The funny thing too is that area is a TOD being on the PSU campus. Btw thanks for mentioning Tilikum Crossing, I bike across that underrated beautiful bridge every day for work!
As someone who lives at Orenco Station, I certainly enjoy living here and use transit to go downtown or to the airport... but what would REALLY help is better bicycle infrastructure, as that's heavily missing from the surrounding area. As for the park blocks, those are already pretty densely built up parts of the city, and what I'd love to see is to take areas already served by the MAX lines that are low density and build those up. There's really no good reason for the majority of buildings in the immediate vicinity of a stop to be 2 stories or shorter, as it devalues the network as a whole.
The most important thing you need for neighborhoods like this? Staple businesses in the walkable area. Especially food oriented businesses - bakeries, grocers, etc. If someone MUST drive every time they need a tomato, they're going to own (and park) a car. If food stores, a post office, medical/dental offices, beauty salons, restaurants/cafes, liquor stores, convenience stores, etc are all within a few blocks, people will walk. And it's not just an emissions issue. It's a quality of life issue. People want to live in neighborhoods, not just a parking lot for housing units.
I wish all neighbourhoods were like this. Urban sprawl and most suburbs have been designed to force you to have a car. In another city beautiful video, he showed that before cars were popular, many neighbourhoods in cities had everything you would need in a relatively short walking radius.
I typically hear these referred to as “anchor stores”, and yea, they’re a huge deal for keeping a neighborhood propped up no matter what. Grocery stores are the most common anchor store by far.
@ghost mall Supermarkets are great, but for most things, that isn't what people really need on the daily. I live in a city, and there's a corner store on literally every corner. Everyone should be able to walk to a place where they can buy potatoes, motor oil, shampoo and eggs, use the ATM, buy lottery tickets or cigarettes (if that's your thing), and get a hot coffee. If you have good corner stores (not those crappy bodegas that sell ramen noodles and loose cigarettes, lol), you might only need to go to a big supermarket once or twice a month. That's what I do. Also crucial: Bakeries. A good butcher shop in walking distance is a godsend. And reasonably priced street food/delis. Big stores like supermarkets, or national fast food chains that thrive on consistency, are really products of car culture. And if you live in a healthy urbanized environment, you find yourself not missing those things. But yeah - a lot of those neighborhoods are pricey. Because the good ones are rare. Supply and demand - if high income people want to live there, and they do, rents and home costs will go up. And the dining/retail becomes very boutique. What we really want is an approach to public planning city-wide that makes these neighborhoods the norm, not just niches in boroughs that can attract big money private investment.
@_____ that doesn't always work, and all too often ends up resulting in permanently vacant commercial space that would've been better used as residential.
@_____ Not sure where you’re living at, but this is actually becoming insanely common in multi family living/commercial apartments. Parking is getting reduced in a lot of the commercial buildings in favor of tenant improvement spaces (stores). It’s a big industry right now.
Another thing that makes TODs more effective is good, separated bike infrastructure, within the half-mile of the station and reaching _outside_ of it. People might be most willing to walk a half mile to a station, but they might be willing to cycle for longer, if it's made easy and safe to do so.
My town has a "bike path" (multi use, motor vehicles banned) that is a just over 5km loop around a golf course that gets tons of use for recreation. (And doesn't meaningfully connect anything, one entrance is by the bus garage/golf course on the dege of town and the other is by an apartment complex on the edge of town) I think its safe ro say that people will gladly bike 5km if its safe and comfortable even without a destination. (And the stats for a place like the Netherlands is much further, but the average adult can go 10km without getting winded) Tldr, people will bike for for miles so extend that good separated/multi use path as far as you reasonably can and it will be used.
@@jasonreed7522 I have a single MPU that runs east-west through my college town and connects to key destinations, like strip malls, the college campus, near to downtown, the campus gym, and many apt complexes. I definitely use it for most trips if I can. And it's an intercity trail that gets plenty of recreational users on weekends too.
In the Netherlands, the maximum distance that people are willing to cycle seems to be around 8-10km. I imagine that it would be similar elsewhere, or maybe slightly lower when using non-electric bikes in a hilly area.
@@crytocc can confirm, when I was a kid I always had to cycle around 6,6km (from my mom) and 12km (from my dad) towards school, its around the max distance someone will be willing to cycle, especially if the infrastructure is as safe as it is over here.
Unfortunately, a nearby half million person city is moving from (often popular) separated bike/pedestrian paths (which span the city, from downtown to distant burbs) to painted bike gutters on busy streets, with predictable results (which makes me wonder about their motivation).
Regarding the question of "Does TOD work", it's worth noting that in much of the world, "Transit Oriented Development" is just called "Development" :) The same principles apply though, of course
The difference is, most of those developments in the rest of the world, are vastly different than those here in the US we claim are TOD. Orenco here is actually a prime example of this, and how it's really just one giant joke to even begin to consider it TOD.
Us Urban development has been thoroughly poisoned by 70 years of car lobby, to the point where nowadays it is just about impossible to make it work. Unless you are willing to tear down much of the established road system, ban cars from half the downtown, and build massive tram and subway networks from scratch, and fill the remains of the roads with buses, then build modrise light commercial/residential housing over the area you freed up, which would tread on the toes of literally everyone, piss off the car manifacturer lobby, and be horrendously expensive. US cities are lost, and the only hope for usable ones are entjrely new developments grown from new development long range transport hubs. Which means passanger rail, which is also trash in the US as a general rule...
@@egoalter1276 yah say it louder please. i _entirely_ agree and have been saying this. and it gets kind of sickening seeing alot of U.S. urban videos on "how to fix suburbs" or "what will improve our cities" or "new zoning laws could help". when they know damn well thatll barely do anything. the damage is _done_ .. all these little remedies in a city here or there are just bandaids masking the huge problem that will never be fixed. its over for the majority of the U.S. cities. its all already built and the flaws are inherent to the citys design, theyre not interchangeable. slapping a bike lane in a non-bikable city doesnt do shit. the only way to fix this is like you said, by tearing it down and doing the right way, or unused space. and that wont happen either, because youll have 90% of americans on your back complaining that your not adding more car lanes instead. they have no idea how bad their transit system is. its over.
Thankfully something I saw with one light rail station in my local system. Not much parking at all at this station, but the number of buses there basically made it so a ton of people at the rail station either got there via bus, or left the station and are about to board a bus.
The irony is, he never mentioned that Orenco lacks this entirely, and has the entire time it has existed. It has a single bus line, and, it rarely runs at all, and only during weekdays, and, of course, it sees little to no riders whatsoever. The only real transit Orenco has at all is just the MAX line. That's it. You really can't even count that damned bus line. So it's just the MAX. And, if they truly wanted it to be transit oriented, they would have put in a new bus line that runs north-south, as that's where the bulk load of ridership would be and is in the first place. Most of the residential is through that corridor, and, a few shopping centers which are more affordable for the average and affordable income folks who use or rely on transit. It would also directly connect to at least one other bus line, the 57, or, if they made it a logical length line, then it would probably also stop at PCC Rock Creek, crossing it with the 52, 47 and 67 as well, giving it access to TCTD and CCRider service, too. In fact, with MAX and the 57, it gives riders another option to transfer to those, and catch a YCT bus as well.
That's why park and rides should primarily be used on the terminal stations on a line. When the area gets dense enough, the line is expanded outward, the original park and ride is rezoned dense housing and given integrated bus routes connecting nearby areas to the station.
TOD's (or bulls eyes or density islands) are key to successful transit networks. A lot of American metro stations are oblivious to this...they put their rail stations in low density/non-walkable/non-bikable neighbors hoods and are shocked they don't get much traffic. City planners should zone areas around train stations for density and walkability. Space is very valuable but wasted in a lot of cities...density could be improved with more one way roads, less street parking, and fewer low density businesses (like car lots). American campuses are actually one of the few accidental success stories for TOD style developments and we could learn a lot from why so many find college campuses so appealing (might be a good video topic). Another tangential video topic might be to explore the relationship between parking and transit. eg I don't take transit to downtown DC to save time...I do it because there is nowhere else to park. Understanding the trilateral relationship between density > parking > transit > ... is key to city planning.
100% agree on using college campuses as a way to pitch transit-oriented development and walkable neighborhoods. If you can tap into people's nostalgia, you might actually have a chance to connect with them.
I'd also say that city planners are not oblivious to TODs, but they often have no better options. NIMBY activists often fight any effort to route transit along existing roads or through their neighborhoods. So transit routes often parallel or twin rail or highway routes, which leads to disconnected stops in industrial areas, as opposed to actually connecting the places people live.
New Brunswick is a great example of TOD’s as there’s a campus-wide bus network that co-exist’s with NJ Transit’s bus network as well as walkable access to the train station with frequent service to NYC/Newark and Trenton (connecting to Philly via Septa in Trenton) along with frequent commuter bus service between NYC and Princeton. Plus there’s plenty of mixed-use development in the downtown and in the college area including the off-campus residential area with plenty of walkable streets.
We can’t do that right now. We have way too many people who use cars now and that wouldn’t work. Imagine working in the city and living 30 minutes away just to have no parking.
TOD is what honestly brings people together. Living in Downtown Miami, I love living next to a light rail station because I have OPTIONS on getting from place to place vs being dependent on a vehicle. Let’s get out of the vehicles and get back to being a COMMUNITY. Disclaimer: Cities know you will be saving money by not necessarily NEEDING a vehicle so usually they jack the rents ASTRONOMICALLY in theses “TOD” zones.
The real reason they jack up the rent pricing in the TOD zones is because it was in the plans the entire time. They always claim to be focused on affordable income units, but there is a typical clause where it's for 5 years typically, then, all restrictions and requirements around it fall away. It's really used for gentrification in the US. That's it. To upscale the hell out of a place, wait out that 5 year period, then out price most of the people who moved there during those 5 years. And they do this because they get massive kickback paychecks from the big developers they hire to build these TODs. It's about the money, and the temporary false perception they gain from it. That's it.
@@dre.supreme yeah but you can't build generational wealth if you're living paycheck to paycheck. people within $5-$10 of min. wage often don't make enough to pay for rent in these kinds of places-- can't get the paper to spend in the first place. that being said, i don't have a great solution for this, not without some real structural change to the whole landlording business model.
@Seizure u think we out here tryna make multiple generations? Hunny this bloodline ends with me, i dont need a parade of generations continuing my legacy of poverty. I will not be birthing future depressed consumers and underpaid workwers. Nty.
@@zuresei It also heavily depends on the state's own landlord-tenant laws, too though for your latter point. Some states it's very bias to the landlords, others, the tenants. There definitely needs to be a strong balance between the two though in order for it to be sensible and logical for both, and thus reasonable for both. That said, the real changes need to happen nationally with the cost of living issue. Every time minimum wages in a region or state go up, the CoL goes up with it. The CoL therefore remains on average 2 to 2.5x higher than whatever the minimum wage is. That whole system needs to be slaughtered, banned and then rebuilt from scratch with a limit on high how CoL is allowed to go.
Also it is interesting to watch this from the view of american city planning. I study urban planning in germany. Basicly all european cities have mixed used areas and more and more towns are trying to not separate work and residential areas anymore. While american cities do still separate those uses and cause the need of more traffic.
American Auto Industry lobbying power baby! Gotta make sure an entire country builds all its cities and towns to look and feel ugly and desolate as hell so that the car makers can make their big bucks!
In london good chunk of the places on the Metropolitan line were housing development built by the station and sold off back pre WW2. They adverted it as Metroland and mainly was for people who wanted to get out of the busy city but still have an easy commute in by chance increasing ridership. The Green countryside that was advertised didn't last long since every station started looking like edgeware.
