Which of these West Coast Cities/Metro Areas will have the best TOD by 2030?
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Keep in mind, while Seattle opens light rail that travels to 2000-4000 ppsm suburbs, Los Angeles will be opening a rapid transit subway that travels under 20,000-40,000 ppsm neighborhoods.
You're just highlighting how Seattle is ahead of the times and its own development by getting rapid transit and buses to low ppsm neighborhoods. Having transit in low density residential neighborhoods is actually amazing. I take my kids to science and children museums, theater, parks, wading pool, Pike Place Market, waterfront etc on public transit all the time from my leafy, walkable 4000 ppsm neighborhood. It's a great quality of life.
If you're just building stations in 40,000 ppsm neighborhoods, you're kind of late to the game.
Whether residents of Mercer Island and Redmond take an interest in light rail remains to be seen.
Keep in mind, while Seattle opens light rail that travels to 2000-4000 ppsm suburbs, Los Angeles will be opening a rapid transit subway that travels under 20,000-40,000 ppsm neighborhoods.
Los Angeles will also be opening up more rail in lower density areas as well. You also need to take into account that TOD is about the pretty immediate environs of the transit stop rather than the potentially much larger boundaries of neighborhoods or municipalities. After all, some lines like the Green Line (C Line now, blegh) in LA have pretty bad placements for TOD such as in the median of large freeways and sometimes amidst a series of on and off ramps or interchanges. Ridership is also greatly affected by connection to other modes and how well that's served as well as job and retail densities of stops. I think the Redmond stops are likely to be pretty big in terms of commuter ridership. TOD is also weird because there are a lot of things that affect it and I think some of the property tax laws and parking minimum requirements make it pretty tough for LA to take advantage of TOD as well as it should though fairly recent legislature often under the umbrella of transit-oriented communities that generally yield higher densities and reduced parking minimums in exchange for some portion of affordable housing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Guineas
You're just highlighting how Seattle is ahead of the times and its own development by getting rapid transit and buses to low ppsm neighborhoods. Having transit in low density residential neighborhoods is actually amazing. I take my kids to science and children museums, theater, parks, wading pool, Pike Place Market, waterfront etc on public transit all the time from my leafy, walkable 4000 ppsm neighborhood. It's a great quality of life.
If you're just building stations in 40,000 ppsm neighborhoods, you're kind of late to the game.
Yea, that project was derailed about twenty five years ago and now it's getting built for a far greater cost. However, Seattle also had a massive rail project with greenlit funding from the feds from the 70s.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 07-27-2022 at 07:52 AM..
I think one question that comes to mind is if any city will actually change the land around existing stations to make TOD a greater possibility. I'm hopeful that'll be the case. The green line (C Line) running through the median of a freeway has some particularly bad prospects, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the case in perpetuity. Flat out freeway removal seems pretty difficult to do, but perhaps something like removing the on and off ramps around the Lakewood station and then opening the space the ramps take for development while capping the below-grade freeway (and station itself) might be something that LA would be willing to take on.
Los Angeles will also be opening up more rail in lower density areas as well. You also need to take into account that TOD is about the pretty immediate environs of the transit stop rather than the potentially much larger boundaries of neighborhoods or municipalities. After all, some lines like the Green Line (C Line now, blegh) in LA have pretty bad placements for TOD such as in the median of large freeways and sometimes amidst a series of on and off ramps or interchanges. Ridership is also greatly affected by connection to other modes and how well that's served as well as job and retail densities of stops. I think the Redmond stops are likely to be pretty big in terms of commuter ridership. TOD is also weird because there are a lot of things that affect it and I think some of the property tax laws and parking minimum requirements make it pretty tough for LA to take advantage of TOD as well as it should though fairly recent legislature often under the umbrella of transit-oriented communities that generally yield higher densities and reduced parking minimums in exchange for some portion of affordable housing.
Where will L.A. be opening rail in lower density areas? The big upcoming ones are the Purple Line, Crenshaw/LAX and the Regional Connector. The only "low density" area will eventually be the San Fernando Valley Rail, which is a ways off, and the Valley as a whole is probably about 6000 ppsm.
Speaking of which, are any ongoing TOD projects that can match the innovation of the Regional Connector and the LAX people mover?
As far as Metro stops in freeway medians, yes it looks awkward but I'm assuming they are there to help achieve top speeds as much as possible.
Redmond will likely grow with the new transit, but Mercer Island?
Yes Mercer Island. It's mostly low-density suburban but has an urban TOD core with maybe 1,000 apartments and condos already (related to its 9.6% pre-Covid transit commute rate), and plenty of room to grow.
This is where policy comes in. Mercer Island is required to accept growth. They'll do it like any Washington city: focus most of it around the TOD zone.
