Making the Most of Transit: Density, Employment Growth, and Ridership around New Stations

Abstract

In 2008 California adopted Senate Bill (SB) 375, which requires the integration of land use and transportation planning to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from vehicle miles traveled (VMT). A prime example of such activities is transit-oriented development (TOD), the targeting of residential, commercial, or mixed-used development to areas around transit stations. This paper assesses how well California has achieved the integration of land use and transportation planning by looking at employment growth around new transit stations from 1996 to 2006. Three facts, presented in the paper, underscore the importance of locating transit near jobs and encouraging job growth near transit: � Transit ridership depends on proximity to transit, especially workplace proximity. � Employment density is more strongly associated with transit ridership than residential density is. � In California, residential density is higher than the national average and rising, but employment density is lower than the national average and falling. Because employment patterns are at least as important for transit ridership as residential patterns are, and because employment patterns and commercial land use have received much less emphasis in policy work and the research literature, the analysis in this paper focuses on employment growth. Looking across the 200-plus transit stations that opened in California from 1992 to 2006, we find that these

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