Mineta Transportation Institute
College of Business
San José State University
San Jose, CA 95192-0219
Created by Congress in 1991
Technical Report Documentation Page
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001096738
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The authors of this study wish to thank the staff of the Mineta Transportation Institute for their assistance in bringing this report to print. In particular, they wish to thank Research Director Trixie Johnson, Research and Publications Assistant Sonya Cardenas, Graphic Artist Ben Corrales and Editorial Associates Robyn Whitlock and Jimmy Young.
Integrating Rail Transit,
Land Development And
TelecommunicationS 3
Transit-Oriented Development Defined 5
How Governments Can Stimulate TOD 15
Telecommunications Networks--
Resources for Urban Development 17
Telecommunications Networks--
A New Family of Incentives for TOD 19
Methodology and Participants from
the Development Community 27
Selection of Interview Candidates 28
STANDARD SCALE FOR COMPARISON 29
Development Communinity
Participants 33
TRANSIT-ORIENTED DEVELOPERS 33
Responses of Development Community 39
QUANTITATIVE DATA: GRADE SCALE 41
INTERPRETATION OF SCORES AND COMMENTS 54
Best Practices: Western Europe and
the United States 59
Using Fiber to Support Transit-Oriented
Development: Key Policy Issues and Experience
from a Western Perspective 59
THE FINANCIAL IMPERATIVE OF USING
FIBER AND RIGHTS OF WAY WITHIN
LIBERALIZING TELECOMMUNICATIONS
REGIMES 61
THE BARRIERS INHIBITING
CROSS-SECTORAL THINKING 62
BEST PRACTICES IN WESTERN EUROPE 66
UNITED STATES: FIBER AND STATION FACILITIES 69
Current Telecommunications
Policies Bay Area and Southern
California 79
Conclusions, Recommendations,
and Future Research 87
In the last 30 years, while integrated land use transportation concepts and practices have been gestating, the nature of telecommunications technologies and markets has changed dramatically. This study empirically examines a practical aspect of a relationship that is only now being conceptualized-the relationship between rail transit, land development and telecommunications.
Although this research is intended to inform policy, it has implications for a new conceptual paradigm of integrated thinking about public transit, land development and digital networks. The goal is the articulation of concepts, policies and practices that use digital networks as a complement to bricks and mortar construction in order to quickly and affordably reshape urban form around public transportation systems.
It is clear that overcoming the barriers to transit-oriented development requires a strategy of public-private partnerships. These partnerships involve local governments, metropolitan planning organizations, transit authorities and sometimes state and federal agencies making collateral investments in infrastructure, joint developing public land or providing an array of incentives to attract the necessary private capital and expertise.
The recent changes in telecommunications markets are particularly relevant to public rail authorities. Since construction of wireline networks requires access to rights-of-way, and competitive markets have lead to dramatic expansion of private network infrastructure, rail authorities are well positioned to offer rights-of-way in joint development agreements as a way of acquiring extensive network resources.
Businesses, hospitals, governments, colleges, secondary schools and other private organizations and public institutions are only now beginning to factor these new technologies and services into their business plans and practices. As these institutions gain access to digital networks and acquire the skills to use them, they can be guided toward policies for providing remote access to work for their employees and to services for their customers.
ISTEA and its successor TEA-21 have given regions more flexibility in spending federal transportation funds. Many of the livable communities programs have become feasible due to this flexibility.
The primary purpose of this study is to determine the interest level of the development community in three specific network-based incentives that could be offered by transportation agencies and rail authorities through telecommunications network policies. In order to provide a context of meaning for the responses of the development community, two other research questions were asked:
What are the current and best practices using telecommunications networks as development incentives elsewhere in the nation and in Western Europe?
Based on the current telecommunications network policies in Southern California and the Bay Area, what are prospects for, and barriers to, offering network incentives to TOD?
Taken together, these questions will shed light on the potential for public transit authorities and MPOs to collaborate on developing a network strategy to support transit-oriented development.
Conclusions of this study include the following concepts:
Common and best practices in the United States and Europe suggest that regardless of the relative degree of telecommunications market liberalization, rail transit authorities are looking to joint development arrangements with private telecommunications companies for network infrastructure to support internal operations of to generate revenue.The cost and availability of digital network resources are unlikely barriers to developing and deploying network strategies, and the potential for synergy between public transit and public telecommunications may become an idea in good currency.
The development community wants the incentives.
Network strategy is close to adoption somewhere. The prospects for offering the network incentives in either the northern or southern metropolitan regions in California may be good.
The challenge is to overcome the barriers to innovation.
The capabilities of digital networks allow partial reallocation of many functions. This insight suggests the possibility of analyzing existing TODs in terms of the bundle of the functions unique to each. This data base could help gain insights in the mix of functions that most effectively realize the goals of a transit village. Because the combination of bricks and mortar and telepresence can now create a wide variety of functions in a compact space, it is worth researching the characteristics of an optimal mix under various circumstances.
Integrating Rail Transit, Land Development And Telecommunications
This study empirically examines a practical aspect of a relationship that is only now being conceptualized--the relationship between rail transit, land development, and telecommunications. It pushes the envelope of knowledge in so far as the interaction between just two of the factors, public transportation and land use in terms of urban form, has been an intense focus of policy research for only about 30 years, especially the last 10 years. (See TCRP Report 16, Transit and Urban Form, Volumes 1 and 2, Transportation Research Board, 1996.)
In this same 30-year period during which integrated land use-transportation concepts and practices have been gestating, the nature of telecommunications technologies and markets has changed dramatically. A watershed event was the 1984 court-ordered break-up of the ATT telephone monopoly that introduced market competition and unleashed a torrent of new telecommunications technologies and services. The evolution of the commercial Internet out of the non-commercial, research-oriented ARPANET is one of the more significant manifestations of this phenomenon. It is the urban space-shaping capabilities of these new technologies and services that have yet to be absorbed into the transportation institution's network policies.
Although this research is intended to inform policy, it has implications for a new conceptual paradigm of integrated thinking about public transit, land development, and digital networks. The goal is the articulation of concepts, policies, and practices that use digital networks as a complement to bricks and mortar construction in order to quickly and affordably reshape urban form around public transportation systems.
This study is concerned with the feasibility of introducing three telecommunications-based incentives for transit-oriented development. The market for these hypothetical incentives is the developers of transit-oriented projects. California's Bay Area/Santa Clara Valley and Los Angeles/Southern California regions are the study's geographical focus. The question is the extent to which members of the development community believe that the incentives would affect the viability of their transit-oriented projects.
The first section of this report establishes that TOD is a reasonable social goal, particularly important to rail authorities because it is linked to long-term ridership growth, and to transportation policy agencies because it is included in their regional plans. TOD also represents an urban form approach to transportation solutions for regions with polluted air and where the highway infrastructure is overwhelmed with congestion--and significant expansion of that infrastructure is not affordable.
