Transit-Oriented Design Takes on the Sprawl Juggernaut

After decades of development towards the periphery over woodland lots and fertile farmland with interstate highways leading the way, America is looking more seriously at the art of planning.

In the Massachusetts governor’s race this fall, the candidates promised to manage growth better and traced the impacts of sprawl to a lack of planning. Although they disagreed on the form of regional governance that would be needed to help guide local communities, they agreed on the urgent need for open space preservation and for new legislation that would create incentives for concentrating development in existing communities with well established infrastructure.

To aid communities in understanding their strengths and weaknesses and the best way to redirect future development, Smart Growth America, a coalition of over 80 national and local organizations committed to combating sprawl, has just come out with a new study entitled Measuring Sprawl and Its Impacts by Reid Ewing of Rutgers University and Rolf Pendall of Cornell University.

The report describes how healthy metropolitan areas thrive economically from reduced air pollution and congestion as a result of development patterns that allow a range of transportation and housing options.

Strength of Metropolitan Centers
According to the Smart Growth America study, successful metropolitan centers, be they downtowns, small towns, or so-called "edge cities," are concentrations of activity that help businesses thrive. They support alternative transportation modes and multipurpose trip making. They foster a sense of place in the urban landscape. Centeredness can be represented by concentrations of either population or employment. It can reflect a single dominant center or multiple subcenters. The academic literature associates compactness with centers of all types and sprawl with the absence of centers of any type.

The most sprawling metro area of the 83 surveyed by the Smart Growth America study is Riverside, California, with an index value of 14.22. It received especially low marks because:

• It has few areas that serve as town centers or focal points for the community. For example, more than 66 percent of the population lives more than ten miles from a central business district.
• It has little neighborhood mixing of homes with other uses. Only 28 percent of residents in the Riverside area live within one-half block of any business or institution.
• Its residential density is below average. Less than one percent of the Riverside metropolitan area’s population lives in communities with enough density to be effectively served by transit.
• Its street network is poorly connected. Over 70 percent of its blocks are larger than traditional urban size.

In the overall national ranking, Riverside is followed by Greensboro, NC; Raleigh, NC; Atlanta, GA; Greenville, SC; West Palm Beach, FL; Bridgeport, CT; Knoxville, TN; Oxnard, CA; and Ft. Worth, TX.

Most cities in the northeast, despite dispersed development patterns since World War II, fare much better than the national average, thanks in large part to the region’s rich inheritance of historical town centers.

Edge Cities into Mixed-Use Communities
As regions realize the financial and cultural advantages of reclaiming vast stretches of single-use commercial landscapes, they may find inspiration from New Urbanist style planners such as Peter Calthorpe, who have pioneered new trends in retrofiting these first generation suburban districts into pedestrian-friendly villages.

The term ‘transit-oriented development’ (TOD) was first popularized by Calthorpe and John Fregonese as they mapped out transit villages serviced by Portland, Oregon’s first light-rail lines. These transit villages, such as the poster child, Orenco Station, are fundamental building blocks of Calthorpe’s regional interventions at Stapleton Airport and Envision Utah.

Several years ago, Oaktree Development, a Cambridge, MA based developer with green building credentials, saw a transit village in the making at the Alewife office park in North Cambridge. There was already a concentration of useful building blocks: the Alewife $84 million MBTA transit station completed in 1985, the Minuteman Bikeway, and the adjoining Cambridge Park office complex (identified by Joel Gareau’s book, Edge City) with ample amounts of yet undeveloped vacant lots. In a feat of daring, they sited Cambridge Park Place, a luxury 311-unit apartment building, right in the middle of the aging office park, a relic of  the 1980’s high-tech boom with utilitarian high-rise towers resting on a plinth of asphalt.

