an older but interesting article if u missed it
Greasing the wheels at transit stations
FRANCES BULA
With 150,000 people coming and going each day on trains and buses, the intersection of Broadway Avenue and Commercial Drive is Vancouver's busiest public transportation hub.
But this urban crossroads, where two commuter rail lines and an express bus line intersect on the city's east side, is serviced by little more than a few low-rise commercial buildings filled with fast-food outlets, banks and a drug store.
According to the latest trend in city planning, this vibrant hub should be exploding with “transit-oriented development” – tall buildings filled with shops, offices and apartments. The theory is that if you put dense development near transit, especially rail stations, you'll have people living, working, shopping and travelling at maximum efficiency.
That Commercial and Broadway isn't a model of transit-oriented development illuminates the tough track such ideas face in Canadian cities. Still, Toronto and Vancouver are working hard to encourage higher densities around new and future transit lines.
“Building mixed-used developments next to transit is the one area of development where we have common ground between the city, developers and the community,” says John Conicella, vice-president of development strategy at Wesgroup Properties. “But the challenge the three groups have is that change is always the most difficult thing.”
Wesgroup just built a four-storey health clinic at the Broadway and Commercial intersection. While it's the tallest building there, it's far shorter than what Mr. Conicella wanted to build. However, he said a denser development would have required a rezoning and another four to five years of waiting for approval – even though all sides thought density was a good idea.
This zoning mismatch is just one of the many barriers to dense development around transit stations. Transit lines in Vancouver are attracting more overall density, says city senior planner Chris DeMarco, but it's uneven – and even irrational. Development sometimes blossoms in quiet, almost suburban areas and limps along at the high-volume traffic hubs.
In Vancouver, while the Broadway and Commercial section has stagnated, other stations in more suburban areas have experienced population growth rates of 50 to 100 per cent. In New Westminster, for instance, a small municipality east of Vancouver on the Fraser River, large projects are being planned around two stations.
This counterintuitive pattern carries over to Toronto, where subway stations along the wildly busy and decaying Bloor-Danforth line are mostly surrounded by sleepy neighbourhoods or, at most, low-rise buildings with motley corner stores and perhaps a shawarma shop.
Travel north to the suburbs on the Yonge-University-Spadina line, however, and you find the once-suburban main street near North York station has transformed into a canyon of towers with 20,000 apartments and 12,000 employees in the vicinity.
Why the difference? Developers blame the city and development-resistant residents.
City planners agree. That's why Vancouver pushed to make dense development easier along the newly built Canada Line rail link, with buildings of four to eight stories permitted between stations, and up to 12 stories at stations.
“If there isn't clarity around what's allowed, developers are quite properly holding off because they don't know how much to pay for land,” says Brent Toderian, director of planning for Vancouver.
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on...eels-at-transit-stations/article2040240/
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