Access planning for transit stations: Europe

I just wrote about transit station access wrt Greater Tysons ("Tysons (Corner) 10 Years after the plan to make it more walkable: the necessity of implementation mechanisms") just a few days ago, and mentioned how the Regional Plan Association report Urban Design Manhattan influenced me in terms of thinking about access to stations in terms of both horizontal and vertical dimensions in a more systematic way.

Delft

ArchDaily has a piece, "Tunnel Vision: Europe's New Urban Pathways and Metro Stations," about recent access improvement initiatives in Amsterdam, Delft (Netherlands), Budapest, Rotterdam, and Zurich.

It's more focused on underground-specific linkages and monumental architecture rather than a systematic approach to developing access improvements.  But the images are still pretty cool.

Oh, another is Bicycle Dutch mentioned the opening of a new massive bicycle parking garage at a Netherlands train station ("A huge new bicycle parking garage in The Hague"). It has space for 700 bike share bikes, and 7,000 parking slots.

And there is an ad on the Washington City Paper website about public comments for the Washington Union Station Expansion Project (I couldn't seem to find the closing date), and I expect that my comments from a few years ago didn't go anywhere.

In those comments I stressed reconfiguring access on the front facing plaza, to the extent possible shifting the traffic underground, creating world class bicycle support programs, and adding visitor and museum functions.

I made the point that since Union Station is the only train station in the US owned by the Federal Railroad Administration/US Department of Transportation, they should aim to make it a best practice demonstration station for the rest of the country.

The concepts about visitor and museum functions build off my comments on the State Rail Plan and the entry calling for the creation of a heritage streetcar system (modeled after San Francisco) serving the National Mall, from staging points at Union Station, Georgetown, and Arlington County (Arlington Cemetery, the Iwo Jima Memorial, and Rosslyn).

It's unfortunate that planning-wise the US doesn't seem to have done a good job in terms of codifying best practice guidance, and working it into new projects going forward.

Past blog entries on station planning include:

-- "Transit, stations, and placemaking: stations as entrypoints into neighborhoods," 2013
-- "Transit stations as an element of civic architecture/commerce as an engine of urbanism," 2016 (this entry is more important for the comments, where I put in new information as I come across it)
-- "Revisiting creating Public Improvement Districts in transit station catchment areas," 2020, which updates slightly the original piece from 2016
-- "Transportation Infrastructure and Civic Architecture #3: Rhode Island Avenue Pedestrian Bridge to the Metrorail station," 2016
-- "Takoma Langley Crossroads Transit Center: a critical evaluation," 2016
-- "Updating my review of the Silver Spring Transit Center: a few things I missed in 2015," 2018

Plus I have a partially written series about re-thinking railroad passenger service planning and marketing in the US, which I guess I should get back to.

It was partially inspired by an article about the initiatives at Los Angeles Union Station ("At 80, Union Station tries to reinvent itself for a rail future," Los Angeles Times) along with programming on NHK World about transit service in Japan, the 150th anniversary of the Golden Spike last year, etc.

Los Angeles Union Station is very pretty, but because it's not in a thriving part of Los Angeles, the station lacks the kinds of ancillary functions in a station like retail and food, which tend to be amazing in main train stations in Europe because they serve so many people (for example, the Essen train station has a Lidl Supermarket, among other retail; the Hamburg station has an amazing array of retail and food options, etc.).  There is a smattering.