The Transport Politic has an excellent post on the debate over the plan to build Honolulu’s proposed light rail system elevated through downtown, as opposed to at the surface as a group of architects wants.
Everyone is prone to reduce the complexity of urbanism to a problem solvable by their own profession, and risks being dismissive of the expertise of other professions’ points of view. (See here, for example.) When a group of architects proposes that a major new transit investment should be made slower and more expensive to operate in order to foster a better streetscape, as is happening in Honolulu, one hopes that they have thought through the urbanist consequences of all the people who’ll be in cars instead of on transit because the transit is too slow, infrequent, and unreliable. Let me clarify each of those words:
One of the problems with discussions of Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) is that the term sounds much too specialized. We hear talk of TODs as a special class of developments with special requirements and possibilities, and perhaps requiring special expertise. We often hear that a certain development is or isn’t aTOD, as though transit-orientation were not — as it obviously is — a matter of degree.