Institute for Transportation and Development Policy

Promoting sustainable and equitable transportation worldwide

The Challenge of Planning and Implementing TOD in Metropolitan USA

Metro West development site south of the Vienna Metro station. Photo: Hiroaki Suzuki

by Hiroaki Suzuki, Former World Bank Lead Urban Specialist

After retirement, my wife and I started to look for a place to downsize and to reduce our carbon footprint. We visited a TOD site, adjacent to Vienna station of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s (WMATA) Metro Orange Line, called Metro West (MW), located in the state of Virginia, USA. On the brochure of the developer, MW looked like an ideal place for us without depending too much on automobiles. The original plan of MW was approved by the Fairfax County Government in 2008. MW contains roughly 1200 resident units combined with retail uses and office spaces. It appears to meet most of ITDP’s TOD Standard criteria: Walk, Cycle, Connect, Transit, Mix, Densify, Compact, and Shift. We were attracted to MW because of its accessibility by transit to Washington D.C’s downtown, two international airports, suburban town features with various retails and restaurants, and good amenities such as the community center.

Several months later, we revisited the site and noticed that a huge block just in front of the metro station (see photos below), where the retail uses, restaurants, and office spaces were supposed to be constructed, remained vacant and undeveloped. We asked the developer when this block would be completed and learned from them that the block would be developed by another developer and that the timing of its completion was uncertain.

Aerial view of the Metro West site with undeveloped lots. Source: Google Earth

I did a quick Google search and found that the mix land use plan of this site was facing a big challenge. The Fairfax County Government approved the developer’s plan to develop MW as mix land use town center but at the public hearing meeting held several years later, the developer of the retail spaces and office spaces announced a possible scale down of the development, due to lukewarm regional economy. It seems that MW did not attract enough demand for their office spaces as reflected in the low occupancy rate of the office buildings in the Fairfax County.  In addition, MW is competing with other full-fledged suburban town centers already developed, such as Reston Town Center of the WMATA’s Silver Line and Mosaic District of the same Orange line, both within 5-15 miles from MW.

In the absence of adequate office space demand, the day time population of MW is not large enough to justify full scale development of retails and restaurants. It seems that the developer has not yet submitted the plan modification to the Fairfax County Government, which would be most probably rejected by the Fairfax County Government.  So, the full development of MW is in limbo, 10 years after the construction started.

The difficult path of MW development highlights two interlinked important factors which affect TOD implementation, the timeline and the condition of the regional economy- particularly that of the real estate market. Any TOD development cycle easily takes a long time, often 20 to 30 years from its planning to implementation. Over this long period, the market condition assumed in the original plan evolves, sometimes not in the direction of the developer’s forecast. The factor which makes the developer’s job more challenging is that several similar suburban town projects are planned and implemented within 10 to 15 miles distance.

The challenge of MW reminds me of the importance of planning TOD, not only at station level, but also at the corridor level. Thanks to good guidelines of TOD such as ITDP’s TOD Standard, many cities started to adapt them in their TOD projects. It is important for them to understand that mixed use and density are the elements of TOD which are affected by not only specific site conditions but also that of the regional economy.

As a Japanese urban development expert, I wonder how Japanese transit agencies, developers and local governments would tackle a challenge similar to MW. First, it seems that the Japanese counterparts have much longer planning vision and master plans often developed in a collaborative manner by these stakeholders. However, they cannot escape from the unpredictable market development, not anticipated in the original plan. Second, if they faced the same challenge, I imagine that they would take a more proactive and strategic approach to create demand. They would revisit the original plan to find a way to increase demand for the day time population and transit use. Some of the measures would be to develop magnet facilities such as a satellite university campus or an outpatient hospital visitor center.  Third, they would more efficiently use the huge parking space and bus terminal by constructing three to four story buildings with bus terminals located on the underground or first floor and the above said magnet facilities and other retails and restaurants housed on the floors above. The construction cost of this multiple purpose complex can be jointly born by, the transit agency or the local government (whoever owns the land for the bus terminal) using the land of bus terminal as equity and the developer (the developer can construct more residential units thanks to the efficient use of the land) and other investors such as a university or hospital. Fourth, they would consider extending metro catchment areas by offering more frequent commuter feeder services, probably an adoption of a auto-drive bus system, as many condos are being developed adjacent to MW. Finally, at the later stage when the initial stage would be successfully implemented and more demand would arise, they would construct the facilities serving both the population of Vienna West and Vienna East, over the connecting bridge of the metro line and the Route 66, like the one built in the busiest JR Yamanote Line in Tokyo.

Viewers enjoying blooming cherry tree at Gakushuinshita station, Tokyo. Pictured the background: dense urban fabric and train infrastructure.
Shinjuku “Busta” Bus Terminal Station constructed over JR Yamanote LineSource: UPON
Night view of the Takashimaya Building looking over the Shinjuku Rail Station and the “Busta” Bus Terminal Station. Source: Zengame from Flickr.

US federal, state, and local governments, transit agencies, and developers may not have enough incentive to adopt these projects, which require complex stakeholder collaboration and innovative but complex engineering and financing solutions because of the availability of ample lands and spaces, however, the lack of proactive and innovative approaches has made the USA’s capital area the most congested metropole in the country and forced people to commute long hours by car, as far as Winchester, located almost 76 miles away from Washington DC. Metro West initiated with a collaborative and innovative concept could provide wonderful solutions for air pollution, green gas emissions, and housing affordability, if all the stakeholders review the original plan with fresh eyes.

