When TOD is NOT-TOD

 

Walking near Joyce Station, Vancouver (Google Image 2012)

Skytrain is being used as the preferred technology for transit in our region. Yet, as this Google view shows, significant issues in urban design present today when we add density within easy walking distance of elevated transit. The challenge we face is combining transit planning with community planning. Typically, this is done under the rubric of an urban design plan.

The most obvious flaw in the photo is the view available to the new homes on the left—or the lack of it. As shown three or four storey residences are compromised when Skytrain is pushed through the heart of a neighbourhood. The same result will obtain all along the elevated track of the Expo Line’s 19 mile (30.5 km) path. The quality of view achieved in our homes affects our sense experience, which in turn conditions our mental well-being. And, how about the noise pollution from trains whirling by at short distances from our windows and doors at all hours of the day, and in rapid succession or ‘tight headways’ during peak hours?

Blighting the urbanism is not just a problem for the Expo Line, it results wherever trains-in-the-sky cross urban land including Vancouver, Chicago and Paris.

TOD (Transit Oriented Development) was supposed to provide high-quality, high-density, human-scale, affordable neighbourhoods within easy walking distance of transit stations. The point was to lower automobile ownership by half, lower automobile use by more than that, and build affordable communities with a palpable sense of place. The problem at Joyce Station, and most other transit hubs in Metro Vancouver, is with defining how high ‘high-density’ should go. Since the time of the Greeks and the Romans this quantity has been known: 3.5 stories in northern cities.

The origins of TOD can be traced back to a week-long charrette hosted by the University of Washington, Seattle. The results were published in 1990 in a small book entitled Pedestrian Pockets.

Peter Calthorpe’s website describes Pedestrian Pockets this way:

The Pedestrian Pocket [is] “a simple cluster of housing, retail space and offices within a quarter-mile walking radius of a transit system,” [It] answers the rapid privatization, depersonalization and fragmentation of suburbia with a model that relies upon mass transit, higher density development and quality public space.

Searching for a name back in those days, attending the 2001 Port Townsend Forum, I settled on the Pedestrian Shed to describe that urban footprint with a 5-minute walking radius. I soon found confirmation for that nomenclature reading neighborhood plans for cities in Australia. Now the term is in widespread.

However, in our metro area TOD has come to mean “Towers and Skytrain”—another term that I coined describing the Mal-appropriation of the urbanist TOD by Vancouver area planners based on their miscalculations of what ‘high density’ means in humanist urbanism. This flaw is exposed finally by studying the quote above and comparing it to the featured photo at the top of the post—and all the other photos in this post. The Skytrain-and-Towers urbanism  is about as far from the original proposed scheme as anyone should care to go.

Notice the low quality of the urban realm in the photo. Imagine yourself as one of those pedestrians! This is not a deliberate Jeff Wall photographic representation. This is a random Google car photo taken in 2012. The woman on the left is gazing across at the mother pushing the baby stroller on the other side of the street. The caption could well read, “We Gotta Get Out of this Place!”

One more person is visible in the background. All three are walking in an environment without human scale. There is nowhere to go in sight; and no attractive public realm to traverse on the way. The telephone and power lines on the left are as great a psychological barrier to the sky, as the concrete elevated transit guideway on the right. Notice that the municipality has seen fit to plant not a single street tree! Some planning.

The local transportation authority, Translink, may share some of the responsibility. I must remember to ask the next Translink official I meet whether there is a set-back requirement restricting the planting of trees near the elevated guideway. The answer is probably ‘yes’. The outmoded, driver-less 1980s technology cannot operate in snow without putting a driver on board. And of course, Translink cannot provide enough drivers available when it snows. It is quite possible that falling leaves, or an errant branch, would freeze the entire system!

The front door yards on the left of the picture are closed-off from the street with concrete block walls that appear to be as high as the pedestrian (say 5 feet). While tall garden walls may be appropriate on the rear side of some properties, the desired effect on the front is to put “eyes on the street”. This can only be achieved when fronting residential door yards retain a high level of transparency. Of course, in order to make this desirable the quality of the fronting street must be far different than what was built here.

A final concern is affordability. Our region finds itself in a property price bubble that has put owning a home out of reach of most young families, singles and seniors (classified in census counts as median household incomes). Combining planning with transit implementation in TOD plans should provide the means for accessing cheap land further away from the Central Business District. Distance from the job centre should yield affordability, with fast and convenient transit easing the penalty of living on the periphery. But the formula is not working; something has broken down. Transit is being used to export tower-and-podium urbanism instead from (communist) Hong Kong. Prices all along the corridor and at station areas on the regional perimeter are sky-high. As the price per square foot rises in the tower, it brings up land prices on the nearby parcels. One after the other, skytrain stations spike the price in what were once suburban lands on the peripheral areas of the regional city.

Thus, property prices are made to soar region-wide by the Mal-apropriation of planning tools designed to return exactly the opposite results. Affordability fails to materialize on both TOD lots within easy walking distance of transit stations, and housing lots everywhere else. Real Estate profits go up and up; yet the quality of the resulting urbanism is increasingly lower and lower. Defaulting to the preferred method of assembling land—building condo towers far in excess necessary density, and reaping sky-high profits from naked land speculation—contributes as little as possible to the neighbourhood. Skyrocketing prices notwithstanding, the photo is rife with evidence of an all-out effort to lower costs: Cheap buildings, low-quality neighbourhood design, and stripped-down investment in public realm speak to the naked ambition of maximizing profits for the municipality and developer alike. This alignment of the interests of industry and government may not be ‘fascist’ in nature, yet they appear to be heading in that direction.

