Developers should put pedestrians first
Populace in low-density areas may get little benefit from a transit-oriented approach
Until recently, transit-oriented development, also known as TOD, was a term familiar only to those who enjoy geeking out on urban planning concepts. (Let’s just say it’s a fairly limited audience.)
But Montreal’s Plan métropolitain d’aménagement et de développement, which sets a course for how Montreal will grow and evolve as a city in the near future, has identified 155 TOD zones in the Greater Montreal area. So as geeky as TOD might sound, it’s an idea worth paying attention to.
As a group, these TOD areas are supposed to accommodate 40 per cent of all new residential homes to be built between 2011 and 2031. For urban TOD zones near métro stations and the like, this seems like a no-brainer. But it’s a concept that is deeply divisive in Montreal’s outer suburbs.
You see, some of those 155 TOD zones are in low-density areas, without frequent rapid transit options. For example, the village of Hudson, which barely qualifies as a suburb, has only two trains per workday — one in, one out. Yet it too has been urged to densify, to capitalize on its tenuous train link.
There are few places that have embraced transit-oriented development more thoroughly than Vancouver. So it’s worth paying attention when one of the Vancouver planners who helped popularize the concept says he’s backing away from the term.
Brent Toderian, consultant, speaker and former Vancouver city planner, said the issue is that designing well-planned, livable places is about so much more than just building homes near transit.
“I almost don’t even use the term (TOD) now. Transit isn’t the top priority. If we’ve created the right density, land-use mix and public realm design, people will walk and bike, which are higher priorities than just taking transit,” said Toderian. “Better than getting them to the transit station, we can get them to go to the downtown (area) and stay there. Some will take transit, but that’s how downtowns function. There are choices.”
Rather than transit-oriented development, Toderian has come to prefer designing places that are multi-modal but don’t require the use of a car to navigate. He aims to create places that are designed first and foremost to invite people to walk, but — in order of priority — also consider the needs of cyclists, then public transportation users, then drivers.
By putting the pedestrian experience at the top, Toderian says, the design capitalizes on what he calls “the power of nearness.” When the things you need in your daily life are close by, it just makes sense to bike or walk.
“You have to decide whether what you’re trying to create is a real urban place, or just a higherdensity suburb,” he said. “You can sprout towers and not have it be particularly urban. It can still be car-dependent. It can still be single-use and badly designed for pedestrians.”
To walk or bike assumes not only that there are connecting routes that are possible to take without a car, but that the trip is worth taking in the first place. A real downtown is a place of to and fro, as people beetle about from home to work, to dinner, to run errands, or just to go out and have some fun.
When all the “tos” are far away, everyone’s going “from.” And transit-oriented development doesn’t necessarily change that. You might have lots of people living near a train, métro or REM station, but when the residents have no reason to stick around, it remains a place of “from.”
The real challenge facing our suburban communities is how to transform the built environment they have inherited to create real places that people want to go to.
If we’ve created the right density, land-use mix and public realm design, people will walk and bike, which are higher priorities than just taking transit.