Transit Oriented Development Efforts Should Leverage CT's Walkable Cities
/by Dr. Rosalie Singerman Ray
Faced with superstorms and economic headwinds, Connecticut planners have focused on resiliency over the past decade. Building transit-oriented development (TOD) along Connecticut’s new and existing transit infrastructure provides an opportunity to structure economic growth around “resilient corridors,” as studies have shown that walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods are more resilient to economic shock and better for the planet.
Yet the data show that many of Connecticut’s existing station areas prioritize parking over walkability, and a failure to develop concrete metrics for TOD has deprioritized investing in Connecticut’s existing walkable cities. In addition, the state’s strongest transit corridor, the New Haven Metro North line, is significantly threatened by sea level rise.
With a grant from the Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaptation (CIRCA), I and two other researchers at the University of Connecticut analyzed the station areas along Metro North’s New Haven line, assessing both their walkability and their vulnerability to sea level rise.
“...the data show that many of Connecticut’s existing station areas prioritize parking over walkability, and a failure to develop concrete metrics for TOD has deprioritized investing in Connecticut’s existing walkable cities. ”
For walkability, we used three quantitative metrics — intersection density, link-node ratio, and the number of “city connector” roads” within the station area — as well as a qualitative assessment of the walking environment using Google Maps to assess the presence of crosswalks, sidewalks, and perceived speed. Areas with at least 100 intersections per square mile are considered walkable, while link-node ratios over 1.4 are well-connected.
Our assessment of city connector roads began with state-owned arterials, but also includes any multi-lane roadway (e.g. West Ave in Norwalk) that extends beyond the station area. The city connector metric shows how easy it is to access the station area from other places in the city.
Connecticut’s best transit line has only six walkable, well-connected stations: State Street, Union Station, South Norwalk, Milford, Stamford, and Bridgeport. With the exception of Milford, these serve coastal cities and are the areas to focus on for resilient development. A second tier of towns — both Fairfield stations, Darien, Southport, Stratford, East Norwalk, and Noroton Heights — could become walkable with focused investment, assuming such investment makes sense given sea level rise.
To take this data-driven approach, thresholds like 100 intersections/ sq. mi. or a link-node ratio of greater than 1.4 should be used to put numbers to the “transit-supportive standards for land uses, built environment densities and walkable environments” currently included in the state definition of TOD (Sec. 13b-79o), and to guide towns in prioritizing how to improve the street network near their stations.
Having identified the walkable station areas, we then used CIRCA’s 1% annual exceedance probability (AEP) storm surge flood shapefile for 2050 to assess vulnerability to sea level rise. This shapefile shows the areas that would likely be flooded by a 100-year storm in 2050, when CIRCA estimates that the sea level along the Connecticut coast will rise approximately 20 inches. We overlaid this shapefile on town parcel layers and the Metro North rail shapefile, identifying vulnerable parcels and stretches of rail line. We also used the TOD plans for the 14 stations that had them to specifically identify whether parcels identified for TOD would be affected.
The southern part of the downtown Fairfield and Stamford station areas are the most impacted TOD zones, followed by Bridgeport, South Norwalk, Stratford, West Haven, and State Street. There are also 3.27 miles of potentially flooded track, including the main line and a piece of the Danbury line.
Of those sections, the largest are between Union Station and State Street in New Haven, the Danbury Branch in Norwalk, Bridgeport station, and the viaducts crossing the Pequonnock River in Bridgeport, a stretch between Westport and Green’s Farms along the Sherwood Millpond, and between Fairfield and Fairfield Metro. The track between Union Station and State Street has experienced flooding in the past, and depth projections estimate flooding of more than six feet on that stretch.
However, the model does not take the Stamford Hurricane Barrier into account, nor the levee project that New Haven is developing with the Army Corps of Engineers, so in these cities in particular these assessments represent a worst-case scenario.
“Our findings show that resilient corridors in Connecticut should start with the cities.”
Our findings show that resilient corridors in Connecticut should start with the cities. The State should adopt meaningful metrics like intersection density and link-node ratio for its planning and implementation grants. Moreover, transit funding for both bus and rail should be targeted to walkable areas and used as incentives to increase walkability. These shifts will help strengthen Connecticut’s cities and bolster their economic engines.
At the same time, the three-plus miles of vulnerable track and bridges should be assessed in depth as part of Connecticut DOT’s ongoing resiliency assessment. From a systemic perspective, weakness anywhere along the line threatens the success of TOD in every town.
Dr. Rosalie Singerman is Assistant Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. She researched factors affecting Transit Oriented Development in Connecticut as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate with the University of Connecticut’s Transportation Technology and Society Research Group, led by Dr. Carol Atkinson-Palombo and Dr. Norman Garrick. Singerman attended Smith College and UCLA and received her PhD from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation, and Planning.
This article first appeared in the Winter 2022 issue of Connecticut Planning, a publication of the Connecticut Chapter of the American Planning Association.