But TOD has not happened in needed quantities through purely market forces. This is due to a combination of financial, political, and physical factors. Also, the public transit institution itself has been slow to adopt the culture and the tools to cause appropriate projects to develop at rail stations.
It has become clear that overcoming the barriers to TOD requires a strategy of public-private partnerships. These partnerships involve local governments, metropolitan planning organizations, transit authorities, and sometimes state and federal agencies making collateral investments in infrastructure, joint-developing public land, or providing an array of incentives to attract the necessary private capital and expertise.
The recent changes in telecommunications markets are particularly relevant to public rail authorities. Since construction of wireline networks requires access to rights-of-way, and competitive markets have led to dramatic expansion of private network infrastructure, rail authorities are well positioned to offer rights-of-way in joint development agreements as a way of acquiring extensive network resources.
The transition from regulated utility to competitive marketplace has resulted in consumer benefits such as vastly expanded service options and, in some cases, lower prices. But the nature of markets means that devices and services are distributed unevenly between neighborhoods and houses, according to the consumer's ability to pay. Competition also means uneven infrastructure development within metropolitan regions. While thriving central business districts typically have a glut of fiber optics, many low income districts have been skipped over. The telecommunications network policies of transportation agencies can address both the household/neighborhood and the district inequities as part of a strategy for improving access to work and to services.
Businesses, hospitals, governments, colleges, secondary schools, and other private organizations and public institutions are only now beginning to factor these new technologies and services into their business plans and practices. As these institutions gain access to digital networks and acquire the skills to use them, they can be guided toward policies for providing remote access to work for their employees and to services for their customers.
Finally, ISTEA and its successor TEA-21 have given regions more flexibility in spending federal transportation funds. Many of the livable communities programs have become feasible through this flexibility.
All of these factors have created an array of opportunities for rail authorities to use their rights-of-way and for metropolitan planning organizations to deploy their local and federal funds in order to provide network resources as incentives for transit-oriented development.
The primary purpose of this study is to determine the interest level of the development community in three specific network-based incentives that could be offered by transportation agencies and rail authorities through telecommunications network policies.
In order to provide a context of meaning for the responses of the development community, two other research questions were asked:
Taken together, these questions will shed light on the potential for public transit authorities and MPOs to collaborate on developing a network strategy to support transit-oriented development.
Transit-oriented development (TOD) is the development of transit supportive functions adjacent to urban rail stops. A TOD project can be a single family, multi-family or mixed residential cluster; an employment center such as an office complex; an employment-service center combination such as a retail mall or medical facility; or a mix of residential, employment, and service functions.
The idea behind TOD is to direct land development to public transit, particularly rail systems. Locating key functions in a compact development within 1/3 mile of a transit station theoretically should result in greater use of the transit system. Trip origins for many people would be connected to many of their trip destinations. The convenience of rail transit would lead to rail becoming the mode choice of residents, employees, and shoppers. Land use would support transit use.
The traditional central city in a metropolitan region, or a small town in a rural area is an ideal model for integrating housing, retail, jobs, and services in a compact area so that functions are within walking distance or a short transit ride. The central city is traditionally the place where the greatest variety of goods and services could be found. The promise of TOD is that, collectively, the station developments can add up to a single central city with the rail system providing public transit access between functions, like a horizontal elevator.
The ideal TOD model is the transit village . At its core, the transit village is a compact, mixed-use community, centered around the transit station that, by design, invites residents, workers, and shoppers to drive their cars less and ride mass transit more (Bernick and Cervero, Transit Villages in the 21st Century , McGraw-Hill, 1997, page 5). The Transit Village includes six elements or characteristics:
There is also the hope that transit villages and other TODs can revitalize the neighborhoods around stations, often small business districts which have declined because of competition from auto-oriented retail malls and office centers.
Transit villages and other transit oriented developments are considered by their advocates to be the antidote to the sprawl model of urban form where large scale, low density, single function tracts are integrated over relatively long distances by the single occupant vehicle. Smart growth, livable communities, traditional neighborhoods, and new urbanist developments are different terms for comparable concepts.
Without engaging directly in the debate over empirical validation of the underlying TOD concepts--whether the built environment, land use policy or urban design can influence travel behavior--there are several reasons why TOD is important. For a discussion of the debate, see "The Impacts of Urban Form on Travel: A Critical Review," Randall Crane, Lincoln Land Institute Working Paper WP99RC1, 1999.
Planning for urban rail systems involves forecasts of ridership growth that are in part based on assumptions about transit-oriented development. A recent study commissioned by the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) concluded in part that there has been a "frequent failure of major transit investments in the United States to generate the amount of transit-related development anticipated and needed (emphasis in the original) to generate the long term ridership essential to justify the capital investment in transit" ("Joint Development Entrepreneurial Study" Sedway, Kotin, Mouchly Group, May, 1996, page 2).
As a specific case, TOD has lagged in the BART system.
All along, system planners expected that suburban BART stations would naturally become magnets for new development centers. Disappointment set in when over time most station areas either remained unchanged or took on the low density settlement patterns that characterize much of the East Bay. It became apparent that BART, in and of itself, was unable to incite new growth or turn around flat or declining local real estate markets (Bernick and Cervero, 1996, page 188).
The UC Berkeley Transportation Department conducted a study of TOD implementation at the stations in San Diego's MTDB system in 1996. One of the themes upon which their analysis was focused was that TOD policy may be a regional strategy but TOD implementation is not.
If one restricts attention to projects that were specifically designed to leverage rail transit, there are relatively few TODs either existing or being planned near San Diego Trolley stations. In other words, the San Diego experience is consistent with the experience elsewhere; TOD projects are built in some places, but they appear to fill a market niche rather than becoming a major trend" (Boarnet and Compin, "Transit Oriented Development in San Diego County: Incrementally Implementing a Comprehensive Idea," University of California Transportation Center, Working Paper # 343, June, 1996, Pages 10-11).
In addition to the ridership issues that existing rail transit authorities may face, there are also potential long term national policy issues at stake. The report to BART observed that without institutional policy changes
...it is very likely that many of the major investments in new and expanding light and heavy rail systems that are currently under way will, looking back 10 to 20 years from now, be considered poor transportation investments because the transit-supportive land uses needed to generate adequate ridership did not materialize. If this happens, funding for further rail transit investments could be in serious jeopardy (Sedway, Kotin, Mouchly Group, May, 1996, page 2).
It should be noted that real estate market conditions generally improved after these studies were published. And the Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) and rail authorities in California arguably became more effective catalysts. As a result there has been more TOD planning and building activities in recent years, particularly in the Bay Area and San Diego. However, the economy has slowed again in spring, 2001 and this may slow construction of new projects other than housing.
