My first brush with transit oriented development – the first time it really dawned on me as to how it worked – was at Kew Gardens station in London. I went looking for a train station, but I found a transit village. I was hooked.

Walking from the train platform to the entrance to the Kew Botanical Gardens (more than a quarter mile away-my reason for being there in the first place) is everything urban living should be. There is of course the rail service and train station itself, and outside of that a Tesco Express (small grocery store) and a combination of retail, including a coffee shop, restaurant and local businesses in stately row along the Station Parade. These stores serve many of the community’s needs. Surrounding this are rowhomes, single-family homes and flats, all in a mixed-density and walkable environment. Interestingly, it is exactly one quarter mile from the tube station to Kew Road, the edge of the neighborhood.

I spend a lot of time visiting transit villages. In fact, I live in one in Minneapolis. Some are better than others, and I’ll admit, mine (the 38th Street station) needs work. A good transit village (not just a train station) is a artful balance of design and density. In my observations, I cannot help but wonder if we are selling ourselves short in terms of density.

My colleagues Jon Commers, Peter Musty and Michael Lander just released a quick snapshot of what should make up a good transit-oriented development. You can see from reviewing this, they break TODs in to three mixed-use scenarios, the Village, the Town and the City, and all are quite dense. Among other uses, the Village contains 1,650 housing units, the Town 4,000, and the City 6,000 units within a quarter-mile radius of the station.

How does that compare with my favorite TODs? Let’s look around. The Center for Transit Oriented Development (CTOD) has a great database with, among other things, housing unit counts within a half-mile of station areas across the country. However, these figures are for 2000, so they provide a great baseline but don’t include units at TODs that have been built since. For example, Englewood outside Denver has 856 households in the CTOD database. Add to that the 438-unit apartment project by Trammell Crow and you get 1,300 units. The Mission station on the Gold Line in Pasadena is a great little village, and has 2,505 according to CTOD. Add the 67 units at the Mission Meridian condo project and you are just shy of 2,600. Downtown Plano in the Dallas metro had 819 units in 2000, and adding the 463-unit Eastside Village and another 500 units still planned may get the unit count up to 2,000. Orenco Station, the beloved TOD in suburban Portland, Oregon, was just in the news because its residents are still driving to work. Indeed, a major reason may be that not all of the 1,800 units are within a half-mile, much less a quarter-mile of the light rail station.

You get the picture. Across the country, most half-mile areas around light rail stations have fewer than 3,000 units within a half-mile of stations, which is in all likelihood far below the threshold of 1,650 units within a quarter-mile promoted by my colleagues for the baseline Village. Don’t get me wrong, these are good TODs, but they need additional intensity.

Not all transit villages are selling themselves short. Older TODs like the Francisco station in Chicago have over 7,000 housing units within a half-mile. As well, the Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor, a favorite among TOD policy enthusiasts in Arlington, Virginia, does a little better. In 2000, those station areas had between 2,500 and 9,000 units each, with more added this decade. Much of this development (well over 10,000 housing units, not to mention 15 million square feet of office) has occurred in the past 30 years following a conscious policy decision to intensify development around stations.

What station areas in the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor may be lacking in terms of design is more than made up for by very high ridership and modal splits, and the fact that Arlington County gets a disproportionate amount of their real estate taxes from the intense uses along the corridor – good policy indeed!

That is why I believe the Twin Cities, among others, is selling itself short. We are planning two additional light rail lines here in the next six years. Both lines will add a little over 30 rail stations that previously did not exist. The planning for each corridor includes a general vision of intensification of land uses around each station area.

The average number of new housing units around each station area is around 1,000, give or take, by 2030. The total varies by station, but overall the 30 new stations may accomodate 30,000 units. That seems like a lot, but it is just 10% of the 300,000 new households forecast in the Twin Cities in that time. Considering the lack of other road and freeway investments planned in that time, why not go for 25% of the total? Or one-third? Increased intensity around each station will accomodate more of the metro area demand for housing and increase transit usage, reducing strain on roads and lowering VMT. It will also result in more support for retail and other uses to create complete transit villages. For example, it takes a population of 10,000 to support a small grocery store. 1,000 doesn’t make much of a dent.

Local residents aren’t always nuts about more density, but if we are investing billions in transit, we should be maximixing the bang for our buck. I will delve deeper in to this in the next few months, and I welcome any conversation. The bottom line is, we are selling ourselves short if we just build train stations. We should be encouraging the sort of density required to create true transit villages.

Public gathering spaces are fundamental to a city, and Minneapolis needs one. For everyday use, a meeting place, informal strolls, just sitting around and even spontaneous celebrating, every city should have a place that pops in to the collective mind of the populus.

London has Trafalgar Square, New York City has Times Square (one could argue New York has several), Chicago has Millennium Park (”meet me at ‘the Bean’”), Cincinnati has Fountain Square, Madison has Library Mall, and the list goes on. My hometown needs one.

Just how badly we need a public gathering place became evident last week following the Minnesota Twins riveting 12th inning victory over the Detroit Tigers in a one-game playoff that decided the division championship. Following the game, my friend Mike and I didn’t feel like calling it a night, and we sure didn’t want to board a crowded train to head home. Not yet. For lack of a better alternative, as there was no natural place to go hang out and celebrate, we walked several blocks to the nearest decent bar for a drink. (At least when the new Target Field opens next year, one will no longer have to walk several blocks just to find a variety of good bars.)