Years ago my cousin lived in a community in South Western Holland. The subdivision was encircled by a train in such a way that 90% of the homes were within 200m of a transit stop. This train then went to the main station in Den Haag and from there the world. I was told that less than 70% of the homes did not own a car, because they did not need one. So it was not just ONE stop but rather a loop through the entire subdivision (mixed use) including all of it. Also, while this is very cool, one of the obstacles is the car culture of North America regardless. I expect users will take a walkable community and somehow jam their cars into it.
Yes, public transit stops should not be more than 500m away from the next. That way you get (theoretically) everyone within 350m of a stop, or a 5 minute walk.
People won't try to jam cars into it if you tell them this apartment/house doesn't have parking or isn't best for people that own cars. That will attract people without cars and people that want cars will go somewhere else. I know people will say this is not true, but it works in Brooklyn were many landlords and apartments are very explicit with potential residence to not live there if they want to park a car. Some apartments but on the lease that residents cannot park a car within 300M
@@sunkickr Perhaps, and this may be regional, but if people are going to shoot someone that asked them to wear a mask, then I can just imagine what they are going to say to someone who says they cannot park their chariot nearby. People do not always read the fine print either and it is not always explained to them or they think they can beat it later because they need the living space. The same goes for folks who buy properties near airports and then get mad about the noise from the airplanes. People are people and the current trend is that they don't want to be told what to do unless they agree with it.
love when i get the notification that you have a new video out. Only realised and became interested in all of this a few months ago, I lived in a regional area of Australia where it is just urban sprawl, no real town centre, stroads and about 4 bus lines that at peak hour ran every hour. I just thought that is just how everyone lived......until i moved to Cologne Germany. What an eye opener. 90% of what i need on a day to day basis is within 7 minutes walk.
This is my hometown! There's a burger place native to Oregon, and a late night coffee shop right in that plaza. Lots of young people hang out there as it's about the only place open past 9pm.
Living in Portland, I can tell you that we desperately need more of this. The bus system is okay at best, and the MAX is useless unless you live way out in the suburbs like Hillsboro. Most of Portland is still car dependant as hell and it sucks to live here because of that.
The MAX is great if you live a block away from the blue line. It's less great for anyone else, though I still prefer it to taking a bus when it's an option.
The other thing I noticed when I lived there was the heavy flow in both directions - people living in Portland worked in the subs and people living in the subs worked in Portland. I have never seen such 2 way flow during work commutes. I always wondered why Portland Metro had this.
I get alot of use out of the MAX myself but I live like 2 blocks from the yellow line. We desperately need the downtown MAX tunnel to help speed things up but even in the state the system is now it's still at least possible to use it to get around fairly well especially compared to most cities our size in the US.
Come and check any metro area one state south, you won't complain about Portland any more. SF city is great, but transit goes nonexistent pretty fast in virtually any direction.
@@ncsuor The higher paying jobs are in the suburbs. Living in Portland is more expensive than living in the suburbs. So the higher-income suburban workers can afford to live in Portland while the lower-income Portland workers can only afford to live in the suburbs.
This is my dream also! And thank you for saying so. I have low vision and can't drive. Worst of all, I happen to live in the Midwest where it's basically EXPECTED you have a car. Even in my state's largest cities, there's no rail and the bus systems are kind of a joke... I don't think people realize just how discriminated against those of us who literally CAN'T drive can be. In most videos and discussions I've seen about transit and walkablity in the US, it is still presented with the assumption that it's a choice to drive or not. IDK... I guess it feels good to see at least a couple of people here who "get it."
Unfortunately as a different disabled person I need my car. I can't walk around for more than 20 mins and find taking public transport very difficult. So I need to be able to park my car near where I shop! It's nearly impossible to make everyone happy :((
@@aleaf01in Amsterdam the disabled can use small cars on the bike lanes in cities. And the bike paths allow electric wheelchairs to get around easily and safely
Isn't another reason for lower car-use in TODs the walkability itself? If I live in a neighborhood with easy walkable access to amenities, I might not even need a car - or at least not a second one.
Definitely. If you only ever feel like you have to go two blocks in order to get somewhere then there’s no reason to use a car. The funny psychological thing is that this still works even if you only have to go two blocks to get to the transit line followed by a two block walk to the store.
@@SaveMoneySavethePlanet I call it the 10 minute law. If you reach your destination in 10 minutes, it's not far. If by car, bike or foot is what planning and design decide. And since the station is destination it can indeed feel "near" even if you end up traveling 30 minutes in total (albeit that is too much for normal shopping, but for a doctor's visit - works)
@@steemlenn8797 yea I think that’s a good rule of thumb. I know I’ve been taking the train to work lately and, even though the trip is technically longer, it doesn’t feel this way since I get on the train so fast and then just chill and listen to podcasts
the greater salt lake area that i live in seems to be slowly making these changes. more mid rise condo's are popping up near our light rail line. which i read that draper county (where i live) has a bill in place that allows for "unlimited density" within a certain radious around a transit hub, as you mentioned. watching these videos always makes me realize that utah is suprisingly good on public transit compared to other places
I lived in one of the new apartment buildings next to a TRAX station thinking that I was going to be living in a more walkable area since it was more dense than the suburbs that I previously lived in. If I didn't have a car when I lived there, it would have been challenging for me to do simple things (ex: haircuts, grocery stores, coffee shops). It was a huge let down and I did not like the experience of living in a building owned by a huge shell corporation that shushed me if I said that anything was wrong with my unit. I hope that more condos or local owned buildings as well as businesses pop up near TRAX stations. It would be much better than "luxury" apartments and huge parking structures.
@@lucoarriaza corporate landlords suck. I've done my best to avoid them my whole adult life. Where I live now is low density, but very walkable by Phoenix standards as it's adjacent to a major shopping center, near three bus routes, and along a nice greenbelt bike route. The most important thing though is it's affordable and I'm renting from a private person and not a corporation. I'm only 2 1/2 miles away from light rail and can get there quickly by bus or e-scooter.
Yup, it's terrible! The whole place feels so desolate and awful, and both cities are riddled with stroads. And to top it all off, it's so difficult to get places on foot or bike.
@@talideon I feel like stroads ruin access to bus and rail more than anything. The majority of the light rail line in Phoenix is literally in the middle of a huge stroad with stations where it intersects with another. This causes you to have to usually cross a 6+ lane stroad and a half to get from the train platform to literally anything including bus stops for a transfer.
@@talideon I have been able to get around fine with an electric skateboard + BART. The only places I really struggle to get to in the Bay Area is North Bay, but I doubt Marin wants a filthy poor like me in their neighborhood anyway
@@WeAreChecking You shouldn't need to get the BART. There are significant chunks of Pleasanton that are not accessible on foot directly due to lack of sidewalks.
This reminds me of the city I live near called Ebina in Japan. Ever since they added rapid express from Ebina station to Shinjuku, the area has seen a massive increase in apartments and stores.
These principles are true, my college built a big fancy bus depot in the middle of campus, they gave everyone (well forced them to buy with tuition) bus passes, but ridership is still really bad. Because the bus stops are too far from people's suburban houses. I've got a bus that goes by me and it's almost as fast as driving, I've had the bus catch up to me in my car. BUT... the stop is just over a half mile from my house so I haven't ridden it once in 2 years. Whoops!
Just over half a mile is really not that far, as long as it is safe. If it isn't, the safety is probably the issue, not the distance. For health reasons, we are advised to walk a least half an hour a day (the WHO actually advises for an hour), that's more than a mile a day. I guess in your situation they still made the car too attractive. If the bus is slightly cheaper, but slightly less convenient, you have no reasons to change habits. If you didn't need a car at all, the bus would be significantly cheaper (buying a car, paying insurance, etc. is expansive, not owning one saves money), and become a viable option again, but if they want to make it an option for people who do own a car, they need to make that car ride more expansive (for instance by charging more for parking) or less convenient (for instance, by having less parking spaces available). Changing habits is really hard, people need a good reason to do it. If the new option is just about as good as the old one, why switch ? It's very human to keep doing the same. Car has been made very attractive because of urban planning decisions favouring it, if you don't reverse them, it will be hard to compete with public transit and walking/biking.
It's amazing how just this mixed use and mixed scale of housing makes those places look western european. Some shots could almost be taken in a Dutch city.
@ghost mall I think part of the problem, and the reason for that, is because it IS manufactured. It's planned from top to bottom. The more interesting and human parts of cities, including European ones, are those that grow organically from bottom-up demand, that incorporate local preferences and a continuous sense of place, and that have inherent purposes and identities...the problem in the US is an ingrained culture of placelessness. What you've got to do is find the places that already have thriving communities and embolden those existing communities to upscale, loosen planning/zoning laws to encourage innovation, enable locals to start local businesses, etc.
I live in the Tanasbourne area right next to Orenco Station. While there are many improvements yet to be made in terms of walkability and transit access, I'm proud to say that I'm able to comfortably live here without a car!
Here in New Zealand the central government has put the screws on the local councils to enhance transit oriented development by up zoning the areas around railway stations. I understand that the new rules allow for 10 floor apartments within 12min walk from the station(train or busway) or higher at the discretion of the local council. And there are more rules increasing density in other areas
I just looked at a document that my very suburban USA city made a few years ago, that talks about TODs in a positive way, and my faith in our ability to improve just skyrocketed
@Esh to an extent, yes. The document has been out for less than 5 years, and I’ve already seen multiple apartment buildings being made, including at least one that has a coffee shop in it (which I don’t think existed in our city before), multiple bike lanes, and one main stroad being turned much more into a place for pedestrians (a protected bike lane, thinner car lanes, more pedestrian crossings, and a median to make crossing safer. While the transit oriented development part hasn’t been implemented yet, they’ve given plans for where it will be going and what it will look like, and I think they’re planning to have most of the transit part up by 2025 or something. Now, these changes that I’ve seen have only been through parts of our city, but you can’t really expect them to be widespread within 5 years. But it seems like they will continue in this way, especially once they really start completing these first projects
Marta has been trying to do this in the metro Atlanta area. They're basically getting contractors to build housing around the already established train stations.
I work at Intel. You can’t directly get to Ronler Acres by the Max alone but the company offers regular shuttles from Orenco Station to the campus. Before Covid, the shuttle was full of riders in the morning and the afternoon. I live at Orenco Station next to the dog park and can easily walk to campus, but the shuttle’s there so I use it.
Wow, I used to work just outside Orenco Station. It felt fairly unremarkable, but now that you point it out it is very interesting. As someone that grew up in a few Portland suburbs and now wants nothing to do with them, I have to say that it does feel like somewhat of a bright spot. It feels lively, walkable, and almost urban. While it's not for me, I respect the concept!
A TOD sounds more or less like a streetcar suburb. I live in a streetcar suburb now in Melbourne, Australia and having most of my basic amenities a walk, bike or team ride away is great. If it wasn't for work, I wouldn't even take the train to our CBD.
I feel like such a conservative by saying that the US had housing development right in the 1920's when all of our urban core downtowns were built with shops and stores on the ground floor and apartment buildings above. To complete most of your daily tasks, you walked downstairs, went to the grocery store at the corner of the street, grabbed your food and walked upstairs to cook it. We need to go back to this style of development! In europe this is basically how it is everyday, all the time. Houses need much smaller refrigerators because if you want to live in a city you can pick up food on your walk or bus ride home from work, there are grocery stores, bakeries, etc. everywhere, on every corner. Feeling like some chicken that night? Grab it! In the US even if you live in one of these transit oriented developments it won't matter at all if you still have to hop in your car to drive to the supermarket or bakery because it's 2 miles away and you have to cross an ocean of parking lots to get there. These developments need to be anchored by daily staple businesses like a supermarket in order for them to be successful, desirable places to live. I knew a friend who lived above a development where his apartment building sat on top of a Whole Foods. He said it was the best place he ever lived because if he was hungry he could just walk downstairs then and there to pick a tomato up for dinner, grab a carton of milk... etc. I felt the same way when I lived in a city center in spain for a summer and the building had a grocery store in the ground floor and a supermarket across the street. It's so much nicer to live like this! Also, transit agencies don't seem to recognize that in order to get people to use their services aside from commuting, they need to live in a decently walkable area that means it's possible to get by without a car. It doesn't matter if the bus service downtown is frequent if you can't ride the bus to get groceries because it goes the other way. We have so many pieces to put back together before we can really get this country back into a better place.
there's also psychological uncomfort coming from unbalance between riding the transit time and walking time, if your public transport trip is shorter than your walk to and from stops it feels really bad, doesn't it? that's pretty much the case for my office: I ride a tram for less than 20 minutes but sometimes the whole trip takes over an hour due to waiting for the tram and all the walking
Same problem here lol, I take the GO train transit here to school which is exceptionally fast, the ride itself is 30 minutes but all the bus delays and painfully long frequencies here in my suburb to the GO station plus the little bit of walking extend the time to almost an hour
I ended up buying a car a few months ago for this reason. The bus time vs drive time to my office is essentially even, but there was 10 to 15 mins on either end of the bus commute of walking to/from the bus location (and waiting for the bus). Halved my commute time by getting a car.
