Technology-Driven Transit-Oriented Development

THRILLING

DER Technology-Driven WONSTORY Transit-Oriented Development by Alden S. Raine, Ph.D.

When he famously suggested that cows had laid out Boston, Ralph Waldo Emerson added, “Well, there are worse surveyors.” While Emerson may have had a point about winding streets and hidden turns, another facet of Boston’s urban planning is considerably more compelling. Boston has been a leader in transitoriented development (TOD) since long before the concept even had a name. Nicknamed The Hub, Boston is the economic and cultural capital of New England. It earned that title a long time ago, but has kept it in part because the city still works well in the last quarter of its fourth century. 28

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One big reason is its transit system. Operated by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), Boston’s system is the oldest in the nation— and the fourth largest. With its network of historic neighborhood centers, university and hospital campuses, and suburban downtowns surrounding that quirky, congested core, Boston simply couldn’t have arrived at its current economic level, and couldn’t hope to sustain a prosperous future, without transit. Besides being the birthplace of American liberty, Boston is arguably the birthplace of American mass transportation as well. Mass transportation began here in 1631, when the city was only a peninsula connected to the mainland by a narrow

strip of land now known as the South End. Ferries to the surrounding harbor villages and a stagecoach across the neck to the mainland were essential to the city’s early growth. Horsedrawn streetcars appeared in the 1820s, followed by electric streetcars in the 1880s and the nation’s first subway – which still carries the downtown trunk of the Green Line – in 1897. Over a century, Boston, like other major U.S. cities, saw its elevated railway, street railway, and bus lines multiply, compete with one another, combine into a few larger enterprises, hit the wall of the postwar automobile era, and eventually pass into public ownership. Since 1964 the MBTA has run the entire regional network, which is one of the nation’s half-dozen so-called legacy systems.

For well over a century, Boston’s urban form has grown up around transit nodes and corridors, from East Boston’s emergence at the transfer point between ferry and narrow-gauge rail, to Brookline and the South End’s development as archetypal streetcar suburbs. to Harvard and MIT’s indispensable connection to the Red Line. The automobile era stretched and bent, but did not break Boston’s ancient nexus between transit and development. And in the last quarter century, the city has had an extensive urban rebirth, reinforcing and to a degree reinventing TOD as the engine that powers the Hub, particularly technology-driven TOD. “Without a doubt, transit has played – and always will play – a significant role in Boston. But there is also a generational component adding to the importance of TOD in the last quarter century,” explains James Keefe, principal and president of Trinity Financial, a prominent Boston-based TOD developer. “We are deliberately a little ahead of the curve on our projects, because we believe the next generation of

renters, buyers, and workers will be less car-centric than their parents and grandparents. They’re much more open to public transit. “My kids walk and bike, and they take buses and transit and cabs. And I don’t think it’s really a green thing. I think the suburban culde-sac has just lost its allure with this generation. Having shiny new vehicles in their driveways isn’t essential to their identity. But transit is part of their overall identification with the urban landscape. “In eastern Massachusetts, the existing roads offer very limited opportunity for expansion. To accommodate growth, public transit must be expanded. So we’re talking about expanding both light and heavy rail, and even reestablishing urban trolley systems. From a developer’s standpoint, transit expansion will continue to generate significant TOD opportunities.” Stark differences are evident in the generational preferences in Boston— and in many other cities. As I will

discuss later, those generational differences also extend to technology and the critical role it plays in TOD. But all things being technologically and generationally equal, Boston possesses a unique advantage that other cities lack, enabling the city to take advantage of these differences quicker than most other cities. Five elements that began to coalesce about 30 years ago helped prepare the city for its urban rebirth. Perhaps the most important event occurred back in the early 1970s, when Boston became one of the first cities in the country to reject a large-scale highway master plan that would have torn the city apart with expressways. This was a seminal moment in Boston’s late 20th Century political history; an entire generation of us in city and state government cut our teeth on that battle. At the time, people didn’t have the smart growth or TOD vocabulary at hand to bolster their opposition. But a stand was taken for social justice and the quality of neighborhood life, and an urban vivisection was prevented. Moreover,

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the corridors that were to have seen new expressways were shifted to transit projects instead, and the interstate highway funds that were to have fueled the wave of asphalt were reprogrammed – another national first – for transit. As a result, the second development of lasting import was the wide-ranging modernization and expansion of the MBTA, a process that began in the 1970s and continues to this day. The MBTA I rode as a youngster, high-schooler, and college student was omnipresent and indispensable, but it was wearing out and some of its most strategically important corridors were still served by congested bus routes rather than higher-speed, higher-capacity rapid transit. Subway lines could only accommodate four-car trains. The commuter rail network was all but dead. Commuter ferries were indeed dead. Bus rapid transit hadn’t yet been invented. But now, a visitor to Boston in 2010 will ride an MBTA system that goes more places faster, has much greater peak capacity, includes more transit modes and is 30

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vastly more modern in appearance and technology than the one I grew up on.

yet. Those concepts may not sound revolutionary today, but they were back then.

