Four fallacies of "transit-oriented development"

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Allan Ferguson

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

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As the Regional Transportation District has expanded its rail lines through Denver's southeast corridor and looks forward to "FasTracks" expansion along several other corridors westward, northward, and eastward, the planning mantra for development along these corridors has become "transit-oriented development" (TOD).

According to Denver's Office of Economic Development, some fifty-one of fifty-seven planned light rail stations "have TOD potential with eighteen of those sites containing ten acres or more."

In the TOD planners' vision of Denver's future, tens of thousands of people will flock to high-density housing to live, play, and shop near rail stations where they can leave their cars behind and join the happy world of carbonless commuters. To achieve this Nirvana, of course, many current homeowners and business people will have to be bought out, removed by eminent domain, or otherwise displaced to make room for the developers.

This developer's dream seems to have widespread, unquestioning support among elected officials at every level in Denver and Colorado. It's time to debunk a few of main tenets of TOD

Tenet #1 - TOD will encourage a return to the city and discourage suburban sprawl. This, of course, is utter nonsense. Historically, by making it easy to get in and out of the city center, transit lines have had the opposite effect. The development of rail lines and their relationship to suburban growth has been studied to death in Boston, New York, and Chicago. And, yes, even the Denver Tramway Company fed the growth of Englewood and Littleton, just as RTD will feed the continued growth of southeast Denver.

Tenet #2 - Ecologically sound, high-density TOD housing is the "wave of the future." Sorry planners, this is Colorado, not Washington DC or New York. What we have here is space and the desire for single-family home ownership. Relatively cheap land and housing lie outside the city. That has always been true in Colorado and will continue to be true. Those who buy into TOD housing will constitute no more than a drop in the population bucket of the Denver-Boulder metropolitan area.

Tenet #3 - TOD will get us out of our cars and cut pollution. Suppose by 2020 we're driving nonpolluting electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles. What then becomes of this argument? How important is it that we get out of our cars? Moreover, in this sprawling metropolitan area, RTD will never have the money or rolling stock necessary to adequately cover the area with dependable, frequent bus service feeding into rail lines. This is Denver, not Boston or New York. We'll still need our cars.

Tenet #4 - TOD will create great, walkable, liveable communities. High-density residences tend to be populated by people with weak ties to their surrounding neighborhood, while those living in low-density housing tend to take greater pride in their property, know their neighbors, and participate more in every aspect of neighborhood life. Of course, this is a broad generalization, but it is also an accurate generalization fully studied by urban sociologists.

One further observation: Wherever the lines between elected officials and developers intersect, one will find unsavory influence, favoritism, and, ultimately, corruption. Denver cannot escape this fact of political life. Let us tread warily toward a future filled with TOD.

Allan Ferguson, a resident of Denver, is a neighborhood activist leading opposition to a proposed high-rise development at University Light Rail Station.

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