Site Specific Context Issues - Transit Oriented Development - Part 2

Transcript summary — log in to access this content in full.

I was doing a project recently where we came across one that was well over two, I think it was 2.5 in certain locations and 2.75 in other locations, it was kind of a dense suburb, and so that's a lot of parking, and that's a big requirement of parking and there's a fair amount of cost in that, there's a lot of driveways and civil engineering and all the water retention issues that come with that, plus you just have to have that much space, either on the land as open parking, or you're lifting up the building and building the first couple of floors with these parking decks, which has caused a lot of people to be sort of unhappy with a lot of the recent city developments, in that, if you're walking by a building where the first three floors or two floors are parking decks, that means there's very little to look at, there's not windows, there's not stuff happening, you know, there's not a lobby that you can look into, or retail on the street 'cause that's taken up by this parking, and so part of the push for transit oriented design is about encouraging transit, part of it is about getting people out of their cars, but another part is this idea, well if we can get rid of the parking garage type mentality, not only does that mean that people are actually taking the transit, but it means that we're not looking at the cars all the time, and that we can actually have retail and things like that in these denser locations, we can kind of encourage these other types of uses in these locations where we want to have a lot of pedestrians, because you know we want people walking to and from the transit. So having a zoning official say, yeah alright typically, let's say is one space per car, you're allowed to build, I mean one space per unit, you're allowed to build 30 units of housing, that means you'd have to have a 30 unit parking garage, but because you're within the 600 foot line to this metro, we're gonna say you don't have to have any parking. So that means suddenly you're able to build 30 units, and not pay for any of the parking costs.

Log in to access files