Transit-oriented Development Starts with Clear Priorities
A well-executed transit-oriented development (TOD) effort around bus rapid transit (BRT) can strengthen ridership and support wider social goals, such as affordable housing and creating more livable communities, but these benefits don’t automatically follow any new BRT project. Agencies that want to advance TOD programs need market intelligence, local developer insights and strategic public sector focus to attract and sustain the support needed to fund, staff, develop and successfully implement transit-oriented programs.
Reaping the benefits of TOD starts with knowing where to focus efforts. Combining clearly established agency and stakeholder development goals with tools to prioritize station area planning positions agencies to efficiently and effectively navigate the challenges of implementation. Transit agencies or cities that are planning across corridors with multiple or even dozens of station sites need an awareness of site-specific readiness for TOD development. This can help prioritize limited staff resources, cultivate stakeholder partnerships and advance TOD progress for sites in multiple real estate submarkets simultaneously.
Establishing typologies first
What does this look like in practice? A midsize Midwest metro provides a great recent example. HDR is working with a transit agency developing BRT in two corridors simultaneously. The agency’s goals for the corridors include driving economic growth, attracting new businesses and helping employers attract and retain employees—all outcomes that TOD can support.
Across the two corridors, there are 28 different station sites. To develop strategies appropriate to each station area, HDR and the agency grouped stations with similar characteristics. This involved evaluating five development attributes of each location:
- Real estate market interest and development potential and activity
- Transit market depth
- Development pattern of existing built environment
- Land use regulatory frameworks
- Institutional presence and orientation
After each station site was scored, they were grouped into six typologies. This categorization was combined with an assessment of the time it takes to make changes in the attributes studied for each station location—institutional policy can change quickly, for instance; development patterns may change over decades.
The resulting ranking helped the agency and city officials understand which station areas and types were already performing well in terms of development goals. It revealed which are likely to need catalyzation for redevelopment in response to BRT implementation. This corridor-wide analysis also showed some common factors that could most influence TOD efforts at the station locations.
Five questions a TOD prioritization framework should answer
As agencies consider how to prioritize their efforts and focus, the questions below offer a good place to start:
1. What outcomes are we trying to advance through TOD?
Is the priority ridership, access to jobs, housing choice, climate goals or a mix of these and others? A framework should reflect stated agency and community objectives.
2. Given our staffing and budget, where can we make a real difference in the next 12 to 24 months?
A good framework helps agencies pick a short list of stations or corridors where focused effort will produce visible outcomes, rather than trying to “do TOD” everywhere at once.
3. What level of effort is appropriate for each location?
Some areas may warrant detailed planning and capital investment now while others may benefit more from policy coordination, land preservation or incremental improvements.
4. How will this framework guide real decisions over time?
A prioritization tool should inform capital planning, grant applications and partnerships. Agencies should be able to explain how it shapes what they do next.
5. How will success be measured?
The best sounding framework is only useful if it actually leads to the outcomes identified as its main goals. Long term, how will an agency track and measure whether those goals are being achieved? Starting projects with the understanding that evaluation and tracking of specific metrics will be included provides an opportunity to build ongoing momentum by showing proven results to the community, leaders and stakeholders.
Identifying a TOD X-factor: Institutional presence
Every city and metro area has different strengths to support positive TOD outcomes. Some cities, for instance, have advanced transit-supportive land use reforms to allow taller buildings or eliminate parking requirements along transit corridors.
In the course of the prioritization study for the Midwest agency, it quickly became clear that the presence of government or nonprofit institutions near stations was a key criterion affecting development in this city. The institutions in question are diverse—they include city and county governments, the school system, a local development authority and religious organizations of different faiths.
But they share a common trait: Institutions that are present, active, occupy significant landholdings near future BRT stations and are open to partnership can act as a powerful X-factor to increase a location’s likelihood of achieving the agency’s and city’s development goals.
Institutional presence becomes particularly powerful when an institution owns significant land acreage near a station. If a champion at the institution embraces the vision for TOD in the region, that institution can adapt very quickly to position a site for development that can attract both public and private partners.
Turning the data into a strategy
With the data available for all 28 stations and the importance of institutions established, the team turned to focusing on more granular, station-level strategies for TOD. A key place to start was institutions with strong partnership opportunities, especially those with significant acreage within an eighth of a mile of future BRT stations.
A local community college, for example, has underutilized parking that could be converted to development opportunities. It also recognizes that onsite housing could give the campus more vibrant energy around the clock. An institutional partnership could offer a way forward to jump-start development.
The local nonprofit development authority also holds promise. It holds 22 acres immediately adjacent to a future station and more land near a second station site. These are locations where the development authority and the transit agency could partner on potential joint development projects with market rate housing procured under the Federal Transit Administration’s (FTA) joint development program (FTA 7050.1c). They could be used as proof of concept to private market developers that this corridor can be an emerging market.
These sites also benefit from being at stations adjacent to each other along the corridor. If the transit agency and the city seek to catalyze both sites simultaneously, this could improve the frameworks for both small-scale and large-scale development. Making these investments adjacent to each other also signals a level of public investment and stewardship that incentivizes the private sector to increase its interest.
Next steps: Giving every station a strategy for the next few years
The finished TOD framework described here—expected to be complete in summer 2026—will have strategies for all 28 stations to prepare for future TOD success.
For sites where development interest is already strong, those strategies will be about staying the course, educating the development community about project approval procedures and sharing stories of projects that are already successfully navigating regulations.
For areas where the market is likely years away from receiving strong market interest, this is a great time to look at land swaps and land assemblage close to future station sites.
And for places in the middle, where a nudge from the public sector could be the spark that ignites a local market, recommendations will include developing new advisory roles in local government or nonprofit sectors. These could include professionals who can help smaller developers learn how to bundle local incentive programs into their capital stacks. Another suggestion is the addition of a “process navigator” to help developers who may only deliver a project every three to five years understand the latest regulatory opportunities and constraints.
Prioritization promotes progress
All of this work began with setting clear development goals. The prioritization effort then investigated conditions, held multiple roundtables with developers and discussed with local stakeholders. The result is better understanding of where best to deploy limited resources to meet the agency and city’s TOD goals.
Successful TOD prioritization uses transit alignment planning as a foundation and then explores land use regulations, real estate markets, the existing built environment and unique local influences to identify sites that have more potential than may be immediately obvious.
When those sites’ strengths are known, a clear prioritization framework helps focus efforts and optimize the schedule for interventions. It builds shared language and understanding of why different stations benefit from different TOD planning activities in different parts of the real estate cycle. It can also be useful in demonstrating strategic intent when competing for grants.
Ultimately, if followed consistently, prioritization reduces uncertainty for developers by demonstrating how the city is taking coordinated actions to promote the uplift of an entire corridor to match a generational investment in transit.
About the Author
Patrick McDonough
Transit-oriented Development Lead, HDR
Patrick McDonough, AICP, is the transit-oriented development lead at HDR and has spent more than 20 years leading analyses and studies for transit corridors.