In order to coordinate transportation planning across metropolitan areas or urban regions, the USDOT designates metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to represent each region.
The transportation policy for the region can be found in two essential documents. MPOs are required to produce a Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) with a 20 year planning horizon--with updates every 3 years. MPOs are also required to produce a Regional Transportation Improvement Program (RTIP) every two years. The RTIP provides a 6-year snapshot of transportation projects in the region for which funding is committed. The RTIPs establish the short-term funding decisions that help implement the RTP. The RTIP directs the expenditure of federal transportation funds which have been allocated to each region.
The RTP and RTIP must provide for air quality improvements sufficient for the state/region to meet state and federal air quality standards, and must conform to the State Implementation Plan (SIP). The SIP documents regional and local efforts to meet federal ambient air quality standards.
The Metropolitan Transportation Commission is the MPO for nine counties in the greater Bay Area.
In 1998, MTC launched the Transportation for Livable Communities program. It has provided planning grants, technical assistance, and capital grants to help cities and non-profit organizations develop transportation-related projects. The TOD-related projects that TLC funds are those that:
MTC's TLC program has recently been expanded to include a Housing Incentive Program (HIP). This program was based on the San Mateo County TOD Incentive Program launched in January, 1999. It seeks to encourage density around transit stations by providing local jurisdictions with $2,000 per bedroom for new housing development within 1/3 mile of a transit station with a minimum 40 units per net acre. The funds can be used for any transportation project within the jurisdiction's limits.
The TLC program has been budgeted for $100 million over the next 20 years.
The Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) is the MPO for six counties in Southern California. Unlike MTC, SCAG does not program the federal TEA21 funds that are allocated to the region. That responsibility is handled by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) which issues a "call for projects" every two years. That "call" does not include special funds for livable communities so there is no financial commitment in the south comparable to the program in the north.
MTA allocates funds according to modal application such as freeways (HOV lanes), signal synchronization and bus speed improvement, and transportation demand management. One of the model applications is "regional bikeways and pedestrian improvements" which includes design and construction of bicycle lanes and paths and related amenities such as landscaping and signage.
SCAG supports livable communities through advocacy and education. Its Web page contains case studies and profiles of successful projects.
Its current emphasis, budgeted through 2002, is for "growth visioning for sustaining a livable region." "SCAG has created the Growth Visioning Com-mittee to inform, engage and facilitate consensus on a Vision--a strategy for addressing the challenging consequences of anticipated growth in the region" (www.scag.ca.gov/livable).
"Visioning is a tool that has gained widespread attention as a method of stimulating rethinking about how the future might be shaped in neighborhoods, communities and regions. It involves identifying desirable--as opposed to merely projected--future conditions and stimulating change to realize that future image, typically drawing upon "smart growth" strategies and techniques to the extent that they can be applied" ("Growth Visioning for Sustaining a Livable Region: Visioning Case Studies, 10 Regions in the US," Summary Report, The Planning Center and Southern California Transportation and Land Use Coalition, May 24, 2001).
The regional visioning process is being designed in 2001. The process will be conducted in 2001/2002.
SCAG's transit oriented development policy is to locate a significant share of new housing and jobs within .25 mile of transit stations or major bus corridors. It advocates linking communities and neighborhoods with viable pedestrian and bicycle facilities. It promotes in-fill development to revitalize under utilized and vacant sites.
California State Treasurer, Philip Angelides, published a report in 1999 describing the State's Smart Investment Policy. The policy addresses the need to make strategic use of limited state funds in the face of growth anticipated to equal that experienced in the state's boom years of the 1950s through the 1970s. "Growth will increase the need for all forms of public and private sector goods and services--needs that will overwhelm public resources if investment policies are not conceived with wisdom and vision" (Angelides, 1999, page 1).
The report recognizes that it is not possible to fight growth, but it is essential to make growth smart. Smart growth generally means locating development away from the urban periphery into the existing urban fabric near public transit services in order to be "more economical, more efficient, and less harmful to the natural environment."
[Smart] development means land uses that support transportation options beyond more freeways and roads; a better mix of housing in communities and neighborhoods; locating jobs near housing, and balancing job growth with new housing; land use designs that bring homes, schools, workplaces, services, and retail shops closer together; communities centered around civic places; more efficient, well planned higher density of land use, and protection of environmental resources (Angelides, 1999, page 9).
This specifically suggests compact, mixed use developments adjacent to rail and bus transit stops.
The state-wide initiative has spawned regional smart growth alliances with their own initiatives. For example, MTC recently joined with the Association of Bay Area Governments, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, and the Regional Water Quality Control Board, and the Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Development to develop a set of "best practices" and possible financial incentives for "smart growth." MTC's definition of smart growth includes development that supports and enhances public transit, among other characteristics.
In the big picture, if regional mobility worked well without TOD, then incentives for TOD would be less imperative. Unfortunately, things are not working well.
In general, the private automobile is used for around 90% of all trips in California's metropolitan areas. Public transit carries only about 6% of all trips. The regional transportation plans forecast congestion and air quality crises as unmitigated effects of growth, which will worsen an already bad situation. The commitment to transit service and road maintenance limits the amount of funds available for other options. Of those, the expansion of the road system and extension of the rail system require the most capital.
According to the MTC, 25 million daily person-trips are being forecast in the Bay Area for the year 2020. The transportation budget for accommodating this volume of traffic is $90 billion. Of that amount, $73 billion--81% of the total available--is committed to maintaining and operating public transit systems and the road system (from streets to freeways). Despite this substantial investment to improve transportation in the region, the mode share of automobile trips will remain at about 90%. There will be about 365 vehicle-hours of delay per day due to congestion.
Despite $82.5 billion expenditures over the next 25 years in Southern California, commute times will not decrease and evening peak speeds will decrease by 10%.
There is also an immediate problem in Southern California. The proposed solutions contained in SCAG's Regional Transportation Plan will not bring the region into conformance with federal air quality standards. The shortfall occurs specifically in unrealistic assumptions about the number of vehicle trips that will be converted from automobiles to high speed rapid transit. "For every motorist planners can show they are putting on the train--even if only on paper--the planning agency gets credit for meeting clean air laws" (Shuit, "Flaws in Region's Transit Plan May Jeopardize Funds," Los Angeles Times, Page B-1, April 22, 2001).
If the regional plan fails to meet its requirements, $1.9 billion in highway funds scheduled to flow into the region to relieve congested highways and freeways would be halted.
Growth and development have been for many years highly controversial throughout much of California. Today, development in general is as much political as it is economic. However, there are a number of impediments specific to transit-oriented development: financial, political, physical, and institutional factors.
