Letter from me in today’s Chronicle. Text at the end of this dispatch.
and today’s Statesman takes up the same subject (Transit Oriented Development – commonly abbreviated as TOD) again – using East Hillsboro Oregon (suburb of Portland) as their model. When are the cheerleaders going to get it – you get TOD IF AND ONLY IF your rail line has demonstrated a year or three of high ridership from people who CHOSE to ride rail, not from people who HAD to ride public transit?
For the I Told You So watch:
A fight is looming: The neighborhood plans that already exist for Plaza Saltillo and the areas around the Lamar and MLK stops don’t call for the kind of intense density city leaders want around rail stations.
As I pointed out several times during the run-up to the election, one of the many problems with the routing of this commuter rail line is that it runs through neighborhoods that don’t want any additional development, rather than down Lamar/Guadalupe where additional development is regarded as inevitable (although my own wildly irresponsible neighborhood does their best to counteract city-wide sanity on this regard).
(Chronicle Letter):
Cold Water on TOD
Dear Editor,
I hate to throw cold water on the frenzy over TOD (transit-oriented development) [“Here Comes the Train,” News, Jan. 28], but it’s worth remembering that no commuter rail start in the U.S. in recent memory has generated any transit-oriented development worth noting. In fact, all of the TOD that has occurred in the U.S. in most of our lifetimes has been around light rail starts which had to first demonstrate a high level of ridership from new transit customers (i.e., not just those who used to take the bus, but new customers to transit).This is how Dallas, Denver, Portland, Salt Lake, and Minneapolis have gotten and are continuing to get great new urban buildings around their light-rail lines.
The key here is that thanks to Mike Krusee and naive pro-transit people in Austin, we’re not getting a rail line like those cities got (which goes where people actually want to go from day one); we’re getting one like South Florida got (which requires shuttle buses to get anywhere worth going). South Florida’s commuter line has yet (after 15 years) to generate one lousy square-foot of TOD.
Regards,
Mike Dahmus
Urban Transportation Commission
Great comments Mike. I whole heartedly agree with your letter and your analysis.
One nit. I suggest you spell out acronyms the first time you use them in an article or letter. Not everyone remembers and casual readers will not know that TOD stands for transit oriented development. It helps orient people to your discussion after hours of mind-numbing web surfing.