Transit Oriented Development, Explained

About the thumbnail: I'm not ACTUALLY proposing housing in Portland's park blocks. It was just a nice thumbnail. :)

Why is underground parking not ever considered in this country? You accepted parking on a ground floor of a main street. I would not.

I’m convinced that Cyberpunk style megabuildings are gonna be the future that people who are obsessed with eliminating people’s ability to choose to drive cars eventually settle on.

get rid of park and rides and increase feeder bus frequency at peak times from all corners of the surrounding suburbs

IMO one of the reasons orenco doesn't get much ridership (doesn't seem like it has more than other stations at least) is because there's not really many places to go from the rail. In most instances, you need to take the rail to get close to your destination, the walk, so it's not so usefull. We really need more stations like orenco to start seeing more ridership. The other issue, is the rail closes so early at night, so if you are going somewhere in the evening by rail, you are going to need to find another way back at night.

Please do something special for the dissection of Sacramento..the positives/negitives of infrastructure/public transpertation/entertainment...and what you would do to improve Sacramentos desirability/ tourism/ city beautification/functionality...please and thankyou

Visit tokyo

Good design cannot fix bad urban zoning and political policies.

If a rail station only serves a half mile radius, that's not really sustainable IMHO, so this radius needs to be extended:
* add a bus stop right at the other side of the platform, so people already see the bus to their suburb when exiting the train. This extends the radius to how far the busses go.
* next is bike parking and actually make bicycles the preferred mode of transportation in the directly surrounding area and a useful option for about 5 miles.
* private vehicles can only access the station directly via a ring to drop someone off ("Kiss and Ride" as we call it here).
* Every other car traffic goes to a parking garage (never surface parking!!!) somewhere close to a larger road. This serves a double role: Park&Ride and it replaces any parking options for the surrounding area, even for residents. This allows the streets to be more friendly to pedestrians and cyclists and makes it even denser.
If the whole scenario works, people arriving by train go shopping in that area and then go home by bike, bus or car (in that order).

and yet This successful Development is like a ghost town.....

USA examples = Moscow century ago (ok half-century ago)

TOD's only work if a certain demographic is not present.

Its always interesting seeing Americans trying to figure out public transport what has been working in Europe very well for the last 150+ years. But i hope these projects will have succed. The way Americans commute and build is unsustainable long term anymore.

The crazy thing is that in Europe, TOD is just called "development". It's just the standard expectation for what development should be.

I'd love to watch more documentaries on Curiosity Stream. But I just can't find anything that looks interesting. How can I find decent documentaries like the ones mentioned during the ad spot?

All 6 of our city's transit oriented communities and developments failed. Transit communities just don't work because they are all cut off by a major freeway or arterial road which is where all our citys TODs were placed by. Also does not help that our city keeps cutting transit making the TODs a really bad choice for housing.

Shame it's build by modernist in their ugly style. I wouldn't want to be there.

i live about a mile from orenco, its so surreal to see you standing there

Can you please add metric units to your videos? :)

only 6 floors? LMAO here in Ukraine, 8 is the minimum and 16+ is the expected

Transit-Oriented Development by itself is not a solution to the issues of car-centric cities. Especially in newer southern and western cities, the whole idea of public transit by itself is a major turn-off. Here in Central Florida, many natives see transit as something for poor people and many, if not most, don't use it or would never use it. (To be fair, "transit" in most of Florida is like spotting Bigfoot.) The idea of TOD is funny to me, growing up in New York where trains and buses are part of the landscape. A good amount of suburbanites may or may not want TOD but in sprawling areas they generally don't want transit of any kind to begin with.

I miss Oregon

Another great technique is capping highways with parks or building land bridges. Since transit is often easy to build along existing road right of way, hiding the highways and providing more walking space could be a good addition to the TOD. I hope to see more of that in the future .

Funny thing about the green line, the most recent developments have converted areas to TODs. A great example is Lents. Lents has high rise mixed use apartments and a fantastic community all around the max stop. It's a public transit hub for SE. I actually don't see the problem of building on each side of the highway IF you have pedestrian and bike bridges frequently, which Lents does. I-205 is also raised up so people from both sides of the highway can access the neighborhood easily. That's another reason it works so well. I'm actually really confused on how a walk under an overpass or over a bridge kills the advantage. You're still extremely close, public transit is still right there, and the neighborhood is still dense.

All the project and studies presented in this video, it feels so weird to me as a European who take transit, walk to the bus and station every day. Nice video and interesting subject !

Park and ride is just a missing suburban bus system.

😳 Did not expect to see my childhood home in this video.

San Diego's MTS just built a big multi-level parking facility next to the new Noble Drive LRT station. However, the station abuts an important shopping center. There is quite a bit of successful shopping centers along the new Blue Line LRT extension.

These giant parking spaces and garages are terrible everywhere, but near transit is absolutely crime against urbanism and a huge waste of money. You gotta make driving as hard as possible if you want encourage people to leave the cars at home, I think European cities do a great job doing this.

I live in São Paulo, which has transit but not as extensive as it should, but a lot of times I prefer going by metro or train because it’s easy and convenient, but mostly because it’s 10 times cheaper than going by car from the suburb. I think outside of NY, Chicago and Boston, most American cities don’t give this flexibility to people. I love that when I visit those cities I could get around by walking and taking the subway.