The market viability of the housing product is questionable. The market for high density housing is thought to be soft due to consumer preference for low-density living. (Bernick and Cervero, pages 139-140)
There is often a lack of conventional financing. Transit-based housing is a largely untested market. (Bernick and Cervero, pages 139-140)
Markets fluctuate and the market demand for each element of a mix of uses seldom follows the same cycles (Bernick and Cervero, pages 139-140). For example the recession of the late 80s to early 90s hurt the office market.
Local governments that control land development at the stations often oppose TOD for the following reasons:
Some stations are sited in freeway medians. (Bernik and Cervero, page 165)
Many systems are built along existing rights-of-way and are surrounded by existing development. There is no vacant land upon which to build (Boarnet and Compin, Page 12).
The public transportation institution itself is part of the problem. The culture inside many transportation authorities is focused on operations--keeping the wheels rolling. Land development in those cases is not considered to be part of the core business. The skills required to be effective are outside of traditional transit planning expertise.
...the goal of using land use policies to boost ridership represents a major shift in American transportation planning. Prior to the mid-1980s, transportation planners rarely sought to influence travel behavior by manipulating land use patterns. Furthermore, rail systems by their nature involve several stations, often in multiple jurisdictions and land use authorities. This level in inter-governmental land use policy coordination, while found in other nations, is not typical of American planning. Thus both in intellectual disposition and in the required amount of coordination, TOD is a departure for transportation planning in the United States (Boarnet and Compin, page 1).
The progress toward TOD has been incremental, measured one or two projects at a time. While for any station or even city, each project is a significant effort, the character of station-proximate land throughout the system is, at best, adapting slowly. Hence the revolutionary prospect that land use can boost rail transit ridership faces a long, incremental implementation process (Boarnet and Compin, page 22).
The public transit institution has been slow to adopt new policies, play new roles, and use new tools. The need for reform of transportation agencies and authorities is part of the today's TOD challenge, and certainly part of developing network policies to support TOD.
Because of the various factors which impede market development of TOD, it is clear that each level of government will need to play some leadership role if it expects to capture the potential public benefits of TOD. This is especially true if the transit village ideal is to be realized.
The need for the transit agency and local government to assume a proactive role, is perhaps most crucial. Without government leadership, nothing will happen....To move a transit village proposal forward from theory to implementation, some form of public-sector financial participation--in the form of infrastructure investment, land assembly, or direct participation--is absolutely essential (Bernick and Cervero, Page 352).
Local governments regulate development activity around rail stations through zoning and other land use controls. This policy framework must accommodate high density projects, including those with a housing component. In addition to providing a TOD-friendly regulatory environment, government can also adopt policies and programs that will actively stimulate TOD. These include:
Beyond those local initiatives, regional, state, and federal agencies can provide funds as investments in services or support infrastructure. It is not unusual for the total government investment supporting a TOD project to run into the millions of dollars. The Richmond Redevelopment Agency, for example, applied $25 million in various government funds to support its transit village.
The MPO establishes the priorities and plans for the region and, based on those plans, can provide federal and state transportation funds.
Investments tangentially related to livable communities/TOD include transit, bicycle and pedestrian facilities, which will receive $400 million--.4% of the total 20 year budget. As mentioned above, the Transportation for Livable Communities program will receive $100 million.
Some of the recent TOD oriented investments made by MTC's TLC planning grant program include:
Some of the recent TOD oriented investments made by the TLC capital program include:
In addition, $9 million has been set aside through 2002/2003 for the Housing Incentive Program as an incentive for 4,500 new housing units within walking distance of rail transit (this program is described in Section 1.2.2.1 on page 5).
The rail authority itself is constrained in terms of the incentives that it can bring to the table. It can offer only its own assets. Typically, this involves land adjacent to some stations, often in use as a surface parking lot. This land can be used as the basis for joint development with a private partner.
While the relationship between land use and transportation has been evolving within the transportation planning profession, so also has the relationship between telecommunications and cities been evolving. For an excellent review of the emerging concepts and empirical research, see Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces and Urban Places, Routledge, 1996.
Several factors have converged to make this evolution possible--technological advances, competitive markets, and rights-of-way needed for wireline networks owned by rail authorities.
It is, in part, the quantum leap in technological capabilities that has excited the imagination about the potential for networks to be used to reorganize urban space. "If improvements in fiber optics continue, the carrying capacity of a single fiber may reach hundreds of trillions of bits per second just a decade or so from now" (Gary Stix, "The Triumph of the Light," Scientific American, October, 2000). For perspective, an ISDN connection runs at 128 kilobits per second over twisted pair copper wire.
William Mitchell, Dean of Urban Planning at MIT, provides the following description of the implications of the extraordinary capabilities of digital networks.
When piped systems replace wells you get a greater flow of water and you can take long hot showers. When freeways supplant dirt tracks you can live in the suburbs and drive every day to work. And when high-speed, digital telecommunications system succeed the telegraph and the telephone, you get socially significant changes in everyday interactions. It turns out that the more bits per second that you can push through a communications channel, the more complex and sophisticated the interchanges and transactions that can take place over it (Mitchell, e-topia, MIT Press, 1999, page 16-17).
At megabit and gigabit rates, expressive subtleties--tones of voice, body language, and so on--need not be filtered out, as they are in lower-bandwidth telecommunications...This telepresence can begin to compete effectively with bodily presence in situations--such as negotiating a contract, discussing a design proposal, or conducting a medical examination--where nuance and context are critical (ibid, page 18).
As simply put by Nicholas Negroponte:
Digital living will include less and less dependence upon being in a specific place at a specific time, and the transmission of place itself will start to become possible (Negroponte, Being Digital, Random House, 1995, page 165).
Technology available today supports applications that can be used to transmit place and reorganize urban form. The applications include telework, distance education, e-government, telemedicine, and e-commerce.
ATT's divestiture of its Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) in 1984 formalized the technology-driven trend toward competitive markets. In the 1950s, the telecommunications markets consisted of the regulated telephone utility and broadcast television over VHF frequencies. Today, there are many more markets and each generally has several competing firms, and sometimes even competing industries. For example, broadcast television, direct broadcast satellites, cable television, video tapes, and DVDs are five industries, each with competing firms within them, that vie for a share of the home entertainment market.
However, the local exchange market through which households and businesses purchase dial tone, local switching, and distribution remains a monopoly in most places. Competition has begun to emerge in a few, mostly large metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles. But even in those cases, the former RBOC remains the dominant carrier.
The salient characteristic of new markets and new competitors is that new infrastructure has been, and continues to be developed by private firms, particularly in the intra-regional domain where competition is just now growing. Firms characterized as alternate local transport networks, competitive local exchange carriers, cellular telephone networks, and digital cable companies have developed either new or modernized wire-line backbone networks in most metropolitan regions in California.