Future Denver: Getting People Near Frequent Transit

Denver, a mid-sized city by US standards, is one of America’s fastest-growing cities. Denver’s population is expected to increase by more than 30 percent by 2050, and the city faces the challenge of accommodating additional mobility needs. Fortunately, they have the opportunity to apply the lessons learned from their peer cities, such as Minneapolis, and reinvent themselves with transit-oriented developments, including high quality walking and cycling facilities and first/last mile connections, as well as reliable and convenient frequent transit services, which would distinguish Denver as a world-class city.

Last month, ITDP hosted an event at the Downtown Denver Partnership, titled ‘Future Denver: Getting People Near Frequent Transit’ featuring Minneapolis City Council President, Lisa Bender, alongside representatives from the Regional Transportation District (RTD), the city department of public works (DPW), and the regional council of governments (DRCOG).   The convening included a presentation by Lisa where she shared challenges and progress made in her city, an assessment of indicators for sustainable mobility by Joe Chestnut from ITDP, as well as interactive discussions and a group brainstorming exercise on how to increase people near frequent transit in the city of Denver.

This event was held at a pivotal moment for Denver. The city has plans for a multi-modal transport network, encouraging mode shift to reduce single-occupancy vehicles (SOV) to 50% from the current share of 73% by 2030. Reaching this target will be a long process, requiring commitments to intermediate milestones accompanied by corresponding funding allocations.

While Denver’s population continues to grow, the city has not made significant progress toward reaching the lower SOV target. Increasing density around high-capacity transit-corridors, or “getting people near frequent transit” will be a key strategy to meet this objective. The 2016 mode split for the Denver metro region leaves a lot to be desired:

Mode City Region City Targets

(by 2030)
Driving Alone 75% 82% 50%
Carpool 9% 9% N/A
Public Transit 7% 5% 15%
Walk 5% 2% 7.5%
Bike 3% 1% 7.5%

Source: U.S. Census Bureau (ACS 2016 Report) & Denver Mobility Action Plan

Like many American cities, Denver’s transit offerings are limited by car-oriented parking regulations. The city has historically allocated investments toward expanding suburban rail, however the land uses around the station areas are low density and include park-and-rides as required by CDOT. The parking around certain rail transit stations is so vast, it requires knowledge of specific destinations or imagination to trust what lies beyond the sea of asphalt. Municipal bonds used to pay for the rail build-out preclude redevelopment of the vast parking craters surrounding the stations. The bonds stipulate that the majority of funding be dedicated to public use (at least 90%), thereby preventing RTD from engaging private developers to construct mixed-use projects.  

Source: ITDP (Data: GTFS)

Lisa Bender, Minneapolis City Council President, presenting at Future Denver

ITDP benchmarked how Denver compares to other peers cities on a host of indicators, including the percentage of jobs near frequent transit with first/last mile connections made by walking and protected bicycle lane networks. Denver performs fairly well on many of the metrics, aside from the People Near Transit metric.

Other cities that perform well on the metric, including Minneapolis, have seen the results of setting intermediate goals and budget allocations to reach targets. Minneapolis is ahead of many other cities that were evaluated on the People Near Transit metric largely due to investing in quality walking and bicycling facilities, and designing bus services to connect high demand destinations to move closer toward achieving their mobility goals. Denver has set the goal to increase the percentage of bike and pedestrian commuters to 15%, and public transit to 15% respectively by 2030. Yet current funding allocations put into questions whether the targets will be reached.

Source: ITDP (Data: GTFS)

Minneapolis also has updated their comprehensive plan (2018), implemented a protected bikeway plan (2015) and complete streets policy (2016), allocated additional funding for parks and streets (2016), adopted parking reforms into their building codes (2015), and are beginning to implement a new zoning code that allows for accessory dwelling units, duplexes and/or ‘granny flats’ to address the supply of affordable housing.

Denver is now faced with the opportunity to reinvent themselves from a predominantly car-oriented city to one with transit-oriented developments, including high quality walking and cycling facilities as first/last mile connections, with reliable and convenient frequent transit services, distinguishing themselves as a city that truly puts people near frequent transit.

Fortaleza, Brazil Wins 2019 Sustainable Transport Award

Fortaleza will host the 2019 MOBILIZE Summit
Bucheon City, South Korea will receive an Honorable Mention

Fortaleza, Brazil a coastal city of 2.6 million in the state of Ceara, is the 5th largest city in the nation, and growing rapidly. As with many cities around the world, Fortaleza has struggled to meet their growing need for urban mobility without sacrificing the environment and quality of life for their residents. Fortunately, the city’s actions over the past couple of years have shown that they are facing this challenge head-on.

The city has been implementing good practices on their streets since 2014, including complete streets, or equitable division of road space; reducing CO2, and increasing road safety by prioritizing public transport, cycling, and walking. In 2018, Fortaleza reached a goal of 108 km of dedicated bus lanes, which include refurbished bus terminals and a fare-integrated transport system. In addition, they have delivered a whopping 225 km of cycling infrastructure, and integrated bike share systems with public transport. Road safety elements implemented include a reduced speed limit, narrowing roads for cars, raised pedestrian crossings, and redesigns of intersections. As a result, deaths from traffic collisions were reduced from 14.66 (per 100,000) in 2014, to 9.71 in 2017.

“Fortaleza has taken the right approach to transport, which is one that moves away from private cars, to one that prioritizes and integrates pedestrians, cyclist, and public transport users,” says Michael Kodransky, Chair of the Sustainable Transport Award Committee and Head of MOBILIZE, “There is a growing realization among cities that the individual transport model is unsustainable, and we’re very happy to showcase Fortaleza’s leadership over the next year. We very much look forward to bringing 200+ sustainable transport experts to see the city’s achievements for themselves at next year’s MOBILIZE.”

