Mar. 23, 2011 - Issue #805 : Urban Transportation

Five minutes to work

Transit is the key to urban redevelopment

A five-minute walk has become the new meausuring stick in urban planning. While cities have been designed around the convenience of the car for the last 50 years, a dramatic change is starting to manifest. Instead of building outward, urban planners are looking to build up and around existing neighbourhoods.

"It's a reflection of the times," says Erik Backstrom, a senior planner with the City of Edmonton. Working with transit-oriented development in communities across Edmonton, Backstrom is just one of the city planners working to implement a new focus on walkable communities centred around transit.  Backstrom has been a planner with the city for over 12 years and since that time has witnessed a transition in thinking.

"It's definitely changed. There's much more emphasis on walkability and provision of bike facilities and the importance of transit," says Backstrom. "A lot of it has to do with demographics and energy. Fifty years ago there was a baby boom and energy was fairly cheap. Now the energy situation is a lot different and the demographics are different."

Like a lot of urban planners, Backstrom questions the logic of continuing to build outward, focusing on suburban bungalows now that gas is expensive and family sizes are shrinking. As these conditions have changed, urban planners have returned to a method of planning around urban centres focused on transit.

Transit-oriented development is in no way new. It was first implemented around transit nodes when subway and street cars were built in the 1800s. Today, planners look at creating walkable neighbourhoods designed around 800 metres of a transit station—that five- to 10-minute walk.
"When a city is growing, there have to be decisions about where development is going to go," says Backstrom, adding that Edmonton has made the decision to develop mature areas. "We do want to run the LRT through areas where there is potential for intensification over time. There should be a mix of land uses, a large site, prime for redevelopment because of age or size and areas that already have infrastructure and amenties to support putting more people there."

This refocusing on transit and centralized development has taken time. In 2007 the Federation of Canadian Municipalities prepared a report for the federal government which stated that the cost of transportation was unlikely to be met through the funding of road expansion. The FCM called on the federal government to fund public transit for $2 billion a year, simply to maintain ridership levels and resources. This paled in comparison to the $123 billion infrastructure deficit cities were facing in all service and infrastructure areas. That year, the federal government made a four-year commitment to share federal gas tax revenue and in 2008 the federal budget revealed $500 million for transit development. Nowhere near the $2 billion CUTA estimated needed to be spent, but a marginal improvement, and recognition that federal transit funding needed to exist—a dramatic change from 10 years earlier when Canada was the only G7 country that did not have a national strategy or funding structure for transit.

Aware of this infrastructure crisis and the growing inability to fund transit, the City of Edmonton recognized the need to refocus infrastructure development. In 2004 the city approved the idea of transit-oriented development in its Smart Choices design process. Since that time the greatest new planning development has been focused on choice. "We want to provide choices to people so they can make decisions attractive to them," Backstrom explains.

Chris Wagner, a resident in Parkdale and facilities director with the Parkdale Cromdale Community League believes  in intensification. "It's important in a city like Edmonton that we should be looking at ways to densify around transit nodes and building in areas that are already serviced and close to existing infrastructure to bring the cost of these developments under control."
Wagner made the choice to live in an inner-city neighbourhood because he tired of running up over 80 000 km of commute while working between Edmonton and Red Deer: "I bought my house in Parkdale because it is a developed, inner-city neighbourhood and [because of] its proximity to transit."

Wagner is also concerned about maintaining the vibrancy of the community as projects are developed. "We don't want to just see projects put up because there's an economy for it," he says. "We want to ensure whatever they're planning around the station respects the existing neighbourhood and the walkability and makes it a more vibrant, inner-city neighbourhood."
Wagner and his community league have a lot of work ahead of them to ensure this vision is developed along with the transit line. The Parkdale and Cromdale communities are about to see a dramatic influx of development: the Stadium LRT station has been in redevelopment since 2009 when a community profile was developed around the principles of transit-oriented design.
Stadium station is one of the first in the city to undergo a full transit-oriented development plan, even before the city has fully approved transit-oriented guidelines. Backstrom emphasizes that development should recognize what already exists in communities, noting, "There's a lot of research into the unique character of the area; it's not something we just come up with a plan on our own."
Wagner is hopeful this is the case, despite some disappointment with current development. "We've had a couple of condo developments in the area in the last little while and while good for density, they're walled off from the rest of the area," says Wagner. "Basically they've created these walled-in condo blocks that offer little in the way of sight lines, they're not esthetically pleasing from a walking standpoint—people are forced to walk across parking lots."

This is the opposite of transit-oriented design, which is meant to draw pedestrians into communities through engaging street level design and interaction—quality lighting, landscaping, and pedestrian destinations. Streets will be built according to a grid system to accommodate pedestrians.
The plan at Stadium station and the surrounding communities is to build straight-grid systems outward for 800 metres from the transit station, while also building complete streets. Urban planning models estimate that if services are accessible and walking is made safe and easy, pedestrians will walk anywhere from one to three kilometres. Wagner would like to see more open concepts and a concern for safety.

"I hope as they move forward, it's not just about buildings but about the area as well," he says. "We want to make sure the development respects the neighbourhood and we can continute to flourish as an inner city neighbourhood."

While transit-oriented concepts and walkability are beginning to be considered in numerous neighbourhood redevelopment plans, Stadium station will be the first to implement a transit-oriented plan, the lessons from which could begin to reshape the city. With over 60 new stations being planned—stretching south to the airport and northwest to St Albert—if the city gets those lessons right, that five-minute walk to work could become a reality for most of the city. V

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