The significance of these networks to regional economic growth is summarized by William Mitchell:
The global digital network...will increasingly become the key to opportunity and development, and the enabler of new social construction and urban patterns. Investment, jobs, and economic power seem certain to migrate to those neighborhoods, cities, regions, and nations that can quickly put the infrastructure in place and effectively exploit it (Mitchell, page 14-15).
However, effective exploitation will require universally distributed opportunities to use the network. Markets imply that the quality and quantity of goods consumed are functions of the consumer's ability to pay a higher price. Many "worthy" uses may not be able to afford commercial prices. Virtual access to work and to services by large segments of the traveling public may be infeasible at commercial prices.
Rapid technological innovation causes the high end of all those newly formed markets to constantly rise, thereby rendering the technological infrastructure of most households, small businesses, and non-profit corporations as perpetually in some degree of obsolescence. CDs replace vinyl recordings and DVDs replace CDs. Digital high definition television monitors replace lower definition analogue sets. The Intel Pentium chip replaces the 486 chip and today the newest computers run on the Pentium 4. Digital photographs require much more network bandwidth than text e-mail.
In most cases, a high degree of technical literacy is required in order to become an effective consumer of most any technology product or service. Knowledge, like money, is not evenly distributed.
In other words, new private investment in fiber optics and new social needs in the information technology marketplace combine to create new opportunities for the agile transportation authority wishing to leverage its rights-of-way.
The resource absolutely essential to wire-line networks is right-of-way. Gaining access to public rights-of-way is more cost-effective for network developers than assembling them a parcel at a time from private owners. Public rights-of-way can be assembled a segment at a time from local governments. However, transportation authorities and electric utilities own, in most cases, up to several hundred miles of continuous rights-of-way. These rights-of-way have unique value in an era of network expansion and modernization.
Every rail authority needs a telecommunications system to support its operations. Operations include a number of activities that range from train control to platform security via video monitoring. These networks, initially developed by the rail authority itself, often have excess capacity, empty conduit, or at least spare space in the underground vault. This is significant since burying the cable is the largest cost in building wired networks. As a result, rail authorities are well positioned to enter into joint development agreements with private network firms, usually at relatively modest costs to the authorities.
New rail systems, or the segments built in the last ten years or so, have typically used optical fibers as the medium for their operations network. Older segments were built using copper wires, either twisted pair or coaxial cable. Authorities have been modernizing these copper-based systems over the past 20 years. Private partners have sometimes been involved.
In other words, telecommunications market competition has led to private investment in new network infrastructure, thereby creating joint development opportunities for rail authorities wishing to leverage their rights-of-way. Whether through private or rail authority investments, rail corridors either contain or can potentially contain vast amounts of network capacity.
Competitive markets have also produced an ever-rising high end of technology, allocation of quality and quantity by price, and increasing requirements for technical sophistication among consumers. These new needs have created new opportunities for rail authorities. For example, rail authorities with little investment of their own can leverage their rights of way in order to obtain modern networks to support operations, and to create high-end, expertly staffed, non-commercial public access to broadband digital networks at rail stations.
The incentives that were tested in this study were derived from a network deployment model for rail authorities, funded by the MTA.
Bernick and Cervero, writing from a land use perspective, anticipated that telecommunications could support transit village development, or other forms of live-work communities.
Advances in telecommunications and changes in the way people live and work could very well give rise to the kinds of self-sufficient villages that Ebenezer Howard and his contemporaries dreamed of...Distributed workplaces of the future will take the form of neighborhood telecenters, equipped with videoconferencing, on-line data-search capabilities, and facsimile transmission and voice mail (Bernick and Cervero, Page 368).
Writing from a telecommunications perspective, integration of digital networks and bricks and mortar buildings at transit stops is what Mitchell refers to as smart places:
All networks produced privileged places at their junctions and access points--for example, access to irrigation systems, highway off-ramps, air transportation hubs, seaports, and railway junctions. Today, there are smart places, where the bits flow abundantly and the physical and digital worlds overlap, at points where we plug into the digital telecommunications infrastructure (Mitchell, Page 31).
Whether as electronic Garden Cities or smart places, the question is one of how a synthesis of land, rail and telecommunications can be conceptualized and translated into policy. The answer has been evolving since the early 1990s.
In 1991, the Joint Development Department of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (LACTC) had been receiving inquiries into the possible use of its rights-of-way for commercial development of fiber networks. Before proceeding, management sought technical assistance in identifying the various network utilization strategies available should the LACTC enter into a joint-development agreement. The resulting policy report, "MetroNet: Strategies for Fiber Optic Deployment" (Siembab, 1992) presented a model of how broadband networks could be combined with rail transit to affect transit-oriented developments.
The model consisted of two new infrastructure elements. First, a metropolitan area network (MAN) referred to as the MetroNet (to be consistent with MTA's Metro Rail and SCRRA's Metrolink terminology). Second, a series of non-commercial, shared-use, multiple-function facilities that would provide access to the MAN, and therefore access to markets, work, and services.
According to this network deployment model, the metropolitan area network (MAN) would include government and public-non-profit components. The MAN could be developed through a public-private partnership, through a public-public partnership with other agencies, or by the rail authority acting alone. The MAN would initially be built on the rights of way owned by the rail authority. It would subsequently extend off those rights of ways to designated activity centers well-served by bus transit. This would mean that the main government buildings, public schools, and colleges and universities, and public health/hospital facilities in a region would all be connected to the MAN. The public non-profit network would be available at below market prices to private schools and colleges, community non-profits, private hospitals and so forth.
A network access center is a public facility that provides non-commercial access to devices that attach to digital networks in an array of settings. These settings include office, meeting space, medical clinic, classroom, training center, video production studio, and so forth. If one understands the travel demand of the adjacent community, it is possible to program the technology platform to provide access to some sub-set of the functions for which the community normally travels or would like to travel if convenient. Distance education, telemedicine, e-government, e-commerce, e-banking, and e-retail are some of the network applications that could appear at each network access center. The MAN would connect the NACs.
The 1992 riots resulted in interest throughout the region to "rebuild LA." A project to demonstrate the principles of the MetroNet model, sponsored by the MTA and funded by ISTEA, was one of the initiatives. This became the Blue Line TeleVillage Demonstration Project (BLTV), located along the Metro Blue Line light rail in Compton, about midpoint between the Los Angeles and Long Beach central business districts. Planning began in the fall of 1994, the facility opened in March, 1996, and continues in operation today. See Section 5.5.2.1 below for a description of the BLTV. The MetroNet model was subsequently absorbed into the core of a regional strategy referred to by Siembab as Network Oriented Development (NOD).
