Design First Walters fm qxd 2/26/04 7: 50 pm page I

Figure 7.8
Apartment Building, Davidson, NC. These
apartments screen their parking at the rear and
provide good definition to the public space of the
street. It is important that some entrances into the
building are accessible directly from the sidewalk.
These connect the private spaces of the building
visually and socially to the public space of the street.
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Office developments have conventionally been
designed with isolation, rather than integration
in mind. This makes them nearly impossible to
serve with transit. Because the foundation of
every successful transit network is its local bus
routes, neither the commuter rail nor our new
transit loop will work efficiently without local
buses carrying passengers to and from the sta-
tions and office buildings where thousands of
people work. It’s thus very important to encour-
age office workers to use transit by making it easy
and convenient. The office design typology
shown in Figure 6.39 depicts a much more tran-
sit-friendly arrangement that moves the buildings
and their entrances closer to the street and creates
a formal pedestrian plaza. We urged the RTP
management to encourage larger employers with
expansion plans to pursue designs like this to
encourage higher use of transit.
IMPLEMENTATION
As part of our recommendations for implementing
the master plan, we developed a matrix of all recom-
mendations prioritized for levels of urgency, and
identifying the parties responsible for taking action.
The full details of this matrix are too detailed for this
abbreviated case study, but typical extracts are shown
in Table 7.1.
We determined priorities by considering the fol-
lowing factors:
●
The relative severity of the problem.
●
The availability of personnel and financial
resources necessary to implement the specific
proposals.
●
The interdependence of the various implementa-
tion tasks, in particular, the degree to which imple-
menting one item depended on the successful
completion of another item.
In view of the above factors, we felt we could not
put forward a precise timetable for every recom-
mendation, but listed the levels of priority as follows:
High
: Short time frame (6 months – 1 year).
Resources should be immediately allocated to address
these tasks.
Medium
: Tasks should be completed in a 1–5-year
time frame as resources allow.
Low
: No urgency required. Task may be completed
when resources and timing allow.
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES
168
by planning staff if the design criteria are met. This
avoids a lengthy, drawn out debate by elected offi-
cials about policy that has already been decided.
Additional consideration should be given to
restructuring various fees and requirements (impact
fees, development fees, etc.) as incentives for TND.
Street design standards should be common across
the different jurisdictions within the CORE area.
The recommendations of the Institute of Trans-
portation Engineers in 
Traffic Engineering for
NeoTraditional Neighborhood Design
(1994) and the
TND Guidelines
, adopted by the North Carolina
Department of Transportation in August 2000, are
excellent resources for street design standards and
should be locally adopted by each jurisdiction and
incorporated into their TND Ordinance (ITE,
1994; NCDOT, 2000).