TRANSIT ORIENTED COMMUNITIES (TOC) TOOL

Miami-Dade County Transportation Planning Organization

Across the country, cities and regions are managing growth and offering mobility and access through transit oriented development (TOD). This development paradigm focuses new residential, commercial, office, and institutional investments in compact development nodes served by high quality transit. In many regions, policies focus on development patterns and outcomes, assessing where growth is occurring to support the region’s former or forthcoming transit investments. While this emphasis on development is sensible, it is too limited to account for a host of other outcomes pertaining to livability, resilience, accessibility and other principles that shape plans and policies. The transit oriented community (TOC) is an emerging concept that extends TOD principles to include the diverse ways infrastructure and development mold our daily lives.

In Miami, TOC is a lynchpin of a regional growth management and investment strategy called the Strategic Miami Area Rapid Transit (SMART) Plan. The SMART Plan calls for major rapid transit investments in six corridors, connecting the region’s existing Metro and MetroMover lines with bus rapid transit, light rail, and other high quality transit facilities. These rapid transit investments are supported by TOC in station areas to manage growth, create accessible multimodal places, and promote livability.

Renaissance created the TOC Tool for the Miami-Dade Transportation Planning Organization (TPO). The TOC Tool is a web-based mapping and data visualization interface to help the TPO and its local and regional partners track growth and investment in SMART Plan corridors and station areas, monitor multimodal travel and accessibility, and assess the impacts of growth over time. It consists of a series of inter-related dashboards, supported by standardized data and metrics, that offer the user a high-level overview of TOC’s effectiveness in supporting SMART Plan goals across multiple timeframes: a snapshot of current conditions, recent historical trends, and the near-term outlook based on permitted development. These resources are nested in a website that also offers orientation literature explaining what TOC is and its role in the region’s growth and mobility plans.

Upon completion of the initial TOC Tool, Renaissance collaborated with Miami Dade County staff to transfer ownership of all supporting data, scripts, and web resources. The County will continue to update the tool’s contents over time. This will allow the TOC Tool to serve as an accessible longitudinal monitoring resource as well as a standardized regional data repository, facilitating interagency planning coordination, and informing decision making.

To learn more about Miami-Dade TPO’s Transit Oriented Communities website, click here.