The MetroNet deployment model, demonstrated through the BLTV, suggested that digital networks could be used to offer three types of incentives for TOD. The three--direct access to fiber, network services, and network access centers--were presented to the participating members of the development community as part of this research study. The incentives are realistic in that they can be realized with off-the-shelf technologies at costs far less than the costs of other TOD incentives.
Incentive: Exclusive long term use of one or more fiber strands. If there is no MAN, one could be developed with a private partner at little or no cost to the rail authority. In the worst case, the authority could offer excess capacity from its operations network.
Beneficiaries: Office or industrial tenants with very high volumes of data communications--among multiple sites of the same organization (especially if the sites are also rail adjacent), with trading partners in the region, or for access to the Internet.
Benefits: Free or very low cost high volume digital communications from a station location to any other point on the MAN, or access to points-of-presence of other network vendors or Internet service providers. This incentive would be passed on by the developer to an anchor tenant with network management capabilities.
Examples: Government data processing center, medical center, stock broker, information technology design and manufacture operations, or research and development firms.
Incentive: Free high-speed access to Internet as well as free Internet service. Security alarm service could also be provided, but this option was not presented. These services can be acquired from a third party at little or no cost to the rail authority in exchange for exclusive use by the third party of some bandwidth on the MAN.
Benefits: Lowers costs to residents for services that are increasingly considered valuable, or even essential.
Examples: Residential (or mixed-use) developments. Households for whom Internet service is essential, some small businesses and merchants in mixed use buildings.
Incentive: This would take the form of a core facility modeled on the prototype NAC (the BLTV) that will, by itself, substantially increase the mix of activities located at a rail transit station. This would potentially involve a public, non-commercial facility of between 2,000 and 10,000 square feet that would combine furniture, technology, and staffing in order to create electronic access to:
NACs can be funded using federal transportation funds if included in the RTP and RTIP, or could qualify as part of a special program in the regional "call for projects" like MTC's TLC program. The BLTV was funded by ISTEA through the 1994 call for projects.
Benefits: This facility would provide an extremely compact mix of uses that would make the station area a significant activity center for a cross section of community members. It has the potential to make the station a destination rather than a just a portal to transit.
From the economic perspective, it:
It is, in other words, a system of public transit on the information highway, which is co-located with a system of public rail transit.
Beneficiaries: Since a NAC should be designed to address community needs, it could conceivably benefit any kind of development--low, middle, and high income residences, small to medium office businesses, and small retail businesses.
For small businesses and non-profit corporations, it can provide resources for various types of electronic meetings including audio or video conferencing, training in various computer programs, and small business technical assistance.
For residents, it can provide post-secondary educational opportunities from local community colleges, well equipped work stations that can be used by entrepreneurs or contract employees, and other similar services.
For employees of large corporations working in TOD office buildings, it can provide access to credit unions, continuing education classes and professional conferences, certain medical exams, and so forth.
The three network incentives can potentially address some of the barriers identified above. The incentives could affect some of those barriers in the following ways.
Network services can add amenities worth about $60 per month to each housing unit (the approximate market value of Internet service with DSL or cable modem access). These amenities could help overcome consumer resistance to the rail-adjacent location and might distinguish the project from competitors. Regarding financing, as mentioned during the interviews, the market value of the incentives could lead to a larger loan (10% larger in the hypothetical example--see Chapter 4).
Network access centers can create a presence for functions that are not subject to normal service delivery economics. Just as an ATM machine drastically reduced the cost of a withdrawal transaction compared with using a teller in a bricks and mortar bank, so can distance education classes, e-government services, and e-retailing opportunities lower the cost of service delivery. This means a much smaller market size can support such activities. A commitment from the MPO to provide funds to lease 5-15,000 square feet of store front or office space would help counter a down-market. And the resulting income to the developer could also be used to increase the size of the bank loan.
Network access centers would increase the draw of TOD activity centers without threatening the sales tax revenue of off-track retail centers. By making some public services such as government, education, and health care more compact and transit convenient, the stress on the equivalent bricks and mortar facilities could be mitigated. Streets should be no more congested despite the addition of new functions.
NIMBY resistance in both affluent and less affluent communities might be mitigated by network access centers programmed to satisfy local needs and interests, from job training programs to high-end executive work stations.
Network access centers do not require new construction on vacant land. NACs can be developed in vacancies in existing buildings. Platforms located in freeway medians make TOD difficult, but modest sized network access centers or full service kiosks can be accommodated on some of those platforms.
Network incentives complicate the challenges to the public transportation institutional culture already grappling with effective ways to integrate land development with rail transportation. The policies and practices of MPOs and rail authorities form a barrier to network incentives just as with TOD in general. The promise for overcoming these barriers is that they leverage the assets of the transit authority in a way that provides incentives that cost the authority less to produce than the real estate market values them.
This project collected four types of data:
TOD policies were assembled primarily from official publications available on the Internet. In a few cases, a knowledgeable individual was contacted by phone or e-mail to provide guidance or interpretation.
Good practices were collected in both Western Europe and the United States. Professor Stephen Graham, University of Newcastle on Tyne, conducted the following tasks relative to Western Europe:
Professor Malu Roldan, San José State University, conducted the following tasks relative to the United States:
Field observation involved visits by the Principal Investigator to many of the stops along the BART, MTA, and VTA rail systems to observe existing TOD projects and potential TOD sites.
The most complex data collection effort involved the interviews with the TOD community. The interview format included description of the need for TOD, explanation of the possible incentives, open discussion, and, finally, scale-assignment.
The interview was completed in 15 minutes in a few instances. Because of respondent interest in discussing options, issues and opportunities, 45 minutes to an hour was the norm. This process is discussed in greater detail below.
The project used broad strokes to identify members of the TOD community. Names of interview candidates were solicited from several sources:
The Local Government Commission maintains a list of "infill" developers. The list is annotated with a brief description of the developers recent projects. This list was screened to eliminate those that appeared to lack transit oriented experience.
The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority maintains a mailing list of people with a variety of interests in RFPs regarding joint development of MTA property at Metro stations. This list was screened to eliminate property managers, construction companies, project managers, and others with a peripheral interest in TOD.
The Valley Transportation Authority has a staff member assigned to provide support for TOD. VTA hosted in the summer of 2000 a "livable communities summit." VTA made available the list of attendees at that summit and identified developers with interest in specific VTA station developments.
The Transportation Department in the City of Oakland provided a few names of developers currently interested in BART stations located in Oakland.
The Southern California Regional Rail Authority maintains a list of contacts representing the cities along the rights of way. These contact persons were generally in public information or city management and were seldom directly involved in land use planning for the jurisdiction. Nevertheless, an e-mail was sent to each person asking them to forward the request for information to the appropriate person. TOD development policies and names of transit oriented developers locally active were requested. There were only two responses to this e-mail request and the information received was limited to TOD policies.
