Reasons for this trend are not difficult to identify. Increasingly, the locational freedom offered by automobiles has allowed development to spread out, consuming more land and downsizing development densities as never before.3 The dominance of automobile-oriented development patterns has become self-fulfilling: such sub-urban forms are virtually impossible to serve by public transit, especially rail transit. They provide few concentrations of workers or residents for which mass transit makes sense. Public policies governing development, revenue-generation, and financial subsidies at national, state, and local levels reinforce this state of affairs.
Even cities beset by economic woes, such as Baltimore, Buffalo, Detroit, and Pittsburgh, found reasons to build rail transit systems. Other major urban regions, including Seattle, Phoenix, and Raleigh-Durham, have undertaken extensive planning for rail transit. As summarized in Table 1, by the mid-1990s, rail service was available, under construction, or being planned for over two dozen of the largest metropolitan areas in North America.
The renewed impulse to invest in rail transit came from several sources. Perhaps the most fundamental was a pervasive and growing concern among urban planners, environmentalists, and public officials about low-density patterns of metropolitan development. The spread of auto-dependent urban growth is threatening valued environmental features and qualities, requiring huge and rising expenditures for infrastructure systems, and draining the economic and social lifeblood from older central cities and their close-in suburbs.
Table 1: Generations of Rail Transit Systems
| Generation | City or Region (Year Operations Initiated) |
| Simultaneous city/transit development, continuous since mid-1800s, including modern extensions: | Boston
Chicago Cleveland New York Philadelphia |
| Mid-1950s to mid-1970s major regionwide systems: | Toronto (1954)
San Francisco (1973) Washington, D.C. (1976) |
| The Third Wave, late 1970s through 1980s: | Atlanta (1979)
San Diego (1981) Miami (1984) Buffalo (1985) Pittsburgh (1985) Portland (1986) Vancouver (1986) Baltimore Metro (1987) Sacramento (1987) |
| New Systems in the 1990s: | Los Angeles (1990)
San Jose (1991) Baltimore LRT (1992) Detroit (1993) St. Louis (1993) Denver (1994) Dallas (1996) |
In addition, projected increases in the variety of households and living styles throughout the nation indicate growing needs for alternative modes of both living and travel.
Transit-focused development is characterized by certain types and patterns of land use that help to make transit at least as convenient, attractive, and inexpensive to use as automobile travel. In general, transit-supportive land use patterns are characterized by:
Researchers observe that these qualities are found in older cities where development accompanied the growth of rail transit systems before automobiles came into general use. Transit-supportive development evolved naturally when rail transit provided the basic means of transportation throughout urban areas. Capturing some part of this experience in future development is a principal tenet of many current metropolitan planning strategies. Planners' efforts towards this objective, however, should recognize the obstacles they face in the form of contrary market forces, limits on the extent of "corrective" public policies and actions, and the character of the new rail lines themselves.
In each of these cities, as well, regional and local public policy initiatives put in place as rail systems were constructed actively supported station-area development in downtown, mid-town, and inner suburban centers. In fact, the intensive development that took place in downtowns of these cities probably could not have occurred without the mobility attributes of rail transit. 4. In the Washington, D.C. area, the rapid transformation of inner suburban business and commercial centers in Montgomery and Arlington counties corresponded with the advent of rail service. The cohesion of growth and transit was heartily supported by the proactive public policies of these jurisdictions.
Portland's experience, although initiated during a relatively quiet period of development, demonstrates the potential effects of providing a comprehensive framework of public policies and strong program actions that channel development into transit-supportive clusters.
Similar if less dramatic experience in other cities that have built rail systems, including Atlanta, Miami, and San Diego, demonstrates the successes that may be achieved in promoting rail-focused development during active development periods and with constructive public policy support.
The importance of these factors is revealed by the setbacks encountered since real estate markets declined in the mid- to late-1980s and/or when public officials have been reluctant to establish strong public backing for intensive station-area development. The weak development market in many regions has sharply cut expectations for station-area development in established systems. Most hard-hit were the new systems built in the 1980s and 1990s, whose service came on line just as development opportunities faded. My 1996 survey of transit-focused development in 19 regions found that promised or potential projects had gone on the back burner a decade before and were only now regaining attention.
Many of the recent projects cited in Michael Bernick's and Robert Cervero's new book, Transit Villages in the 21st Century (McGraw Hill, 1996) are supported by significant public subsidies or consist primarily of public facilities. Even in Portland, which has been experiencing rapid growth in recent years, proposed "blockbuster" projects have been scaled back to satisfy market realities in addition to public policy concerns.
Furthermore, the availability of transit service alone is unlikely to greatly affect development patterns in this automobile age. Developers are far more concerned with locating projects with good automobile access than with proximity to transit. After all, 90 to 95 percent of the future workers, shoppers, or residents are likely to use automobiles rather than buses or trains. In addition, the buildup of traffic congestion that promotes greater transit use drives developers to other locations.
