Arlington’s strategies have yielded substantial economic, transportation, and environmental benefits – allowing continued growth with less reliance on auto trips, and more use of transit and other travel options.
It isn’t just one policy but many that contribute to enhanced performance such as:
- Building mixed-use environments with highest densities around transit stops
- Expanding viable and attractive transportation options
- Making user information readily available and providing ongoing education and encouragement
- Sustaining and strengthening transportation demand management (TDM), and
- Actively managing parking.
Sustaining community performance requires ongoing investments in infrastructure.
It’s not a short term commitment – to achieve the full benefits, it requires sustaining and enhancing programs and policies over time.
It also requires ongoing community and institutional exposure to/and assimilation of best practices from other communities in the U.S. and abroad.
Other areas for future exploration include:
- Improve trip generation guidance for urban transit-oriented mixed-use developments and neighborhoods
- Incorporate actual site- and neighborhood-level performance into regional transportation models and project selection processes (better data, better models, improved decision-making)
- Fully account for the supply and cost of parking in transportation and community development, and
- Identify and document structural changes in the environment that would alter the assumptions about community development and transportation system use.