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Rapid transit and suburban residential land use

1978; Eno Foundation for Transportation; Volume: 32; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

0041-0713

D J Dingemans,

Transportation Planning and Optimization

This article discusses how, when the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system was first designed for the San Francisco Bay region of California, one of its principal goals was to effect a restructuring of the suburbs served by the transit lines. The BART planners hoped that intense commercial and land uses would cluster in pedestrian-oriented districts around the stations. As a result of this subcentering, a more efficient, attractive and nucleated suburban form was to emerge-an ideal form that was to be an alternative to what many perceived as formless sprawl. Now that the BART system is in operation, are the location patterns evolving in accordance with the desired new form? The research reported in this article examined the location pattern of one type of housing-the suburban townhouse-in the vicinity of the BART main suburban line through central Contra Costa County. The distribution of townhouses has shown that the desired result has not yet been achieved. Only a small share of the many new townhouses constructed since BART were clustered near the stations, and access to BART does not appear to have been the dominant influence on the townhouse location process. In fact, urban sprawl rather than residential best describes the existing townhouse pattern. Strong, direct controls over land-use assignment process would probably be necessary in the future to stimulate subcentering along the BART line.