The Metropolitan Transportation Development Board provided a list of developers having made recent inquiries into development opportunities adjacent to the San Diego trolley system.
The project's limited budget impacted the time for and cost of travel to conduct the interviews. The location of the Principal Investigator in Los Angeles resulted in a bias toward Los Angeles based developers as interview candidates. However, developer interest in TOD sites was not limited to the location of the developer's home office so there was not a bias toward sites adjacent to MTA stations. For example, Creative Housing in Los Angeles is planning to develop the MacArthur transit village in Oakland.
The procedure followed was to obtain the telephone number from an information operator, call and either speak to the target or leave a message. About 90% of calls required a call back. In all, over 75 firms were called to obtain the 22 interviews.
The MetroNet deployment model, as discussed in Section 1.6, was not presented in the interviews. Each interviewee was presented with the three discrete incentives and the responses reflected the relevance of the incentives to specific current or recently completed projects.
A standard scale was needed in order to compare responses. This scale was developed through informal conversations with various people familiar with the TOD community, but not directly involved with it. These included a planner from the City of Los Angeles formerly assigned to livable communities unit (since disbanded by the City), a low cost housing developer familiar with technology applications but with no experience with TOD, and a senior transportation planner with the City of Oakland. The 4-point scale that was adopted appears to reflect a rational or common sense way of relating to the incentives.
The interviews introduced new ideas. The questions posed had never previously been asked. None of the respondents could provide answers based on facts or experience. What has been gathered are impressions and attitudes. Underlying some of the attitudes are beliefs about the appropriate role of government and the personal experience of the respondent in relation to specific government agencies that included local governments, transportation authorities, and metropolitan planning organizations.
Responses reflect a set of assumptions about their tenants that may ultimately be incorrect. The survey did not include tenants or tenant organizations.
Respondents generally thought specifically in terms of their own developments, particularly current projects. This fails to appreciate the strategic benefits of region-wide deployment.
The quality of the interviews varied in terms of the interviewee's available time, and his/her comfort with the seemingly technical topic.
There is some self-selection among the respondents. Those that agreed to the interview might well have a bias toward network technology. Those who did not make the time to return the phone calls or would not make time for the appointment could well have been people who would have had a negative reaction to the incentives.
There may be a "why not?" phenomenon present. Respondents were basically asked whether contributions by a third party would provide an incentive to their developments. While every respondent seriously reflected on the impact of these contributions, there is the possibility that there was a touch of "why not, it's not my money" in their response.
With only a couple of exceptions, most interviewees were unfamiliar with the telecommunications concepts being advanced. And those exceptions were minimally knowledgeable and certainly not experts in the area.
It is a challenge to explain that which doesn't exist to people with little available time. This is one reason why in-person meetings were preferred to telephone interviews.
The scale has limitations. Like other attempts to reduce responses to numbers for the sake of comparability, richness is lost. In many cases, the reasoning behind the assessment provides more information than the number assigned. For this reason, qualitative data in the form of respondent comments has been included.
Development Communinity Participants
The interviews conducted with the 22 members of the development community essentially constitute a preliminary market assessment for a new family of telecommunications incentives. These incentives are not now offered but are relatively low cost and do not require technological innovation.
Twenty-two individuals can provide only an initial impression of interest. For perspective, there are over 120 names on the mailing list of just the MTA.
However, a number of very significant organizations participated. Five of the planned transit villages, those with the most advanced plans, were represented. Some of the most important TOD housing developers in the state participated. They include Eden Housing (Ohlone Chynoweth), Bridge Housing (Ohlone Court, Coggins Square), and The Lee Group (Village Green).
For analysis, the 22 have been broken into 3 groups, Transit Oriented Developers, Transit Village Developers, and Other. The five organizations planning transit villages have been separated because they are a planning a version of the ideal, mixed-use TOD. This allows the analysis to determine whether there are differences in preferences between transit village developers and developers specializing in single uses. The "Other" category contains respondents who are associated with development, but who are not actually developers.
Bridge Housing is among the leading developers of affordable housing in California. The company advocates "smart growth" concepts, and builds on infill sites in existing communities, often at or near rail stations. Mixed-use projects either incorporate new retail and commercial activity (Marin City USA) or are located near job centers (West Oakland). Recent projects include Strobridge Court in Castro Valley (built on BART station property), Montevista in Milpitas (walking distance to VTA light rail station), and Coggins Square (walking distance to Pleasant Hill BART station). Bridge also developed the 135 unit Ohlone Court, the project on the outer edge at VTA's Ohlone Chynoweth station in San Jose.
The Castle Group is a privately held residential real estate organization headquartered in San Mateo, California. The firm's businesses include development, land investment, construction, and ownership-affiliated entities. Castle projects consist of both rental and for-sale housing, with product types including stacked flats, townhomes, lofts, high-rise, detached single-family, and mixed-use developments. The firm's specialty is high density, in-fill environments. It recently completed the Whisman Station housing development in Mountain View and the adaptive re-use of Del Monte Plant #51 in San Jose, providing 450 housing units within walking distance from the Diridon Station.
Eden is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to providing housing and associated services to people without adequate financial means. It has developed 3,300 units of affordable housing throughout Northern California for seniors, families, and people with special housing needs. Eden was the developer of 195 rental units at the Ohlone Chynoweth VTA light rail station.
ICC acquires land, obtains construction loans and selects a merchant builder for a variety of project types. This includes office projects and mixed residential and retail. It has not done a TOD yet, but was a bidder on one of the Metro Red Line RFPs.
Develops residential projects as well as retail projects, from mini-malls to a 200,000 square foot shopping center (in Orange County). It has 2,000 tenants in various developments, but none are currently at rail stations. He was interested in one of the MTA's RFPs for the Metro Red Line.
The Lee Group specializes in public/private ventures with redevelopment agencies and community development departments. Their focus is on housing--from entry level single family for low and moderate income families to luxury estates. They were responsible for the Village Green, 186 single family detached homes adjacent to the Sylmar/San Fernando Metrolink Station with childcare center. It is the largest transit-based affordable housing development in the County of Los Angeles. The firm also develops some mixed-use projects. Venice Renaissance mixed affordable senior and handicapped rental housing with for-sale ocean view condominiums and ground floor retail. The principals of the firm have been involved in Southern California real estate development for over 40 years.
Madison Park Real Estate Investment Trust
The firm's slogan is "the live-work REIT." They make adaptive reuse of classic buildings abandoned or under-utilized. It is currently working on converting an old Sears store at 27th and Telegraph in Oakland to mixed use--live-work units with ground floor retail. Another project is the old bakery in Emeryville, where there will be 57 live/work units. Typical size of such units is 700 to 1,800 square feet. The firm looks for transit adjacent locations but basically redevelops wherever they find suitable properties.
