15 million in 2030 (See Figure 1).

Figure 1: Encouraging Transit-Oriented Development, US EPA

Of course, when an area becomes more attractive and real estate values rise, it often becomes more expensive and gentrified. This is one of the impacts that is most commonly brought up by people concerned about TOD. However, the implementation of TOD helps cut down transportation costs for households which is one of the largest expenses for American households (cite). In addition, there are tools that governments can apply to ensure the availability of affordable housing. For more information on affordable housing feel free to refer to materials posted for the month of September on the Project Planning Green website for reference.  

I also wanted to provide some case studies in this blog to help us better understand the benefits and costs of TOD and their applications. I picked three case studies that all feature different scenarios, benefits, and costs that can occur with the implementation of TOD.  

Case Study 1- Arlington, VA

Revitalization around Arlington, Virginia’s transit corridor has been an overwhelming success story. Since the local government started to focus on development around transit stations roughly 30 years ago, the area has experienced the following overall results: 

  • The assessed value of land around stations increased 81 percent in 10 years;
  • 8 percent of county land generates 33 percent of county revenues – allowing Arlington to have the lowest property tax in Northern Virginia;
  • 50 percent of residents take transit to work
  • 73 percent walk to stations. 

Case Study 2- Oakland, CA

The Fruitvale Village Project around the Fruitvale Bay Area Rapid Transit Station worked with the local community to construct a mixed-use village around the transit station instead of the originally planned parking structure. The result has been a vibrant transit village that served to revitalize nearby neighborhoods, provide public services, shopfronts, and commercial offices.

Successful implementations of TOD gave us strong results, but there are also real barriers to making all of these projects successful. When different elements of TOD aren’t prioritized and implemented, there are significant negative effects as well. As a result, there are a lot of success stories with TOD but there are also some not so successful cases out there. The next case study showcases just one of those TOD cases where the full benefits are not realized. 

Case Study 3- Chicago, IL

Chicago from the years 2000 to 2010 saw a greater decline in development around transit areas as compared to the broader region. This led to residents spending more money on transportation and experiencing reduced access to jobs. What’s even more significant is that the transit areas in Chicago lost job opportunities at a rate that is three times faster than the region as a whole and the vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the area went up. All of which is very unusual for a transit area. However, when examined further, the areas with the lowest VMT and the highest increase in property values also correlated with income increases, decreased VMT and other signifiers of a successful TOD area. What this points to is that most of the transit area has not been developed to optimize the advantages that a TOD area can provide. Additional policy implementations and enforcement are needed to ensure the success of a more significant portion of the TOD areas. For a more detailed analysis and policy recommendation please see the “Transit Oriented Development In The Chicago Region” report under this blog’s Resources section. 

This completes our blog post for this week. Don’t forget to check out and subscribe to our podcast this week and tell your friends about us!

See you next week! 

Project Planning Green

Resources: 

Podcast Transcription

Speaker 1: (00:14)
Hi everyone. Happy Sunday. Thanks for tuning in to project planning green the podcast. My name is Christine and I’m going to be your host for this podcast episode. Before we get started, I wanted to go over some of the announcements that we have because we have some pretty exciting news that we would like to share. So the first thing I want to share is that we’re going to be transcribing our episodes from now on. We want to be able to provide our podcast to the people who can now listen to our podcasts and that’s part of the reasons why we are going to be transcribing our episodes. We will be providing the transcription where our podcast website is and we are also going to be including it where our blog posts are. So be on the lookout for that. And in addition, we will be doing two instead of four blogs from now on per month and the blogs will be coinciding with our podcast weekends.

Speaker 1: (01:15)
This way we can streamline the publications for our podcast and blogs so that we don’t have to be spending every minute of our every week working on this. And part of the reason for that is because everybody on project planning Green’s team are doing this pro bono. We’re very passionate about it, but this is not something that pays our bills. We all have full time jobs and that leads to my next point. We do have a Patreon page, so if you want to support us, you can go to the support us button, project planning, green.com on the right hand corner you will see a Support Us button. You can just go ahead and press that and that will take you to our Patreon page. You can donate as little as $3 per month and that’s really less than the amount of money that you pay for a cup of coffee in the morning.

