Development Patterns

This report looks at the potential impacts autonomous vehicle deployment could have on parking demand and how that might impact urban development. The study focused on three distinct areas of San Francisco. The research found that, contrary to headlines about AV impacts on parking, achieving large reductions in parking demand based on AV deployment will not be easy. To achieve significant parking reductions, AVs would need to be shared (not privately owned), pooled (riders willing to pick up other passengers along the way), have widespread geographic deployment (across entire metropolitan areas), and would need to complement high-capacity transit. Without all or most of these factors, parking demand may only by marginally impacted by AV deployment. The study also found that if parking demand could be reduced, different areas of the city would see quite different results. While many areas in San Francisco would see minimal development impacts as parking is not currently a significant driver or limiter of development, more auto-dominated areas could see substantial impacts if parking demand could be reduced by more than 40%. This raises interesting questions of how these levels of parking demand reduction might impact more auto-dominated and suburban areas throughout the country. This research was funded by Waymo.

Jarrett Walker, author of "Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich our Communities and Lives," writes about the costs and benefits of microtransit on his blog, "Human Transit". Walker is skeptical of Microtransit. He argues that it is spacially, economically, and fiscally inefficient and should only be used in very rare and specific cases.

Urbanism Next Center Director and Professor Nico Larco testified during the congressional hearing, "The Road Ahead for Automated Vehicles." Professor Larco highlighted the work of Urbanism Next and the potential cascading impacts of autonomous vehicles.

Townscaper is an experimental community simulation and town-building game where the user can draw a series of buildings to obtain a town and represent urban spaces.

"In this paper we put together a list of the basic instincts that drive and contain travelers' behavior, showing how they mesh with technological progress and economic constraints."

"This memorandum outlines the process, objectives, and findings of an analysis the City of Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS) engaged Economic & Planning Systems (EPS) to undertake regarding whether proposed density bonuses would create sufficient additional residual land value to compensate for newly-established regulatory requirements in Multi-Dwelling Unit zone districts."

This article questions the effects of parking minimums and policies on residential renters in the U.S. by analyzing a sample of rental housing units from the 2011 American Housing Survey.

Parking drives up the cost of development and puts the burden on tenants who purchase or rent housing in these developments. Most zoning codes and practices require generous parking supply, and tenants are forced to pay for parking regardless of if they are using it. This reduces housing affordability which has a disproportionate effect on lower-income households.

Ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft are reducing the need for parking, which negatively affects parking companies but is otherwise beneficial for cities.

This article studies the relationship between gasoline consumption and urban design patterns by comparing 32 principal cities from around the world. The purpose is to evaluate physical planning policies for conserving transportation energy in urban areas.

This report gives a detailed analysis of the United States’ housing market, demographic drivers, homeownership, rental housing, and housing challenges for 2019.

This article examines the relationship between urban form and vehicle miles travelled, especially as it relates to last mile goods delivery and greenhouse gas emissions.

This article examines bicyclists’ travel behavior for transportation and for recreational purposes based on preferences, physical and social environmental factors, and perceived safety.

This report discusses 761 walkable urban places in the United States' 30 largest metropolitan areas and their impact on social equity and educational attainment, and their economic impact on office, retail, and housing land uses.

There is a growing market for pedestrian- and transit-oreinted development. This article outlines existing literature in order to assess how increased demand for these types of developments is impacting land value. It also includes suggestions for further research on the topic.

The article describes five of Portland, Oregon's neighborhoods and their respective histories, along with the native restaurants and shops that characterize each neighborhood.

This article examines the theoretical heat-energy demand of different types of urban form at a scale of 500 m × 500 m.

The city of Chandler, Arizona is preparing for autonomous vehicles’ impact on parking by allowing developers to provide less parking if they provide accommodations for ride-sharing and autonomous vehicles.

Buffalo has become to first major city to completely remove its outdated minimum parking requirements citywide.

A study of five U.S. cities, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, Des Moines, and Jackson, Wyoming was conducted to analyze how much land and money is being devoted to parking.

This article outlines a case study of Los Angeles parking requirements, studying whether parking requirements impact the amount and type of housing that is developed, particularly in housing developed in old vacant and commercial buildings.

The City of Houston removed its minimum parking requirements for property owners in east downtown and part of Midtown. Developers in those neighborhoods will now be able to decide how much parking is needed for businesses and residences.

This article discusses regulations around land use and why careful implementation is important. The author studied how two areas of Los Angeles near rail stations developed housing under baseline land use regulations and found that developers were most sensitive to density restrictions and parking requirements.

