Online Opportunities for TOD Learning

We have started to assemble a list of webinars of interest to those working in TOD communities. Check back frequently as we will be expanding the list in the coming weeks.

Active Transportation

The Safe Routes Partnership offers webinars and other resources designed to help communities promote and support walking, bicycling, and safe routes to transit for people of all ages and abilities. Topics include securing funding to support active transportation goals, advancing Complete Streets policies, supporting equitable Vision Zero policies, incorporating active transportation into comprehensive plans, and more.

Safe Routes Partnership Webinars

Photo by Gabriel Santiago on Unsplash
Buses and BRT

Planning Webcast offers weekly webinar from local American Planning Association chapters on a variety of topics, including transportation planning. This webinar from September 2019 discusses recent bus rapid transit Projects in Indianapolis, Richmond, VA, and Los Angeles, plus related TOD projects in Los Angeles.

Bus Rapid Transit: Insight on Project Development and Implementation

Presenters:  Justin Stuehrenberg, PE, Vice President - Planning & Capital Projects, IndyGo - Indianapolis Public Transportation Corporation; Carrie Rose Pace, Director of Communication - Greater Richmond Transit Company; and David Olivo, Senior City Planner - Los Angeles Department of City Planning, Community Planning Division 

Also consider spending 14 minutes with Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia. In this TED talk from 2013, he discussed how "an advanced city is not one where even Althe poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport."

Complete Streets

The National Complete Streets Coalition (NCSC) hosts a monthly webinar series, featuring case studies and examples of best practices from communities nationwide and beyond. The current series focuses on putting policies into practice (see below). As part of this series, the NCSC recently hosted Complete Streets Responses to COVID-19, a webinar led by Emiko Atherton, formerly director of the National Complete Streets Coalition, and featuring a panel of experts working on COVID-19 response.

Complete Streets 301. Putting People First
Protecting User Data and Expanding Mobility for All Communities
Equitable Complete Streets Principles in School Communities
Complete Streets for Healthy Living
Complete Streets Federal Policy Update

Creative Placemaking

The Center for Community Progress offers monthly webinars that support its mission of building a future in which vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties no longer exist.

Trends in Creative Placemaking on Problem Properties
Presenters: Liz Kozub - Associate Director of National Leadership and Education, Center for Community Progress; Rachel Engh - Conductor of Curiosity, Metris Arts Consulting; and Linda Steele, ArtUp

Design Justice

How can Design Justice—an approach to design which is led by marginalized communities and which aims explicitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities—be used in the built environment?

This free course, presented by the Museum of Design in Atlanta, Georgia, provides an overview of the Design Justice movement, and presents case studies, storyboards, tools, and resources that can be used to take action in the field.

Architecture and Urbanism for Justice

Session 1: Intro to Design Justice
Session 2: Designing a Just City
Session 3: Peacemaking & Spaces for Justice
Session 4: Tactical Urbanism + You
Session 5: Indigenous/Native Design

Session 1 Intro to Design Justice
Session 1 Intro to Design Justice
Equitable TOD (eTOD)

In early 2019, the Center for Transit-Oriented Development (CNT) recorded a five-part series on issues affecting equity and affordability in transit-friendly communities. Topics included affordable housing, parking, delivery of social service, new transportation technologies, and the impact of history and culture on eTOD.

CNT: eTOD Webinars

Also of interest are these offerings from the Center for Community Progress:

Myth Busting Shared Equity Homeownership in Weak Market Cities
Presenters: Beth Sorce – Director of Capacity Building, Grounded Solutions Network and India Walton – Executive Director, F.B. Community Land Trust

Strengthening the Middle: Challenges and Strategies for Rebuilding Middle Neighborhoods
Presenter: Alan Mallach, Senior Fellow, Center for Community Progress

Communities at Risk: Understanding the Challenges Facing Middle Neighborhoods
Presenter: Alan Mallach, Senior Fellow, Center for Community Progress

Financing TOD

The TOD Office at Metro Transit (Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN) and Baker Tilly, a municipal financial advisory firm, teamed up to host a webinar entitled Innovative Financing for TOD. Slides for the presentation can be found here:

Also, the World Bank offers a series of self-paced modules designed to explore the basics of TOD corridor planning. This module introduces the topic of TOD financing and explores business models suitable for TOD investment.

Investing in TOD: Transit-Oriented Development at a Corridor Scale

Form-Based Codes

Planetizen, the planning news website, offers an online version of its one-day course on Form-Based Codes. FBC101: ABCs of Form-Based Codes features leading practitioners and innovators in the subject and is the first course in an eight-course track.

Planetizen: FBC101 Online
AICP CM, CNU-A, LA CES (fee)

 

Form-based code rendering example. Credit: Pennoni | Transit Friendly Planning: A Guide for New Jersey Communities
Form-based code rendering example. Credit: Pennoni | Transit Friendly Planning: A Guide for New Jersey Communities
Health

Urban planning and public health share common missions and have an intertwined past. Each field grew out of efforts that began in the 19th century and continued into the 20th century and that aimed to improve the welfare of individuals, families, and communities by creating safe and convenient places. While urban planning and public health became distinct fields, each with its own methods and goals, the two disciplines have increasingly found alignment in purpose. Some of the ways the fields relate can be seen in Active Transportation, or Complete Streets (seen above). The resources linked below explore the interrelationship of urban planning and public health in various other ways.

