Books & Reports

In 2011, Reconnecting America developed a three-part series of briefs on the opportunity for New Orleans and Baton Rouge to develop an integrated, regional transportation network that supports strong communities and improves opportunity for the residents and businesses of southern Louisiana. The briefs were written for CONNECT, a coalition of public and private sector organizations that work across the New Orleans and Baton Rouge regions to advocate for expanded mobility choices that offer improved access to affordable homes, job centers and equitable economic opportunity. The CONNECT Coalition is a project of the Center for Planning Excellence (CPEX), a nonprofit that helps create highly functional, equitable communities throughout Louisiana by supporting community members and leaders as they work toward a shared vision for future growth and development.

The Center for Transit-Oriented Development today released “TOD 204: Planning for TOD at the Regional Scale,” the sixth in the Federal Transit Administration-sponsored series of reports explaining best practices of transit-oriented development.

What's the difference between good transit-oriented development and great transit-oriented development? The answer is laid out in the new Center for Transit-Oriented Development (CTOD) report, "Connecting the West Corridor Communities: An Implementation Strategy for TOD along the Denver Region’s West Corridor."

Introduction This report provides an evaluation of planning and implementation efforts undertaken based on the Pennsylvania Transit Revitalization Investment District (TRID) Act. This innovative law, passed in 2004, has been cited nationally as a model for fostering transit-oriented development (TOD). TRID is intended to achieve a variety of goals including: Encouraging TOD and economic development; Fostering collaboration between multiple entities; Promoting the use of value capture mechanisms, public-private partnerships, and other innovative financing methods to spur infrastructure investment; Incorporating community involvement in planning; and Generating increased revenue and ridership for transit agencies. The TRID legislation enables the use of a district-based tax increment financing mechanism to capture increases in property values to pay for needed improvements. It is distinct from tax-increment financing (TIF) because unlike TIF, it does not require that there be a…

In anticipation of the release of the Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA) for the 2011 round of HUD Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grants, Reconnecting America did a series of interviews with successful applicants from the 2010 round of HUD Regional Sustainable Communities Grants to understand has led to the formation of strong collaborative efforts that were successful in winning a highly competitive grant. These interviews included winners of both the Category 1 grants to support the creation of Regional Plans for Sustainable Development and Category 2 grants for Detailed Execution Plans and Programs. We asked interviewees for key tips around convening multidisciplinary consortia, identifying the lead applicant and developing an agreed-upon scope of work. The following tips were compiled by Reconnecting America independently of any involvement of HUD staff and should be taken as general best practices in forming regional planning partnerships, not universal or official…

Today the Center for Transit-Oriented Development released a pair of studies exploring the impact of job sprawl and the importance of linking employment centers with transit. 

The Center for Transit-Oriented Development today released the Transit-Oriented Development Strategic Plan created for the Metro TOD Program in Portland, Oregon. In conjunction with the release, CTOD published a web page providing guidance on how the plan contents can be nationally applied.

Since 2004, regions including Denver, Portland, Salt Lake City, Houston, Seattle, Los Angeles, Charlotte and the Twin Cities have been planning large transit network expansions that would move forward faster than the one-line-at-a-time production schedule that in the past had been economically and politically feasible. At the same time, smaller regions have been inspired by the benefits that transit can bring to their communities and have proposed their first streetcars, light rail starter lines and Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). However these places have to compete with each other for the approximately $1.6 billion annually available in the federal New Starts funding program to build out their multibillion-dollar networks. Reconnecting America spent several months in late 2010 gathering the most current transit plans available from the 100 largest regions around the country, as well as some known projects from smaller regions.