The nexus between transportation and land use.

Category: Commuter Rail

The latest example proving the nexus between transportation and land use…

Crossrail Line 1. Source: David Arthur

…Comes to us from London, my brief one-time home. Courtesy of Crossrail, the major commuter rail project linking East and West London together more seamlessly with dramatic expected time savings. While Crossrail is not scheduled to open until 2018, the benefits that the Crossrail project is promising to deliver have already impacted the local real estate market.

Goldman’s employees would be able to reach Heathrow Airport from Farringdon in about 30 minutes on Crossrail, compared with more than an hour on the London Underground. Travel to east London’s Canary Wharf financial district will take 9 minutes, from about 25 minutes today. The City Thameslink system already takes passengers to Gatwick Airport to the south and Luton Airport north of the City.

“That’s what makes this the crossroads of central London,” Rees, the City’s top planner, said in an interview.

Crossrail will build 9 new stations in Central London, provide up to 24 trains per hour (1 train every two and a half minutes!) carrying 1,500 riders each. It will increase the rail network capacity while simultaneously reducing travel times by up to 50%. Transit-oriented development is already taking place, capitalizing on new areas of Central London becoming more accessible. More than 3 million square feet of residential and retail development are anticipated to take place, just over the stations sites.

This is the benefit that transportation infrastructure can bear on a place. It is smart development – taking advantage of the high-capacity, incredibly expensive infrastructure by also providing high density land uses to leverage that infrastructure investment.

See video.

 

Union Station

A public service announcement:

I’ve got a guest post up over at my friend Molly’s fantastic site talking about the history of Chicago’s Union Station.

The Great Hall at Chicago Union Station.

The Great Hall at Chicago Union Station.

Building Skyscrapers Over Trains

I came across this instructional video on the same day that I saw that the River Point development off of Canal St. and Lake St. in Chicago has broken ground. This project is being constructed above the Metra tracks leading into Union Station (H/T Atlantic Cities).

Transit Mode and Development Opportunities

I have not mentioned this before, but my favorite planning book  in the last year has to be Human Transit. Authored by Jarrett Walker, the book is based on much of what he has been saying on his blog by the same name. Reading his interview with the Urban Land Institute on how developers need to think like transit planners has resonated with me in my own practice.

A significant aspect of my job involves transit-oriented development. My role is to represent my agency as the planning stakeholder. TOD has been the rage in many suburbs in Chicago, particularly the ones with commuter rail. I have a good feeling when I go into a town for a TOD plan which one will succeed and which one will fail. As Walker states:

Even if your development is at a rail station, the bus system is almost always a key part of how a transit-oriented, low-car style actually becomes viable. That’s why it’s important for developers to think about what makes transit useful, which is often very different from what makes it superficially appealing. Only the useful is an enduring value.

I see too many towns that believe that by building development near their train stations that they can breed success. Of course, many of these places do not have bus service of any meaningful kind to provide a modal connection between the commuter rail and the rest of the surrounding area, nor are they willing to drop the parking minimums in the TOD area. Thus, it’s not really transit-oriented but rather transit-adjacent development that is planned. And by not taking into account frequency of service and multimodal connections between bus and rail, many TODs are simply not viable and are instead designed to support the car rather than stand independent of it.

 

 

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