In this book, Donald Shoup reports on the progress cities have made on the principles outlined in book The High Cost of Parking. Remove off-street parking requirements, charge the right prices for on-street parking and use that revenue towards improving public services.

The growth of e-commerce in the past led to a decrease in brick-and-mortar retail presence, but it appears as if the tides are changing in favor of re-investing in the physical retail market. The line between online and physical commerce is beginning to blur, and companies such as Amazon aim to combine their strategies to expand in both markets.

Gas stations around the country have been in declines for the past couple decades due to shifting fuel sources away from gasoline and changing land value in cities.

An increasing number of architects, developers, and engineers are designing new parking garages that can be converted into other uses in the future if needed.

“This research examines office parking at a series of case study sites in suburban Southern California, identifying its impact on travel behavior, development density, development cost, and urban design.”

“Donald Shoup argues that free parking has contributed to auto dependence, rapid urban sprawl, extravagant energy use, and a host of other problems.”

Many developers are trying to keep their malls relevant as traditional big-box retailers announce store closures. This articles highlights five examples of malls around the U.S. that have plans to reinvent themselves as mixed use and experiential destinations.

This article is a literature review of the definition and effects of urban sprawl for the purpose of implementing planning policies that discourage sprawl.

“Parking is expensive. We can break these costs down into two categories. One is the explicit fiscal costs of parking, to the provider and to the public. The other is the implicit opportunity cost of parking, which occupies land that could have been put to another beneficial use, and/or is often built at the expense of another beneficial activity.”

Today, warehouses are transforming into massive “mega-distribution centers” located in increasingly suburban areas. However, the rapid delivery expectations of E-commerce will also perpetuate the need for a network of local, smaller-scale supply points.

Open source simulation platform for supporting planning and analysis of urban development, incorporating the interactions between land use, transportation, the economy, and the environment.

Urban Footprint provides a cloud-based urban planning software built by urban planners and designers who truly understand planning needs. Service includes actionable data, scenario building, and multi-metric analysis.

Open-access scenario planning package that allows users to analyze how their community's current growth pattern and future decisions impacting growth will impact a range of measures from public health, fiscal resiliency and environmental sustainability.

Dino Polo Club Mini Metro and Mini Motorways game is a minimalist metro planning puzzle and road allocation game suited for all ages and knowledge-levels games that make everyday concepts fun and engaging for everyone.

Citilabs offers a number of analytical and visualization products to aid in modeling population movement, scenario planning, and transit operations.

This report categorizes and summarizes efforts that are already underway in cities across the world to rethink curb management, to outline the key takeaways from the one-day workshop that involved city staff from Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, and to identify major research gaps.

Williams Goldhagen draws from recent research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology to demonstrate how people’s experiences of the places they build are central to their well-being, their physical health, their communal and social lives, and even their very sense of themselves. From this foundation, Goldhagen presents a powerful case that societies must use this knowledge to rethink what and how they build: the world needs better-designed, healthier environments that address the complex range of human individual and social needs.

Urban innovations company Sidewalk Labs and the Canadian government announced a partnership Tuesday to develop 750 acres along Toronto’s waterfront into what they envision as a high-tech living laboratory for solving urban problems. It would be the largest urban redevelopment project in North America.

This study presents the emerging trends of Real Estate in 2019, such as firm Profitability prospects, real estate business prospects, housing issue, retail transforms, tax reform, and capital market. It also analyzes the trends for different type of property and different region of US and Canada.

This chapter estimates how minimum parking requirements increase the cost of constructing housing, office buildings, and shopping centers. It also explains proposed legislation to limit how much parking cities can require in transit-rich districts.

The article describes the trend of mall development strategy and how the now model of development is integrated into the new lifestyle and space of community.

This blog talks about how the autonomous vehicles will change the built environment such as street design, parking infrastructure, public space, etc. It also mentions how different modes can be integrated with the change of built environment.

In working with Waterfront Toronto, the public entity that owns the land, to develop Quayside, Sidewalk Labs would reimagine urban life in five dimensions—housing, energy, mobility, social services, and shared public spaces—with an aim to “serve as a model for sustainable neighborhoods” around the world.

"This paper builds on the growing scholarship on neighbourhood-level GHG production by combining emissions calculations from embodied energy, building-operating energy, and transportation energy, examining four variations of residential density."

The storm clouds of sprawl addiction had been gathering for years, but it took the Meltdown and the ensuing Great Recession to make it clear just how damaging that addiction had been to the health of cities across the US and abroad. Sprawl has two really big things going for it, but three even bigger things now going against it which are poised to turn the tide against the pattern of sprawl.

