UCTC Berkeley says TOD failure

One of the nice ideas of the ‘smart growth’ and ‘livability’ crowd is that with good planning rail transit stops can attract dense high quality and efficient development, and that this justifies some of the enormous subsidies that rail requires in the US. They call it Transit Oriented Development (TOD). Trouble is it juss don’t happen, if you’ll excuse the grammar. We have it from two horses mouths, champion horses, namely John Landis and Robert Cervero, high priests of TOD and the New Urbanism. Give ‘em credit, they’re honest, they’re guys of ultimate integrity, facing facts and declaring like poor Mikhail Gorbachev a decade ago that the system they revered and rooted for, just doesn’t work. Landis & Cervero report in ACCESS #14 Spring 99 (the UCTC Berkeley mag which is a must-read access@uclink4.berkeley.edu http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~uctc 510 643 5454) that the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system has almost completely failed to generate good and dense development around its rail stations. They are reporting the results of a major BART@20 study and they say the Bay area train system has failed to deliver on all but one of its major promises. It has not relieved congestion on major area freeways or the Bay bridge. It has not encouraged a bunch of transit oriented developments that might offer an alternative to reliance on the automobile and alleviate sprawl. And third it has failed to be a catalyst for redevelopment of well-located but blighted inner areas.

Landis & Cervero do credit BART with one major achievement: by making it accessible to the region it has played a major role in maintaining and enhancing downtown San Francisco as a vital and dominant center of financial institutions and tourism that might otherwise have departed. But as for shaping the region’s development generally BART has been an almost total flop.

“Contrary to expectations we found that population has grown faster away from BART than near it,” they report - 35% in districts not served by BART vs 17% in BART served districts. Only in small San Francisco city itself did BART appear to stimulate densification. Job growth in the region generally seems almost to have been repelled by BART stations: “Employment grew 84% in non-BART superdistricts vs 39% in the BART-served ones, mirroring the trend of job decentralization that was occurring throughout the US. At the county level employment grew 7 times faster in the non-BART portions of Alameda co than in the BART-served...”

BART stations required thousands of housing demolitions. Planners had hoped that they would be replaced and added to, but report Landis & Cervero, it “didn’t work out that way: disinvestment in housing near BART stations continued...” BART’s influence on land use was “minor and uneven.” So what does clearly influence development if rail transit is a flop? Freeway interchanges of course. Here she comes, the Gorbachevian admission that ‘We wuz wrong, sorrybout that’: “BART’s lack of influence stands in marked contrast to the effect of freeway interchanges. Among undeveloped Alameda and Contra Costa sites in 1985 proximity to the nearest freeway interchange exerted a strong negative effect on single-family (housing) development (and) a strong positve effect on commercial development...” The study looked at effects of BART on land values and rents: “(A)ccessibility benefits from BART as capitalized into station-area land values have not been sufficient to overcome either weak local real estate markets or entrenched opposition to development.”