Another friend of mine watched the game at work. When it was over, she pondered heading downtown to celebrate with fellow revelers. However, when she considered where that single gathering place might be, nothing came to mind. That is because we don’t have one, and that is a shame. Instead, she went shopping at Target.

Don’t get me wrong, Minneapolis has an exceptional amount of public space. Our parks system is world-renowned, but except for the lakes they encircle, they are mostly linear and not centrally-located. We have miles of trails and countless locations for outdoor recreation and events, but a spontaneous celebration at 10PM doesn’t make sense at the Lake Harriet Bandshell.

Cities need a public place for gatherings, formal and informal, inlcuding celebrations and protests (don’t get me wrong, the irony of witnessing a “tea party” being held in Millennium Park in Chicago, one of the city’s biggest investments of public money, is not lost on me). It needs to be that one place that is attractive and well-managed and naturally pops in to everyones mind as a gathering place.

Downtown Minneapolis has made some great strides in the past few years, building attractive new buildings, improving street frontage, starting light rail service, adding residences, and most recently converting one-way streets to two-way and starting the Downtown Improvement District. But we still need a gathering place, a park or square, a natural place for the public to meet. It will take political courage and money, but the payoff is a place we can all share.

It’s not everyday you hear someone tell you to visit Columbus, Ohio, but I highly recommend it. Columbus has more examples of progressive urbanism than most cities its size. It deserves a look.

True, I was there in January. And yes, I had to deal with an ice storm that sealed my car shut. As I scraped my car with my hotel key card (always ask for two!) on a cold Saturday morning in Columbus, I remarkably was able to roll down the driver’s side window and the ice stayed in place! I knocked it out with my elbow. But the rest of my day there was foggy and 35 degrees. With no wind, that kind of weather is perfect for walking and exploring a city.

And so a little fog and ice didn’t deter me from some great urban sightseeing. I managed to see the Rickenbacker Global Logistics Hub, Easton Town Center, Germantown, the Arena District, Short North and the OSU campus, and was impressed by it all.

View my Columbus photos here at Picasaweb.

Columbus has some real design gems, both old and new. For starters, I stayed in the Westin downtown, which was originally the Great Southern Hotel, dating to 1897. (Recessions and January weekends make for very good hotel deals. I even got a free bottle of wine, although I’m not sure why.)

Second, Germantown is located south of downtown in a world unto itself. When in Columbus, I recommend starting there. It is an intimate, historic neighborhood full of lovely red brick homes, churches, commercial buildings and brick streets. Start at the Book Loft, a wonderful independent bookstore with a labyrinth of rooms. After browsing, wander the neighborhood a bit before grabbing a cup of coffee and reading one of your new books.

I managed a tour of Easton Town Center, led by the developer Yaromir Steiner himself. Easton was built in 1999 and a forerunner of so many of today’s mixed-use town centers. Check out the work of Steiner + Associates here.

On to downtown. My surroundings at the Westin are that sort of urban awfulness that found at the edge of so many American downtowns – lots of surface parking lots, a few newer, bunker-style brutalism government buildings and one lonely, out of place bar in an old building that somehow defied the wrecking ball.

That said, between the Westin and th lovely state capitol building, along High Street, is a former shopping mall called City Center, that is just over 20 years old, and is currently meeting its fate. In its place will be Columbus Commons, a downtown park, a wonderful urban green space that promises to be a favorite gathering place for residents and visitors.

I wandered down to the Scioto River to gaze at the mist hanging over the water, and then north to the Arena District, a development by Nationwide Realty Investors. It has been done in phases and is quite nice, including several restaurants, residential development and a very nice green. The Arena is home to the NHL’s Blue Jackets, and the district’s old and new buildings are primarily clad in smart red brick. I sought out O’Shaughnessy’s, an Irish pub, before moving on in search of a good dinner.

Wandering north along High Street, I was unaware I was crossing a freeway. I made it up in to the Short North neighborhood, which is centered along High Street and contains numerous restaurants and storefronts for window shopping, all in a wonderfully scaled mixed-use neighborhood. Numerous arches, placed at regular intervals, span and define the street. On this chilly evening, they were lit up and blended in to the fog in the distance.

Like I said, I didn’t know until the next day that I had crossed a freeway. But I had traversed the Cap at Union Station, a one-block infill development along High Street completed in 2004. It makes the transition as a pedestrian from downtown to Short North seamless. Where there once was a bridge like any other crossing an interstate (that had no right to be built through an existing neighborhood in the first place), there is now a row of restaurants and stores lining the street. The only clue was both sides of this one block stretch of street shared a similar design.

The Cap is really three briges over the interstate, one for cars and one on either side that support one-story retail buildings with 25,000 square feet of space. It is a great example of a project that reconnects two urban neighborhoods divided by a freeway. The cost of $7.8 million (yes, over $300 per square foot) isn’t cheap, but the neighborhoods on either side already supported rents that were close to the $25 to $35 charged at the Cap. As an observer, I’d argue the project not only justifies the rents at the Cap but they also increase the value of properties in neighborhoods on either side – a benefit to all.

One last really neat project is The Brunson, a condo building on High Street in downtown Columbus. The project is part renovated historic building and part new construction at the same height and scale. It is proof that new an old buildings can look good next to each other, given the right massing, scale and relationship to the street.

So next time you are in Columbus, even in January, take a nice stroll and soak it all in.