The firm builds commercial and residential projects. Residential is usually in-fill, zero lot line, detached, at medium to high density. The firm has an office building under construction near downtown Sunnyvale with 460,000 square feet and 10,000 square feet of retail.
The Olson company is one of the 15 largest home builders in Orange County. It specializes in in-fill and builds near transit when possible. It recently developed Renaissance Walk, 40 units of affordable housing one block from the Metro Blue Line in Long Beach. It also built Heritage Walk, 38 units one block from the Pasadena Blue Line, and a 200 unit complex is being built near a BART station in Pittsburg in the Bay Area. It also has several developments in San Diego.
Swenson Builders are committed to in-fill development and TOD. The firm prefers very high density in the form of 10 story buildings or more. For example, it has proposed to build two 15-story towers at the Tamien station on the VTA light rail system. The firm is planning to build a headquarters building for a technology company on the Vasona Line, and 140 senior housing units and 61 townhouses.
Urban Partners acquires and develops real properties in high population growth and urban core areas of California, particularly in metropolitan Los Angeles. It specializes in mixed-use projects that require complex land use planning, financial structuring, and entitlement expertise. It is currently developing a housing project at the Del Mar Station on the Pasadena Blue Line.
Alameda County Community Development Agency
The County of Alameda owns a site in the City of Dublin adjacent to the East Dublin stop on the BART line (the end of the eastern extension). The CDA intends to develop the land into a mixed-use project that was referred to as a Transit Village. It will include retail, hotel, multi-family dwellings and office commercial. No developers have been retained but Sun and Oracle Corporations each have options on large parcels.
Currently involved in two mixed-use projects, one on the Pasadena Blue Line which is predominantly housing, and the other which is at the MacArthur BART Station in Oakland. The MacArthur project is planned to be a transit village. The firm is committed to the goals of the transit village--reduced auto dependence and a higher quality of life through a dense village environment with transit access.
Economic Development Division
City of Mountain View
The City of Mountain View downtown area is adjacent to a multi-modal transit stop, with VTA bus and light rail services as well as CalTrain available. (CalTrain is a commuter rail train serving the Bay Area and San Jose.) The City has adopted policies and made investments consistent with the evolution of a transit village. For example, the City created a transit overlay zone that provides a density bonus in order to attract development to the downtown. The Crossings housing development is one of those developments. The City also narrowed San Carlos Street, west of the transit stop, in order to provide parking, street landscaping, and enhance the pedestrian experience. The City also built a new civic center, including a performing arts center on San Carlos Street, 5 blocks west of the transit stop.
The Fruitvale Development Corporation
The FDC is the developer of the Fruitvale Transit Village, perhaps the currently planned transit village with the highest public profile. Office space for several community organizations, 47 housing units, a medical clinic and 38,000 square feet of retail are planned. The Fruitvale Transit Village will be developed at the BART Fruitvale Station in Oakland.
Richmond Redevelopment Agency
City of Richmond
The City of Richmond Redevelopment Agency has planned and will begin construction on a transit village at its intermodal station on 16 acres of land, much of it an existing BART surface parking lot. BART and Amtrak (including the Capital Corridor from San Jose to Sacramento) rail services and multiple Alameda County Transit bus lines are available. The project will cost almost $60 million and it will include at build-out 231 affordable townhouses and live-work units, 20,000 square feet of retail, and a 30,000 square foot cultural center. There are also related improvements including a police substation, Amtrak platform and canopy, a four-story 680-space garage for replacement parking, and an elevated adjacent street. Almost $21 million in public funds (about 35% of the total cost) have been committed to the project.
Provides architecture and engineering, program management, and facilities design services to commercial, institutional and industrial developers. It has been in business since 1983. The firm's principal is committed to transit oriented development and believes that rail transit will change the urban dynamics of Los Angeles. A 350 unit housing development at the Pasadena Blue Line Del Mar station is a current project.
Bank of America does not discriminate between TOD and other projects. The same investment criteria must be met in either case. The interview was conducted with a Senior Vice President in the Home Builder Division. Her most direct involvement in TOD was as a member of an Urban Land Institute "Advisory Panel" in Charlotte North Carolina.
Leases retail shopping centers in the Los Angeles area. The person interviewed had no previous experience with TOD.
Mountain View Council member for 18 years, two years as Vice Chair of VTA Board.
She has been out of office for 2 years.
Orange County Transportation Authority
The OCTA is the lead agency developing the Center Line, Orange County's first rail transit system. The first phase is being planned for 30 miles with a projected cost of $2.3 billion.
The system will have TOD elements. The corridor cities will adopt policy guidelines for TOD and commit to station area planning. OCTA funded the cities to study TOD options. These studies were intended to augment OCTA traffic analyses. The amount of those funds varied between $100,000 and $350,000. OCTA was selecting the locally preferred alternative, but the project was put on hold in the spring of 2001.
Langdon Wilson offers architectural and planning services to diverse projects including mixed use housing and retail.
Interviews were conducted primarily in February and March, 2001. The effects of the electric power crisis in California were only beginning to be felt, and suburban real estate markets were hot due to a sustained period of economic growth. Affordable housing was badly needed throughout the regions polled--Santa Clara County, Los Angeles and Orange Counties, San Francisco and the East Bay. Indeed, it is these very economies that are generating the demand for affordable housing that is being built as sprawl at the suburban periphery. At least three of the transit villages are planned for areas needing economic revitalization--Fruitvale, MacArthur, and Richmond.
In most cases, the responses reflected the extent to which the respondent has one or more specific projects for which the incentives appeared to be a good fit. The responses should not be interpreted in terms of whether offering the incentives would make good public policy, but rather the degree to which the incentives would benefit a current or planned project.
Respondents were asked to rate each incentive in terms of a 4-point scale:
A "1" means no interest in the incentive.
A "2" means interest, but doubt that the incentive would have a significant impact.
A "3" means that the incentive would be significant, contingent upon certain conditions, such as particular demographic characteristics or project location.
A "4" means that the incentive would unconditionally have a significant impact.
However, the number of interviews was small so that the apparent precision possible with numerical data can be misleading. The average values should be interpreted as tendencies, not exact ratings.
The expertise of each participant was generally limited to a specific development type or combination of types. As a result, the following tables record responses in 3 categories--retail developments, office developments, and mixed developments. Mixed developments include housing-retail combinations or transit villages, which promise to integrate housing, retail, office, and cultural or community buildings.
The three incentives do not apply equally to each development type. For example, direct access to strands of fiber does not currently make sense to a residential development, but might be attractive to an office complex with sophisticated high volume consumers of network services. DSL/ISP for office developments was similarly not asked. These variations in participant expertise and relevance to development type account for the uneven number of responses to each incentive.