5 Metro Areas that are National Leaders in Transit-Oriented Development

John Karras of UrbanScale.com shines a spotlight on 5 metro areas that are national leaders in transit-oriented development (TOD). He also discusses the 4 key ingredients necessary to create successful TOD. Focus on these 4 ingredients, Karras says, and your city can succeed in creating TOD to become a more vibrant community.

What is Transit Oriented Development?

While TOD’s “buzzword status” seems to have faded in recent years, it’s actually more prevalent now than it was just a decade ago. In fact, as the benefits of TOD become more widely recognized, its potential to transform America’s urban areas will grow in coming decades.

And TOD is one of the best strategies to improve the urban vitality of your city, especially if you combine it with some of these downtown revitalization strategies. So, what exactly is TOD? According to visionary urban planner, architect, and author Peter Calthorpe:

"A formula for a transit-oriented development (TOD) is very simple. Its diversity: diversity in population and in land use."

Read a more detailed explanation of Calthorpe’s TOD formula here. Another leading urbanist thinker, Kaid Benfield, author and Special Counsel for Urban Solutions at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), states that, “To make both transit and nearby neighborhoods work together, we must pay as much attention to the neighborhood as to the transit.” Read more about Benfield’s opinion on TOD here.

1. Washington, DC metro area

The entire Washington, D.C. region is a hotbed for TOD.  In D.C., a new transit station was built in 2004 on the existing Metro Red Line in the NoMa (North of Massachussetts Avenue) neighborhood at a cost of $110 million. According to an article from Rachel MacCleery and Andy Stone at the Urban Land Institute, the NoMa station alone has sparked $3 billion in new development. By early 2012, the area surrounding the NoMa station had already added 7,000,000 square feet of new office, residential, hotel and retail space since 2004, with another 3,000,000 square feet of space under construction.

And the D.C. region’s TOD success is not confined within the boundaries of the District. Many of the region’s older suburban downtowns like Bethesda and Silver Spring, MD have also experienced large amounts of new development adjacent to Metro transit stations. But the Northern Virginia suburbs of D.C. (primarily Arlington County) offer the best example of TOD in the D.C. region.  Arlington County used TOD to transform itself from a low-density, auto-dominated corridor into a zone of dense, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods.  It’s really a misnomer to call this area a suburb, because the county is more urban and vibrant than most of the downtown districts in the U.S.

According to a 2004 research report from the Transportation Research Board, “No place in the United States has witnessed more high-rise, mixed-use development along a rail corridor over the past three decades than Arlington County, Virginia.” From the time that Metro rail began service in the county in the 1970s until 2004, new real estate investments included: 24.4 million square feet of office space, 3.8 million square feet of retail space, 24,000 mixed-income dwelling units, and over 6,300 hotel rooms.

And the D.C. region’s strong legacy of TOD appears on track to continue. The metro area is currently building a new subway line that will connect Arlington County to Dulles International Airport in Loudoun County.  This new line, the Silver Metro Line, will travel through an area that is currently dominated by suburban corporate campuses and wealthy residential districts that could soon become the next high-profile TOD zone.

For #2 thru #5 on John’s list, please continue on to UrbanScale.com.