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Not long ago, downtown Plano was the nearly forgotten commercial center of a farming community displaced by metropolitan expansion. Today, downtown Plano is reemerging as an urban center, stimulated in part by the coming of light rail transit. New development containing nearly 500,000 square feet of floor area was recently completed, adding 463 urban apartments and 40,000 square feet of non-residential development to the compact 80-acre downtown. Historic commercial and civic buildings are being restored, including the adaptive reuse of the city’s first school gymnasium (built in 1938) as a performing arts theater; and new single-family housing is contributing to the revitalization of neighborhoods adjoining downtown. Plano provides insight on the use of light rail transit (LRT) and the principles of new urbanism to create an urban activity center within the context of older commercial development and as a sustainable development strategy for a maturing suburban city.

Introduction Considering the difficult experience many Houstonians had during the construction of the region’s first light rail line from Downtown to the Medical Center, the Gulf Coast Institute recent­ly explored the experiences of six big cities engaged in building new light rail transit systems. We selected the cities of Los Ange­les, San Diego, Dallas, Portland, Minneapolis, and Salt Lake City, all of which have recently built their first line or added to their light rail system. We tried to reach representatives of the transit agency, the local government, and the business communi­ty, and in many cases had to follow leads to reach individuals who had first­hand experience during construction. This paper covers one part of that ongoing effort. As seen in Houston, construction of light rail can have a disruptive affect on businesses, just the same as utility and street development. Businesses directly abutting the roadway are especially at risk if access by customers or…

Executive Summary Background The Market Street Corridor Transit Oriented Development (TOD) Plan provides a vision and framework for redevelopment of five station areas – about a quarter-mile radius around five stations on the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority’s (SEPTA) Market-Frankford EL located in various neighborhoods of West Philadelphia. SEPTA is currently reconstructing EL stations in West Philadelphia. Wishing to leverage these invest­ments, the Philadelphia City Planning Com­mission asked the consultant team led by Wal­lace Roberts & Todd, LLC (WRT) to develop TOD-based land use plans and redevelopment guidelines for the Market Street commercial corridor, which runs adjacent to EL. Transit Oriented Development refers to compact, pedestrian-oriented mixed use de­velopment, characterized by moderate to high density development around transit stations. The consultant team developed land use and urban design plans for high opportunity sites to create…

1. INTRODUCTION Hedonic pricing methods explain the value of real estate in terms of the features of the property. This approach treats a certain property as a composite of characteristics to which value can be attached. The sum of the value of the individual characteristics makes up the value of the property as a whole. Studies on real estate prices generally categorise the value bearing features of properties into three types namely: physical, accessibly and environmental (Fujita 1989; Bowes and Ihlanfeldt 2001). Several studies have been conducted focusing on different features of interest. Accessibility as provided by different modes of transportation and railways in particular also received attention. In order to single out the effect of railway stations on property values, it is suggested in the literature that stations should be seen as nodes in a transport network and places in an area (Bertolini and Spit 1998). Based on this framework, recent empirical studies treat the node…

This is a tale of three cities—Jersey City and neighboring Hoboken in New Jersey, and Evanston, Illinois – that have experienced an enormous amount of development since the late 1980s, reversing three decades of decline brought on by the great suburban exodus of the 1950s. The result is that in 2006 all three cities are prospering, posting significant increases in property values and sales taxes and other revenues due to the
building boom and resulting increases in business activity. The amount of high-density development that has occurred could never have occurred this quickly if these cities did not have rich transit networks providing very high-quality connections to the abundant jobs, culture and destinations in their big city neighbors: Manhattan is across the Hudson River from Hoboken and Jersey City; Chicago and Evanston share a border.

Station highlights and overview from Charolotte's South End pedestrian landscape planning process.

As the DART system has expanded in recent years, developers and planners have paid increasing attention to “transit-oriented development” (TOD) in order to capitalize on access to this high-speed urban transit alternative. Evidence to date suggests that a significant amount of new and rehabilitated property development has, in fact, occurred in close proximity to DART LRT stations.