Walking time doesn't bother me nearly as much as waiting time. I enjoy a 15 minute walk to a bus or rail stop, but waiting 20 minutes plus for the next bus or train, or any transfer location that has me sitting over ten minutes between routes sucks.
@@danieldaniels7571 well, in my case it's also the fact that there's a stop right in front of my office! but no line goes directly there and by switching somewhere else my trip would be both less reliable and even longer...
@@Z4KIUS sounds like a really poorly routed route that uses that stop. Where I live there are many busses that pass the closest stop 5 minutes from my home without stopping labeled as "not in service" only to start their routes at other stops an additional half mile away in the direction I usually travel. To use that stop I have to often wait over 30 minutes for the bus that stops there to get me to those other stops that are an additional ten minute walk away. It's infuriating.
The Orange Line is Arlington is pretty great, especially now that the Silver goes through it too (and the blue goes out to Rosslyn). Unfortunately, once it goes above ground into Fairfax County, with the exception of the newly in-filled & developed Dunn Loring station, the stations are basically just giant parking deserts. Vienna/Fairfax has recently started developing more housing, but only housing, so there's no real community, no retail or service, no sense of place. And plenty of parking. So, they've basically made somewhat dense housing that's still essentially car-centric. I keep seeing talk about putting in mixed-use stuff at Fairfax, but that can keeps getting kicked down the road. They've gone and built some denser new developments in the City of Fairfax...but they've added huge parking garages & haven't bolstered the bus service in any way. And they're far enough away from each other and from cultural stuff, that people who live there have to drive to get anywhere So, it's just creating more traffic. They're trying...but they're doing everything in these ineffective half-measures.
@Zaydan Naufal North America. It's a town on the Metro line he mentioned in the Washington DC region. We are not building much affordable housing here in the the States. Some. But not enough.
West Falls Church is going to be re-developed as TOD in the near future. Additionally, the area south of the station formerly occupied by the high school is going to be a new TOD.
I agree. I think the main metro stop that doesn't need the residential or work centered development is the Tysons corner stop on the silver Line. I live in Arlington so its nice for me to go into the east falls church metro stop and go to Tysons without needing a car. the only problem is that the east falls church metro stop is not really walkable.
@@danielgreen1557 There was a plan approved back in 2011 for TOD at East Falls Church but it "fizzled out" due to strong NIMBYism. Agree the area is not really walkable. Not sure if the still-approved plan can just be re-started at some point or if they'd have to go through the approval process again. Looks like in the interim attention will shift to West Falls Church, much like it did from Vienna to Dunn Loring when the Vienna development plan was scaled back to adding some residential only.
I'm pretty familiar with that Orange Line and it certainly could be improved. I like taking it to Tyson's Corner to avoid traffic and parking but I need a car to get to the station in the first place. The 28A bus goes through it but of course, it's slow and there have been times when it just didn't come. The nearest cultural center to East Falls Church is Eden Center for some great Vietnamese food but it's not walkable to the station :(. Needs more mixed use buildings but that station is on the side of the I-66 highway so it's hard to develop when it's boxed in by a highway on one side and NIMBYs on the other side
If a rail station only serves a half mile radius, that's not really sustainable IMHO, so this radius needs to be extended: * add a bus stop right at the other side of the platform, so people already see the bus to their suburb when exiting the train. This extends the radius to how far the busses go. * next is bike parking and actually make bicycles the preferred mode of transportation in the directly surrounding area and a useful option for about 5 miles. * private vehicles can only access the station directly via a ring to drop someone off ("Kiss and Ride" as we call it here). * Every other car traffic goes to a parking garage (never surface parking!!!) somewhere close to a larger road. This serves a double role: Park&Ride and it replaces any parking options for the surrounding area, even for residents. This allows the streets to be more friendly to pedestrians and cyclists and makes it even denser. If the whole scenario works, people arriving by train go shopping in that area and then go home by bike, bus or car (in that order).
0:04 lol! I’m literally sitting in that Ava’s coffee shop back there right now and as I started watching this and I looked out the window to see if you were there.
@ghost mall Starbucks is gone (couldn’t compete with Ava’s) replaced by a bakery and it’s a New Season's not a Whole Foods. There is a Lil Big Burger right there next to Ava’s. Orange theory fitness, a BAR class place, some other shops. Personally I go there to do work on my laptop at Ava’s and the Nine Dang Thai is my favorite Thai restaurant. The pizza place is very popular there too. I don’t live in/near Orenco.
The part of this video is how it's a balanced argument, doesn't use deride any individual choices, doesn't throw in gratuitous insults or pejoritives... ...and it's still obvious that transit, transit oriented development, and mixed use development patterns are good things that we should do more of.
This reminds me so much of Stockholm. Pretty much everyone lives near some type of rail station here, and they all have at least one square/plaza/broad pedestrian street, one or two cafes and grocery stores, doctor's offices, etc., along with multi-story residential buildings. The bigger ones will also have a shopping mall (usually connected to the station) and office buildings. Some are definitely less attractive than others, and some are lean significantly toward being either mainly residential or business, meaning it's not uncommon for people to commute for up to two hours to work/school at the opposite end of the city region from where they live, but it's comforting knowing that even if you're somewhere you've never been before, you usually just need to listen for the sound of a train and walk in that direction if you need to find a grocery store or a doctor.
I'm thinking about moving there. I took a trip there about a month ago for five days and went everywhere by public transit. I documented much of it on my vlog. Ended up using Sunset Transit Center a lot not for it's park and ride but for easy transfer to local bus routes into Beaverton where I was staying with my daughter.
Park and Ride is great - if you do it for bikes. It increases the easy distance from half a mile to two. Thanks to the pi*r² that is a LOT of additional pickup area (Which can also be served by buses for those who don't ride bikes for whatever reason.) Put the train station in the center together with services like town hall and doctors and have the bike lanes go like light from a star. Spread a few groery stores around. Have a 10 minute bus service and train access and you can have 30-50K people in this area with about 20% need for cars compared to the standard US city.
The neighbourhoods of North York and Yonge Eglinton in Toronto are also good examples of transit oriented development. They've effectively become the 2nd and 3rd "downtowns" for the city of Toronto respectively. Also Toronto is one of the few cities in North America with all of it's streetcar suburbs intact, which is another early form of TOD.
Toronto also has a lot of non-transit oriented development, they kinda just build wherever and hope that transit comes later. But the communities that you listed are indeed transit oriented.
I think another note to add is that a lot of transit is near highways because the government owns the land and can develop a rail line under the highway. What I've seen in Boston is that the area directly around the station can be turned into a TOD but then a sky walk can be used to cross over to the far side of the highway and turn it into a park and ride. This also allows for the infrastructure needed for funneling traffic into the park and ride to not compete with the land needed for the TOD.
Another great technique is capping highways with parks or building land bridges. Since transit is often easy to build along existing road right of way, hiding the highways and providing more walking space could be a good addition to the TOD. I hope to see more of that in the future .
Shoutout to Elmonica TC in Beaverton! I always love the MAX but that station in particular has a place in my heart. I lived in the apartments across the street for years and it was super convenient. Hearing them put the trains in the yard in the evening was quite soothing at night.
There is NOTHING soothing about the noise of a train. I live in a nice, peaceful suburb with one exception, I can unfortunately hear the cargo trains about half a mile from my home, even when I'm in bed at night. I hate the noise.
My hometown (Bergen, Norway) is doing the same thing, building a light rail system with frequent departures, and then allowing the development of apartment and office buildings along each new line. So you can live in an apartment with the light rail within walking distance, and just take it to get where you need to go.
The MAX tunnel would be a seriously game changing project for the region. The Southwest Corridor project should be improved a sent back to voters with a better funding mechanism and a solid plan to connect it directly to a north-south downtown tunnel.
If you're running transit in the middle of a highway, build over the highway. Essentially a giant bridge with the transit stop in the middle pilliars and the top covered in buildings and parks. Sure, it'll probably be expensive, but it'll allow the land to be used for something more productive, and hey, nobody on the highway is going to bat an eye at driving through what would look to them to be a 2km tunnel.
As an European it's pretty strange to see something hyped so much as "pioneering concept" while it's one of the most common fundamental things in an average European city for decades :D
You should check out Las Colinas Texas. They tried to replicate water canals for transport as well as a monorail very ambitious but things went sideways and didn't work out. I think its a great example of ambition vs reality and lack of will.
When you ask whether you can achieve these results without transit at all, Amberglen may become a case study for that. Hillsboro's building the same kind of density there, originally with the intent of building Portland's "second downtown" (ambitious, but perhaps a bit optimistic). Though the Quatama stop ostensibly "serves" the area, it's far from the bulk of Amberglen, there's not a single bus line (the east-west route along Cornell is the closest option), and the higher density development has been almost exclusively residential despite early plans calling for ground level retail. They wanted to extend the MAX or a streetcar into the area, but to my knowledge that idea remains a long-term dream. Parking's become a sore point as the business park properties prohibit overnight, non-tenant parking (even though many of those buildings are partially or entirely vacant), and new residents therefore park on neighborhood streets in the area. Hillsboro also has a lot of conflicting ideas. They build places like Orenco (though being surrounded by car-dependency limits its potential) and actively try to build up downtown. They have weird interim places like Amberglen and the under construction master-planned South Hillsboro. But the City often drags its feet on affordable housing, the stadium's exclusively car-dependent, and in Tanasbourne they just tore down an Office Depot and Barnes & Noble to build a friggin' In & Out (a truly cynical nod to Idiocracy and stereotypical sprawl). Hillsboro also holds Pride events and seems fairly vocal about LGBT inclusion in city newsletters while approving every Chik-Fil-A application that comes across their desk. I like Hillsboro, and for a mostly post-90s West Coast suburb you could VERY easily do far worse, but sometimes I wonder how much of this was truly by design versus luck.
@ghost mall I liked that it wasnt a long walk to a decent amount of Stuff. I never thought it was lacking per we but my experience was that it was fairly office heavy (especially like podiatrist and that kind of specialist med)
I'd like to add that you can make the TOD range larger by improving bicycle infrastructure. It's pretty common in the Netherlands to have to bike about 3-4 km to a train station, or really anywhere. On a bicycle, you move at easily 4-5 times walking speed while expending less energy.
I just passed the culdesac development in Tempe, AZ, which is supposed to be a car free development. It’s right next to light rail. It will be interesting to see if it will be successful in the car oriented Phoenix metro area.
My daughter's boyfriend works there at Intel, but always drives there from his apartment in Beaverton even though it only takes 20 minutes to walk to the Max station at 158th from his apartment.
@Zaydan Naufal Yeah, but I get to use their employee discounts by abusing my sibling benefits :) Only reason I went with intel over Amd was that I could get current gen i7 chips at the same price as ryzen 5 ones.
Looking at places not called New York, it seems pretty mixed to have TOD. Many development like highways and single-family zoning have occured before TODs became desirable, so now it is hard to have a lot of good TOD.