Of course, the ‘savings’ are not being passed on to the consumer. As municipalities inherit the responsibility of maintaining this jacked-up level of infrastructure and service, local governments are finding it hard to balance budgets. Land assembly and land-price-lift seem to be combining to keep prices—not just profits—soaring. Are taxes next?

In conclusion—as the photo below amply demonstrates—putting density up against transit lines is not necessary. We can build hi-density without hi-rise by observing the principles of a human-scale urbanism over a pedestrian shed, and then a group of pedestrian sheds, centred around a 12-minute walking radius around fast and efficient transit. Only then will the resulting in neighbourhoods present with hi-levels of social functioning.

Care must be taken to design a public realm that is supportive of social mixing, not the “No Man’s and Woman’s and Children’s Lands” we see above.

In addition, a new paradigm must be embraced where the neighbourhood as a whole is designed (not just ‘planned’). Decisions about the station area cannot be left to the whim of market forces. Local governments and design professionals have a critical role to play, in addition to a mandated democratic duty. Finally, the choice of building product must be made with the purpose of delivering affordable housing for the taxpayer. This race to the bottom—maximizing profits in the private sector, lifting land prices, and maximizing profits in the public sector or city hall—even as we contemplate bankruptcy of local governments blindly chasing after the ‘profits’ of the Towers-and-Skytrain paradigm must come to a full stop.

The result of massive levels of public investment in transit should be affordable housing, livable streets and walkable neighbourhoods. Not this stuff.

Aerial View of Joyce Skytrain. Green arrow identifies the place, and points in the direction, of the featured photo at the top of the post.

Joyce Station Quartier Footprint (dotted line)

The Quartier

The quote from Pedestrian Pockets cites “within a five minute walk of the transit system” as a critical element in TOD design. I have called this footprint the pedestrian shed; the New Urbanism in the United States identifies it as the site for TOD (transit oriented development); and Leon Krier refers to the quartier (urban quarter). In all cases what is associated with this spatially defined footprint of urban land is the delivery of human-scale urbanism, not Skytrain-and-Towers. This puts some distance between ‘good’ urbanism and one of the most elemental failings of Modern Planning. Namely, its inability to established what it meant by a “neighbourhood”. Or to stick to it, once the two Clarences—Perry and Stein—returned to the Roman castrum and the Renaissance town to prescribe human scale—as found in the 5-minute walking distance, and low-rise density—as the critical data in ‘good’ urbanism.

Overlaid on the site aerial photo one soon realizes that the quartier footprint for Joyce Station is more than ample to achieve high-densities within easy walking distance of the station and without having to build giga-scale towers.

The Walk to Transit

Of course, the transit planning literature is even more assertive suggesting that folks might walk five, ten and even fifteen minutes to transit. The corresponding growth in density (measured as units per acre) or population (measured as 2.2 persons per unit per acre) becomes geometric rather than linear. The resulting population from enlarging the radius of the transportation catchment will not be 2x and 3x greater as the table below shows.

Table showing Populations supported at three walk to transit distances.

The results of the table assume an average population density of 80 units per acre (unit size = 800 sq. ft.). This density can be achieved building either 40-foot high walk-up apartments or 3.5 storey fee-simple row houses. However, while some sites in the neighborhood can build out at this extreme high-end of the human-scale urbanism, it would be a mistake to use it as the ‘average density’ achieved throughout the neighbourhood.

A fully built-out pedestrian shed should not exceed 5,000 people. And a group of six pedestrian sheds centred hierarchically around an original quartier should not exceed 35,000 population. The 199,131 shown in the table above is clearly out-of-bounds for Vancouver’s west coast vernacular.

Now, Millennium and Expo Lines share stations, so we have to be careful not to count twice. However, the total number of transit station sites build in Vancouver are as follows:

1. Expo 20 stations
2. Millennium 13 (stations not shared)
3. Canada 15 stations

The total 48 stations can be home to 1.7 million people living within a 15 minute walking distance of fast and effective transit. That doubles the existing population, presenting a build out that may serve us for over 70 years if the population continues growing at its current pace of 1% per annum. We don’t need the towers. The high end of the Human Scale Typologies found in the local vernacular allow us to house 1 million-plus living within station area quartiers.

In conclusion, we offer the following principles:

1. Avoid projecting catchment areas that “sprawl” beyond the bounds of the human scale urbanism—it’s just not necessary.
2. Focus attention in designing the pedestrian shed or urban quartier surrounding the transit station as clusters of affordable houses, livable streets and walkable neighborhoods.
3. Finally, replace the Skytrain technology with 0-GHG trains riding either on the surface of the street or underground.

Reverse View of featured image at the top of the post (Google Images 2012)

Verso (looking in the rear view mirror)

Experts will disagree. In my view there is no advantage to putting up towers and guideways. Two wrongs don’t make a right. This part of the Expo line was built on the old BC Electric R.O.W. That should provide a clue.

The beset transportation choices are compatible with ‘good’ urbanism. This include: subway, modern tram (LRT/streetcar), BRT (B-Line trolleys with both lane and signal priority) and 0-GHG private cars. Commuter service on the main trunk railways (West Coast Express) also have a role to play.

We can see in the photo at the top of the post, and in the views that follow it, just how much damage the Skytrain wreaks on the urban fabric.

We can build much better urbanism than that.