Transportation demand management and the location of significant facilities

The most basic principle of transportation demand management is that you situate facilities in places that possess or have the potential to be served by multi-modal transportation options. In our region, not owning a car and not liking to wait a long time getting out of a parking lot, I never go to concerts held at the Nissan Pavillion, in Prince William County, Virginia, about 40 miles from Washington, DC. It's just too big a pain in the butt.

The Dutch form of accessibility planning requires that all uses be rated for their transportation demand load and all places be rated for their supply of transportation infrastructure. Zoning directs uses to the places where transportation demand and transportation supply are in rough equilibrium, or to the places where transportation demand is best met.

For example, in DC's zoning laws, churches and schools are matter of right uses in a zone, regardless of location, without any attention paid to whether or not the sites are well-served by transit.

The original intent was to locate what became the Washington Nationals Stadium at New York and Florida Avenues, abutting what is now the New York Avenue Metro Station, and in close proximity to Union Station, which has local railroad passenger services to Virginia and Maryland.
Instead, the stadium was relocated to the Anacostia Waterfront, in order to jumpstart development plans for that area of southeast DC.

The original location would have had much better transit connections than the current location.

Still, it's not an issue only with DC. Part of building a new Yankee Stadium involved the construction of a railroad station immediately serving the station. It cost $91 million. See "Train direct to Yankee Stadium hits a home run with fans," from the New Haven Register. The station is on the Hudson Line, where it will serve as a local station, and service on that line, as well as the Harlem and New Haven lines will be provided on game days.

Camden Yards baseball stadium and the M&T Bank football stadium in Baltimore are reasonably accessible to the MARC train station at Camden Yards (as well as to light rail), except that the region doesn't have a well integrated railroad passenger travel network, and so service tends to not be available--especially from that station, which has limited service hours--when games are played.

From "Metro-North Station Opens at Yankee Stadium" in the NYT City Room blog:

The station connects the Yankees’ new ballpark to Grand Central Terminal in 15 minutes and links the area to places as far north as New Haven, Conn., and Poughkeepsie and Southeast, N.Y. It also has a 450-foot pedestrian bridge that leads from the stadium to the parks that are being built on the Harlem River waterfront.

It cost $91 million — $39 million financed by the city and the rest by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — and it was concluded in exactly two years, in spite of the fact that it was built over active railroad tracks, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said.

“It’s another alternative to taking the subway here,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “And the more alternatives you give, the fewer people will drive.”

Reducing traffic in an area that has one of the city’s highest asthma rates is one of the station’s main goals. Transportation authority officials estimate that on game days alone, 10,000 people will pass through the station, having forgone their cars for a train ride. On other days, the expectation is that 5,000 to 10,000 people on average will take the train.

Photo of the Yankee Stadium - E. 153rd Street Station under construction.