Unfortunately, Portland is still in North America, so sooner or later...well, sooner, you run into problems whose easiest solution is a car. I lived near Orenco for years and loved it, but it was still somewhat unusual to be a pedestrian in that general area.
Seems like park and ride is good for the station furthest out on the line, that way people from the outskirts of town can drive from where they are to the edge of town where traffic isn't too bad, then access transit to get from the edge of town to the centre where traffic is worse. Also land further out is going to be less dense and valuable in the first place, and if the line is extended the lots can be easily redeveloped.
Being a PDX area business owner and transit freak, I can agree with most of the video. With MAX stations it's usually a hit a or miss because YES indeed parking can fill up fast but we are all used to it. Portland and the surrounding hoods is mostly full of bus riders. I am one of them because parking at many stations is a pain. At Sunset Station, if you arrive past 9am you are pretty much screwed if driving. It's why we have commute bus lines. I had no issue taking the 59 bus to Sunset tram station.
Ever looked a JR, the japanees railway? They are basically a real estate company, since they build entire little towns around their new stations and advertise them, such that the station is highly used. Interesting to see that this is also happening in US. Railway Companys around the world regularly meet in japan with JR to discuss inmprovements in international Rail Systems.
I recently went to the battery in Atlanta, it’s a mixed use entertainment district that has a pedestrian only street. My only issue with it is that the only way to get there is to drive. Might be an interesting video to do on places that do things almost correct but have a glaring error or two.
For an example of development and transit in total ignorance of each other, I nominate Chicago’s Jefferson Park Transit Center. It is a junction of two rail systems (CTA and Metra) and tons of bus lines. It’s
The Orange line Metro stops get it both right and wrong. In Arlington and in DC itself, the TOD is apparent. In Fairfax County, though, it's the same old story of train stations surrounded by a sea of parking, though there are some hopeful signs. For instance, the area near the Dunn-Loring metro stop has seen a boom in mixed use development.
This sounds like Japan. If a city or neighbourhood in japan has a station, the station becomes the absolute focus of the area. The commercial district surrounds it, the housing radiates out from there, the areas each side of the station (many stations are built as bridges over the tracks) feature bus stations and taxi ranks and often there are supermarkets, malls, department stores and entertainment very close by, in many cases linked to or integrated into the station building itself. There's also inevitably a large amount of bicycle parking, and many people own two bicycles, one for each stop they use regularly. It absolutely works, and IMO should be the model for anyone who wants to make a city people want to be in. To really illustrates how well the concept works, check this out: in the Japanese apartment rental market, the number one factor affecting rent is distance from the station. I traded up from a single room apartment ten minutes walk from the station to a place three times the size, for the same rent, because you need to walk for 30 minutes to get there (but I can cycle it in 8-15).
Been exclusively using transit in Portland for 3 years after going car free. I never use the Max as it can be kind of sketchy and it’s so slow. The bus system here is great and biking is great too.
I used transit exclusively in Portland for five days when I was there about a month ago. I used the Max much more than the busses mostly because it was difficult to figure out where the busses went and when. I didn't bike, but I did walk and use Lime scooters a lot
What's frustrating is that many other advanced countries have already figured this out and are decades beyond us. I would love for you to visit Seoul, South Korea. Check it out.
Figured out what? These “advanced” countries don’t build dense housing for fun, they do it because their space is limited and they need most land for other things like agriculture, nature, etc. That doesn’t mean that all issues suddenly vanished. The grass ain’t greener on the other side.
@@VieleGuteFahrer I lived the other side for 10 years and I personally found it to be spectacularly great. The urban environment is mostly centered around people, not cars, which is transformational in lifestyle. Europe has many examples of such cities as well. And, they build useful infrastructure fast. The Seoul metro area opened 10 new subway lines in the time I was there, bringing the total number of lines to 23 i think. It takes 6 months to re-pave a 10 mile stretch of country highway here.
My good man, take a look at rome or Istanbul. This is how all humans everywhere have built cities since cities exited. The US has done its best to go against common sense for the last 70 years in terms of urban development.
You should look at the train stop at Fullerton, CA. I started training because of gas prices, and while most train stations in California are isolated with maybe a parking garage or office complex, Fullerton’s is right in the middle of downtown and reminded me of this video 😎
San Diego's MTS just built a big multi-level parking facility next to the new Noble Drive LRT station. However, the station abuts an important shopping center. There is quite a bit of successful shopping centers along the new Blue Line LRT extension.
I have to say that the lack of TOD in the Portland metro area is one of the biggest problems facing Trimet (including frequency cuts due to COVID that have yet to be undone). Orenco Station is one of the few truly TODs in most of the MAX stations throughout the system. The station nearest my apartment--Beaverton Central--has two new, massive parking garages, in addition to surface-level parking, and Beaverton Central has nothing but a strip mall, car dealer, trailer park, and two completely empty plots of land around it! Further west, even station areas that aren't completely empty have yet to be developed beyond single-family homes and sprawling, suburban, car-dependent areas. Even just outside downtown, over the Willamette River, into east Portland and Gresham, most stations have little dense development. A system like MAX is NOT cheap to build, and Metro does the whole region a disservice by not significantly intensifying redevelopment efforts around MAX stations to increase the system's ridership. This isn't even touching how little development occurs along the bus lines! We know TOD works; what the country as a whole needs, now, is to actually DO it.
Beaverton Central is getting better though. All those new apartments with restaurants and shops on the bottom floor, as well as the new fine arts center and the big food cart pod -- all right next to the station
@@Themanlyarts There are two enormous parking garages and loads of surface level parking lots. All of those parking lots need to be redeveloped into multi-level apartment and condo buildings; not single extra parking spot should be build next to a city-central station on a rail system that costs billions to build.
The old San Diego Chargers Stadium is being redeveloped into SDSU Mission Valley, which has 1.6 M sq ft office space, 4600 dwellings, 95 K retail, a 35K seat stadium, and a 400 room hotel. It will be directly connected to SDSU main campus by the Green Line Trolley which will increase to 7.5 min frequencies all day by the time development is finished.
If I understand the concept correctly, the thing I don't love about TODs is that they aren't incremental in nature; they're pre-funded all at once in advance of any proof that the area will be economically prosperous enough to earn back the cost of all the improvements. The Strong Towns approach sidesteps this by only ever investing in a place (with public and private investment) after a place has proven itself to be economically productive and therefore worthy of additional investment (again, both public and private). The idea of building something that costs a large amount of money before you're sure not only risks losing money on the project in question, but it sews cynicism in people who want to make investments to enhance walkability, density, public transportation, etc. in other places. Incremental development sidesteps this risk altogether.
Funny thing about the green line, the most recent developments have converted areas to TODs. A great example is Lents. Lents has high rise mixed use apartments and a fantastic community all around the max stop. It's a public transit hub for SE. I actually don't see the problem of building on each side of the highway IF you have pedestrian and bike bridges frequently, which Lents does. I-205 is also raised up so people from both sides of the highway can access the neighborhood easily. That's another reason it works so well. I'm actually really confused on how a walk under an overpass or over a bridge kills the advantage. You're still extremely close, public transit is still right there, and the neighborhood is still dense.
It's weird to me that Trimet built the Orange Line stations from Brooklyn to Milwaukie where they are. It would be so sweet if the Max went straight through Sellwood-Moorland and downtown Milwaukie, instead of them being a few streets over awkwardly next to 99E.
@ghost mall I currently live very close to the streetcar and Max lines by PSU but might be moving to Sellwood or Milwaukie soon due to price/work and I was pretty disappointed by the stations. I am still bummed about the green line extension.
The issue is I don't know if they could have put them anywhere else. Sellwood, Brooklyn, and Westmoreland are all too dense to have a MAX train run through them, meaning the only other spot they could have gone is along the Springwater, which logistically doesn't make any sense.
@ghost mall They do have those tracks that go along the river, maybe one day they can do something with that but people will probably say it's redundant with the Max. While density might pose an issue it would've been cool if some of the stations were more like what we see on the yellow line at Rosa Parks or Killingsworth. It would be awesome if there was expansion to Oregon city or even Lake O but that's a pipe dream.
@@Preygrantess I feel like those tracks would be really tough to implement because they don't really go through any neighborhoods and you'd need to put in elevators along the bluff to make it ADA compliant.
@City Beautiful I live in exactly one of these buildings. Avalon Del Mar Station in Pasadena CA is a mixed use development with light rail literally going through the development, with restaurants, bars, a bus stop, and retail in the complex, all on top of an underground park and ride structure.
Harrison, NJ is another one. They are building a TOD on top of a former industrial site. It's successful in attracting new residents, but it's criticized for being soulless.
It is verry interesting to watch that as an European: Basicly all historic citys, including the first american ones where build for walkability an effectivity. The bulls eye concept therefore is nothing new. It is just realising how stupid the urban planning of the last decades has been and trying to take a step back.
Super cool! Eau Claire, Wisconsin is building something like this. As a Wisconsinite I hope you are able to come see the new Transit Center when it's finished!
About the thumbnail: I'm not ACTUALLY proposing housing in Portland's park blocks. It was just a nice thumbnail. :)
Had me worried there!
Would ruin my campus’s vibe tbh
The funny thing too is that area is a TOD being on the PSU campus. Btw thanks for mentioning Tilikum Crossing, I bike across that underrated beautiful bridge every day for work!
As someone who lives at Orenco Station, I certainly enjoy living here and use transit to go downtown or to the airport... but what would REALLY help is better bicycle infrastructure, as that's heavily missing from the surrounding area. As for the park blocks, those are already pretty densely built up parts of the city, and what I'd love to see is to take areas already served by the MAX lines that are low density and build those up. There's really no good reason for the majority of buildings in the immediate vicinity of a stop to be 2 stories or shorter, as it devalues the network as a whole.
No, it’s because some people live on the train lol
The most important thing you need for neighborhoods like this? Staple businesses in the walkable area. Especially food oriented businesses - bakeries, grocers, etc. If someone MUST drive every time they need a tomato, they're going to own (and park) a car. If food stores, a post office, medical/dental offices, beauty salons, restaurants/cafes, liquor stores, convenience stores, etc are all within a few blocks, people will walk. And it's not just an emissions issue. It's a quality of life issue. People want to live in neighborhoods, not just a parking lot for housing units.
I wish all neighbourhoods were like this. Urban sprawl and most suburbs have been designed to force you to have a car.
In another city beautiful video, he showed that before cars were popular, many neighbourhoods in cities had everything you would need in a relatively short walking radius.
I typically hear these referred to as “anchor stores”, and yea, they’re a huge deal for keeping a neighborhood propped up no matter what.
Grocery stores are the most common anchor store by far.
@ghost mall Supermarkets are great, but for most things, that isn't what people really need on the daily. I live in a city, and there's a corner store on literally every corner. Everyone should be able to walk to a place where they can buy potatoes, motor oil, shampoo and eggs, use the ATM, buy lottery tickets or cigarettes (if that's your thing), and get a hot coffee. If you have good corner stores (not those crappy bodegas that sell ramen noodles and loose cigarettes, lol), you might only need to go to a big supermarket once or twice a month. That's what I do.
Also crucial: Bakeries. A good butcher shop in walking distance is a godsend. And reasonably priced street food/delis. Big stores like supermarkets, or national fast food chains that thrive on consistency, are really products of car culture. And if you live in a healthy urbanized environment, you find yourself not missing those things.
But yeah - a lot of those neighborhoods are pricey. Because the good ones are rare. Supply and demand - if high income people want to live there, and they do, rents and home costs will go up. And the dining/retail becomes very boutique. What we really want is an approach to public planning city-wide that makes these neighborhoods the norm, not just niches in boroughs that can attract big money private investment.
@_____ that doesn't always work, and all too often ends up resulting in permanently vacant commercial space that would've been better used as residential.