Currently, little planning is being done to prepare for driverless technology. Actors at multiple levels, however, have tools at their disposal to help ensure that new technology does not come at the expense of the nation’s remaining natural habitats. This Article advocates for a shift in paradigm from policies that are merely anti-car to those that are pro-density, and provides suggestions for both cities and suburban areas for how harness the positive aspects of driverless cars while trying to stem the negative. Planning for density regardless of technology will help to ensure that, for the world of the future, there is actually a world.

As we build new developments, are we still short on parking? Parking minimums have created endless hot, asphalt deserts in our developments and now cities are working to reverse these laws.

This commentary discusses about how AVs have impact on the space such as parking and road safety, etc.

Seattle City Council passes in a 7 to 1 vote a plan for large parking reforms including separating parking costs from rent and increasing bike parking requirements.

This report describes a shoppers trip and what the planner may be most interested in about it as well as street design and it's accommodation for all activities that may need to happen throughout the day.

"This paper explores the relationships between transportation, land use and taxation. It investigates how current land tax and regulatory practices affect the amount of land devoted to roads and parking facilities, and how this affects transport patterns. It discusses ways to measure the amount of land devoted to transport facilities, examine how this varies under different circumstances, estimate the value of this resource, evaluate how tax policies and regulations policies treat this land, and analyze whether current practices are optimal in terms of various economic and social objectives."

The main objective of this research project is to provide FDOT with information and guidance on how best to begin to prepare for a future in which AV technology first takes root and then takes over the market. The FSU Research Team is investigating the potential impacts of widespread adoption of AV technology on the transportation network and urban form for four key land use and transportation nodes that are vital to the welfare of the State of Florida: Downtown, Office/Medical/University Center, Urban Arterial, and Transit Neighborhood. To accomplish this, the FSU Research Team engaged one-hundred planners, engineers, industry professionals, and public officials in a facilitated visioning session at the 2015 Florida Automated Vehicle Summit (FAV Summit). During this session the research team gathered input on how AVs will impact our communities and how the built environment will need to adapt to accommodate AVs in the coming decades.

We quantify the importance of early action to tackle urban sprawl. We focus on the long-term nature of infrastructure decisions, specifically local roadways, which can lock in greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come. The location and interconnectedness of local roadways form a near permanent backbone for the future layout of land parcels, buildings, and transportation options. We provide new estimates of the environmental impact of low-connectivity roads, characterized by cul-de-sacs and T-intersections, which we dub street-network sprawl. We find an elasticity of vehicle ownership with respect to street connectivity of –0.15—larger than suggested by previous research. We then apply this estimate to quantify the long-term emissions implications of alternative scenarios for street-network sprawl. On current trends alone, we project vehicle travel and emissions to fall by ∼3.2% over the 2015–2050 period, compared to a scenario where sprawl plateaus at its 1994 peak. Concerted policy efforts to increase street connectivity could more than triple these reductions to ∼8.8% by 2050. Longer-term reductions over the 2050–2100 period are more speculative, but could be more than 50% greater than those achieved by 2050. The longer the timescale over which mitigation efforts are considered, the more important it becomes to address the physical form of the built environment.

"This paper provides a review of scenarios on these issues to date. Although some scenario studies provide useful insights about urban growth and change, very few consider detailed impacts of AVs on urban form, such as the density and mix of functions, the layout of urban development and the accessibility of locations, including the distance to transit."

This paper introduces Metrolinx’s recently released Mobility Hub Guidelines and highlights two key aspects of the document: the importance of classifying the current and planned urban context and transportation function at a mobility hub, and methods to overcome challenges in achieving both transport and placemaking roles.

From ancient Rome to modern Atlanta, the shape of cities has been defined by the technologies that allow commuters to get to work in about 30 minutes.

Concerns over rising fuel prices and greenhouse-gas emissions have prompted research into the influences of built environments on travel, notably vehicle miles traveled (VMT). Accessibility to basic employment has comparatively modest effects, as do size of urbanized area, and rail-transit supplies and usage. Nevertheless, urban planning and city design should be part of any strategic effort to shrink the environmental footprint of the urban transportation sector.

The continued use of minimum parking requirements is likely to encourage automobile use at a time when metropolitan areas are actively seeking to manage congestion and increase transit use, biking, and walking. Widely discussed ways to reform parking policies may be less than effective if planners do not consider the remaining incentives to auto use created by the existing parking infrastructure. Planners should encourage the conversion of existing parking facilities to alternative uses.

