Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) and Employment

Document Type

Report

Publication Date

2011

Subject Area

land use - impacts, land use - planning, land use - transit oriented development, place - north america

Keywords

job sprawl, employment, transit, employment decentralisation, destination

Abstract

In a white paper entitled “Transit-Oriented Development and Employment,” CTOD discusses the relationship between transit and job concentrations and explains the importance of the destination side of the trip for both transit operations and land-use planning in station areas. "Future transit planning must focus on making the critical connections between home and work trips," said Sam Zimbabwe, director of the Center for Transit-Oriented Development. "Without these strong connections, transit will never be able to fulfill its potential to address immediate goals such as accessibility improvements or longer-term goals of stronger regional economies and reduced greenhouse gas emissions at the metropolitan level." The report examines Atlanta, Georgia; Phoenix, Arizona; and the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul), Minnesota, to illustrate the patterns of employment concentrations and show how these create opportunities for future transit investments. "Transit-oriented development planning has generally been more focused on the origin side of the trip, conceived as dense residential neighborhoods and mixed-use development featuring housing built over retail," explained Dena Belzer, lead author and president of Strategic Economics, a CTOD partner. "However, with employment uses more closely associated to transit ridership than dense residential uses, it is clear job centers must be a key component of the TOD equation."

Rights

Permission to link to this report has been given by Reconnecting America, copyright remains with them and Center for Transit-Oriented Development.

Comments

This report was prepared by Dena Belzer and Sujata Srivastava of Strategic
Economics and the CTOD, Jeff Wood of Reconnecting America and the CTOD,
and Ellen Greenberg of ARUP. Copy-editing was performed by Derek Braun and
John Hughes.

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