Speaker 1: (02:11)
That will go towards helping us with publications, helping us with our equipment and helping us with transcribing fees and all the other fees that goes into producing this podcast. And we will be really appreciative of that. So going forward, I also wanted to mention that we have started a Pinterest page and we want to explore this option to post all of our art for our podcast and our blogs on there. We also want to collect some interesting urban planning theme boards and urban skateboards. So if you have a Pinterest and you want to check us out and this project planning green, our Pinterest page and we are really excited for people to check out and connect, um, the social media page as well.

Speaker 1: (02:59)
So having said all that, I wanted to get started on talking about transit oriented development.

Speaker 1: (03:08)
So before we get started today on delving into our second part of transit oriented developments, I want to just recap from the definitions that we’ve learned two weeks ago. So the first term that we learned was transit oriented development. Of course, this term points to the creation of compact developments near quality transit. So why is quality transit? Well, quality transit includes mass transit and that includes rapid transit stations, rails and trains, and other options as well. The compact development portion of this definition includes the goal of creating more than 8 units of household per acre around transit stations or some, we’ll call the trends sizzle. That way you’ll create enough density to make a successful transit oriented development community. The next term I wanted to talk about is the last mile problem. So then the last mile problem refers to the issue of somebody who wants to take transit but lives, you know, just a little bit further than is ideal and has a problem getting to the transit stations for one reason or another.

Speaker 1: (04:23)
And this is actually pretty common, so think about yourself living maybe half to a mile away from the transit station. It’s just over a few blocks. So walking is a little far. So what people would do to help with these kind of issues, especially, you know, if people are buying things and having to carry them, is to provide alternative transit options. And that includes biking, that includes scooters and maybe even include, bus lines from the transit stations to closer to people’s homes and neighborhoods. So there are a lot of options on how to solve the last mile problem out there.

Speaker 1: (05:11)
So now that we have recapped on what our definitions mean, I want to go over the benefit and costs of transit oriented development, but I want everyone to keep in mind that these benefits and costs that are mentioned here are just what people are most commonly mentioning or what the studies have showed most often. So of course there might be other benefits or costs are not discussed here. So I wanted to start with the benefits. So the first benefit that I wanted to talk about is improved competitiveness for the cities. Having transit oriented development is shown to sometimes be able to double job density around transit stations. And studies have also shown that doubling job density around stations can increase economic productivity by five to 10% and that’s considered a pretty significant, the productivity that is provided by the Tod also translates into higher revenues for the local government in terms of monetary and in terms of support for local public services and additional transit as well.

Speaker 1: (06:22)
So it benefits right back into the community. The increased revenue can also come from that increase real estate values that is also shown to increase around transit oriented development areas. So a lot of transit oriented development also has increased real estate values around transit stations. And this is because the area’s become more attractive to people who are moving into the area with the convenience of being able to take transit and not having to own a car, being able to get around without having to pay very high transportation costs and all those things adds up and helps people make the decision to move into transit oriented development neighborhoods. Additionally, transit oriented development also expand the mobility choices that people have and reduce the automobile dependence of the surrounding area and the surrounding neighborhoods. And of course not driving helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well, which really helps combat climate change, which is such a important topic in our world today.

Speaker 1: (07:34)
So having said all these benefits, I want to dig a little bit into the costs that is most commonly mentioned for Tod areas. So the most common cost that is mentioned of Tod areas is gentrification. Well, it’s pretty understandable when real estate values around transit stations have increase, that means that it becomes more expensive to live there. There are more people who are moving in the place can become denser and the services could become a little bit more expensive as people fight to get to the area. However, this does not mean that the area has to be unaffordable to live in just because there is gentrification. Again, you have to look at the whole picture. So when you have transit oriented development, it often reduces the household costs for transportation and that is a big deal because transportation costs in America is one of the largest costs for people and having reduced that costs will help a lot of household cut down on their costs in general.

Speaker 1: (08:44)
And on top of that, there are a lot of things that local governments and state governments can do to help with affordable housing and just with planning correctly in general and if interested in finding out more about affordable housing, I really encourage you to dig into our materials from the month of September and the month of September has a lot of blogs and podcasts about affordable housing that you can explore that will really help you find out how to keep affordable housing and find out the tour that the local government can use in order to keep affordable housing available to people. Also moving on today I wanted to explore some case studies to just give us some reference point, on how Tod has done over the past years that we have been using it. So I found three case studies that I wanted to showcase today in this podcast and I wanted them to show different things like different positive and negative things about Tod so that we can really get a holistic picture of what Tod can do for the community and what an unsuccessful case could look like.