The STA committee was particularly impressed with the replicability of Fortaleza’s projects, as many are based on low cost interventions, partnerships with the private sector, and pilot projects that gather data to justify further capital projects. Fortaleza, has already been working with different cities to share the good practices on sustainable transport and road safety, from a developing city perspective.

“Despite the challenges faced as a developing country city, Fortaleza has demonstrated that through creativity, innovation, leadership and public participation, it is possible to achieve successful results in promoting sustainable mobility in a short term. One of our main strategies has been to adapt international good practices to our local context and we believe that MOBILIZE 2019 will be an important opportunity to maximize the exchange of experiences. We feel honored in receiving this price and to host such prestigious event in our city.” says the mayor of Fortaleza, Roberto Claudio Rodrigues Bezerra.

Photo Credit: http://news.bucheon.go.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=5923

Walkway in Citizen’s River, Bucheon City.

Bucheon City, South Korea will receive the honorable mention for their creation of an extensive new network of cycling and walking paths, including transforming areas around three metro stations into community and cultural public spaces.

Former STA winning cities include Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Santiago, Chile; Seoul, South Korea; Paris, France; Guangzhou, China; San Francisco, USA; Mexico City, Mexico; and Yichang, China.

Both cities will be honored at an award ceremony in Washington, DC in January 2019 during the Transport Research Board annual meeting. Fortaleza will be the site of MOBILIZE 2019, ITDP’s annual Sustainable Transport Summit organized in partnership with the Volvo Research and Education Foundations. The event will showcase best practices and lessons in sustainable mobility to an international group of city practitioners and researchers, spotlighting this emerging city as a learning lab. For more information, visit mobilizesummit.org.

MOBILIZE Dar es Salaam Speaker Series: Benjamin de la Peña

For the last decade, Seattle has been the fastest growing city in the U.S. The population boom, the city’s biggest since the 19th century Yukon Gold Rush, has strained transportation infrastructure, which relies almost entirely on surface buses without many dedicated lanes. In the 1960s and 1970s, voters turned down federal funding to build a mass transit system and the city has been paying the price ever since. But the tide is turning in favor of transit, with the current generation of voters approving a $54 billion mass transit measure in 2016 that will build out regional light rail over the next 20 years.

To help think big within city limits, Seattle relies on Benjamin (Benjie) de la Peña, Chief of Strategy and Innovation for the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT). He came to the Emerald City after nearly a decade in philanthropy with the Rockefeller Foundation, where he oversaw pioneering mobility initiatives like Walk Score, Transit Score, Digital Matatus, and the BRT Standard. As a former local to Miami, New York, Baltimore, Washington D.C. and his native metro Manila, Benjie knows his way around cities of all shapes and sizes.

ITDP: The theme of MOBILIZE is making space for mobility in booming cities. What is your city doing to address mobility in the face of rapid urbanization? And what are the challenges in accelerating these solutions?

Benjamin de la Peña: We’ve added 100,000 people in the last 10 years. That’s tremendous growth for a North American city. To accommodate everyone, the first thing we’re doing is expanding options. Seattle, both the region and the city itself, has excellent support for investing in transportation over the last decade.

Community Transit Double Tall bus in Downtown Seattle, US

We’ve renewed Bridging the Gap with a Move Seattle levy, which is $930 million dollars over nine years for building up infrastructure. There’s the $45 million dollar per year Seattle Transportation Benefit District that allows us to buy transportation services, mostly bus services, and we’ve gotten to where about 62% of the households in Seattle are now within a 10 minute walk of a frequent bus line that comes every 10 minutes or less..

Those investments have amounted to really great ridership. About 75% of commuters within the city and people coming in from outside the city travel to work by a means other than single occupancy vehicles. We’ve lowered single occupancy vehicle use from 30% in 2016 to 25% in 2017 by increasing transit, expanding bike infrastructure, and connecting sidewalks.

We’re also figuring out new, emerging technologies like rideshare, ridehail, and dockless bike share. At the core, we provide the people who live, work, and play in Seattle with more transportation options, other than single occupancy vehicles. We’ll continue to push in terms of understanding the choices that our commuters have from the moment when they’re making that choice, and building up infrastructures that creates complete streets and more balanced uses of the street.

 

What impact would you like to have as SDOT Chief of Strategy and Innovation in the coming years to address the issue of mobility and rapid urbanization?

On street use, there is so much construction going on we need to figure out a way to communicate better when it comes to road closures. In transit and mobility, we’ve got a streetcar that we need to complete that network, and then we’re buying up more transportation services. Not just bus, we need to figure out how to use microtransit. How do we use dockless bike share and everything else that’s coming in? We want to make sure that all of these emerging services are equitable in line with Seattle’s new mobility playbook.

The playbook sets out four plays that are a response to this technology because the transportation system is highly inequitable. In order to function in North American cities, you need to own a car. So what we’re trying to do is first we make sure that all of these emerging technologies, which are disrupting transportation in cities, deliver fair and just transportation.

We want to make sure that we put people first, instead of being enamored by autonomous vehicles or whatever new technologies are coming. We want to decide first what kind of city do we want, then we embrace the technologies and ask the technologies to adapt to the kind of city we want.

We need to be organized within SDOT. I want to build out an information-driven transportation system now, but government agencies are not completely equipped for this. We need to act as an information broker and push out data as a service, so one of the key things I want to build out is an information infrastructure plan for Seattle. We have four mobility plans in Seattle: pedestrian, bike, transit, and freight.

A row of BYD Co. electric buses parked at a public transport hub in Shenzhen, China Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images

We require a fifth plan, which is information infrastructure. And the question there is not about technology, it’s about what information do we need to deliver at a particular time in a particular place, so that users, whether they are autonomous vehicles, people with smartphones, or whoever else get the confirmation they need on how to use the transportation system and the choices in front of them at the right time.

