| Land Use and Growth Management |
| From Clouds to Reality: Light Rail and Smart
Growth in Oregon |
| By G. B. Arrington, Portland, Oregon 1-503-274-2298, arrington@pbworld.com
|
| Portland, Oregon, is demonstrating
that light rail linked with land use planning can have a dramatic
positive impact on shaping regional growth. The Westside Light Rail
is the region's most aggressive venture in marrying transportation
and land use. |
|
More than $2.4 billion in new development have been attracted to
Portland, Oregon's "field of dreams." To explain, when referring
to Portland's Westside Light Rail transit project, an article in a
May 1995 issue of Newsweek magazine stated "they are building
transit first, literally in fields, in the hope that development will
follow."
Has the hope been realized? Ridership is at record highs, the rail
system is expanding more than threefold, property values in the corridors
are up and sprawl has been slowed. Portland has used transit as a
vehicle to move people, clean the air, reinvest in its downtown, defer
investment in highways and enhance the community's quality of life.
This marriage of land use and transit is at the center of an unprecedented
experiment designed to reinvent the American dream of a livable community.
PB did the preliminary engineering and final design of the Westside
project.
Westside Light Rail: A
Billion Dollar Development Gamble
When Portland's Eastside light rail transit line was planned, the
decision was to put the train where the riders were. For the Westside
project, it came down to creating a "new transportation corridor"
by following an old railroad right-of-way. The goal was to open up
substantial amounts of land development where rail would be the dominant
influence, not the car. All told, in 1994 there were approximately
1,500 acres of vacant developable land in the vicinity of the planned
Westside stations. The long-term success or failure of the public's
nearly $1 billion investment in the Westside Light Rail project will
be determined in large part by what happens around its 20 stations.
Over the past 20 years detailed station area plans have been completed
for all the land around both the Eastside and Westside MAX (Metropolitan
Area Express) station areas in parallel with engineering and construction
of the rail projects. In both cases, the desire to capture the development
potential presented by light rail resulted in multi-jurisdictional
planning and development programs for each light rail station area
along the two corridors.
| 
Figure 1: The Round at Beaverton Central Station
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New Communities Focused on Light Rail
Stations along the Westside are becoming magnets for new transit-
oriented communities-infill housing projects, suburban transformation
and redevelopment, and entire new urbanist communities carved out
of green fields. Since the decision was made to build the Westside
light rail, more than $500 million in new development has occurred
next to its stations.
Even before the Westside LRT project opened for service in September
1998, new transit oriented communities with nearly 7,000 new residences
were underway next to Westside stations, including the Round at Beaverton
Central Station (Figure 1).
The Westside's Orenco Station (Figure 2) was visited by former Vice
President Al Gore when he came to Portland to open the new Westside
MAX light rail line and to hold his first national livable communities
roundtable. In addition to this attention from the White House, the
National Association of Home Builders awarded the Orenco Station Town
Center project five gold medals, including one for the best master
planned community in America.
Figure 2: Orenco Station Town Center was named "Best
Master Planned Community in America."
|
The $150 million 1,834-home community planned around light rail is
showing that transit oriented development is not only sound public
policy, it can also generate more transit trips and work well in the
marketplace without public subsidy.
Winning
the War with Automobile Trips
Thanks to the region's land use policies, transit in Portland is starting
to do the unthinkable--win the war against automobile dependency.
Ridership on the 18-mile-long project is averaging more than 25,000
a day-nearly double what it was forecast to be at the end of its first
year of operations. More than half of those passengers are new transit
riders in the corridor.
From 1990 to 1999, the growth in transit ridership was 31 percent
faster than the growth in vehicle miles traveled, 75 percent faster
than the growth in service and 143 percent faster than the growth
in population.
Using Transit to
Build the Portland Community
In Portland, there has been a marked return to the city with reinvestment
in neighborhoods and commercial areas. Portland's share of regional
housing has climbed steadily upward from 7.6 percent in 1986 to 18.2
percent in 1998. The Portland story, then, is more about community
building than MAX building. The challenge for the future is to see
if Portland can continue to build on this record of success with transportation
and land use.
The Westside light rail transit project has served as an urban laboratory
for Portland's innovative growth management strategies, which have
been deemed "highly successful" for many reasons:
- Ridership on Portland's bus and MAX light
rail system is at historic highs. As of November 2000, MAX reached
a new 12-month average daily boarding ridership record of 67,400.
Buses accounted for 203,000 weekday boardings.
- No new road capacity has been added to the
downtown area for more than 20 years. Transit provides the transportation
capacity to serve downtown growth; one-third of work trips to
the downtown area are by transit.
- Housing development is occurring where it
is wanted-next to transit and in the inner city.
- The envelope on density and mix of uses has
been pushed. Compared to other western U.S. cities, Portland's
suburban densities next to transit are high. On the Westside LRT,
density for new development is required to be at lease 25 people
per acre.
- The transit zoning in place at the stations
helps to reshape the suburban model with four key components:
minimum densities, parking maximums, limitations on auto dependent
uses, and a design overlay for building orientation and site design
for walkability.
- Many of the suburban stations have constructed
mixed use projects, such as Orenco, Beaverton Creek and The Round
at Beaverton Central, and many stations include green plazas.
There is also a major wetland preservation program that guarantees
a green corridor.
Perhaps the most important point is that transit oriented development
is occurring in a manner that helps to leverage each community's vision
for how it wants to grow. The strategy is not about transit, but transit
is a beneficiary in terms of ridership and because transit is seen
as a tool for helping the Portland region grow smart.
The Metro 2040 Growth Concept was designed around transit, making
it the framework for organizing new growth. This legally binding plan
calls for 60 percent of new jobs and 40 percent of new households
to be within walking distance of high quality transit. Moving 2040
out of the clouds and onto the ground depends on the transit land
use connection. [Ed note: For additional information on the Metro
2040 Growth Concept, see "Managing
the Land Use Impacts of the Sunrise Freeway" by Katherine
Still.]
A New Genetic Code for America's
Cities
Portland is a reminder that planning and civic stewardship can make
a positive difference in people's lives and that traffic jams and
sprawling outward are not the enviable hallmarks of how our cities
grow.
For America's cities, Portland's experience provides a model of a
vibrant compact city that others can learn from. The two-decade-long
marriage of transit and land use has paid large rewards. |
|
| G. B. Arrington is the Land Use Program Manager
for the Land Use Resource Center and is a national resource for transit
oriented development. He was the moderator at Al Gore's national livable
communities roundtable. Additional information on his background appears
on bottom of "Land
Use and New Starts: A National Assessment". |
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