More Studies Added to Best Practices Library
We've added three more studies to our best practices library, including Terry Clower's and Bernard Weinstein's fourth assessment of the fiscal impacts of development around stations on DART's 50-mile-long light rail system. Like their previous studies, this one finds a robust market for TOD in Dallas.
Clower and Weinstein find that property values near stations increased 50 percent from 2005 to 2007, and that when both planned and existing projects are considered, development near stations should generate more than $127 million in state and local tax revenues. This includes more than $46 million a year in tax revenues to area schools, $16.8 million to DART's member cities, and millions more to other taxing entities including the state. Clower and Weinstein also estimate the retail component of TOD projects will generate more than $660 million in annual taxable retail sales, boosting local municipal revenues by $6.6 million annually.
They conclude: "Increasingly, cities competing for economic opportunity in a global marketplace see efficient public transportation systems as a necessary condition for long-term growth. While the return on these investments is best measured in broad economic trends, our findings support the conclusion that transit-oriented development associated with DART rail stations offers substantial fiscal impacts for local taxing entitles."
The second addition is a 2007 "green paper" released by the Commission of the European Communities to provide a framework for thinking about a European Union policy for urban mobility.
The paper shows the EU to be in a similar place as the United States: With 60 percent of the population living in urban centers which also produce 85 percent of the EU's gross domestic product traffic congestion, noise and pollution have become severe problems, and concern about greenhouse gas emissions and quality of life are mounting. This paper lays out the issues and options, which include integrating transportation and land use, and transportation alternatives that include everything from promoting walking and biking to tele-shopping and car-sharing.
The third addition is an April 2008 article from the Lincoln Land Institute's Land Lines magazine about the land value impacts of the bus rapid transit system in Bogota, Colombia, considered a premier example of BRT.
The study, by Daniel Rodriguez, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, and Carlos Mojica, a graduate student at MIT, showed mixed results, with some properties showing a price appreciation of 15 to 20 percent. The authors concluded that there "is no simple way of unambiguously examining the land value impacts of large public investments . . . Our findings show some promise for financing infrastructure through the land value increases they may create. But ambiguities and caveats remain."
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