A presentation to AARP volunteers at a session titled, "The Role of Transportation Planning in Creating Livable Communities."

This one-page cheat sheet compares transit types from heavy rail to express bus on cost per mile, operating speeds, power source, and more. Real-world examples and photos make this an easy illustration for comparison purposes.

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![Center for TOD] G.B. Arrington is principal practice leader for PB PlaceMaking, Parsons Brinckerhoff’s global transit-oriented development practice. Prior to joining PB he was director of strategic planning for TriMet in Portland, where he played an important role in making that region a model of good planning and good transit. PB is a global infrastructure company that has been involved in designing communities around transit since William Barclay Parsons became the chief engineer for the New York City subway at the turn of the last century.

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RA: One of the most cutting edge areas of your practice has been that you are urging cities and transit agencies to begin planning for TOD early – explain the importance of this.

G.B.: TOD is like voting in Chicago -- it’s something you need to do early and often. It’s a continuous process if cities and transit agencies want to get things in place and be effective. The biggest mistake is to start planning for TOD too late, which means that alignments are chosen and stations are sited in a way that doesn’t allow for TOD. We recommend working with cities and neighborhoods and developers throughout the process of designing and building new lines and extensions.

RA: What’s the first step for a city?

G.B.: The first step is to realize that TOD is probably illegal in your entire community, so you need to change the planning process and zoning codes to allow for less suburban, less auto-oriented development. Transit agencies also need to realize that the way new transit is implemented is typically anti-TOD because we design systems around the automobile when we should be designing for the pedestrian, which is the only way to create good TOD.

RA: Where are you doing some of your most exciting work?

G.B.: We are working in Dubai, which is exciting because that country moves from planning to implementation in such a short period of time and the scale of the effort is staggering. Miami is exciting because they put good policies in place when the system was built in the early 1980s and got no performance, but now all that is changing along with the real estate market. Our work in Denver is exciting because the region is building 50 new stations and wants to do TOD around all of them at the same time -- so the scale is unprecedented in the U.S.

RA: What is it about the process here that makes TOD so much more time-consuming and costly?

G.B.: The process here doesn’t have to be that way. In Dubai the process is much more streamlined because the decision-maker is the sheik. As in China, where we also work, Dubai is in the developing nation part of the economy curve, so everything is much more accelerated. But that also means you have to get it right the first time, whereas in the U.S. the decision-making process is so long and involved that you know you have time to revisit your decisions.

RA: Do you find that cities and transit agencies get it or is there still reticence?

G.B.: There’s a growing and robust marketplace that supports reinvestment in cities using transit and TOD as one of the tools.

RA: There have been news stories about how the condo market has softened. What impact do you think this will have on the market for higher-density TOD housing? Do you think that locations near transit will hold their value?

G.B.: The real estate market is cyclical, and there has been some over-development of condo projects in cities like Washington D.C. and Miami, where prices are starting to go down. But because transit is well-positioned and sites near transit have good accessibility I think they will hold their value. Even before the real estate boom we saw that sites near transit were increasing in value, especially in those regions with traffic congestion – which is nearly every region -- and with transit and TOD-supportive policies in place. In those regions TOD clearly outperforms the market and will continue to do so.

RA: Which regions would you cite as the best examples of having TOD-supportive planning and policy in place early?

G.B.: One of the things I’m proudest of having done in my public sector career is having encouraged the decision to locate Portland’s Westside Max light rail line based on the opportunity the alignment provided to shape development. The elected officials took a gamble and spent $965 million dollars based on the assumption that if we built the rail line where there was all this vacant land that development would follow if we had supportive policies in place – and it really worked.

RA: What is some of your other “cutting edge” work?

G.B.: We are working with the Regional Transportation District in Denver on all the FasTracks rail lines and asking whether the lines are being designed in such a way as to optimize development opportunities at the same time that they work well as transit. We are working with the transit design team and with communities and asking questions that haven’t been asked before, like “How do you design a transit line that fits into a community and that will help shape growth?” We’re doing a similar project in Miami and in Baltimore – we are changing the practice of transit with development in mind.

RA: What have been some of the changes that result?

G.B.: We’ve ended up moving stations, we’ve changed the design of transit facilities, moved parking further away from station platforms, changed what happens in the cross section of the street around the station. We’ve recommended that certain stations be dropped because they are being built for political, not functional, reasons. And we are bringing different stakeholders and different interests to the table so that as engineers go through the design process they understand that there are things besides design and engineering changes that they need to consider.

RA: Is there anything else that cities can do to pave the way for TOD?

G.B.: One of the very first decisions is to select the right corridor. If it’s an abandoned rail line it’s important to consider why it was abandoned. And while it’s easy to put a transit line down the middle of a freeway you have to ask how the line and its stations are going to become focal points for development and important places for communities. Land use has to become the defining characteristic of transit if we want to change transit from being merely a people-moving tool to a community-building tool – which requires different skills but is totally compatible.

RA: A last question: What is it about your work that you like best?

G.B.: It excites me to help people solve complex problems and to give them the confidence to move forward and be successful.