Erin KENNEY
Biographical note
Professor Zegras is an Associate Professor of Transportation & Urban Planning at MIT. His research interests focus on (1) improving our understanding of the dynamic relationships between human behavior and the environments; (2) devising and demonstrating new planning approaches; and (3) identifying viable pathways to implement change. He received his BA in Economics and Spanish from Tufts University, a Master in City Planning and a Master of Science in Transportation from MIT and a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning, also from MIT. Yiling Xie and Erin Kenney are second-year Master in City Planning students at MIT. Yiling holds a BA in Economics and BEng in Urban Planning from Peking University. Erin holds a BS in math from MIT. Their research interests focus on public transportation, new forms of development, and data-enabled research.
Presentation title: Implementing TOD in China: A supply-side investigation
This project consists of four key deliverables. First, we created an evaluation framework to enumerate the public and private costs and benefits of TOD. This framework not only identifies the outcomes of TOD, but to whom they accrue, and thus how and where TOD should be promoted. Second, we developed data inventories at the city and station levels in order to understand the current landscape of TOD in China. These inventories contain TOD-relevant characteristics, and a “TOD Score” is calculated at the respective levels. Third, we identify public and private sector challenges and barriers to TOD through qualitative research, interviewing a range of stakeholders to reveal the variation in TOD challenges and opportunities across three cities (Shanghai, Beijing, and Jinan). This data organized in part by a strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats (SWOT) analysis. Fourth, and finally, weconduct a feasibility analysis, at the station level and the city level. We would like to present the results of the feasibility analysis.
The feasibility analysis directly builds on of the results of the previous tasks: it incorporates the data collected in the macroscopic and microscopic inventories into the operationalized version of the theoretical cost-benefit framework, and it uses the public and private sector challenges to implementing TOD to propose TOD interventions at the metro station-level. Specifically, we use station-level characteristics in the operationalized cost-benefit framework to value a station’s current TOD worth. Next, we propose station-level interventions based on the station level characteristics. Then, we modify the station-level characteristics, according to the proposed interventions, and we revalue the TOD worth at the station.
In terms of our hypotheses and expected findings, we hypothesize that the theoretical public and private benefits outweigh the costs. Further, in compiling the macroscopic and microscopic inventories, we discover that there is a substantial amount of existing rail and BRT based transit infrastructure — and an even greater amount of potential for implementing TOD in most Chinese cities. But challenges to implementation across cities are different: we expect that for first tier cities, such as Beijing, the biggest challenge would be political while for second and third tier cities, such as Kunming and Jinan, the biggest challenge would be economical. Finally, the strategies for implementing TOD must be city-specific; we plan to start at the station level and aggregate these station level strategies to the city.