 

What city projects anywhere in the world are most interesting to you right now?

I am absolutely fascinated by how Chinese cities have flipped their bus systems into all electric fleets very quickly by adapting to the power system rather than waiting for the power system to be rebuilt. Rather than waiting for power distribution systems to be able to handle charging infrastructure, cities like Guangzhou and Shenzen put capacitors and batteries in bus depots so that the buses can come and load. That allowed the cities to turn around and give incentives for renewing the fleet battery-powered engines.

I am fascinated by autonomous vehicles, particular multi-ride autonomous vehicles, which is still a toy system right now in multiple cities with usually just one route or one direction. But that technology could be really interesting as we provide more transportation options. I’m not a big fan of autonomous vehicles as private cars, but if these are larger vehicles that could carry more people and we could pair it with infrastructure like BRT, we will get much more efficient transportation.

Lots of cities are experimenting with scooters. We’re not sure if we’re going to do that in Seattle yet, but electric scooters and electric bikes could really be game changers. Of course you look at the granddaddies of complete bike infrastructure like Copenhagen and Amsterdam, and we need to do that. We want to be able to do it in a city like Seattle if we can get past the politics, because that’s more transportation options and the game changer of the electric bike is that I can be a granny and be doing hills in Seattle.

 

What are you most excited to see or learn about at MOBILIZE?

I want to see DART, the Dar es Salaam bus rapid transit project. When I was at the Rockefeller Foundation, there was still a back and forth with Dar about whether it was going to move forward or not. I also want to understand what cities are really doing around informal transportation. I co-wrote a monograph on innovations in informal transportation because is still a critical piece of urban transportation. If you look at cities like Dhaka, 30% of the city’s workforce is employed in connection with informal transportation.

We need to innovate how to get all the good things about informal transit – like the availability and ability to go places that larger infrastructure can’t go – and not get all the bad things that go with it like safety problems. I’d like to see where Dar es Salaam is thinking about that and if there are other cities around the world that are thinking about how do you deal with informal transportation.

 

How is Seattle leveraging data to alleviate crippling traffic congestion?

We have adapted systems in terms of traffic management and traffic lights in a couple of corridors. We monitor all of these so that we’re looking at the performance of corridors. Of course that’s still driven by vehicles crossing through a particular corridor and we need to be better at figuring out metrics for people. This summer, we are piloting a study in 25 neighborhoods with the Gehl Institute on what are people doing in the streets.

Melrose Promenade created based on pedestrian movement | SDOT Flickr

Melrose Promenade Community Crosswalk in Seattle | Photo Credit: SDOT Flickr

That brings to the table more of our understanding of how the right or way is used as public space and gives us better leverage to ask what interventions are actually working. In developed world cities, the largest store in data is about vehicle movement and so we then respond to vehicle movement. We need a counter-narrative that responds to how people actually use space.

We are studying whether congestion pricing will work for the city so that we can price the roads correctly and correct the inequalities that are in the system. Internally we are trying to get our house in order particularly around incident management and closures. Our systems are so disparate, we don’t always know exactly what we need to know at the right moment. That’s because we gather data for recordkeeping and we don’t treat data as an asset.

 

What lessons from the private and philanthropic sectors are you applying to your role in the public sector?

Understand the system. Projects don’t exist in vacuums and if you want to move something forward, you can’t just be pushing at one aspect. You have be thinking about the system and how they interlock. So as I move a project forward in one segment, I have to understand what are the drivers of that system. What other pieces need to be moved and who are the partners we need to recruit for both the expertise and the support as we try to enact institutional change?

 

Seattle is one of the few U.S. cities that has seen increased bus ridership in the last few years. Why do you think that is?

We provide more bus service. As Jarrett Walker, author of Human Transit, said, “Frequency is freedom.” If I know that I’ll probably wait just five, at most ten minutes, for my bus to come, then it’s an easier choice. The worst situation is you wait 15 or 20 minutes and there’s no bus coming. Technology has helped too with apps like OneBusAway and Transit – all of these systems make bus travel more predictable because I know exactly when the next bus will arrive.

In my new role, we want to explore how we can better understand the choices that commuters make – whether to ride the bus or take a bike or drive – and figure out how to nudge them into more sustainable options. I want the agency to learn the methods of human-centered design; we need to move faster and fail and learn better, so we are also rolling out “lean” and trying out “agile”.

We know that rapid changes in technology precipitate changes in organizations and institutions and we want to be ahead of that curve.

This interview is the part of the MOBILIZE Dar es Salaam Speaker Series.  In this series, we will feature interviews with speakers and researchers from VREF’s Future Urban Transport where they will discuss their work in sustainable transport and reflect on MOBILIZE Dar es Salaam’s theme: Making Space for Mobility in Booming Cities.  

To learn more about MOBILIZE Dar es Salaam visit mobilizesummit.org.

Future Dallas: Targeting Sustainable Mobility

View of I-35 E highway in the urban core of Dallas, US.

On April 26th, ITDP hosted a workshop in Dallas to aid coalitions of people in the city in setting a vision for shifting away from single occupancy vehicle use and towards the support of walking, cycling, and public transit. This workshop was held at a pivotal moment for Dallas. With a newly formed Department of Transportation (DOT), the city is in the midst of developing a comprehensive mobility plan. While the city has been in the habit of making forecasts based on existing trends, setting measurable long-term mode share targets that will require alignment with public budgets will be the key to the plan’s success.