@_____ Not sure where you’re living at, but this is actually becoming insanely common in multi family living/commercial apartments. Parking is getting reduced in a lot of the commercial buildings in favor of tenant improvement spaces (stores). It’s a big industry right now.
Another thing that makes TODs more effective is good, separated bike infrastructure, within the half-mile of the station and reaching _outside_ of it. People might be most willing to walk a half mile to a station, but they might be willing to cycle for longer, if it's made easy and safe to do so.
My town has a "bike path" (multi use, motor vehicles banned) that is a just over 5km loop around a golf course that gets tons of use for recreation. (And doesn't meaningfully connect anything, one entrance is by the bus garage/golf course on the dege of town and the other is by an apartment complex on the edge of town)
I think its safe ro say that people will gladly bike 5km if its safe and comfortable even without a destination. (And the stats for a place like the Netherlands is much further, but the average adult can go 10km without getting winded)
Tldr, people will bike for for miles so extend that good separated/multi use path as far as you reasonably can and it will be used.
@@jasonreed7522 I have a single MPU that runs east-west through my college town and connects to key destinations, like strip malls, the college campus, near to downtown, the campus gym, and many apt complexes. I definitely use it for most trips if I can. And it's an intercity trail that gets plenty of recreational users on weekends too.
In the Netherlands, the maximum distance that people are willing to cycle seems to be around 8-10km. I imagine that it would be similar elsewhere, or maybe slightly lower when using non-electric bikes in a hilly area.
@@crytocc can confirm, when I was a kid I always had to cycle around 6,6km (from my mom) and 12km (from my dad) towards school, its around the max distance someone will be willing to cycle, especially if the infrastructure is as safe as it is over here.
Unfortunately, a nearby half million person city is moving from (often popular) separated bike/pedestrian paths (which span the city, from downtown to distant burbs) to painted bike gutters on busy streets, with predictable results (which makes me wonder about their motivation).
Regarding the question of "Does TOD work", it's worth noting that in much of the world, "Transit Oriented Development" is just called "Development" :)
The same principles apply though, of course
The difference is, most of those developments in the rest of the world, are vastly different than those here in the US we claim are TOD. Orenco here is actually a prime example of this, and how it's really just one giant joke to even begin to consider it TOD.
Us Urban development has been thoroughly poisoned by 70 years of car lobby, to the point where nowadays it is just about impossible to make it work. Unless you are willing to tear down much of the established road system, ban cars from half the downtown, and build massive tram and subway networks from scratch, and fill the remains of the roads with buses, then build modrise light commercial/residential housing over the area you freed up, which would tread on the toes of literally everyone, piss off the car manifacturer lobby, and be horrendously expensive.
US cities are lost, and the only hope for usable ones are entjrely new developments grown from new development long range transport hubs. Which means passanger rail, which is also trash in the US as a general rule...
@@egoalter1276 yah say it louder please. i _entirely_ agree and have been saying this.
and it gets kind of sickening seeing alot of U.S. urban videos on "how to fix suburbs" or "what will improve our cities" or "new zoning laws could help". when they know damn well thatll barely do anything. the damage is _done_ .. all these little remedies in a city here or there are just bandaids masking the huge problem that will never be fixed. its over for the majority of the U.S. cities. its all already built and the flaws are inherent to the citys design, theyre not interchangeable. slapping a bike lane in a non-bikable city doesnt do shit. the only way to fix this is like you said, by tearing it down and doing the right way, or unused space.
and that wont happen either, because youll have 90% of americans on your back complaining that your not adding more car lanes instead. they have no idea how bad their transit system is. its over.
If you have a good bus network supplementing the rail, you don't need as much parking at stations.
Thankfully something I saw with one light rail station in my local system.
Not much parking at all at this station, but the number of buses there basically made it so a ton of people at the rail station either got there via bus, or left the station and are about to board a bus.
The irony is, he never mentioned that Orenco lacks this entirely, and has the entire time it has existed. It has a single bus line, and, it rarely runs at all, and only during weekdays, and, of course, it sees little to no riders whatsoever. The only real transit Orenco has at all is just the MAX line. That's it. You really can't even count that damned bus line. So it's just the MAX. And, if they truly wanted it to be transit oriented, they would have put in a new bus line that runs north-south, as that's where the bulk load of ridership would be and is in the first place. Most of the residential is through that corridor, and, a few shopping centers which are more affordable for the average and affordable income folks who use or rely on transit. It would also directly connect to at least one other bus line, the 57, or, if they made it a logical length line, then it would probably also stop at PCC Rock Creek, crossing it with the 52, 47 and 67 as well, giving it access to TCTD and CCRider service, too. In fact, with MAX and the 57, it gives riders another option to transfer to those, and catch a YCT bus as well.
And safe bike lanes. They alone would increase the 0.5 mile bulls eye radius to 3 miles easily.
That's why park and rides should primarily be used on the terminal stations on a line. When the area gets dense enough, the line is expanded outward, the original park and ride is rezoned dense housing and given integrated bus routes connecting nearby areas to the station.
Also having a good bike network, which is especially useful for those who don't live inside the TOD itself.
TOD's (or bulls eyes or density islands) are key to successful transit networks. A lot of American metro stations are oblivious to this...they put their rail stations in low density/non-walkable/non-bikable neighbors hoods and are shocked they don't get much traffic. City planners should zone areas around train stations for density and walkability. Space is very valuable but wasted in a lot of cities...density could be improved with more one way roads, less street parking, and fewer low density businesses (like car lots). American campuses are actually one of the few accidental success stories for TOD style developments and we could learn a lot from why so many find college campuses so appealing (might be a good video topic). Another tangential video topic might be to explore the relationship between parking and transit. eg I don't take transit to downtown DC to save time...I do it because there is nowhere else to park. Understanding the trilateral relationship between density > parking > transit > ... is key to city planning.
100% agree on using college campuses as a way to pitch transit-oriented development and walkable neighborhoods. If you can tap into people's nostalgia, you might actually have a chance to connect with them.
I'd also say that city planners are not oblivious to TODs, but they often have no better options. NIMBY activists often fight any effort to route transit along existing roads or through their neighborhoods. So transit routes often parallel or twin rail or highway routes, which leads to disconnected stops in industrial areas, as opposed to actually connecting the places people live.
New Brunswick is a great example of TOD’s as there’s a campus-wide bus network that co-exist’s with NJ Transit’s bus network as well as walkable access to the train station with frequent service to NYC/Newark and Trenton (connecting to Philly via Septa in Trenton) along with frequent commuter bus service between NYC and Princeton. Plus there’s plenty of mixed-use development in the downtown and in the college area including the off-campus residential area with plenty of walkable streets.
In Los Angeles, some of the Expo line stops are literally just surrounded by strip malls and single family homes. It's absolutely gross
We can’t do that right now. We have way too many people who use cars now and that wouldn’t work. Imagine working in the city and living 30 minutes away just to have no parking.
TOD is what honestly brings people together. Living in Downtown Miami, I love living next to a light rail station because I have OPTIONS on getting from place to place vs being dependent on a vehicle. Let’s get out of the vehicles and get back to being a COMMUNITY.
Disclaimer: Cities know you will be saving money by not necessarily NEEDING a vehicle so usually they jack the rents ASTRONOMICALLY in theses “TOD” zones.
The real reason they jack up the rent pricing in the TOD zones is because it was in the plans the entire time. They always claim to be focused on affordable income units, but there is a typical clause where it's for 5 years typically, then, all restrictions and requirements around it fall away. It's really used for gentrification in the US. That's it. To upscale the hell out of a place, wait out that 5 year period, then out price most of the people who moved there during those 5 years. And they do this because they get massive kickback paychecks from the big developers they hire to build these TODs. It's about the money, and the temporary false perception they gain from it. That's it.
@@TheCriminalViolin No such thing as affordable these days. Get ya paper and spend it. We live and we die. Can’t take it witchu.
@@dre.supreme yeah but you can't build generational wealth if you're living paycheck to paycheck. people within $5-$10 of min. wage often don't make enough to pay for rent in these kinds of places-- can't get the paper to spend in the first place.
that being said, i don't have a great solution for this, not without some real structural change to the whole landlording business model.
@Seizure u think we out here tryna make multiple generations? Hunny this bloodline ends with me, i dont need a parade of generations continuing my legacy of poverty. I will not be birthing future depressed consumers and underpaid workwers. Nty.
@@zuresei It also heavily depends on the state's own landlord-tenant laws, too though for your latter point. Some states it's very bias to the landlords, others, the tenants. There definitely needs to be a strong balance between the two though in order for it to be sensible and logical for both, and thus reasonable for both.
That said, the real changes need to happen nationally with the cost of living issue. Every time minimum wages in a region or state go up, the CoL goes up with it. The CoL therefore remains on average 2 to 2.5x higher than whatever the minimum wage is. That whole system needs to be slaughtered, banned and then rebuilt from scratch with a limit on high how CoL is allowed to go.
Fun fact: outside of North America, a common term for "transit-oriented development" is "a normal city"
Indeed.
*in Europe. A lot of places outside of NA actually has worse car-oriented cities such as Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Manila, Perth, Santiago etc.
Also it is interesting to watch this from the view of american city planning. I study urban planning in germany. Basicly all european cities have mixed used areas and more and more towns are trying to not separate work and residential areas anymore. While american cities do still separate those uses and cause the need of more traffic.
American Auto Industry lobbying power baby! Gotta make sure an entire country builds all its cities and towns to look and feel ugly and desolate as hell so that the car makers can make their big bucks!
In london good chunk of the places on the Metropolitan line were housing development built by the station and sold off back pre WW2.
They adverted it as Metroland and mainly was for people who wanted to get out of the busy city but still have an easy commute in by chance increasing ridership.
The Green countryside that was advertised didn't last long since every station started looking like edgeware.
And it's caused by the Hazardous Antihero *dramatic music and zoom-in* Charles Tyson Yerkes
Years ago my cousin lived in a community in South Western Holland. The subdivision was encircled by a train in such a way that 90% of the homes were within 200m of a transit stop. This train then went to the main station in Den Haag and from there the world. I was told that less than 70% of the homes did not own a car, because they did not need one. So it was not just ONE stop but rather a loop through the entire subdivision (mixed use) including all of it.
Also, while this is very cool, one of the obstacles is the car culture of North America regardless. I expect users will take a walkable community and somehow jam their cars into it.
Yes, public transit stops should not be more than 500m away from the next. That way you get (theoretically) everyone within 350m of a stop, or a 5 minute walk.
You mean at least 70%, the less than part is confusing
@@skyhappy Yes, it's just an estimate my cousin gave me. About a third of the homes did not have a place for a car.
People won't try to jam cars into it if you tell them this apartment/house doesn't have parking or isn't best for people that own cars. That will attract people without cars and people that want cars will go somewhere else. I know people will say this is not true, but it works in Brooklyn were many landlords and apartments are very explicit with potential residence to not live there if they want to park a car. Some apartments but on the lease that residents cannot park a car within 300M
@@sunkickr Perhaps, and this may be regional, but if people are going to shoot someone that asked them to wear a mask, then I can just imagine what they are going to say to someone who says they cannot park their chariot nearby. People do not always read the fine print either and it is not always explained to them or they think they can beat it later because they need the living space. The same goes for folks who buy properties near airports and then get mad about the noise from the airplanes. People are people and the current trend is that they don't want to be told what to do unless they agree with it.
love when i get the notification that you have a new video out. Only realised and became interested in all of this a few months ago, I lived in a regional area of Australia where it is just urban sprawl, no real town centre, stroads and about 4 bus lines that at peak hour ran every hour. I just thought that is just how everyone lived......until i moved to Cologne Germany. What an eye opener. 90% of what i need on a day to day basis is within 7 minutes walk.
This is my hometown! There's a burger place native to Oregon, and a late night coffee shop right in that plaza. Lots of young people hang out there as it's about the only place open past 9pm.
