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Executive Summary The federal government, through various transportation acts, such as the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA), the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21), and, more recently, the Safe, Affordable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act—A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU), has reinforced the need for integration of land use and transportation and the provision of public transit. Other federal programs, such as the Livable Communities Program and the New Starts Program, have provided additional impetus to public transit. At the state and regional level, the past three decades have seen increased provision of public transit. However, the public transit systems typically require significant operating and capital subsidies—75 percent of transit funding is provided by local and state governments.1 With all levels of government under significant fiscal stress, new transit funding mechanisms are welcome. Value capture (VC) is once…

Building and expanding a fixed rail public transit system is a considerable undertaking for any metropolitan region. Investments on this scale, which can run in the billions of dollars, certainly reshape how people move throughout a region, but their impacts do not end at the turnstile. For residents and businesses that place importance on accessibility, such investments can also essentially redistribute the value of location within a region, making a place more or less desirable than before simply because of its proximity to the transit system. And as we know, a residential location’s value is best reflected in how much people are willing to pay to live there.

Introduction This report provides an evaluation of planning and implementation efforts undertaken based on the Pennsylvania Transit Revitalization Investment District (TRID) Act. This innovative law, passed in 2004, has been cited nationally as a model for fostering transit-oriented development (TOD). TRID is intended to achieve a variety of goals including: Encouraging TOD and economic development; Fostering collaboration between multiple entities; Promoting the use of value capture mechanisms, public-private partnerships, and other innovative financing methods to spur infrastructure investment; Incorporating community involvement in planning; and Generating increased revenue and ridership for transit agencies. The TRID legislation enables the use of a district-based tax increment financing mechanism to capture increases in property values to pay for needed improvements. It is distinct from tax-increment financing (TIF) because unlike TIF, it does not require that there be a…

I. Introduction The worsening financial state of the federal, state, and local governments is a frequent subject in media and political circles. As discretionary expenditures, transportation programs likely face significant changes if they are to cope with spending cuts across all levels of government. These changes would require not only reprioritizing the use of scarce funds, cutting ineffective programs, and improving the performance of remaining programs, but also encouraging states and local partners to find other sources of funding for transportation. Measuring accessibility is an essential tool in such a makeover because it reveals the benefits of a transportation system. Accessibility is the ease of reaching valued destinations, such as jobs, shops, schools, entertainment, and recreation. As such, accessibility creates value. Capturing some of this value would allow state and local governments to invest in the operations, maintenance, and in some cases expansion of their…

The New Jersey Association of REALTORS® (NJAR®) Governmental Research Foundation (GRF) has released a report conducted by the Bloustein School's Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center revealing an association between designated Transit Village areas and higher residential property values. The study, An Evaluation of Property Values in New Jersey Transit Villages, is available online.

According to GRF President Bill Hanley, “The study was undertaken to determine whether the Transit Village Initiative, and its corresponding redevelopment, leads to increased property values for home and business owners within the designated area.”

Researchers performed an in-depth examination of six of the state’s 20 Transit Villages: Bound Brook (Somerset County), Belmar (Monmouth County), Burlington City (Burlington County), Journal Square in Jersey City (Hudson County), Metuchen (Middlesex County) and Pleasantville (Atlantic County). The various site analyses were…

This paper summarizes the findings of more than 100 studies concerning the impacts transit service has on nearby property values, and the feasibility of capturing a portion of the incremental value to finance transit improvements. The results indicate that proximity to transit often increases property values enough to offset some or all of transit system capital costs.

What GAO Found More than half of the transit agencies from which GAO collected data (32 of 55) reported that joint development—in which a transit agency and a private entity partner to create development at a transit station—has been used as a source of funding for transit, while about a third (19 of 55) reported that special assessment districts, tax increment financing, and development impact fees have been used. Transit agencies that have extensively used joint development typically share characteristics, such as having formal joint development policies and in-house real estate expertise. Financial data collected from several transit agencies indicate that revenue generated annually through joint development is generally small when compared with an agency’s annual operating expenses. Revenue generated by the other three value capture strategies has varied, but in some cases has been critical to the financial feasibility of the transit project or to improvements that support…

This dissertation examines Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo as three transit-oriented global center models, wherein entrepreneurial city-states have largely integrated rail transit investments with urban regeneration projects to guide postindustrial agglomeration and spur economic development in target locations. For each of the three Asian cases, I classify types of joint development packages on the basis of built environment attributes and estimate the impacts of rail transit investments and joint development packages on market location shifts and land price changes over the last decade. The empirical findings suggest that mixed-use redevelopment projects and urban amenity improvements around terminal stations largely shift the competitive advantages of knowledge-based businesses and the lifestyle preferences of highly skilled professionals towards central locations. The hedonic price models, however, reveal that the synergetic effects of rail transit investments and urban…