Bellevue and Redmond are similar. Most of their future Link stations are surrounded by large amounts of TOD construction. In fact, this single corridor has has as much office construction in TODs as the entire LA region (TOD or otherwise) combined. Plus many thousands of housing units UC.
Where will L.A. be opening rail in lower density areas? The big upcoming ones are the Purple Line, Crenshaw/LAX and the Regional Connector. The only "low density" area will eventually be the San Fernando Valley Rail, which is a ways off, and the Valley as a whole is probably about 6000 ppsm.
Speaking of which, are any ongoing TOD projects that can match the innovation of the Regional Connector and the LAX people mover?
As far as Metro stops in freeway medians, yes it looks awkward but I'm assuming they are there to help achieve top speeds as much as possible.
Redmond will likely grow with the new transit, but Mercer Island?
The (former) Gold Line extensions are just that. I had mentioned earlier that this was part of how the political sausage was made and that's part of the suboptimal spending that needed to happen to get LA County as a whole to fund Measure R and measures before such. This meant you had to give greater priority than one normally would think is reasonable for rail in areas that aren't all that densely populated and frankly aren't great candidates for light rail. However, it's arguably what needed to be done to get people to willingly direct funding towards mass transit including for some very good routes such as the purple llne extension.
I'm not sure what you mean by ongoing TOD projects and innovation of the Regional Connector. They're not doing much TOD for the Regional Connector--they're running rail through areas that are already structurally dense and should have had rail in the first place. It's not clear to me how you understand TOD since you also talk about density on the neighborhood level when TOD is more about fairly immediate surroundings of the stop. I do really like the Regional Connector though as I think downtown rail terminal stations are generally not nearly as good as through-running stops.
LAX people mover is a sad consolation prize for not having a direction single seat express rail service that goes into downtown and/or the west side. It's a recurring issue in US rail planning and funding where we are making inconvenient multiple seat rides to serve airports. This is the case with NYC area airports as well with their AirTrain people movers, SFO with its people mover among others. People movers should be used to move among terminals--they should *not* be used as a necessary transfer for all terminals to then again transfer into another mode that actually accesses neighborhoods in the cities. It is horrendously incompetent to have done this and I'm not sure what TOD you think this will lead to. LA has the Harbor Subdivision--that right-of-way should be used for a grade-separated S-Bahn type system that Metrolink should become with a branch directly to about where Terminal B is.
Laying in the median isn't just about looking bad--it's functionally very limiting for TOD, since that's greatly dependent on leveraging short walking distances to the station or surrounding a station. Building in a median does allow for the kind of speeds grade separation allows for. However, grade separation can be easily achieved outside the median of a highway. The reason for it though is that sometimes it's often cheaper and faster to build out or with more easily available political traction or funding sources (few NIMBYs or eminent domain needed, not a tunnel) than doing grade separation in other ways. The trade-off is very marginal TOD potential though I hope something can be figured out for a few of them as I mentioned with removing off-ramps and building freeway caps.
I also didn't think of this as being limited to only stations that have yet to be completed for TOD--I was thinking of this as TOD to be constructed by 2030 including around already existing stations. You have to realize that it may take some time, especially if the stations are not laid out in a greenfield area which almost no stations on the West Coast will be in the coming years, to actually develop in response to the rail stations.
Downtown Redmond's stop does seem pretty likely to get TOD as Redmond already seems willing to do some pretty dense development for buses. I agree that it's unclear what will happen with Mercer Island's stop. I think the larger part of this though is that since there are commuter locations East Link allows for and that it essentially will double the frequency along key stops in Seattle, I think there's a fair chance that the opening of East Link's affect on TOD is to even further propel TOD for existing stops in Seattle itself.
I think it'd be good for you to acknowledge the difference in saying the proportion of stops with TOD versus the absolute amount of TOD and that TOD isn't about a neighborhood level of development (unless the neighborhood is tiny), but about the immediate environs of the station so it's clear we're talking about the same things.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 07-27-2022 at 11:58 PM..
Downtown Redmond already has thousands of new apartments, aided by bus service. Thousands more are planned. There's also a handful of projects in the station by Marymoor Park, some underway, in what used to be industrial.
Only one East Link site lacks major TOD construction, because it's a park-n-ride and bus-transfer point between a wetland and an unwisely-protected SFR area.
LA will probably have the most new TOD housing units by far, but will also be near the bottom of having people that live in TOD actually use transit. Maybe that can change with the D line extension but I'm less optimistic than I was a few years ago because service and safety have deteriorated to the point where essentially the only transit riders left are those without the ability to scrape together money for a car.
Seattle will probably have the most impactful TOD and likely the most new TOD by population percentage.
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