New Transit, New Riders: A Policy to Make The Promise Come True

Traditionally, transportation lines came first and then development sprang up alongside. Now scarce transit financing has led to a reversal—communities are being asked to promise and sometimes even deliver station-area growth before transit extensions will be funded and built. The latest example of this trend is a policy being developed for Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) approval in June. The policy details how MTC will guide regional transportation funding for transit extension projects contained in MTC Resolution 3434 to corridors with adequate transit-oriented development (TOD) to support the new transit facilities.

TOD is the preferred method for achieving ridership by providing a base of local residents and/or workers near transit routes. Typically, TOD calls for a higher concentration of jobs or housing in the immediate area of the station, good access through feeder routes and pedestrian and bicycle facilities, and amenities in the station area such as small stores for quick errand-running during the daily commute.

Because each community is different, and transit services can vary from bus to heavy commuter rail and ferries, TOD is not a uniform concept that can be applied in exactly the same way every time. Urban area TOD may rely on office jobs and retail with little or no housing, while "end of the line" suburban TOD may be mixed-use with more housing and is likely to include access from surrounding areas by feeder buses. Flexibility is a strength, but also a challenge—examples of successful TOD can be persuasive, but communities may feel that TOD done in other areas is too dissimilar to their own situation. Other challenges include the need for changes in the traditional ways of allocating parking; reconsidering existing plans for station sites which include businesses whose customers come by car; and the struggle to include affordable housing, which generates more transit ridership, in developments which will easily sell units at market rate given the region's tight housing market.

Most of these TOD challenges are particularly problematic for agencies such as the transit districts or MTC, because while they have a financial stake in the results, they do not have the final say in land use decisions. This difficulty is demonstrated by the problem of meshing TOD with the typical timeframe for major transportation projects. While Santa Clara residents may want BART to arrive in San Jose in the next few years, the reality is that residents of any TOD built now around a planned BART station in Milpitas (for example) will have a long wait before they can take a BART train to work—and meanwhile, they will be adding congestion to local streets.

However, if other types of development are allowed on the future TOD area now, they may be too valuable to be replaced by TOD when the BART line does arrive, thereby frustrating any plans based on TOD being in place. This situation already exists in Fremont, where the NUMMI plant occupies land adjacent to a proposed station; this major industry is unlikely to be replaced by TOD and is unwilling to accept residential TOD as a neighbor, creating a jobs-heavy station where planners might otherwise have preferred mixed-use.

Several transit districts in the Bay Area, including the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART), and AC Transit, have already developed guidelines for evaluating investment in new routes or extensions. BART's guidelines for extensions use thresholds measuring anticipated jobs and housing near stations to determine whether ridership will justify the expense of creating and operating the new service. BART, AC Transit and Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority have design guidelines to help with the development of neighborhoods with good pedestrian access to transit stops and stations.

To address the need for cost-efficiency in transit expenditures while keeping local flexibility, MTC's policy calls for looking at the entire transit corridor (or expansion project) when TOD potential is evaluated. In the case of the NUMMI plant, it would contribute to meeting any jobs threshold set for the corridor while residential thresholds could be met by other stations. Corridor-level thresholds vary by the mode of transit, with more expensive modes tied to higher thresholds (see table below). Affordable housing is given additional weight so that fewer units are needed to meet the housing thresholds. It is up to local jurisdictions to adopt plans and zoning for how and where housing and jobs will be sited within the half-mile radius around stations.

Corridor-level thresholds are one key component of the new policy. The other two are local station area plans and new Corridor Working Groups to ensure that the housing and jobs create lively, livable neighborhoods near stations and along key transit corridors. Physical transit extension projects using Resolution 3434 funding must demonstrate that the thresholds can be met, either through existing development or through station area plans adopted by local jurisdictions. If new station area plans are needed, funding assistance will be available through MTC. The plans will be done by local governments working with transit agencies, ABAG, MTC and the local congestion management agencies (CMAs). A Caltrans grant to MTC will fund a study to determine appropriate parking requirements near transit. Existing TOD guidelines created by transit districts, ABAG and other agencies will be utilized for the station plans. A pilot project for station area planning grants is proposed to begin during Summer 2005 and will be used to refine the process for later funding cycles.

Corridor Working Groups consisting of county congestion management agencies, MTC, and transit districts will be charged with distributing the required housing and jobs within the project corridors. A working group must be formed for each transit extension eligible for Resolution 3434 funding which is subject to the corridor threshold requirements. Some of these groups are already in place in some form and can be adapted to meet the new requirements. They will be coordinated by the CMAs involved and will include the transit agency doing the extension, the local jurisdictions along the corridor, representatives from ABAG and MTC, and other stakeholders with some involvement in the planning or implementation of the project.

The Corridor Working Groups will decide by consensus how to meet corridor thresholds. They will coordinate the development of the station area planning with the development of the transit project, insuring that they move together to match riders with transit when the projects are complete. MTC will support the work of the Corridor Working Groups through ongoing studies of "best practices" and other implementation issues.

As a check on how realistic the thresholds are for the future of the planned transit projects, a consultant working for MTC evaluated four projects on the Resolution 3434 list: BART East Contra Costa Rail Extension, Sonoma-Marin Rail (SMART), the Dumbarton Rail Corridor, and BART from Fremont to San Jose. Census 2000 figures show that all of these projects except the Dumbarton Rail Corridor currently fall short of the required thresholds, while ABAG projections to 2030 show all except East Contra Costa Rail meeting the requirements. The consultants' results showed that all four projects could meet the thresholds under the proposed policy, based on analysis of land capacity and market demand for TOD. However, some advocacy groups feel that the thresholds have been set too low and the needed densities to support transit ridership will not be achieved, because actual developments are typically approved at less than the allowed densities.

Once in place, the new MTC policy will be a strong link between local land use decisions and funding for new transit service, without imposing strict regional planning guidelines from the top down. However, it will be important that communities in transit corridors work well together, or thresholds will not be met. If the cooperation, incentives and technical assistance included in MTC's policy and implementation strategies are not effective in creating workable station planning and other TOD along corridors, either MTC will withhold funding and some communities will have to do without needed transit, or the policy will be circumvented and scarce transit dollars will be spent unwisely. Ultimately, the policy will be successful only if local officials see the value of it and work to implement TOD in communities that are waiting for new transit projects.

MTC: James Corless, jcorless@mtc.ca.gov, 510-464-7733

BART: Peter Albert, palbert@bart.gov, 510-287-4702

AC Transit: Nathan Landau, nlandau@actransit.org, 510-891-4792

AC Transit design guidelines are online at http://www.actransit.org/environment/urban_planning.wu