Living in Portland, I can tell you that we desperately need more of this. The bus system is okay at best, and the MAX is useless unless you live way out in the suburbs like Hillsboro. Most of Portland is still car dependant as hell and it sucks to live here because of that.
The MAX is great if you live a block away from the blue line. It's less great for anyone else, though I still prefer it to taking a bus when it's an option.
The other thing I noticed when I lived there was the heavy flow in both directions - people living in Portland worked in the subs and people living in the subs worked in Portland. I have never seen such 2 way flow during work commutes. I always wondered why Portland Metro had this.
I get alot of use out of the MAX myself but I live like 2 blocks from the yellow line. We desperately need the downtown MAX tunnel to help speed things up but even in the state the system is now it's still at least possible to use it to get around fairly well especially compared to most cities our size in the US.
Come and check any metro area one state south, you won't complain about Portland any more. SF city is great, but transit goes nonexistent pretty fast in virtually any direction.
@@ncsuor The higher paying jobs are in the suburbs. Living in Portland is more expensive than living in the suburbs. So the higher-income suburban workers can afford to live in Portland while the lower-income Portland workers can only afford to live in the suburbs.
As a car-free person with some disabilities, my dream is to live in a dense, walkable area built around accessible transit
This is my dream also! And thank you for saying so. I have low vision and can't drive. Worst of all, I happen to live in the Midwest where it's basically EXPECTED you have a car. Even in my state's largest cities, there's no rail and the bus systems are kind of a joke... I don't think people realize just how discriminated against those of us who literally CAN'T drive can be. In most videos and discussions I've seen about transit and walkablity in the US, it is still presented with the assumption that it's a choice to drive or not. IDK... I guess it feels good to see at least a couple of people here who "get it."
Unfortunately as a different disabled person I need my car. I can't walk around for more than 20 mins and find taking public transport very difficult. So I need to be able to park my car near where I shop! It's nearly impossible to make everyone happy :((
@@aleaf01Look up the Canta, perfect mini car for mobility disabilities
@@aleaf01in Amsterdam the disabled can use small cars on the bike lanes in cities. And the bike paths allow electric wheelchairs to get around easily and safely
i live about a mile from orenco, its so surreal to see you standing there
Isn't another reason for lower car-use in TODs the walkability itself? If I live in a neighborhood with easy walkable access to amenities, I might not even need a car - or at least not a second one.
Definitely. If you only ever feel like you have to go two blocks in order to get somewhere then there’s no reason to use a car.
The funny psychological thing is that this still works even if you only have to go two blocks to get to the transit line followed by a two block walk to the store.
@@SaveMoneySavethePlanet I call it the 10 minute law. If you reach your destination in 10 minutes, it's not far. If by car, bike or foot is what planning and design decide.
And since the station is destination it can indeed feel "near" even if you end up traveling 30 minutes in total (albeit that is too much for normal shopping, but for a doctor's visit - works)
@@steemlenn8797 yea I think that’s a good rule of thumb. I know I’ve been taking the train to work lately and, even though the trip is technically longer, it doesn’t feel this way since I get on the train so fast and then just chill and listen to podcasts
the greater salt lake area that i live in seems to be slowly making these changes. more mid rise condo's are popping up near our light rail line. which i read that draper county (where i live) has a bill in place that allows for "unlimited density" within a certain radious around a transit hub, as you mentioned. watching these videos always makes me realize that utah is suprisingly good on public transit compared to other places
@@julm7744 how do you know that's the reason?
I lived in one of the new apartment buildings next to a TRAX station thinking that I was going to be living in a more walkable area since it was more dense than the suburbs that I previously lived in. If I didn't have a car when I lived there, it would have been challenging for me to do simple things (ex: haircuts, grocery stores, coffee shops). It was a huge let down and I did not like the experience of living in a building owned by a huge shell corporation that shushed me if I said that anything was wrong with my unit. I hope that more condos or local owned buildings as well as businesses pop up near TRAX stations. It would be much better than "luxury" apartments and huge parking structures.
@@lucoarriaza corporate landlords suck. I've done my best to avoid them my whole adult life. Where I live now is low density, but very walkable by Phoenix standards as it's adjacent to a major shopping center, near three bus routes, and along a nice greenbelt bike route. The most important thing though is it's affordable and I'm renting from a private person and not a corporation. I'm only 2 1/2 miles away from light rail and can get there quickly by bus or e-scooter.
SLC definitely punches way above its weight as far as public transit goes.
@@lucoarriaza The main goal of TOD's is to decrease car use for commuting, not car usage in general.
If you want to see an example of a TOD that still manages to feel completely unwalkable I nominate the Dublin/Pleasanton BART station
Yup, it's terrible! The whole place feels so desolate and awful, and both cities are riddled with stroads. And to top it all off, it's so difficult to get places on foot or bike.
You can't make me think about it! Get out of my head!
@@talideon I feel like stroads ruin access to bus and rail more than anything. The majority of the light rail line in Phoenix is literally in the middle of a huge stroad with stations where it intersects with another. This causes you to have to usually cross a 6+ lane stroad and a half to get from the train platform to literally anything including bus stops for a transfer.
@@talideon I have been able to get around fine with an electric skateboard + BART. The only places I really struggle to get to in the Bay Area is North Bay, but I doubt Marin wants a filthy poor like me in their neighborhood anyway
@@WeAreChecking You shouldn't need to get the BART. There are significant chunks of Pleasanton that are not accessible on foot directly due to lack of sidewalks.
This reminds me of the city I live near called Ebina in Japan. Ever since they added rapid express from Ebina station to Shinjuku, the area has seen a massive increase in apartments and stores.
Is that on odakyu line? That’s cool!
@@shigemorif1066 It is! It's about an hour now from Ebina to Shinjuku by train.
So happy to see you here in Portland! We love our public transit + pedestrian/bike infrastructure
These principles are true, my college built a big fancy bus depot in the middle of campus, they gave everyone (well forced them to buy with tuition) bus passes, but ridership is still really bad. Because the bus stops are too far from people's suburban houses. I've got a bus that goes by me and it's almost as fast as driving, I've had the bus catch up to me in my car.
BUT... the stop is just over a half mile from my house so I haven't ridden it once in 2 years. Whoops!
I would say the root problem is Americans being too soft and lazy to walk just over a half mile.
Buy a onewheel
Just over half a mile is really not that far, as long as it is safe. If it isn't, the safety is probably the issue, not the distance. For health reasons, we are advised to walk a least half an hour a day (the WHO actually advises for an hour), that's more than a mile a day.
I guess in your situation they still made the car too attractive. If the bus is slightly cheaper, but slightly less convenient, you have no reasons to change habits. If you didn't need a car at all, the bus would be significantly cheaper (buying a car, paying insurance, etc. is expansive, not owning one saves money), and become a viable option again, but if they want to make it an option for people who do own a car, they need to make that car ride more expansive (for instance by charging more for parking) or less convenient (for instance, by having less parking spaces available).
Changing habits is really hard, people need a good reason to do it. If the new option is just about as good as the old one, why switch ? It's very human to keep doing the same. Car has been made very attractive because of urban planning decisions favouring it, if you don't reverse them, it will be hard to compete with public transit and walking/biking.
It's amazing how just this mixed use and mixed scale of housing makes those places look western european. Some shots could almost be taken in a Dutch city.
@ghost mall more pleasant than walking in a massive housing development where every house is a cookie cutter tract home with a manicured garden...
@ghost mall the land of car dependency's gotta take baby steps sadly.
@ghost mall I think part of the problem, and the reason for that, is because it IS manufactured. It's planned from top to bottom. The more interesting and human parts of cities, including European ones, are those that grow organically from bottom-up demand, that incorporate local preferences and a continuous sense of place, and that have inherent purposes and identities...the problem in the US is an ingrained culture of placelessness. What you've got to do is find the places that already have thriving communities and embolden those existing communities to upscale, loosen planning/zoning laws to encourage innovation, enable locals to start local businesses, etc.
I use your videos to explain to people what I do for work. Thanks!
I live in the Tanasbourne area right next to Orenco Station. While there are many improvements yet to be made in terms of walkability and transit access, I'm proud to say that I'm able to comfortably live here without a car!
Here in New Zealand the central government has put the screws on the local councils to enhance transit oriented development by up zoning the areas around railway stations. I understand that the new rules allow for 10 floor apartments within 12min walk from the station(train or busway) or higher at the discretion of the local council. And there are more rules increasing density in other areas
I just looked at a document that my very suburban USA city made a few years ago, that talks about TODs in a positive way, and my faith in our ability to improve just skyrocketed
@Esh to an extent, yes. The document has been out for less than 5 years, and I’ve already seen multiple apartment buildings being made, including at least one that has a coffee shop in it (which I don’t think existed in our city before), multiple bike lanes, and one main stroad being turned much more into a place for pedestrians (a protected bike lane, thinner car lanes, more pedestrian crossings, and a median to make crossing safer. While the transit oriented development part hasn’t been implemented yet, they’ve given plans for where it will be going and what it will look like, and I think they’re planning to have most of the transit part up by 2025 or something.
Now, these changes that I’ve seen have only been through parts of our city, but you can’t really expect them to be widespread within 5 years. But it seems like they will continue in this way, especially once they really start completing these first projects
@Esh Rochester, MN. It’s on the smaller side of cities, too
Marta has been trying to do this in the metro Atlanta area. They're basically getting contractors to build housing around the already established train stations.
I work at Intel. You can’t directly get to Ronler Acres by the Max alone but the company offers regular shuttles from Orenco Station to the campus. Before Covid, the shuttle was full of riders in the morning and the afternoon. I live at Orenco Station next to the dog park and can easily walk to campus, but the shuttle’s there so I use it.
I'm in for transit oriented developments! Less cars & congestion, less pollution is a win-win
It is also better for drivers. Less cars = less congestion = faster journeys.
Wow, I used to work just outside Orenco Station. It felt fairly unremarkable, but now that you point it out it is very interesting. As someone that grew up in a few Portland suburbs and now wants nothing to do with them, I have to say that it does feel like somewhat of a bright spot. It feels lively, walkable, and almost urban. While it's not for me, I respect the concept!
A TOD sounds more or less like a streetcar suburb. I live in a streetcar suburb now in Melbourne, Australia and having most of my basic amenities a walk, bike or team ride away is great. If it wasn't for work, I wouldn't even take the train to our CBD.
What a great video! This is a concise and clear argument for the type of thinking we need in city planning!
I feel like such a conservative by saying that the US had housing development right in the 1920's when all of our urban core downtowns were built with shops and stores on the ground floor and apartment buildings above. To complete most of your daily tasks, you walked downstairs, went to the grocery store at the corner of the street, grabbed your food and walked upstairs to cook it. We need to go back to this style of development!
In europe this is basically how it is everyday, all the time. Houses need much smaller refrigerators because if you want to live in a city you can pick up food on your walk or bus ride home from work, there are grocery stores, bakeries, etc. everywhere, on every corner. Feeling like some chicken that night? Grab it!
In the US even if you live in one of these transit oriented developments it won't matter at all if you still have to hop in your car to drive to the supermarket or bakery because it's 2 miles away and you have to cross an ocean of parking lots to get there. These developments need to be anchored by daily staple businesses like a supermarket in order for them to be successful, desirable places to live. I knew a friend who lived above a development where his apartment building sat on top of a Whole Foods. He said it was the best place he ever lived because if he was hungry he could just walk downstairs then and there to pick a tomato up for dinner, grab a carton of milk... etc. I felt the same way when I lived in a city center in spain for a summer and the building had a grocery store in the ground floor and a supermarket across the street. It's so much nicer to live like this!
Also, transit agencies don't seem to recognize that in order to get people to use their services aside from commuting, they need to live in a decently walkable area that means it's possible to get by without a car. It doesn't matter if the bus service downtown is frequent if you can't ride the bus to get groceries because it goes the other way.
We have so many pieces to put back together before we can really get this country back into a better place.
