Resources

Two new guides are available from the Center for Transit-Oriented Development:

TOD 203: Transit Corridors and TOD

"This guidebook illustrates how planning at the corridor scale can help transit investments capture the benefits of TOD," said Sam Zimbabwe, director of the Center for Transit-Oriented Development. "Corridor planning can engage stakeholders, lead to more cost effective planning processes, and identify where along a new or existing transit line that the real estate market will be most active.”

Filled with real-world transit-oriented development lessons, the guidebook explains how corridor planning can facilitate not only successful transportation outcomes but also successful transit-oriented development.

Performance-Based Transit-Oriented Development Typology Guidebook

A hands-on tool for identifying the different conditions that exist around transit stations and determining how that influences performance on a range of metrics.

"The compositions of our communities and the quality of transit have a great influence on how people choose to get around and the choices they have in their daily lives," said Sam Zimbabwe, director of the Center for Transit-Oriented Development (CTOD). "The Performance-Based TOD Typology is a user-friendly tool that gives interested people around the country the ability to evaluate the performance of the transit zones in their neighborhoods and towns."

Whether working locally or regionally, the guidebook provides easy to understand information to help guide efforts to create high-quality TOD that reduces vehicle miles traveled (VMT), a significant generator of our national greenhouse gas emissions, as well as creating a host of community benefits. The guidebook builds off of the TOD Database, a web tool released in October that provides economic and demographic information for every existing and proposed fixed-guideway transit station in the United States. (See URLs for the report below.)

FIRST OF ITS KIND NATIONAL DATABASE WILL FACILITATE TRANSIT-ORIENTED DEVELOPMENT

The Center for Transit-Oriented Development (CTOD) launched a first-of-its-kind web database to provide access to comprehensive information about more than 4,000 transit zones across the United States. The web tool will help developers, investors, and city officials make planning decisions that take advantage of development opportunities around transit nodes.

The TOD Database, available at http://toddata.cnt.org, provides information on density, demographics, occupation and transportation habits of households near 4,160 existing and proposed fixed-guideway transit stations, including commuter rail, streetcars, light rail, bus rapid transit and ferries.  Spanning Honolulu to Portland, Maine, the database synthesizes 40,000 data fields at half mile and quarter mile buffers around fixed rail stations to create a user-friendly web site that allows people to view maps of various transit regions and choose data reports for stations of interest. Users can also query data by geography or demographics. The TOD Database is a product of the Center for Transit-Oriented Development, a partnership among the Center for Neighborhood Technology, Reconnecting America and Strategic Economics.

To read a full article about the database, click here.

The Coalition of Urban Serving Universities (USU) recently released two reports on the role of urban universities as anchor institutions in cities. They contain national survey data and case studies of how universities partner with cities to achieve a host of economic, social and community objectives.

The reports are:

• Urban Universities: Anchors Generating Prosperity for America's Cities, is USU's first white paper.  This policy document demonstrates the value and role of urban universities as "anchors" for cities.  It contains national data, aggregate survey data, and case study examples that showcase the importance of our partnerships to cities, and provides recommendations for federal policies that build upon our success. To read the paper, click here.

• And, the second document, Urban Universities as Anchor Institutions: A Report of National Data and Survey Findings, provides a more in-depth look at the data from a USU survey conducted in the Summer, 2009. To read the paper, click here.

Five years following Hurricane Katrina—a tragedy compounded and made more complex by the Great Recession and the current Gulf oil spill—new evidence shows that greater New Orleans is emerging as a healthier, more resilient region.  Yet, this year’s New Orleans Index at Five, which combines comprehensive trends analyses with seven scholar essays on key post-Katrina reforms, reveals that much work lies ahead if this metropolis is to emerge with a stronger economy, better opportunities for its residents, and a more sustainable future.  The Gulf oil spill creates an opportunity for New Orleanians, and their government, philanthropic and private sector partners, to build on the progress made since Katrina.

The following papers--spearheaded by the Brookings Institution and the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center--include data trends, essays, and a review of the state of greater New Orleans.