The third big event was Massachusetts’ role as an early pioneer of what we now call smart growth. In the 1970s, eastern Massachusetts shared, at least in part, the automobile-driven, landconsumptive growth assumptions of most other American regions. But state government, under the Dukakis administration, rallied a generation of citizens who understood that genuine economic growth, environmental protection, and a strengthened sense of community character could go hand in hand. Back then we worked for downtown revitalization. We worked on strengthening neighborhoods. We began adaptively reusing old mills and schools. We argued for the efficiency of developing and redeveloping areas already served by infrastructure, including transit. In short, Massachusetts was assembling the building blocks of what we recognize today as smart growth; we just hadn’t defined the lexicon

The fourth event that shaped Boston’s contemporary TOD history needs no introduction. Ask people inside or outside of New England about recent Boston transportation projects and one answer comes to mind— the Big Dig. Although generally perceived as a highway project, this $16 billion transportation undertaking was always intended to optimize and promote transit services and smart growth. In fact, the project’s architects tied the highway investment to a series of enforceable environmental mitigation agreements that included a number of MBTA extension, expansion, and modernization investments. Not convinced of the Big Dig’s role in transit and TOD? Boston’s two historic downtown rail hubs – North and South Stations – sit astride the Big Dig, and it was the Big Dig that literally engineered their comeback as centers of transit and

development. And the reemergence of North and South stations is in turn helping to extend smart growth throughout the metropolitan region via the commuter rail system, whose northern and southern branches terminate there. In addition, the Big Dig explicitly created one of the most ambitious planned TOD districts in the country – the 300acre South Boston Waterfront. So, counterintuitive as it may seem, if you examine the five biggest events to shape the contemporary era of TOD in Boston, one of them turns out to be the largest infrastructure project in history. The final TOD-shaping element is perfectly intuitive – it involves developers. For more than two decades, Boston has benefited from a development community peopled with sophisticated local players who have come to understand modern TOD and specialize in it. Current TOD projects are of sufficient scale to truly influence the region’s future. But effective, enduring TOD didn’t just happen. It took a concerted effort on many fronts. Here are three

examples, in which the company I work for – AECOM – was privileged to play a role. After President Nixon closed the Boston Navy Yard in 1972, the South Boston waterfront became mostly a collection of broken glass, weedy parking lots, and unused rail tracks. About the only other elements of note were a couple of legendary waterfront restaurants – boasting all the surface parking you could want. But the 300-acre district just across Fort Point Channel from South Station and the financial district presented a perfect opportunity for a mixed-use extension of downtown. To realize that aim, two things had to happen. First, the district needed direct access to the metropolitan highway system and to Logan International Airport. The Big Dig provided that, with a unique interchange that was built largely under the district – leaving the ground above clear for development. The other TOD building block was the incorporation of the Silver Line, an underground bus rapid transit (BRT) line connect-

ing the waterfront to South Station and eventually to the entire downtown subway system. Thanks to the Silver Line, every developable parcel in the district is within a quarter mile of a transit station, with direct connections to South Station in one direction and the airport in the other. As a result, 13 million square feet of mixed-used TOD development are in the ground or in the pipeline today, with more to come. The next example is the biggest single TOD project in the region: Assembly Square. Strategically sited on the Orange Line – where a new station will be built with both public and private funds to accommodate it – Assembly Square is in East Somerville, just two miles north of downtown Boston. Once the site of a Ford Motor Company assembly plant and more recently a mall, the underutilized 65-acre site was hotly debated for more than 20 years. Enter Federal Realty Investment Trust. “Assembly Square is a 5 million– square foot, mixed-use project that

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will feature 2,000 residential units and 1.7 million square feet of office space,” explains Bob Walsh, vice president of development for Federal Realty. “We already have about 350,000 square feet of retail up and operating, and we’re going to build another 500,000 square feet of inline shops. And there’s going to be a 300,000 square foot IKEA on the site. “This site offers tremendous advantages: it has great highway access from Interstate 93, and terrific surface street access. But what really makes this project sing – and allows us to build to that kind of density – is the fact that the Orange Line tracks are already adjacent to the site. By building a new station, we can link this development to the transit system. That helps make the market for office space, as workers will have ready access to everything the site offers. It also helps us keep parking ratios down, which keeps cars off the streets. Assembly Square is a perfect example of Boston’s commitment to TOD. The fact that there are major TOD projects outside of the city core speaks to the value we place on TOD, and the support it has here.” 32

