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This Recommended Practice describes the spatial areas in which transit stops and stations typically have the greatest impact on land use and development and from which there is high potential to generate transit ridership. It provides guidance on delineating these areas for the purposes of influencing decisions about private and public investments and services.

Case studies of projects that illustrate key policies in the Ontario, Canada, Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe

This paper suggests a cause of low density in urban development or urban sprawl that has not been given much attention in the literature. There have been a number of arguments put forward for market failures that may account for urban sprawl, including incomplete pricing of infrstructure, environmental externalities, and unpriced congestion. The problem analyzed here is that urban growth creates bene…ts for an entire urban area, but the costs of growth are borne by individual neighborhoods. An externality problem arises because existing residents perceive the costs associated with the new residents locating in their neighborhoods, but not the full benefits of new entrants which accrue to the city as a whole. The result is that existing residents have an incentive to block new residents to their neighborhoods, resulting in cities that are less dense than is optimal, or too sprawling. The paper models several di¤erent types of urban growth, and examines the optimal and local choice…

Recent consumer surveys and demographic analyses have indicated a growing market for pedestrian- and transit-designed development. Theoretically, this market shift should be reflected in the price people are willing to pay for that style of development. This article traces the literature that uses hedonic price methods for testing this hypothesis, either by assessing pedestrian/transit-design development holistically or by evaluating its component parts. The literature confirms that the market shift is, indeed, being capitalized into real estate prices and demonstrates that the amenity-based elements of transit-designed development play an important positive role in urban land markets, independent of the accessibility benefits provided by transit.

The coming of high-capacity transit (HCT) to Honolulu represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to capture the community building and people moving benefits of this major investment in Honolulu’s future. HCT represents the largest new transportation infrastructure project on O’ahu since the construction of the interstate highway system. HCT will provide an entirely new way to travel and experience the island. It will introduce numerous physical elements of engineered and architecturally designed transportation infrastructure. The application of sound urban design principles will help to:

The proposed research addresses the impacts of urban form on transit ridership, in general, and the relationship between public transportation and walking, in particular. Urban form is defined in terms of three core dimensions: densities, land use patterns, and street networks. Existing literature suggests that population, employment and development densities (Holtzclaw 1994; Quade and Douglas Inc. 1996b; Cervero 1996); number of non-residential destinations and the mix of land uses (Cervero 2002; Kockelman 1997); density of street networks (Moudon et al. 2006; Handy 1996); and attitudinal factors (Kitamura et al. 1997; Krizek 2000) support walking and contribute to transit ridership.

This paper explores how the quality of the pedestrian environment around transit stops relates with transit ridership. The primary hypothesis tested is that transit tripmaking is higher in urban environments that are more conducive to non-motorized travel, given that bus transit systems are most frequently accessed via walking or biking. A secondary goal is to contribute to an improved understanding of the measurement of the built environment in geographic information systems (GIS). A composite measure of walkability—incorporating land use mix, density and street patterns—was developed for all transit stops in San Diego’s Metropolitan Transit Systems service area and used as a measure of the built environment. Findings indicate a small but significant, positive relationship between the walkability of the built environment and transit ridership.

Numerous studies have found that suburban residents drive more and walk less than residents in traditional neighbourhoods. What is less well understood is the extent to which the observed patterns of travel behaviour can be attributed to the residential built environment (BE) itself, as opposed to attitude-induced residential self-selection. To date, most studies addressing this self-selection issue fall into nine methodological categories: direct questioning, statistical control, instrumental variables, sample selection, propensity score, joint discrete choice models, structural equations models, mutually dependent discrete choice models and longitudinal designs. This paper reviews 38 empirical studies using these approaches. Virtually all of the studies reviewed found a statistically significant influence of the BE remaining after self-selection was accounted for. However, the practical importance of that influence was seldom assessed. Although time and resource limitations are…