Other problems include the locations of many stations on old rail lines flanked by unattractive and deterioriating industrial areas or in neighborhoods disinclined to be redeveloped for more intensive uses, the public and private institutional difficulties involved in infill and redevelopment projects, and the fixation of most zoning and building regulations on automobile-oriented design.
Countering these trends requires assertive public policies and actions. Summarizing conclusions from a number of research studies, a recent study cites the significance of supportive public policies and regulatory actions: "Whatever the accessibility advantage that rail transit confers on a neighborhood or employment center, the political, economic, and institutional context has an overriding influence on the development outcome." 5
Ideally, state and regional agencies should provide positive policy support for transit-focused development in state and regional transportation plans, state growth management systems, regional development strategies, and transportation improvement plans of metropolitan transportation agencies. Local jurisdictions should offer regulatory incentives, site assembly and infrastructure assistance, including subsidies where necessary, and opportunities for joint development. Their growth management programs should promote compact development, direct growth to areas served by transit, encourage transit-friendly community and project designs, and reduce incentives for automobile dependency.
Even these positive steps, unless proactively pursued, can be thwarted by the universally rampant NIMBYism that attends most attempts to promote intensive development in currently or potentially congested areas.
The significance of public policy support for transit-related development is demonstrated in Toronto's recent difficulties. Although for many years a model for transit-focused development, Toronto lost control over regional development taking place outside the metropolitan municipality about the same time that economic problems forced curtailment of transit extensions. These occurrences have substantially reduced transit-focused development in the region.
Except in downtown areas, stations in the heavy-rail systems usually are spaced a mile or more apart and trains operate fairly frequently. However, the outer extensions of these systems function much like commuter rail systems prevalent in many older metropolitan areas. They provide relatively high-speed service from distant stations to central business districts. To allow rapid service, stations are spaced several miles apart and trains operate at half-hour to hour intervals. Most riders on these outer lines access stations by car from a wide radius of relatively low-density development.
Heavy-rail systems, therefore, can deliver large quantities of riders to areas already built up or ripe for intensive redevelopment. Where such transportation service has coincided with market interest in station-area locations, developers have produced many large mixed-use complexes supportive of transit service. Tower City Center in downtown Cleveland, dozens of projects in downtown San Francisco and Washington, D.C., and even suburban employment centers such as Walnut Creek in the San Francisco area and the Bethesda and Ballston areas in the Washington, D.C. region exemplify the synergetic combination of heavy-rail transit service and intensive development.
Most of the newer rail systems, however, are light-rail systems, or trolleys. They can run on tracks laid on local streets as well as separate rights-of-way; to reduce costs, many use old railroad rights-of-way. Light-rail systems usually offer frequent stops, often just a half-mile or mile apart, and therefore provide relatively slow service. Therefore, although most such systems radiate outward from downtown areas, they attract fewer long-distance commuters. Unlike heavy-rail systems where the relatively limited number of stations promise major development opportunities at each one, light-rail systems with their more numerous stops (and slower trains) suggest that developers (and public officials) will pick and choose among them for development opportunities. In addition, it is clear from experience with existing systems that many stops will be subject to constraining requirements for compatibility with existing development. Light-rail systems appear to favor small-scale development projects carefully designed to be compatible with surrounding development.
Promotion of station-area development along light-rail systems, therefore, promises a smaller bang for the buck or, in more formal language, a greater investment of public effort for less distinctive manifestations of development than has been the case with the heavy-rail systems. Public encouragement of transit-focused development along light-rail lines, except in downtown areas, generally will require nurturing of numerous small projects, working with a wide variety of neighborhood groups and developers, to bring to fruition. To be successful, promoting station-area development will need to part of an ongoing program of planning and implementation, coupled with public marketing programs and financial assistance, over many years.
2 Robert Cervero, Transit-Supportive Development in the United States: Experiences and Prospects. (Berkeley: Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California, Berkeley, 1993), p.1.
3 For discussions of the increasing disparities between population growth rates and conversion of land to urban uses, see Henry L. Diamond and Patrick F. Noonan, Land Use in America. The Report of the Sustainable Use of Land Project. (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996).
4 Robert Cervero, for example, comments in his recent study of San Francisco's BART system that BART's most significant effect on land use was its strengthening of development in San Francisco's central business district. Robert Cervero, BART@20: Land Use and Development Impacts. Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California at Berkeley (July 1995).
5 Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas, Inc., Robert Cervero, Howard/Stein-Hudson Associates, Inc., and Jeffrey Zupan, Transit, Urban Form and The Built Environment: A Summary of Knowledge. Prepared for the Transit Cooperative Research Program, TCRP Project H-1, Transit and Urban Form. 1996, p. 63.
Douglas R. Porter, President, The Growth Management Institute