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Boston has a number of sophisticated housing developers who do cutting-edge, mixed-income residential projects. One such developer is Trinity Financial, whose portfolio includes several projects that are right next to (or, in one case, right above) transit stations. Maverick Landing in East Boston is a federally funded Hope VI project. It replaced a deteriorated post-war public housing development with a beautiful, award-winning, mixed-income complex that offers 410 units in newly constructed buildings. The complex includes 20 townhouse buildings, two mid-rise buildings, and a community center. Its success is directly related to the proximity of transit services. Trinity’s Avenir project is a 10-story, mixeduse residential development that sits directly above the North Station stop on the Green and Orange Lines; its street-level retail environment includes a direct entrance to the two transit lines below, as well as an underground connection to the regional commuter rail terminal at North Station. And Trinity’s 116-unit project known as The Carruth is in my old neighborhood of Dorchester. Its residents can walk from their

breakfast tables to the subway, streetcar, or bus in 30 seconds, while its 10,000 square feet of retail space fills a decades-old hole in the fabric of historic Peabody Square. The Carruth is a joint development project, built on MBTA property and designed in tandem with the modernization of Ashmont Station, one of the system’s true workhorses. What makes Trinity so effective at TOD? “This is something we’ve been doing since we started the company 20 years ago – urban infill projects that knit traditional neighborhoods back together,” explains Trinity’s Jim Keefe. “Some of the more blighted areas always seem to be in or around either railway stations or transit lines that have lost some of their vitality and glitter, becoming something of a detriment to the neighborhoods. It was natural for us to look at these underutilized areas. “Today, for anyone who has been burdened with the cost of an automobile and the hassle of getting from point A to point B, living in a place where you don’t need a car is a tremendous advantage. It’s extremely frustrating to drive across any major American city during peak periods.

Factor in a little snow or a special event or a traffic incident and it’s even worse. And in most cities, there is no room to expand roads or highways significantly. Being able to walk out your front door and into a transit station is a very compelling option. TOD is compelling. And TOD benefits extend well beyond individual neighborhoods; they enhance the whole city.” Technology and TOD Technology has proven to be another effective TOD element that helps get people out of their cars. Transforming TOD in many anticipated and unforeseen ways, technology is playing an everincreasing role in enriching TOD and making it more appealing to subsequent generations. While many older transit users adapt to new technologies, generations of young people grow up with these technologies as a given; can a twenty-something imagine a world without a cell phone or a smart phone? Incorporation of technology is providing somewhat of a TOD revolution. “Technology-driven TOD gives people real choices in real time so that users can make informed transportation decisions that are not solely based around driving,” explains Tim Erney, planning department manager for AECOM in Southern California. “As a result, information is the biggest currency of technology in TOD. Providing transportation consumers with real-time bus, subway, light rail, car-share, or bikeshare information gives them greater autonomy in choosing transportation modes. Combine that with the density of TOD, and technology makes alternative transportation options realistic and effective. “For example, an inherent lack of reliability has traditionally been a problem for transit riders. A schedule may state that a bus will arrive every 10 minutes, but if the bus gets delayed and arrives 20 minutes later, that erodes rider confidence. If that happens more than once or on a different transit mode, it calls the system’s integrity into question. But

new technologies—like the NextBus system in San Francisco—provide real-time arrival information for trains and buses. You can look online and eventually on your smart phone to find out exactly where a bus or train is on its route. That gives the rider the power to make an informed transit decision. Technology is also enhancing payment options, with smartcards that enable riders to cross multiple transit lines and platforms while using only one self-reloading payment system that is honored by all of them. “On the operational side, technology is helping to make transit more efficient and therefore more attractive for TOD. With transit-preferential traffic signals and lane-preemption technology, bus headways are being reduced. The same is true for light rail. And transit agencies and larger umbrella transportation entities are also providing unified, comprehensive Web site–based information for users. By connecting to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, agencies are reaching users more profoundly and effectively, making transit even more appealing. In turn, that amplifies the ultimate value of TOD.” The Hub is the economic, cultural, technological, educational, and medical capital of New England. But

it didn’t get that way by accident, and it won’t stay that way by accident. Like Boston’s world-class educational infrastructure, transit-oriented development doesn’t just enhance the city; it helps define it. While TOD has been unofficially practiced in Boston for nearly 400 years, several factors have combined in the last quarter century to make TOD an explicit model for the future growth of the city and region. It may well be that cows had laid out Boston, just as Emerson suggested. But through TOD, Boston has managed – more than all but a handful of American cities – to build and now rebuild a downtown core and a series of neighborhoods where density, vitality, mixed uses, and walkability prevail. Alden S. Raine is the national practice leader in transit-oriented development for AECOM Transportation, and was formerly the executive director of the Massachusetts Port Authority from 1991 to 1993. He also served as Massachusetts’ director of economic development under Governor Michael Dukakis from 1983 to 1990.