The Oil Drum

Transit Oriented Development or "Smart Growth" is often cited as one of the potential solutions to dealing with peak oil by reducing suburban sprawl and creating more usage of mass transit and walkable communities. The idea generally is to promote development near existing transit hubs or along transit corridors.

According to TransitOrientedDevelopment.org, the components of TOD are:

-Walkable design with pedestrian as the highest priority
-Train station as prominent feature of town center
-A regional node containing a mixture of uses in close proximity including office, residential, retail, and civic uses
-High density, high-quality development within 10-minute walk circle surrounding train station
-Collector support transit systems including trolleys, streetcars, light rail, and buses, etc
-Designed to include the easy use of bicycles, scooters, and rollerblades as daily support transportation systems
-Reduced and managed parking inside 10-minute walk circle around town center / train station

There's a lot of talk about promoting transit oriented development (the other TOD) in theory, but how much is actually happening around the US?

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin's Bring New Orleans Back Commission has released a master plan for the rebuilding of the city (Powerpoint, PDF courtesy of NPR). Most of the news coverage of the plan focuses on the controversial process that determines which neighborhoods will be rebuilt. But the plan also embraces transit-oriented development and other new urbanist concepts.

I've excerpted some of the key slides and figures below the fold. Do their ideas have merit? Will they ever get implemented?