The workshop focused on an assessment of mobility indicators such as people near transit, access to jobs, and low income people near frequent transit. Attendees to the workshop included representatives from the Dallas City Hall, the North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG), Regional Chamber of Commerce, Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART), as well other local private sector, non-profit, academic, and advocacy organizations.

Joe Chestnut, ITDP presents mobility indicators assessment
Break-out group focused on public transit targets
City of Denver presents sustainable mobility targets.

The population of the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington Metroplex grew by 146,238 in 2017 – the most growth of any metro area in the U.S. – making it the fourth most populous metro area in the country. The city of Dallas alone grew by 10%. Dallas must decide how it will accommodate this growth without adding traffic congestion. The key, of course is to improve access to the city, while reducing dependency on private cars, with a substantial mode shift to transit.

The current mode shares for the City of Dallas and the metro region leave much room for improvement:

Mode City Region
Driving Alone 76% 80%
Carpool 11% 10%
Public Transit 4% 2%
Walk 2% 1%
Bike 0.2% 0.1%

Source: U.S. Census Bureau (ACS 2016 Report)

ITDP made the case to Dallas in many ways. By mapping jobs near frequent transit, (defined as transit with headways of 12 minutes or less), it becomes clear where there is great potential for transit-oriented development. Dallas has 90 miles of light rail in a hub and spoke pattern branching out from the Downtown. The setting of sustainable mobility targets may be the first step for Dallas toward achieving the greater goal of reducing single occupancy vehicle use and shifting toward sustainable transport.

Source: ITDP (Data: GTFS)
Source: ITDP (Data: GTFS)

Long-term mode share targets from other U.S. cities were presented to illustrate that many peer cities have embarked on this process with the intention of decreasing single occupancy vehicle use. These cities have already begun to see the results of investing in quality walking and cycling facilities, and offering frequent transit services to move closer toward achieving their mobility goals. ITDP compared Dallas to these peers cities on a host of indicators, such as the percentage of jobs near frequent transit with first/last mile connections made by walking and cycling. Dallas performs among the worst on the list, even compared to other sunbelt cities such as Houston, Atlanta, Albuquerque and Denver.

Getting to the Targets

A major component of the workshop included an interactive exercise that challenged participants to produce a collective vision for future mobility in Dallas. Participants were arranged into groups based on transport mode, and each group developed targets. These are the results:

Pegasus Plaza with dockless bikeshare.

New development near Victory DART Station

Public Transit

  • Increase people living near frequent transit to 10% by 2028
  • Increase access to jobs by public transit to 50% by 2030

Cycling

  • Increase cycling mode share from 0.2% to 0.8% by 2022
  • Increase the number of children biking to school by 20% by 2030

Participants also outlined the policies that would be needed to reach these targets by the proposed dates. Policy changes included a desire to reduce resident speed limits to 25 mph and to make zoning changes that would cluster more people within a ½ mile of a buffered bike lane among many others. The goal of the exercise was to have the group work as a unified coalition around each transport mode. Each group developed an action plan for how they would realize all the steps needed to reach the targets.

With a growing workforce and emphasis on strengthening the urban core, Dallas has significant opportunity to apply some of the lessons learned from their peer cities and reinvent themselves as a transit oriented city with walkable urbanism and world-class cycling infrastructure.

[WEBINAR] Freight and Environmental Justice

Webinar Recording


YouTube Link

 

Presentation Slides
Freight and Environmental Justice


About the Webinar
The movement of goods is essential to urban life, but also generates many problems.  Trucks emit pollution and noise; warehouses and intermodal facilities attract concentrations of trucks and trains.  Research shows that poor and minority populations are more impacted by freight-related pollution. At the same time, poor and minority populations are less likely to enjoy the benefits of instant deliveries or wide assortments of food at local shops.  This webinar provides an overview of freight-related environmental justice problems in the US.

 

About the Presenter

Genevieve Giuliano | Director of the METRANS, California State University Long Beach Transportation Center

Genevieve Giuliano is Margaret and John Ferraro Chair in Effective Local Government in the Sol Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California, and Director of the METRANS joint USC and California State University Long Beach Transportation Center. Her research areas include relationships between land use and transportation, transportation policy analysis, travel behavior, and information technology applications in transportation. She has conducted extensive research on freight policy and planning and published over 170 papers. Professor Giuliano is a past Chair of the Executive Committee of the Transportation Research Board, and of the Council of University Transportation Centers. She has received numerous distinguished scholarship and service awards.  She was a member of the National Freight Advisory Committee, and currently serves on the California Freight Efficiency Group. She will also be a speaker at MOBILIZE Dar es Salaam.

Momentum Grows for Bus Improvements, BRT in Boston

The Boston area is preparing for exciting new improvements to its bus service in 2018, so much that #YearoftheBus has become popular on social media and local television has taken an interest in covering the progress. In addition to the three local bus pilots that ITDP is supporting, the local transit authority (the MBTA) and MassDOT have recently initiated efforts to conduct a Network Redesign for its bus system and several other communities have also announced plans to pursue bus improvements like dedicated lanes, Transit Signal Priority (TSP), and platform level boarding.

ITDP has been working in Boston for the past six years, and has seized this opportunity to engage local transit practitioners, advocates and thought leaders in a day of capacity building and learning about bus network redesign and how it can be leveraged as a platform to create Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). Last month, ITDP organized the “Greater Boston Bus Network Redesign & BRT Workshop” at our office in the Community Innovation Center (CIC) in downtown Boston. Featured presentations included international bus network design experts Jarrett Walker of Jarrett Walker + Associates and Christof Spieler of Houston METRO Board of Directors. The goal of the workshop was to give a comprehensive understanding of the bus network redesign process planned for greater Boston, including opportunities for buses to better respond to the region’s changing travel patterns and how a bus network revamp connects with potential corridors of high capacity bus service. ITDP presented the steps that could lead from bus network redesign to Gold Standard BRT, showing case studies of BRT service options from around the world.

