Monthly Archives: February 2019

TOD: A lesson the West Coast can teach to the rest of US

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Inadequate funding, dilapidated infrastructure, and understaffed agencies – all sounds familiar, right? For transportation professionals, one can easily throw in an increase in congestion and fall in transit ridership, and it’s only a tip of an iceberg, comprised of the challenges planners face in the nation. Yet, some communities beg to differ and come up with bold solutions that comprehensively address the puzzle of urban management and development. For example, places like Seattle and Los Angeles step back from the traditional role of their transit agencies as transportation providers and expand their mandate towards comprehensive goals, providing enough authority and additional funding for implementation of mixed-use transit-oriented developments. Sounds like a common logic, which still is not caught up by other major cities in the nation and is even not on the table for the smaller municipalities. Nevertheless, I believe that even places like Iowa City can benefit from a coherent approach to housing and transit, and lessons from the West Coast can be used as a guide for that.

Though Transit Oriented Development is not a new concept, its exact definition and measures are harder to come by (Molinaro, 1993) and in this stage of an intangible concept, it can be difficult to address at the implementation stage by practitioners, who require clear criteria for planning and evaluation (Handy, 2008). Nevertheless, the benefits of mixed-used developments next to transit have been studied and reported by numerous researchers. In his 1991 study, Robert Cervero reported that mixed land use contributes to the share of public transit in modal split. In 1996 Cervero and Radisch found that type of transport for local shopping trips can be predicted by the land use mix, meaning that the greater mix facilitates non-motorized modes. In 1997 Cervero and Kockelman concluded on the significant influence of land use mix (measured by entropy and dissimilarity index) on the reduction of vehicle-miles traveled and a larger share of non-motorized trips to work. In 2010 Ewing and Cervero found that socioeconomic background of a household has a principal influence on the travel mode, however, the built environment affects the lengths of trips. Frank and Pivo (1994) draw a similar conclusion on the impact of land use mix and density on the distribution of trips between motorized and non-motorized modes, while Tracy et al. (2011) pointed out that mix of uses is a significant factor for public transit and non-motorized modes use. Still, with the breadth of evidence that favors the concept, there is no universal methodology for its planning and development, which leaves professionals with the necessity to study best practices and creatively adapt it to the local needs.

What makes the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) to stand out is its leadership role for Los Angeles County, that spans agency’s focus from mere mobility to sustainable urban design and comprehensive transformation of communities through the mix of uses for different income levels, improved building requirements and first/last mile facilities on Metro-owned land around stations and half a mile of corridors (Metro, 2019). This can hardly be considered as a recent endeavor, as since 1980 LA County has passed four half-cent increases in sales tax to fund transit projects, the last one being in November 2016, when 71 percent of voters supported Measure M – a projected $120 billion over 40 years towards the upgrades of existing and construction of new transportation infrastructure, as well as walking and biking facilities, local streets repairs (McCormick, 2017). Most importantly, it provided new resources and requirements for the Transit Oriented Communities (TOC) Demonstration Program that began in October 2015 with the selection of eight projects, where Metro spearheaded partnerships with local government, the private sector and residents through joint development sites and transit supportive planning. From January 2018, the program has become a guiding principle for Metro’s funding and implementation of Measure M (Metro, 2019).

LA Union Station – a major TOC project for LA Metro (Source: LA Metro)

Metro’s transit supportive planning includes both provision of numerous handbooks and toolkits with recommendations and guidance for transit-oriented projects, as wells as actual involvement in program development and management. The latter is of particular interest as it provides financial resources to municipalities for feasibility studies or updates of planning and zoning documents to accommodate TOCs through the Transit Oriented Planning Grant Program. As of the last round, $3.1 million have been appropriated for Transit support Regulatory plans for five jurisdictions, while three more will explore the potential for Transit-Oriented Communities Tax Increment Financing districts (Metro, 2019a). Another array of activities that Metro is engaged in is Joint Development, where the agency partners with developers and leases the land near transit for the projects that contribute to the needs, vision, and goals of the community. If such developments have a residential component, 35% of its units are required to be affordable (measured as 60% of area median income), and the policy is supported through the discount to the ground lease (up to 30%). At the same time, the affordable housing projects that occur in transit’s vicinity without agency’s efforts can receive financial assistance through the Metro Affordable Transit Connected Housing (MATCH) loan fund for up to 75% of its cost (MATCH, 2019).


108 affordable apartments at Othello Station (Source: Sound Transit)

Seattle provides another great example of transit-oriented development effort on the West Coast. As in the case of Los Angeles County, voters of Sound Transit District (comprised of the urban areas of Pierce, King and Snohomish Counties, served by regional agency Sound Transit) have approved tax increases three times since 1996, the last being in 2016, to leverage additional resources for transit-related projects (Sound Transit, 2019). However, it goes a whole extra mile in terms of housing affordability. Titled as an “80-80-80” system, it is a part of Sound Transit light rail expansion, where the state encouraged a transit agency to buy more land than required for the transit system, and then offer 80% of it for affordable housing development (meaning that 80% of units are to be earmarked for households making 80% of area median income). Sound Transit board has already sold two plots near Capitol Hill and Othello stations to affordable housing developers at a low cost, who have delivered more than 250 affordable units (Brownstone, 2016). Moreover, for the Mercy Othello Plaza, around 40% of construction work has been completed by local people from an afflicted community nearby (Pickford, 2017).

As the cases studied show, the change toward progressive planning policies and practices doesn’t happen overnight and it takes years, if not decades, for them to ripe. Nevertheless, better start sooner than later, and both Los Angeles and Seattle provide valuable lessons for other communities on tackling transportation and housing challenges coherently. The first one is that rarely progressive actions can be outsourced to consultants, thus there is a need in certain institutional capacity, an ability to professionally support the development and implementation of transit-oriented projects in-house. Furthermore, in the climate of federal austerity, there is a poignant necessity in local solutions towards financial sustainability of new endeavors, that can be achieved through the incremental increase of taxes and collaboration with stakeholders and developers. None of that is an easy task, which means that we, my fellow planners, have a lot of work to do!

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