Making a Plan: Partnerships for Transforming Community Health through City Planning (2013)
CDC’s Community Guide: Improving the Science of Built environment and Public Health for Physical Activity (2015)
Urban Planning, Transportation, and Public Health Collaborations
Joint Development

Click for brochure

Simply put, joint development is when two or more parties to develop a piece of property. This quite often involves a private developer and a transit agency.

FTA recently hosted this webinar and presentation that reviews changes to the agency's Guidance on Joint Development Circular 7050.1B.

The advocacy organization Rail~Volution presented The Transit Agency's Guide to Joint Development, in which planning professionals discussed the Transportation Research Board's TCRP Research Report 224: Guide to Joint Development for Public Transportation Agencies. (2021).

Also see Joint Development: Partnering to Build Complete Communities Near Transit, a brief review of FTA-assisted joint development projects and their benefits.

Land Banking

Other webinars offered by the Center for Community Progress:

Land Banks 101 The Fundamentals of Land Banking and Equitable Development

Presenter: Kim Graziani – Vice President and Director of National Technical Assistance

Land Banks and Land Banking 101
Presenter: Tarik Abdelazim, Associate Director of National Technical Assistance, Center for Community Progress

Open and Shared Streets

Related to Complete Streets, open and shared street efforts reclaim space once dominated by cars and other motor vehicles for use by pedestrians, bicyclists, and users of all ages and abilities. Increasingly important during this period of pandemic, open and shared streets expand the outdoor space available and enhance safety of those who use and travel through these spaces.

Rebalancing Streets for People (Toole Design)
Free webinar (registration required)
Presenters: Jeremy Chrzan, P.E., PTOE, and Gwen Shaw, EIT,

An Accessible Approach to Shared Streets (Transportation Research and Education Center, Portland State University)
Presenters: Janet Barlow, Accessible Design for the Blind; Jim Elliott, Toole Design Group; Dan Goodman, Federal Highway Administration

 

 

Opportunity Zones

Smart Growth America offers these one hour webinars on Opportunity Zones. Also check out our article: Opportunity Zones 101: A Primer.

Introducing Opportunity Zones

National Opportunity Zones Marketplace

Parking

This Planetizen course examines the challenges presented by most current parking regulations and explores reforms to these codes including processing change, parking management tools, and strategies for engaging political and other stakeholders.

Planetizen: Parking Reform
AICP CM (fee)

Another resource is this one hour webinar on a recent study by Smart Growth America and the University of Utah, Empty_Spaces, which looked at parking needs in five TODs.

Also see eTOD course for "How do Parking Requirements Impact eTOD?" (above).

Transportation Demand Management (TDM)

TDM is set of strategies designed to improve air quality and maximize traveler choice by offering a variety of multi-modal transportation options.

Mobility Labs (ML) offers a wealth of information on understanding how people make their transportation decision, and how planners, employers, developers, and others can help people use transit, ridesharing, walking, biking, and telework to meet their transportation needs. Also check out their 12 Days of Mobility series, which covers parking, marketing, funding, teaching the next generation, cost savings, and other TDM topics.

The City of Boulder, Colorado, has shared this panel on how TDM, Parking, and Access Management have been utilized to improve conditions in the East Arapahoe Corridor.

Another resource is the Association of Commuter Transportation, which has made a number of webinars available, including:

TOD Corridors

Smart Growth Online, features an extensive array of smart growth-related news, events, information, research, presentations, and publications. The website is a project of the Maryland Department of Planning. In 2016, the project offered a webinar series that examined the development of transit-oriented districts or corridors.

Smart Strategies to Transform Commercial Districts

Vacant Land

Two offerings from the Center for Community Progress:

Beyond Clipboards: A Strategic Approach to Code Enforcement
Presenter: Karen Black, Principal, May 8 Consulting, Inc.

Planting Refuge Violence Prevention Through Vacant Property Greening
Presenters: Alison Grodzinski, Managing Director, Prevention Research Center of Michigan/Michigan Youth Violence Prevention Center, and Michelle Kondo, PhD, Research Social Scientist, USDA Forest Service, Philadelphia Field Station

Value Capture

Starting this March, FHWA will host a series of Value Capture Strategies webinars. The webinar series will detail the Value Capture techniques promoted in the Federal Highway Administration’s Every Day Counts (EDC) initiative. This year’s series focuses on the intersection of Innovative Finance and Innovative Project Delivery Tools. These webinars will detail more Value Capture best practices collected from throughout the nation. They will also highlight FHWA’s recently completed Value Capture Primer series of technical documents. See the FHWA Value Capture website or the NJTOD.org calendar for information on each webinar.

What is Value Capture?

When public agencies invest in transportation assets that improve access and increase opportunity in the community, adjacent property owners benefit through greater land value and other economic impacts. Many techniques are available to the public sector to share in a portion of this increased land value to build, maintain, or reinvest in the transportation system.

For a quick introduction to Value Capture, see this video (also embedded above).

Updated March 30, 2022