With the project in the midst of its leasing phase, the success of this location- efficient project will put the value of transit accessibility to the test with this rather forbidding site surrounded by biotech facilities and oceans of as yet unreclaimed blacktop. Well aware of the gamble they were taking, Oaktree upped the ante in this project, not only in architectural terms with handsome Mediterranean styling and roof treatment, but with LEED certification with all the qualities that this brings—high indoor air quality, third party commissioned HVAC system, recycling facilities on each floor, and an expansive elevated garden above the parking decks.

The Bike Path that Could
Bike paths provide an additional way to get people into downtown districts. They can give an economic boost to town center cafes and restaurants as well as broaden the mix of commuter transit choices. The Minuteman Bikeway, just a stone’s throw from Alewife station and down the street from Cambridge Park Place, is the most successful Rails-to-Trails project in the country bringing along it’s path, numerous housing projects and economic vitality.

About a ten minute ride up the bikeway from Alewife in Arlington Center, is an infill rental housing project called the Legacy. It was most assuredly precipitated by the economic development and town center vitality that was stimulated by the bikeway. The 134 unit, 44 units per acre, development was leased out handily at high rental rates, thanks in no small measure to its transit offerings—very convenient bus transit right on  the Legacy’s front door with the bikeway right at the back fence.

Despite being a highly dense development dropped right into downtown, this project sailed effortlessly through planning approvals thanks to the architectural skills of Edward Tsoi, principal at Tsoi/Kobus and Associates and a member of the Arlington Redevelopment Board, who worked with the developer to take advantage of a 10-15-foot drop in the back of the property. This allowed the complex to slip behind the shops on Massachusetts Avenue and not overwhelm the street.

Although criticized stylistically as scaled-up two-family houses made into a floating multi-family battleship, it is still a remarkably successful infill development. The New Urbanist character of the project shows up in a number of places, such as the careful planning of the internal street that is framed at the end with a triumphal arch, leading to the back yard overlooking the Minuteman Bikeway.

Now Let’s Do the Numbers
These well-planned high-density urban projects may not win over people who prefer a more bucolic lifestyle, but let’s see where the numbers stand on environmental impacts attributable to location efficiency. Eliot Allen of Criterion Planners and Engineers, a researcher of sustainable indicators, has put together an Environmental Transect that is based on Andres Duany’s Urban Transect, an abstract form of the stepping-down typologies of a well-designed hierarchy of urban habitat.

At one extreme of the urban transect, downtown projects of 35 units/acre located within a mile of 30,000 jobs or more and within 400 feet of public transit, translate into a per capita vehicle miles traveled of 10 miles per day (3650 miles per year). On the other end, on the metropolitan fringe, the per capita vehicle miles traveled is 35 per day (12,775 miles per year). Although these numbers may seem a little hard to believe, we have to remember that the city number factors in the people who don’t drive at all.

Allen compares two projects–Metro Square, a 46-unit townhouse project taking up a single city block, and a 46-unit exurban sub-division project called Antelope. As expected, Antelope’s per capita greenhouse emissions are double that of Metro Square. The air pollutants are four times greater and three times the land area is used.

One other sobering observation from the field: most of my immediate neighbors who live in my transit-rich neighborhood near Arlington Center rarely seem to take transit or bicycle. The main environmental benefit from their location is the relatively shorter vehicle trips due to the higher density—15 units per acre in this 1920s suburb.

Infill Development Is So Hard to Do
As with Rome, most obsolete suburban shopping malls will not be transformed magically in a day, nor are smaller towns ready to give up the quest for that eternally available free parking space. The New Urbanists’ community visioning tools, such as the visual preference surveys shown by Anton Nelessen at NESEA’s Building Energy 2002 conference, are perhaps the greatest contribution to town planning. Envision Utah, a large planning effort spearheaded by Calthorpe Associates, is an inspiring example of how these new visioning and public charrette venues can lead to the passage of statewide smart growth legislation. But it’s going to take immense civic involvement for advocates to help craft a vision that all stakeholders can agree upon.

Courtney Miller, AIA, heads Courtney Miller Architects and New England Solar Homes.