The Orange line Metro stops get it both right and wrong. In Arlington and in DC itself, the TOD is apparent. In Fairfax County, though, it's the same old story of train stations surrounded by a sea of parking, though there are some hopeful signs. For instance, the area near the Dunn-Loring metro stop has seen a boom in mixed use development.

Hm

Thank you for this video. I’m going to present this concept to my local city council

Funny how my end of the Orange line in Prince George's county in Maryland is not discussed.

I hate to say it, but there's a factor I don't hear being mentioned: public safety (either perceived or actual). There's a fairly major subway & bus station near me that's closely associated with a major shopping mall, a whole herd of smaller strip malls, and a couple of large residential neighborhoods. Access from almost any direction is easy (the exception being the already overburdened intersection of one major road into two major roads); lots of sidewalks, public open spaces, even a large pedestrian bridge over one of the main roadways. The problem is that if you overlay a map of car theft, carjacking, and public nuisances reports/arrests over the area, there's a major concentration right there -- and I can tell you from personal experience that the stairwells for that pedestrian bridge frequently smelled like an outhouse for the same reason that an outhouse smells like that. There's also a history of higher than average assorted crimes, up to & including muggings & assaults. The result is that a lot of people try to avoid walking there, and I know a number of people who park there to take the rail line downtown who schedule their days so they can get their car the heck outta Dodge before it gets too dark in the garage. There's a similar but smaller node even closer to my home that marks the end of the rail line, and while it can get fairly busy during morning & evening rush hour, the number of assaults, etc. in the local news that occur there & the surrounding area often result in people driving long distances to get to other such nodes in the system, if not actually just driving all the way to their destinations. Some of the stories about crimes at these nodes are just that -- stories -- but there's enough actual fact to keep the rumor mill well-fed and the TOD rezoning/development well behind the curve in terms of results. The public needs to both be safe and feel safe at the transit centers, and that's a factor that I rarely hear addressed in discussions of TODs & similar plans. (Note: I am not anti-TOD; I've lived in Europe and loved using the public transportation on a near-daily basis -- I'm simply addressing factors that I hear a large number of potential public transportation customers talk about as a reason to avoid using public transportation.)

Fun fact: outside of North America, a common term for "transit-oriented development" is "a normal city"

since it was mentioned, Intel is a potential candidate for the BDSmovement boycotts, free palestine!

This video is completely wrong about park-and-ride lots, which are absolutely asinine public policy.

Transit agencies often rely on park-and-ride when trying to win grants, and the agencies will try to justify park-and-ride lots as being land banks for future development. But, these things are still asinine.

They will worsen automobile-dependent suburban sprawl, and all of its pernicious effects.

Park-and-ride does not reduce Vehicle Miles Traveled, especially when combined with high-speed rail and similar systems that confer time savings and increased reliability over driving.

Knowing how gas prices can increase this much I wouldn’t mind these types of cities

good

I want to make a TOD, as to promote outside activity

Hmm

I'm in for transit oriented developments! Less cars & congestion, less pollution is a win-win

Gut reaction to the phrase "Park and Ride," why the crap would I ever drive to get on transit which likely takes me to another park and ride where my car isn't? Park and Ride is a crap idea that makes transit useless because they all end in useless parking lots.

It’s funny being from odd and watching this. It’s a nice station in a nice neighborhood. It’s just funny because I usually think of Hillsboro as kind of ghetto and unwalkable. But that spot is nice than where I live in southeast Portland (which is also located near the rail) Also nobody uses park and ride they should cut the size of them in half

I recently went to the battery in Atlanta, it’s a mixed use entertainment district that has a pedestrian only street. My only issue with it is that the only way to get there is to drive. Might be an interesting video to do on places that do things almost correct but have a glaring error or two.

As an European it's pretty strange to see something hyped so much as "pioneering concept" while it's one of the most common fundamental things in an average European city for decades :D

Being a PDX area business owner and transit freak, I can agree with most of the video. With MAX stations it's usually a hit a or miss because YES indeed parking can fill up fast but we are all used to it. Portland and the surrounding hoods is mostly full of bus riders. I am one of them because parking at many stations is a pain. At Sunset Station, if you arrive past 9am you are pretty much screwed if driving. It's why we have commute bus lines. I had no issue taking the 59 bus to Sunset tram station.

to increase public transit, besides the TOD, please also make sure no homeless living on the trains.
sunset transit center is also interesting, when there is basketball or soccer game in town, the parking space will be nearly full.
which is also good that fewer cars enter downtown.

As an italian, even after years, I think I'll never understand US. Why are you so suprised that "hello cars are bad, transit is better". I don't have a license and I have been able to do everything I want in the cities/towns I've lived in. Of course there are some cases where you need a car but, in most of the cities there are ways to go wherever you want without a car: BUS, BIKE, FEET. And "hey from city to city?" what about TRAINS?

The key isn't ONE transit option, it's MULTIPLE.

Park and Ride parking garages with multiple floors should have retail or restaurants on the street level. That would be a good use and make the park and rides more of a destination place than just a place to park your car.