Why does it make you feel like conservative and why do you say it like a bad thing?
there's also psychological uncomfort coming from unbalance between riding the transit time and walking time, if your public transport trip is shorter than your walk to and from stops it feels really bad, doesn't it? that's pretty much the case for my office: I ride a tram for less than 20 minutes but sometimes the whole trip takes over an hour due to waiting for the tram and all the walking
Same problem here lol, I take the GO train transit here to school which is exceptionally fast, the ride itself is 30 minutes but all the bus delays and painfully long frequencies here in my suburb to the GO station plus the little bit of walking extend the time to almost an hour
I ended up buying a car a few months ago for this reason. The bus time vs drive time to my office is essentially even, but there was 10 to 15 mins on either end of the bus commute of walking to/from the bus location (and waiting for the bus). Halved my commute time by getting a car.
Walking time doesn't bother me nearly as much as waiting time. I enjoy a 15 minute walk to a bus or rail stop, but waiting 20 minutes plus for the next bus or train, or any transfer location that has me sitting over ten minutes between routes sucks.
@@danieldaniels7571 well, in my case it's also the fact that there's a stop right in front of my office! but no line goes directly there and by switching somewhere else my trip would be both less reliable and even longer...
@@Z4KIUS sounds like a really poorly routed route that uses that stop. Where I live there are many busses that pass the closest stop 5 minutes from my home without stopping labeled as "not in service" only to start their routes at other stops an additional half mile away in the direction I usually travel. To use that stop I have to often wait over 30 minutes for the bus that stops there to get me to those other stops that are an additional ten minute walk away. It's infuriating.
The Orange Line is Arlington is pretty great, especially now that the Silver goes through it too (and the blue goes out to Rosslyn). Unfortunately, once it goes above ground into Fairfax County, with the exception of the newly in-filled & developed Dunn Loring station, the stations are basically just giant parking deserts. Vienna/Fairfax has recently started developing more housing, but only housing, so there's no real community, no retail or service, no sense of place. And plenty of parking. So, they've basically made somewhat dense housing that's still essentially car-centric. I keep seeing talk about putting in mixed-use stuff at Fairfax, but that can keeps getting kicked down the road.
They've gone and built some denser new developments in the City of Fairfax...but they've added huge parking garages & haven't bolstered the bus service in any way. And they're far enough away from each other and from cultural stuff, that people who live there have to drive to get anywhere So, it's just creating more traffic.
They're trying...but they're doing everything in these ineffective half-measures.
@Zaydan Naufal North America. It's a town on the Metro line he mentioned in the Washington DC region.
We are not building much affordable housing here in the the States. Some. But not enough.
West Falls Church is going to be re-developed as TOD in the near future. Additionally, the area south of the station formerly occupied by the high school is going to be a new TOD.
I agree. I think the main metro stop that doesn't need the residential or work centered development is the Tysons corner stop on the silver Line. I live in Arlington so its nice for me to go into the east falls church metro stop and go to Tysons without needing a car. the only problem is that the east falls church metro stop is not really walkable.
@@danielgreen1557 There was a plan approved back in 2011 for TOD at East Falls Church but it "fizzled out" due to strong NIMBYism. Agree the area is not really walkable. Not sure if the still-approved plan can just be re-started at some point or if they'd have to go through the approval process again. Looks like in the interim attention will shift to West Falls Church, much like it did from Vienna to Dunn Loring when the Vienna development plan was scaled back to adding some residential only.
I'm pretty familiar with that Orange Line and it certainly could be improved. I like taking it to Tyson's Corner to avoid traffic and parking but I need a car to get to the station in the first place. The 28A bus goes through it but of course, it's slow and there have been times when it just didn't come. The nearest cultural center to East Falls Church is Eden Center for some great Vietnamese food but it's not walkable to the station :(. Needs more mixed use buildings but that station is on the side of the I-66 highway so it's hard to develop when it's boxed in by a highway on one side and NIMBYs on the other side
Super cool to see you cover Arlington! Been hoping to see that happen for a while
If a rail station only serves a half mile radius, that's not really sustainable IMHO, so this radius needs to be extended:
* add a bus stop right at the other side of the platform, so people already see the bus to their suburb when exiting the train. This extends the radius to how far the busses go.
* next is bike parking and actually make bicycles the preferred mode of transportation in the directly surrounding area and a useful option for about 5 miles.
* private vehicles can only access the station directly via a ring to drop someone off ("Kiss and Ride" as we call it here).
* Every other car traffic goes to a parking garage (never surface parking!!!) somewhere close to a larger road. This serves a double role: Park&Ride and it replaces any parking options for the surrounding area, even for residents. This allows the streets to be more friendly to pedestrians and cyclists and makes it even denser.
If the whole scenario works, people arriving by train go shopping in that area and then go home by bike, bus or car (in that order).
0:04 lol! I’m literally sitting in that Ava’s coffee shop back there right now and as I started watching this and I looked out the window to see if you were there.
What is it like there?
@ghost mall Okay
@ghost mall No worries, It was just to let you know i read your comment
@ghost mall Starbucks is gone (couldn’t compete with Ava’s) replaced by a bakery and it’s a New Season's not a Whole Foods. There is a Lil Big Burger right there next to Ava’s. Orange theory fitness, a BAR class place, some other shops. Personally I go there to do work on my laptop at Ava’s and the Nine Dang Thai is my favorite Thai restaurant. The pizza place is very popular there too. I don’t live in/near Orenco.
The part of this video is how it's a balanced argument, doesn't use deride any individual choices, doesn't throw in gratuitous insults or pejoritives...
...and it's still obvious that transit, transit oriented development, and mixed use development patterns are good things that we should do more of.
This reminds me so much of Stockholm. Pretty much everyone lives near some type of rail station here, and they all have at least one square/plaza/broad pedestrian street, one or two cafes and grocery stores, doctor's offices, etc., along with multi-story residential buildings. The bigger ones will also have a shopping mall (usually connected to the station) and office buildings. Some are definitely less attractive than others, and some are lean significantly toward being either mainly residential or business, meaning it's not uncommon for people to commute for up to two hours to work/school at the opposite end of the city region from where they live, but it's comforting knowing that even if you're somewhere you've never been before, you usually just need to listen for the sound of a train and walk in that direction if you need to find a grocery store or a doctor.
Didn’t expect someone to make a video about my local light rail station
i love your videos on portland! makes me feel good about living here
I'm thinking about moving there. I took a trip there about a month ago for five days and went everywhere by public transit. I documented much of it on my vlog. Ended up using Sunset Transit Center a lot not for it's park and ride but for easy transfer to local bus routes into Beaverton where I was staying with my daughter.
Park and Ride is great - if you do it for bikes. It increases the easy distance from half a mile to two. Thanks to the pi*r² that is a LOT of additional pickup area (Which can also be served by buses for those who don't ride bikes for whatever reason.)
Put the train station in the center together with services like town hall and doctors and have the bike lanes go like light from a star. Spread a few groery stores around. Have a 10 minute bus service and train access and you can have 30-50K people in this area with about 20% need for cars compared to the standard US city.
amazing educational video. thank you professor. we Korean nationals got a lot to learn from this too.
The neighbourhoods of North York and Yonge Eglinton in Toronto are also good examples of transit oriented development. They've effectively become the 2nd and 3rd "downtowns" for the city of Toronto respectively. Also Toronto is one of the few cities in North America with all of it's streetcar suburbs intact, which is another early form of TOD.
Toronto also has a lot of non-transit oriented development, they kinda just build wherever and hope that transit comes later. But the communities that you listed are indeed transit oriented.
The GTA in general though is just a horrible sprawl of endless cookie-clutter development. Cough *Mississauga*
I think another note to add is that a lot of transit is near highways because the government owns the land and can develop a rail line under the highway. What I've seen in Boston is that the area directly around the station can be turned into a TOD but then a sky walk can be used to cross over to the far side of the highway and turn it into a park and ride. This also allows for the infrastructure needed for funneling traffic into the park and ride to not compete with the land needed for the TOD.
Another great technique is capping highways with parks or building land bridges. Since transit is often easy to build along existing road right of way, hiding the highways and providing more walking space could be a good addition to the TOD. I hope to see more of that in the future .
I really like how you take the turn and adress the must do to the citys.
Shoutout to Elmonica TC in Beaverton! I always love the MAX but that station in particular has a place in my heart. I lived in the apartments across the street for years and it was super convenient. Hearing them put the trains in the yard in the evening was quite soothing at night.
There is NOTHING soothing about the noise of a train. I live in a nice, peaceful suburb with one exception, I can unfortunately hear the cargo trains about half a mile from my home, even when I'm in bed at night. I hate the noise.
My hometown (Bergen, Norway) is doing the same thing, building a light rail system with frequent departures, and then allowing the development of apartment and office buildings along each new line. So you can live in an apartment with the light rail within walking distance, and just take it to get where you need to go.
The MAX tunnel would be a seriously game changing project for the region. The Southwest Corridor project should be improved a sent back to voters with a better funding mechanism and a solid plan to connect it directly to a north-south downtown tunnel.
Our biggest problem are all the Clackamas/Washington Co monied areas like Lake O that try to stop any thing like this form happening.
If you're running transit in the middle of a highway, build over the highway. Essentially a giant bridge with the transit stop in the middle pilliars and the top covered in buildings and parks. Sure, it'll probably be expensive, but it'll allow the land to be used for something more productive, and hey, nobody on the highway is going to bat an eye at driving through what would look to them to be a 2km tunnel.
As an European it's pretty strange to see something hyped so much as "pioneering concept" while it's one of the most common fundamental things in an average European city for decades :D
I used to live at the train stop just east of Orenco, it was always cool to go to this stop and walk around. very pretty, and more quiet as well
You should check out Las Colinas Texas. They tried to replicate water canals for transport as well as a monorail very ambitious but things went sideways and didn't work out. I think its a great example of ambition vs reality and lack of will.
Monorail has never been a good investment for cities. Implementing a canal system seems crazy unless you’ve no other options.
@@CJT3X But I heard it work out great in Shelbyville
When you ask whether you can achieve these results without transit at all, Amberglen may become a case study for that. Hillsboro's building the same kind of density there, originally with the intent of building Portland's "second downtown" (ambitious, but perhaps a bit optimistic).
Though the Quatama stop ostensibly "serves" the area, it's far from the bulk of Amberglen, there's not a single bus line (the east-west route along Cornell is the closest option), and the higher density development has been almost exclusively residential despite early plans calling for ground level retail. They wanted to extend the MAX or a streetcar into the area, but to my knowledge that idea remains a long-term dream.
Parking's become a sore point as the business park properties prohibit overnight, non-tenant parking (even though many of those buildings are partially or entirely vacant), and new residents therefore park on neighborhood streets in the area.
Hillsboro also has a lot of conflicting ideas. They build places like Orenco (though being surrounded by car-dependency limits its potential) and actively try to build up downtown. They have weird interim places like Amberglen and the under construction master-planned South Hillsboro. But the City often drags its feet on affordable housing, the stadium's exclusively car-dependent, and in Tanasbourne they just tore down an Office Depot and Barnes & Noble to build a friggin' In & Out (a truly cynical nod to Idiocracy and stereotypical sprawl). Hillsboro also holds Pride events and seems fairly vocal about LGBT inclusion in city newsletters while approving every Chik-Fil-A application that comes across their desk.
I like Hillsboro, and for a mostly post-90s West Coast suburb you could VERY easily do far worse, but sometimes I wonder how much of this was truly by design versus luck.
Hey, Orenco, made a lot of money buying a townhouse near there in the downturn of 2008 and selling it when I left pdx in 2014
@ghost mall I liked that it wasnt a long walk to a decent amount of Stuff. I never thought it was lacking per we but my experience was that it was fairly office heavy (especially like podiatrist and that kind of specialist med)
I feel so privileged as a Dutch person to have this already
I'd like to add that you can make the TOD range larger by improving bicycle infrastructure. It's pretty common in the Netherlands to have to bike about 3-4 km to a train station, or really anywhere. On a bicycle, you move at easily 4-5 times walking speed while expending less energy.
