Developing a multi-criteria prioritization tool to catalyze TOD on publicly owned land areas

Public agencies can take a leading role in catalyzing TOD by making land available to developers (selling or leasing land, potentially below market prices). In particular, park-and-ride areas that are publicly owned can be leveraged to support TOD uses, such as affordable housing, office space, small businesses, and mixed-use buildings given their convenient access to transit systems and often large land areas. However, few previous studies have discussed the use of publicly owned park-and-rides, which are an important component of publicly owned land, as a catalyst for TOD. To fill the gap in the literature and effectively support TOD planning, this research developed a multi-criteria prioritization tool to identify the most promising locations for TOD and tested it at three park-and-ride sites owned by the Washington State Department of Transportation. The tool was developed through the Delphi process, which is an effective and inexpensive approach to evaluate relevant indicators by synthesizing the opinions of experts from various backgrounds. Five categories with a total of 14 TOD indicators, including transit supportive land-use zoning, job accessibility, land price, land-use mix, and household income, were selected as measures of TOD suitability. The importance of these indicators varied with three different TOD scenarios: (1) emphasis on affordable housing, (2) emphasis on market-rate housing, and (3) emphasis on mixed-use development. Using the calculated suitability scores, this tool can prioritize potential TOD sites for further review.