When we build next to transit, we often call this transit-oriented development. 

What’s interesting about this moniker is that it implies we’re doing something a little special — something out of the ordinary. And I guess that makes sense because, in many cities, it is often out of the ordinary. 

That’s why you don’t hear people at real estate conferences saying, “check out this new cutting edge car-oriented development that our firm is developing.” That doesn’t need to be specified.

But at the end of the day, I’m not sure how special transit-oriented development really is; it’s basically just urban development. Meaning, you put density on top of and next to transit stations and then more people take transit. That’s how this works.

On that note, here is an interesting study from the School of Cities that looked at Toronto’s transit network and how the populations around each station have changed (or not changed) between 1996 and 2021 (census data). 

If you look at the various transit lines, you’ll see that, in some cases, like downtown, we have added a lot of new transit-oriented development. This is good. Populations increased. 

But in many/most other cases, populations remained flat; or worse, they declined. This is a serious problem, and it shows how land use restrictions are forcing us to underutilize our existing transit assets.

Maybe what we need to do is stop thinking about transit-oriented development as something special, and instead remind ourselves that this is standard operating procedure. It’s just what you do next to transit.

Thanks to Sam Kulendran for sharing the above study with me.