I just passed the culdesac development in Tempe, AZ, which is supposed to be a car free development. It’s right next to light rail. It will be interesting to see if it will be successful in the car oriented Phoenix metro area.
My sister used to live near here since she works at intel. Its always cool to see videos about places close to you.
My daughter's boyfriend works there at Intel, but always drives there from his apartment in Beaverton even though it only takes 20 minutes to walk to the Max station at 158th from his apartment.
@Zaydan Naufal Yeah, but I get to use their employee discounts by abusing my sibling benefits :)
Only reason I went with intel over Amd was that I could get current gen i7 chips at the same price as ryzen 5 ones.
@@danieldaniels7571 that might be because Intel stopped running buses between the Orenco Station Max station and the Intel Rondler Acres campus.
@@andrewvenor8035 nah... It's because he was raise upper middle-class in Prescott, Arizona, and isn't one to walk anywhere or use any public transit.
@@danieldaniels7571 I found using Trimet to Intel turns a 15 minute drive into a 90 minute tip on the buses. So I'm not going to judge him.
Just stopping by from Nebula to give the YT upload a like.
Looking at places not called New York, it seems pretty mixed to have TOD. Many development like highways and single-family zoning have occured before TODs became desirable, so now it is hard to have a lot of good TOD.
Upzone everything and see who bites
Unfortunately, Portland is still in North America, so sooner or later...well, sooner, you run into problems whose easiest solution is a car. I lived near Orenco for years and loved it, but it was still somewhat unusual to be a pedestrian in that general area.
Seems like park and ride is good for the station furthest out on the line, that way people from the outskirts of town can drive from where they are to the edge of town where traffic isn't too bad, then access transit to get from the edge of town to the centre where traffic is worse. Also land further out is going to be less dense and valuable in the first place, and if the line is extended the lots can be easily redeveloped.
ah its so nice to recognize all of this stuff, i see it basically every day with riding the max/streetcar
I have family that lives in Orenco and I love visiting, it's such a nice area and there are tons of walking options
Being a PDX area business owner and transit freak, I can agree with most of the video. With MAX stations it's usually a hit a or miss because YES indeed parking can fill up fast but we are all used to it. Portland and the surrounding hoods is mostly full of bus riders. I am one of them because parking at many stations is a pain. At Sunset Station, if you arrive past 9am you are pretty much screwed if driving. It's why we have commute bus lines. I had no issue taking the 59 bus to Sunset tram station.
This looks much more friendly to me as a European, however the roads are still comparably broad and high traffic companies to what I know from Europe.
Ever looked a JR, the japanees railway? They are basically a real estate company, since they build entire little towns around their new stations and advertise them, such that the station is highly used. Interesting to see that this is also happening in US. Railway Companys around the world regularly meet in japan with JR to discuss inmprovements in international Rail Systems.
New CB upload, perfect start to the weekend!
I used to live in Orenco Station! It was fantastic- and the rents were super good for the portland metro area, too
I recently went to the battery in Atlanta, it’s a mixed use entertainment district that has a pedestrian only street. My only issue with it is that the only way to get there is to drive. Might be an interesting video to do on places that do things almost correct but have a glaring error or two.
Much love for PDX
Yep. But eff Hillsboro.
Transit Rights are Human Rights!
For an example of development and transit in total ignorance of each other, I nominate Chicago’s Jefferson Park Transit Center. It is a junction of two rail systems (CTA and Metra) and tons of bus lines. It’s
The Orange line Metro stops get it both right and wrong. In Arlington and in DC itself, the TOD is apparent. In Fairfax County, though, it's the same old story of train stations surrounded by a sea of parking, though there are some hopeful signs. For instance, the area near the Dunn-Loring metro stop has seen a boom in mixed use development.
This sounds like Japan. If a city or neighbourhood in japan has a station, the station becomes the absolute focus of the area. The commercial district surrounds it, the housing radiates out from there, the areas each side of the station (many stations are built as bridges over the tracks) feature bus stations and taxi ranks and often there are supermarkets, malls, department stores and entertainment very close by, in many cases linked to or integrated into the station building itself. There's also inevitably a large amount of bicycle parking, and many people own two bicycles, one for each stop they use regularly. It absolutely works, and IMO should be the model for anyone who wants to make a city people want to be in.
To really illustrates how well the concept works, check this out: in the Japanese apartment rental market, the number one factor affecting rent is distance from the station. I traded up from a single room apartment ten minutes walk from the station to a place three times the size, for the same rent, because you need to walk for 30 minutes to get there (but I can cycle it in 8-15).
Been exclusively using transit in Portland for 3 years after going car free. I never use the Max as it can be kind of sketchy and it’s so slow. The bus system here is great and biking is great too.
I used transit exclusively in Portland for five days when I was there about a month ago. I used the Max much more than the busses mostly because it was difficult to figure out where the busses went and when. I didn't bike, but I did walk and use Lime scooters a lot
What's frustrating is that many other advanced countries have already figured this out and are decades beyond us. I would love for you to visit Seoul, South Korea. Check it out.
Figured out what? These “advanced” countries don’t build dense housing for fun, they do it because their space is limited and they need most land for other things like agriculture, nature, etc. That doesn’t mean that all issues suddenly vanished. The grass ain’t greener on the other side.
@@VieleGuteFahrer I lived the other side for 10 years and I personally found it to be spectacularly great. The urban environment is mostly centered around people, not cars, which is transformational in lifestyle. Europe has many examples of such cities as well. And, they build useful infrastructure fast. The Seoul metro area opened 10 new subway lines in the time I was there, bringing the total number of lines to 23 i think. It takes 6 months to re-pave a 10 mile stretch of country highway here.
My good man, take a look at rome or Istanbul. This is how all humans everywhere have built cities since cities exited. The US has done its best to go against common sense for the last 70 years in terms of urban development.
You should look at the train stop at Fullerton, CA. I started training because of gas prices, and while most train stations in California are isolated with maybe a parking garage or office complex, Fullerton’s is right in the middle of downtown and reminded me of this video 😎
San Diego's MTS just built a big multi-level parking facility next to the new Noble Drive LRT station. However, the station abuts an important shopping center. There is quite a bit of successful shopping centers along the new Blue Line LRT extension.
I have to say that the lack of TOD in the Portland metro area is one of the biggest problems facing Trimet (including frequency cuts due to COVID that have yet to be undone). Orenco Station is one of the few truly TODs in most of the MAX stations throughout the system. The station nearest my apartment--Beaverton Central--has two new, massive parking garages, in addition to surface-level parking, and Beaverton Central has nothing but a strip mall, car dealer, trailer park, and two completely empty plots of land around it! Further west, even station areas that aren't completely empty have yet to be developed beyond single-family homes and sprawling, suburban, car-dependent areas. Even just outside downtown, over the Willamette River, into east Portland and Gresham, most stations have little dense development. A system like MAX is NOT cheap to build, and Metro does the whole region a disservice by not significantly intensifying redevelopment efforts around MAX stations to increase the system's ridership. This isn't even touching how little development occurs along the bus lines!
We know TOD works; what the country as a whole needs, now, is to actually DO it.
Beaverton Central is getting better though. All those new apartments with restaurants and shops on the bottom floor, as well as the new fine arts center and the big food cart pod -- all right next to the station
@@Themanlyarts There are two enormous parking garages and loads of surface level parking lots. All of those parking lots need to be redeveloped into multi-level apartment and condo buildings; not single extra parking spot should be build next to a city-central station on a rail system that costs billions to build.
The old San Diego Chargers Stadium is being redeveloped into SDSU Mission Valley, which has 1.6 M sq ft office space, 4600 dwellings, 95 K retail, a 35K seat stadium, and a 400 room hotel. It will be directly connected to SDSU main campus by the Green Line Trolley which will increase to 7.5 min frequencies all day by the time development is finished.
If I understand the concept correctly, the thing I don't love about TODs is that they aren't incremental in nature; they're pre-funded all at once in advance of any proof that the area will be economically prosperous enough to earn back the cost of all the improvements. The Strong Towns approach sidesteps this by only ever investing in a place (with public and private investment) after a place has proven itself to be economically productive and therefore worthy of additional investment (again, both public and private). The idea of building something that costs a large amount of money before you're sure not only risks losing money on the project in question, but it sews cynicism in people who want to make investments to enhance walkability, density, public transportation, etc. in other places. Incremental development sidesteps this risk altogether.
Funny thing about the green line, the most recent developments have converted areas to TODs. A great example is Lents. Lents has high rise mixed use apartments and a fantastic community all around the max stop. It's a public transit hub for SE. I actually don't see the problem of building on each side of the highway IF you have pedestrian and bike bridges frequently, which Lents does. I-205 is also raised up so people from both sides of the highway can access the neighborhood easily. That's another reason it works so well. I'm actually really confused on how a walk under an overpass or over a bridge kills the advantage. You're still extremely close, public transit is still right there, and the neighborhood is still dense.
This is a fair assessment not favoring one concept over another. So I rate this vlog very high.
I love that you came to Beaverton (Sunset TC)!
I like Sunset TC a lot, and recognized it immediately from using it to transfer to route 48.
It's weird to me that Trimet built the Orange Line stations from Brooklyn to Milwaukie where they are. It would be so sweet if the Max went straight through Sellwood-Moorland and downtown Milwaukie, instead of them being a few streets over awkwardly next to 99E.
@ghost mall I currently live very close to the streetcar and Max lines by PSU but might be moving to Sellwood or Milwaukie soon due to price/work and I was pretty disappointed by the stations. I am still bummed about the green line extension.
The issue is I don't know if they could have put them anywhere else. Sellwood, Brooklyn, and Westmoreland are all too dense to have a MAX train run through them, meaning the only other spot they could have gone is along the Springwater, which logistically doesn't make any sense.
@ghost mall They do have those tracks that go along the river, maybe one day they can do something with that but people will probably say it's redundant with the Max. While density might pose an issue it would've been cool if some of the stations were more like what we see on the yellow line at Rosa Parks or Killingsworth. It would be awesome if there was expansion to Oregon city or even Lake O but that's a pipe dream.
@ghost mall Absolutely, I think linking up the major neighborhood centers (the obvious would be a line going up Milwaukie) is a no-brainer.
@@Preygrantess I feel like those tracks would be really tough to implement because they don't really go through any neighborhoods and you'd need to put in elevators along the bluff to make it ADA compliant.
This is very necessary educational content.
It's so weird to see European style dense building and then realising you're looking at a town in the US.
@City Beautiful I live in exactly one of these buildings. Avalon Del Mar Station in Pasadena CA is a mixed use development with light rail literally going through the development, with restaurants, bars, a bus stop, and retail in the complex, all on top of an underground park and ride structure.
I moved back to portland for more biking, im just a few years too early, but i can see the horizon
I live on the Orange Line Metro in Arlington. Nice to see it in your video
The crazy thing is that in Europe, TOD is just called "development". It's just the standard expectation for what development should be.
Same case in Japan. They have been doing it since the 1880s. Most cities and communities are planned around the railway stations.
OMG!!! I live in Arlington County, Thanks for the shoutout to my home town!!!
Harrison, NJ is another one. They are building a TOD on top of a former industrial site. It's successful in attracting new residents, but it's criticized for being soulless.
If they develop it to be livable, with basic necessities and some cultural centers, it won't be soulless anymore
It is verry interesting to watch that as an European: Basicly all historic citys, including the first american ones where build for walkability an effectivity. The bulls eye concept therefore is nothing new. It is just realising how stupid the urban planning of the last decades has been and trying to take a step back.
Super cool! Eau Claire, Wisconsin is building something like this. As a Wisconsinite I hope you are able to come see the new Transit Center when it's finished!
To be noted, we only have a bus system here.