Accessibility planning

In the Netherlands, it is a way of linking land use to extant infrastructure in a more direct manner than is typical of most jurisdictions in the U.S. All uses are rated for the amount of transportation demand they produce. And all sites are rated for the presence of transportation infrastructure. Uses are directed to sites where transportation demand can be accommodated.

It appears that if growth management in Florida has some similarities. The business section of the Florida Times-Union lists the way sites-proposed projects are permitted in a manner that seems very different from DC's come as they go "matter of right" system which treats all uses as equal within a use zone without paying any attention to the transportation issue. From the "Pipeline" feature:

Informal concurrency: reports whether property can support a project with available infrastructure like roads, drainage and affordable housing.

Conditional capacity availability: Temporarily reserves infrastructure capacity for proposed development on a first-come first-served basis.

Concurrency reservation certificate: issued to developers for projects that will not reduce city's adopted level of service standard for surrounding infrastructure.

Jacksonville Planning and Development Department review: preliminary review of large development proposals, including buildings larger than 40,000 s.f., schoos, housing subdivisions, apartments and condominiums.

I mention this because of article in the Sunday Post about the impact of military base relocation on the various counties in the region. For the most part, the BRAC process removed military installations from locations of high quality transit-based infrastructure to locations with limited transit access. This induces sprawl in a number of ways, including pushing demand for transit service to farther and farther locations where providing service is more expensive and less productive and inefficient. See "A Costly Shuffle." From the article:

Heralded as an economic boon, the Pentagon's base realignment plan will be an expensive game of musical chairs for the Washington region, with more than 90 percent of the region's 30,000 new military jobs coming from somewhere else around the Capital Beltway.

Political leaders, especially in Maryland, rejoiced two years ago when the Pentagon recommended consolidating thousands of military and civilian jobs at the region's bases. Now those leaders, concerned about strain on an already stressed road network, are scrambling to come up with billions of dollars in road and other infrastructure improvements needed for the job shifts coming in 2011.

The seeming savings for the federal government are based on offloading infrastructure costs to state and local governments. Perhaps the overall costs are greater than they would be if the agency/unit hadn't been moved in the first place.

(I wrote about this a couple years ago.)