"Pedestrial realms" to be considered by Council

The Chron's Mike Snyder has the exciting details:

The city’s urban transit corridors ordinance, which it began developing in June 2006, is expected to be considered by the City Council in July. It would offer incentives for developers in six light rail corridors to include a 15-foot “pedestrian realm” with broad, unobstructed sidewalks and other features intended to create appealing, walkable environments.

The new development created under this ordinance will become part of the daily lives of more than 160,000 people the Metropolitan Transit Authority expects to be riding its trains by 2030. Within the next five years, the agency plans to add five new rail lines to the Main Street line it opened on Jan. 1, 2004.

The impact of the ordinance will depend on developers’ willingness to comply with its mostly voluntary standards. Those who agree to create the pedestrian zone will automatically be exempt from rules requiring buildings to be set back a specified distance from the street, giving them more space to build revenue-generating offices, homes or shops.

The ordinance is more limited than steps recommended by the city’s consultants and by the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit real estate organization, to promote transit-oriented development.

Officials in the city planning department, which drafted the ordinance in consultation with community leaders, real estate professionals and the general public, described it as a first step toward changing a development culture that’s long been focused on the automobile rather than on trains or pedestrians.

Imagine where we'd be today if our culture had been pedestrian/mass transit-focused instead of automobile-focused for the past 100 years. But hey, by 2030 METRO expects 160,000 people to be riding the Danger Trains (and you know how good METRO is with projections), so this seems well worth the effort, right?

Posted by Anne Linehan @ 06/04/09 04:50 AM | Print |

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