Quibbles

Reading: New York Does TOD Right

 "Stuart Lerner, Executive Vice President Infrastructure, Stantec"

Claims that TOD is associated with streetcars. I feel compelled to quibble. I recommend he read 'The Electric Inter-Urban Railways in America". Trolleys and trams are electified versions of the horse-drawn railcars, a competing technology to the 'BetaMax' of cable cars. Trams and trolleys are the first suburban transit, focusing on moving people from all those 'streetcar suburbs' into the central city. Hop on, hop off, low speeds, stops but no real stations. Much more like buses.

TOD, in the sense of Calthorpe's concept from the 'New American Metropolis' of mixed use communities wrapped around a transit station, would be better associated with railways. Specifically with commuter railway suburbs. Today, they don't seem very far from the CBD, 3-5 miles, maybe. (Although wiki says the railway suburbs in Boston reached out to 15 miles). Regardless, too far away from the CBD to commute without railways. They were just independent towns that the railway happened to stop in. Until some clever people realized it was possible to live there, and take the train in every morning, and out every evening. Independent towns, too far away from the CBD to get there by any other mode. And the first commuter railway suburbs were born. People still walk to the train, to station (likely near the 'main' street), because there weren't cars then. Zoning wasn't legal, so you had a mix of uses and density. If I had to name the first TOD, and the first transit system to induce TOD, this would be my suggestion.

Commuter railways aren't rapid transit. You can't steer a train, and stopping one takes a long time. They aren't really suitable to urban rapid transit. I forget the exact order of the first rapid transit systems: IIRC, London (1863) was the first ever, with Boston claiming the first in the US (1897) , followed by New York (1904) and Philadelphia (1907). In any case, the first subways were just steam railways run underground. London went for subway first (during the US Civil War!) because their 'city council' outlawed surface-running roadways within the City of London. (City of London is only  square mile, and they were concerned that the whole city would become one big rail-yard). Also why the railroad stations (St. Pancras, etc) are at the edge of the medieval city. In the US, most cities tried to solve the issue of steam railroads colliding with (and crashing into) people, carts, horses, by building elevated rail. Not sure why Boston went for subway first--I suspect because Boston lacks a grid, and so there aren't any straight roads for an elevated roadway to follow.

I forget what Vuchic suggests is the appropriate spacing for commuter rail (and don't have the books handy) but a sample here suggests an average of 1.7 miles between stations. Not nearly the half-mile radius of rapid transit, but a big contrast to the 5.8 mile average spacing (88 miles, 15 stations) of the UTA FrontRunner. 

To get back to TOD: When Calthrope published the New American Metropolis, using the term 'Transit-Oriented Development', nobody was building heavy rail. Post-war attempts to build heavy rail hadn't really panned out. Money diverted from the bus network meant that their construction had actually reduced transit ridership. 

• Cleveland (1956)
• Bay Area (1972)
• DC Metro (1976)
• Atlanta (1979)
• Miami (1984)
• Los Angeles (1993)

Calthorpe operated in the Bay Area, so by the time NAM came out, the limits of BART were already well established. It cost too much, so too little of it was built. (Check out the Vision networks to see how much unbuilt BART didn't happen). So Calthorpe proposed light rail (and bus) as the intended transit mode for TOD).  Light rail is rapid transit, with an average half-mile spacing. With that vision I get the idea that Calthorpe wasn't just proposing a few lines, but a 'New Urbanism', a transit-centric urbanism. Perhaps something like Christaller's work, centers connected to centers by rail.