Over 40 representatives from the MBTA, MassDOT, the regional planning agency (MAPC), transit advocacy organizations, and municipal planning departments – including from jurisdictions such as Worcester, MA –  participated in the workshop. Presentations were also given by the MBTA and MassDOT. Participants were welcomed with an inspiring presentation about the successful bus network redesign in Houston, TX that has lead to a ridership increase by 11-30%.  MassDOT and the MBTA shared some of the strategies under consideration for a network redesign in Boston which includes a focus on improving accessibility, moving away from “one-size-fits all” metrics, and identification of service gaps.

The MBTA Network Redesign will explore a variety of strategies for maximizing transit accessibility in the Boston area:

  • Pursuing a Network of Priority Bus Corridors – Build off of the Bus Service Plan pursuit of speed and reliability improvements (bus lanes, TSP, etc) to envision a system that sacrifices coverage in favor of a near-rapid transit experience in major corridors
  • Rethinking a Bus Network’s Relationship to Rapid Transit – Address capacity constraints on rapid transit and provide more one-seat ride access to employment opportunities
  • Better Crosstown Service to Meet New Travel Needs – Introduction of relatively short, high demand transit links that can respond to changing travel patterns that are not always focused on downtown Boston.

Participants got to experience an  interactive group exercise led by Jarrett Walker that challenged them to devise a bus system using wax ropes color-coded by service frequency and intended to- as sufficiently as possible- serve the imaginary city of “Prairieville”, complete with a downtown, hospitals, shopping malls, universities and an industrial flood plain.

Mr. Walker reflected on the uniqueness of the opportunity to lead his exercise in a room full of professional transit planners, and participants noted the value of being able to work creatively with colleagues from outside their particular department or agency. Each group posted their final maps on the wall and observed the variations in service planning decisions made across the room.

The challenge was to provide the best service possible for the greatest number of people, taking into consideration … residential density, income disparities, employment centers and shopping destinations–all while functioning within the limits of their resources and budget. 

It was fascinating to see the variations in service maps across the room and to observe the very real trade-offs that are often faced by transit planners when designing bus routes driven by the dual yet often counteractive goals of ridership versus coverage.  

Is it possible to achieve both high ridership and high coverage in bus network design? As workshop participants learned through this exercise and through the examples shared by both Walker and Spieler, the answer is often no. For instance, the recent network redesign of Houston’s bus network saw route coverage actually decrease while ridership increased because the buses were now able to serve the heavier ridership routes at higher frequencies. Planners can expect to receive an outpouring of public opposition when a bus route is changed or removed all together, but if the goal of the system is to maximize ridership, then these are often difficult decisions that must be made. If the goal, however, is to maximize coverage then the trade-off usually comes at the expense of frequency (a common characteristic of American bus systems). To this end, it is important for transit agencies to be clear on what their ultimate goals is when pursuing network redesign, and to be prepared to handle the consequences of compromise.

As Boston moves towards its Summer 2018 launch of its Network Redesign, and municipalities from Everett to Arlington to Cambridge to Boston prepare to demonstrate bus improvements that have never been seen across the region (or most parts of the country for that matter), we hope to see a lively continuation of the discussions had during this workshop across an even broader contingency of practitioners and hopefully in concert with real changes to the region’s bus service.  ITDP looks forward to continuing our work with partners on the Boston BRT local pilots and to further identify opportunities to channel this momentum towards a full scale Gold Standard BRT corridor.

Nominate Your City for the 2019 Sustainable Transport Award

ITDP, together with an international committee of development and transport experts, invites you to nominate your city for the Annual Sustainable Transport Award.  

Nominations are now open and will be accepted online at staward.org until April 13, 2018.

Since 2005, the Sustainable Transport Award has recognized profound leadership and vision in sustainable transportation and urban livability. These strategies should improve mobility for all residents, reduce transportation greenhouse and air pollution emissions, and enhance safety and access for bicyclists and pedestrians. Nominations are accepted from any interested parties, including government, civil society organizations, and academic institutions. Nominations must include verifiable project data and contact information for the city.

Cities of all sizes from all over the world have been recognized by the committee for best practices in sustainable transport. Past winners include:

2017 STA winner, Santiago, Chile

  • Santiago, Chile
  • Yichang, China
  • Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • Mexico City, México
  • Medellín, Colombia
  • San Francisco, United States
  • Ahmedabad, India
  • Seoul, South Korea
  • Bogotá, Colombia

A complete list of winning cities with details on their win is available at staward.org.

The 2018 winner, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, is the first African City to win the STA, for launching a series of transformative improvements that bring a high quality rapid transit system to its streets combined with walking and cycling infrastructure improvements. The changes are anchored around the Dar es Salaam Bus Rapid Transit system, or DART, a high quality-high capacity system incorporating best practice design and features, the first true BRT system in East Africa. DART has reduced commute times by more than half for residents, who previously faced upwards of four hours stuck in traffic every day. In addition, the city has built cycle lanes and improved intersections and sidewalks along the corridor.

Dar es Salaam BRT system

In June 2018, Dar es Salaam will host the MOBILIZE Summit, held each year in the winning city. MOBILIZE brings together 200 international urban transport and development planners, practitioners, and officials, world-class researchers, and NGO representatives to share strategies, challenges, research and study the example of Dar es Salaam as an international best practice in sustainable transport. The winner of the 2019 STA is where the summit goes next year.