"This paper presents a comprehensive discussion of the value capture mechanisms that cities can and do use to help finance their public transport systems. It highlights the most important findings from the literature and adds to it with new insights gained through case studies of public transit finance in six European and American cities. The objective is to inform a lively and productive dialogue on non-fare sources of public transport finance, and ultimately to find the best ways to finance the maintenance and extension of transit service in cities around the world."

This study examines the potential changes in residential location choice in a scenario where shared autonomous vehicles (SAVs) are a popular mode of travel in the Atlanta metropolitan area. This hypothetical study is based on an agent-based simulation approach, which integrates residential location choice models with a SAV simulation model. The coupled model simulates future home location choices given current home location preferences and real estate development patterns. The results indicate that commuters may relocate to neighborhoods with better public schools and more amenities due to reductions in commute costs.

With this paper, RMI hopes to (1) offer cities and other mobility and built environment stakeholders an experimentation toolkit that puts them in a position to more quickly unlock the full potential of new mobility in cities designed to shape and enable it, and (2) engage stakeholders in further codeveloping and exploring a concept for living, flexible, and collaborative experimentation sites we’re calling MOD Cities.

"Here we present a unique long-term (decadal) record of CO2 mole fractions from five sites across Utah’s metropolitan Salt Lake Valley. Four state-of-the-art global-scale emission inventories also have a nonlinear relationship with population density across the city; however, in contrast to our observations, they all have nearly constant emissions over time. Our results indicate that decadal scale changes in urban CO2 emissions are detectable through monitoring networks and constitute a valuable approach to evaluate emission inventories and studies of urban carbon cycles."

Urban Mobility in a Digital Age is a transportation technology strategy designed to build on the success and innovation of the City of Los Angeles and its Department of Transportation (LADOT) as regulator and transportation service provider in a complex and evolving ecosystem of public and private services.

On May 10, 2017, Mayor William Peduto charged 120 National Summit on Design & Urban Mobility delegates with the following challenge: “we must develop and carry-out a new social compact for mobility in cities. Now is the time to address mobility to ensure that we serve and support core community values of equity, inclusiveness, sustainability, and collective advancement. A social compact with shared and autonomous mobility providers ensures that these services do good for communities while these businesses do well in cities.

Retail in the U.S. is going through some hardships. There is too much and the shopping trip is the same each time you go. Millennial's are putting retail into a head spin wanting more, quicker and for better prices with less hassle. For these retailer sot keep up with the wants and needs of it's customer base, they're going to have to make some changes.

"Beyond Mobility is about prioritizing the needs and aspirations of people and the creation of great places. This is as important, if not more important, than expediting movement. A stronger focus on accessibility and place creates better communities, environments, and economies. Rethinking how projects are planned and designed in cities and suburbs needs to occur at multiple geographic scales, from micro-designs (such as parklets), corridors (such as road-diets), and city-regions (such as an urban growth boundary). It can involve both software (a shift in policy) and hardware (a physical transformation). Moving beyond mobility must also be socially inclusive, a significant challenge in light of the price increases that typically result from creating higher quality urban spaces."

This paper examines the suburbanization of warehousing and trucking activity within US metropolitan areas between the 1980s and the present using Gini indices as a measure of concentration. While historical work exists on the relocation of transportation and warehousing activity to suburban locations, there has been little to document the most recent shifts in warehousing and logistics. This research does so via spatial analysis of Economic Census data, finding that while most US metropolitan areas have experienced decentralization in the spatial distribution of freight-related activity, there is also some growth in core counties, indicating that a more complex process is going on than simple suburbanization.

This article looks at how "retailers are honing their distribution center strategy to meet current e-commerce demands.

This article mentions the visible downfall of malls and large stores like Sears and Toys R Us, but it highlights how these stores have impacted individuals and their stories from growing up visiting them.

Between April 18 and May 9, 2014, Davis, Hibbitts & Midghall, Inc. (DHM Research) conducted an online survey of respondents living in Clackamas, Multnomah, Washington and Clark counties about their current and preferred residential and neighborhood preferences. The objective of the survey was to assess general opinions and preferences around housing and neighborhood choices and factors that may influence those choices. Portland State University and Metro developed the questionnaire with input from DHM.

This article discusses the trend of corporate entities moving to downtown areas. The reasons include millennial generation, livability of downtown, industrial shift, active transportation access, etc.

Robotic parking will be an amenity starting in high-end buildings and becoming standard, like radios in cars, predicts local landlord Brian Veit.