Planning for Transit-Supportive Development: A Practitioner’s Guide

This resource is a toolkit of practical and innovative measures to help Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPO’s), regional planners, transit agencies, and local government elected officials, staff, land use planners, and transit planners integrate transit planning with local land use planning. This guide includes best practices, guidance, success stories, useful techniques, transferable examples, and lessons learned, aimed at providing planners at the regional, corridor, and local levels with ideas on how to integrate, accommodate, and assess transit-supportive development and transit investment. Included are numerous success stories for integrating transit planning and land use planning. This guide seeks to go beyond just highlighting case studies by providing a link between the regional, corridor, and local planning processes for integrating land use and transit and examining regions that have successfully developed and integrated plans. The guide is meant to be a resource for planners to assist them in the development and implementation of strategies to integrate transit and land use planning in an effort to encourage transit supportive development. “Section 1—Introduction” provides an overview of the guide, highlights challenges to transit-supportive development, discusses planning coordination, describes the publication development process, and presents information on the guide’s format and use. Section 2: General Transit-Supportive Development Planning Topics covers issues that affect all three planning levels, including leadership and champions, regulatory tools, funding and financing, economic benefits, and visualization tools. Section 3: Regional-Level Planning and Transit-Supportive Development reports on specific topics include key ingredients to developing regional vision plans, and methods for forecasting regional markets. Section 4: Corridor-Level Planning and Transit-Supportive Development provides specific topics that include premium transit modes, corridor planning case studies, and guidance on integrating transit-supportive development considerations into the transit corridor planning and National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) processes. Section 5: Local-Level Planning and Transit-Supportive Development reports on specific topics include station and transit-supportive development characteristics, and station neighborhood planning case studies.