“The Sustainable Transport Award is about celebrating bold vision and momentous changes that improve quality of life for people in cities. In the nearly 15 year history of the award, the nominees have often included cities doing great work under the radar,” says Michael Kodransky, chair of the STA Committee, “There are so many inspiring changes happening on the ground in cities that aren’t known as having the usual transport best practices. The STA and MOBILIZE are great vehicles for recognizing political courage and showcasing the latest achievements. It’s also a great opportunity for those of us working in sustainable transport to learn from innovative approaches, which are shared with a global cohort of the leading influencers at MOBILIZE”.

The 2019 winner will be announced at MOBILIZE Dar es Salaam on June 28, 2018. The winner and honorable mentions will be recognized at a ceremony and reception in Washington, DC during the Transport Research Board conference the following January.

Can Private and Public Bikeshare Coexist? A Cautionary Tale from China

Dockless bike companies are increasingly taking over public spaces for private use, creating serious problems for Chinese cities.

By Deng Han, Liu Shaokun, Li Wei, Huang Runjie, ITDP China

Disruption has come to the once calm and steady business of municipal bikeshare, where the Chinese experience is a harbinger of the future for cities everywhere. Virtually overnight last year, red, yellow, and blue bikes sprang up on seemingly every corner in Guangzhou. But they had one crucial difference from the traditional public bike-share system that has been offering residents two wheeled mobility since 2010: They were dockless.

These bikes could be found – and left – anywhere in the city, thanks to a built-in lock that released when the user reserved the bike via a smartphone app and a QR code.

On the surface, this degree of convenience compared to traditional bike-share with its dedicated docking stations seemed a brilliant innovation in delivering a solution to the perennial “last kilometer” problem. After all, people who own bicycles lock them as close as they can to their destination – outside the office, on campus, at a bike rack near the grocery store – rather than leave them at designated locations. But the introduction of a private innovation did not come without headaches. For one, it seems there can be too much of a good thing, as bikes flooded the streets; for another, the sudden rush of rogue bikes for rent onto the streets of Guangzhou also upended municipal plans for expansion of the public system.

Guangzhou’s traditional public bicycle system launched in June 2010. With stations located along the Zhongshan Avenue BRT corridor, the system appeared to meet an obvious need in the neighborhood. According to data provided by the Guangzhou public bicycle company, as of December 2016, the system contained 8,850 bicycles and more than 110 docking stations. That’s an increase from the initial launch of 1,000 vehicles and 18 docking stations. A total of 35,382,400 trips have been made using this service.

Dockless bike share bikes’ surge in popularity in cities such as Guangzhou, where ITDP observed 55 percent of riders on a given day using a dockless bike, and only 2 percent using the city’s bike share bikes.

With five successful years under its belt, Guangzhou proposed a major bike-share expansion in 2015. The city government planned to launch 100,000 traditional public bicycles, which would make it one of the largest systems in the world (New York’s Citibike, for example, has 12,000 bikes). However, as of January 2016, there were still only 10,000 bikes. What happened?

Since September 2016, the privately-owned dockless companies Mobike, ofo, Xiaoming, Bluegogo, U-bicycle, and Coolqi Bike have been players in the Guangzhou market. With a simple per-ride price and convenient smartphone payment, these dockless bike-sharing systems have grown explosively. By the end of May 2017, more than 700,000 dockless shared bikes could be found on Guangzhou streets, with more than 7.5 million registered users and more than 4 million daily trips.

The impact of dockless bike-share on cycling culture has been remarkable. ITDP conducted a survey of bike volumes along the Zhongshan Avenue BRT corridor. Measured in June 2017, over a year after dockless bike-sharing came to Guangzhou, the volume of bikes in the vicinity of Gangding Station and Tangxia Station is up more than 500 percent and 100 percent respectively than in previous years. Crucially, about 55 percent of rides are on dockless shared bikes and only 2 percent are on traditional public bikes. Daily trips by the public bike-share have plummeted from 14,000 to 9,000 per day since the advent of private dockless bike-share.

While this growth might suggest that private dockless bikes are a superior product to traditional public bike-share with docking stations, the Guangzhou experience makes it clear that dockless bike-sharing companies value rapid launch over long-term management. With large deployments, shared bikes are put on the street in a disorderly manner with the hope of cornering the market. Operational costs are in turn transferred onto the back of the city, which must use its resources to keep the clusters of bikes from clogging streets, sidewalks, and public spaces. Newspapers have even reported that users are wedging private dockless bikes into the public system’s docking stations. The Guangdong/Guangzhou Consumers Commission claims that 73.9 percent of respondents expressed support for the development of dockless bike-sharing. However, at this time there is no formal agreement with the city, and these companies pay no fees to the city.

Recognizing the impact of dockless bike-share, the Guangzhou Communications Commission issued technical guidelines for parking urban bicycles in the city center and a blueprint for standardizing Internet rental bikes in Guangzhou. Meanwhile, the public system has undergone a transformation, driven in part by the innovations of the private system. At the moment, the Guangzhou traditional public bicycle system is building up its IT infrastructure to accept Yang Cheng Tong (a local transportation payment card), as well as mobile payments via WeChat, APP, and Alipay.

As private bike-share expands outside China – it can already be found on the streets of Seattle and Washington, DC – there’s debate over whether these two competitors can coexist. We think they can. Traditional public bicycle and dockless bike-sharing have their own advantages and disadvantages, and they learn from each other as a result. Traditional public bicycles are learning to go dockless and adopt online convenience from the dockless bike-sharing systems, while dockless bike-sharing is shedding its chaotic approach in favor of a more rational approach to growth and street parking. There are definitely advantages to having a set location for bikes (docked) and also more flexible bikes (dockless), but they can only work together if there is an intentional plan, with regulations for dockless to complement docked and to reserve precious space for pedestrians. Ideally, traditional public bicycles and dockless bike-sharing will become an organic blend offering a convenient service for the public’s “last kilometer” and short trips.