Speaker 1: (10:02)
The first case I wanted to discuss is the Arlington Virginia Pace. So the Arlington, Virginia area has a transit corridor that has existed for a long time, but in the past 30 years, the local government has started to focus on development around the transit stations, which is TOD and actually through this investment from the local government, the area has just experienced overwhelming success. So our first case is a success story from Tod. Some statistics have shown the following results. So over a 10 year span, the value of the land around the stations has increased over 80% and because of the properties around these stations, having so much value, just 8 percent of the County land around the stations generate 33% of the County revenues, which actually allow Arlington to have the lowest property tax in Northern Virginia and saves everybody money to live on.

Speaker 1: (11:11)
And in addition to that, 50% of the residents take transit to work. So what that means is that people are not taking their cars and are not dependent on their private vehicles, which also is another really significant accomplishment. Just to add on to that, over 70% of the people walk to stations from their home or offices, wherever they’re coming from, which means they don’t need any assistance. And that means there is very little barrier for people to get from where they need to be and to the stations itself to take advantage of the mass transit. So having examined this, I want to move on to another different case. And this case of Tod use happen in Oakland, California. So Oakland, California has a BART station call Fruitvale now I wanted to define BART. So BART is Bay area rapid transit stations, which is the light rail line in Northern California.

Speaker 1: (12:14)
The local government went to the communities and was going to build a parking structure, just a big parking structure so that people can park there and use the transit. So the local community, you learn about this and they’re really not happy about it because they’re worried about what it would do to their communities and their homes and how you will look aesthetically. So what the community did was worked with the local government and came up with this plan of a mixed use village around the transit stations. This has became such a success story because it has helped revitalize nearby him neighborhoods. The village provides public services, there are shop fronts and commercial offices which brings in jobs and it also provided a place that people can go and relax and hang out. And if you go today you can see this nice area that people go to visit and people stop to shop and it’s just a very great gathering place for the community.

Speaker 1: (13:23)
So as I mentioned before, we are going to examine both the success stories and Nassau successful stories. For third case, I chose a case study in Chicago, Illinois. Chicago has long had a transit line in their city as well. However, from the ears of 2000 to 2010 they saw a decline in development around transit zones as compared to the rest of the Chicago region. And this is even more significant because the rate of job opportunities lost is three times greater than the region as a whole. What this means is that people are losing assets to their jobs and they have to spend more money to go out of their area to look for jobs, which defeats the whole point of having a transit oriented development that focus on having jobs in homes around the transit stations because they have the travel out. That also means they’re more dependent on their vehicles.

Speaker 1: (14:22)
So people around the transit stations actually started driving more during this 10 year period that the declining development around transit zones happened. However, as we have talked about before, this is a pretty unusual case because this is not what we’re expecting to have happened around transit areas. So the people who did this study looked a little bit deeper and found two particular stations where the vehicle traveled, decrease for the residents, and the income level increased. So there are places around transit stations where the people are actually experiencing the benefits that Tod is supposed to provide to them. So having a look deeper, the people who study the area realized that Chicago wasn’t developing to optimize the vintages of a Tod area and suggested that more policy implementations to enforce the correct development is needed. Again, the success of those implementations are still to be seen, but there is optimism. Having looked at two successful stations that does have the Tod effects and in a positive way shows that the rest of the line can also experience this positive effect if planned effectively. So in conclusion it looks like Tod does have quite a bit of positives and there are some concerns as well. However, it seems that some of the concerns can be worked out by other supplemental regulations or enforcement or local government action. And with proper planning and proper enforcement and implementation of Tod ideas, we can really expect positive things coming out of the transit oriented development method that can positively add to our communities.

Speaker 1: (16:34)
And this concludes our episode today. Thank you so much for tuning in to our episode. And remember we do have social media, so check us out on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, wherever you can find us. And also subscribe to our podcast. So click that subscribe button, follow army social media pages so that you can keep tabs on us and make sure that you are the first person to know when we have a new episode coming up. These are for today’s podcast is provided by our good friend, DJ Kiraz. She’s a Swedish, DJ, and you can check out her information in the show notes or look her up on SoundCloud or Instagram on the curious music. That’s K. I R. a.Z music. Additional music is provided by Vexento and Johkim Karud. You can find Jochen’s music on YouTube under his name. Johkim Karud. That’s J. O. H K I. M. first name and K, a. R. U. D. last name. The information for the two artists can also be found in the show notes.

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Christine Lan