Progress is underway. Xiaoming, Mobike, and other companies are recognizing their mistakes and working on a virtual “geo-fence” to comply with new bike parking requirements. The public and private models are coming from opposite directions, but will hopefully meet in the middle to strike a compromise in both convenience and order, providing the best experience for all of the city’s mobility needs.

This blog post is modified from an article in the 29th issue of the Sustainable Transport magazine.  You can find the article and others here.

TOD and Affordable Housing

 

A new revitalized TOD-area near the Cleveland BRT


by R. Balachandran, Alchemy Urban Systems

Click to enlarge

The cost of housing is well beyond the money paid for rent or mortgage.  There is also the cost of access. This refers to bundle of services including water supply, sanitation, health, education and most importantly, transportation. Therefore, housing can be made truly affordable only if the whole package (housing plus services) is made affordable. In large cities where walking and cycling are not sufficient to ensure access to needed opportunities and services, Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) offers a great opportunity to do this.  In this blog, I attempt to outline the opportunity and the challenges to making it happen. I write specifically in the context of transit catchments in developing/ low-income countries where the urban poor end up living in substandard housing in risk-prone areas of the city. This discussion is relevant mainly to Metrics 5.B.1- Affordable Housing, and 5.B.2-Housing Preservation of the TOD Standards, but may also be connected to others, for example Metric 4.A.1-Walking Distance to Transit.

 

The Opportunity

An affordable transit system increases accessibility and mobility all along its route, providing substantial benefits to communities in its catchment.  When cities with substantial populations of urban poor take up station area planning, or TOD area planning, they should ensure easy access to transit for low income families.  

To begin with, when transit alignments are planned, stations could be located within walking distance to existing high density low-income settlements (with measures to ensure that redevelopment pressures don’t displace the residents). Secondly, connections could be made to settlements further away using feeder buses, para-transit and infrastructure for walking and cycling.  These two interventions however only provide access to existing settlements with/ without improving their housing conditions.

The most important and forward-looking intervention possible is to enable the development of new affordable housing of acceptable standards within the station areas for low-income families to move into. In cities that have public housing and public transit programs, affordable housing projects should be located in TOD/ station areas. One example, is the Sikandar Bakht Nagar Housing Project for Economically Weaker Sections at Behrampura, Ahmedabad, India (see images), built to rehouse informal dwellers from a flood-prone area on the banks of the Sabarmati River, within short walking distance from both the river and a Bus Rapid Transit station. And while Sikandar Bakht Nagar has been criticized for a number of design, construction and maintenance problems that should be addressed, its residents do benefit from rapid and convenient connections to countless opportunities and resources throughout the city.

Location of the Sikandar Bakht Nagar within a 350 meter walking distance to a BRT station
View inside the housing complex

 

Ensuring Access to Services

A significant element of subsidy is inevitable in the process of producing affordable housing and keeping them affordable.  Fortunately, in a TOD context, there is an opportunity to capture a portion of the unearned value gained by private properties in the catchment of transit (the concept is usually referred to as “value capture”) and use it to achieve comprehensive redevelopment including affordable housing and infrastructure upgrading.  The revenues from value capture should be escrowed towards affordable housing, infrastructure upgrading and other public investments within the TOD areas.

But, while the “value capture” opportunity is seductive, it is often exploited in a simplistic manner where additional development rights are offered at a price in the catchment areas of the transit system without any planning, ostensibly to densify the area according to the principles of TOD.  However, densification without carefully planning the provision of utilities and services can result in infrastructure inadequacies.  Already deprived low-income communities suffer exacerbated shortages for water and sanitation as well as access to health, education and other community services.  They end up paying more for these services, undermining the affordability of housing as a complete package.

Therefore, TOD policy should ensure that promotion of affordable housing in TOD areas happens through planned development or redevelopment with adequate infrastructure provision. Users of the TOD Standard are advised to use their discretion to only allocate density points where infrastructure is sufficient.

BRT in Medellin, Colombia transformed access in a low income neighborhood
Public plaza near a low-income housing development in Sao Paulo, Brazil

 

Maintaining Affordability

Access to transit is a powerful driver for real estate values and could cause gentrification of affordable housing in a TOD/ station area.  Therefore, it is important to take specific measures to keep the housing affordable to the target group over time.  How to do this requires context specific policies.

Many developing countries with poor data infrastructure and enforcement systems have tried in vain to use covenants restricting the resale/ renting of affordable housing units allocated to “beneficiaries” identified through a due process.  Market forces have historically found ways of subverting such restrictions.  Another method is to prevent amalgamation of more than one small house into a bigger one.  Regular checking of the units is required for this and is best achieved by involving the community members.  Creating a “Community Land Trust” (CLT) is yet another method that is gaining favor. The CLTs could regulate or manage all transactions on these houses including sale, rental, lease etc. to ensure that the house is always occupied by the targeted income-group at a price truly affordable to them. CLTs, or variations of this model, could potentially involve the community members in the active management of the affordable housing developments.

To conclude, TOD offers a great opportunity to promote a truly affordable housing and services package for the urban poor in the cities of developing countries. However, beyond the scope of TOD Standard indicators, achieving this in the long term involves addressing the challenges of ensuring adequate services and maintaining affordability of the housing developments.

Download The TOD Standard here and visit todstandard.org for more information.  You can also read more insights from other authors of The TOD Standard here and here.