Transit passenger facility and transit-oriented communities design guidelines

TransLink, Greater Vancouver’s regional transportation authority, wanted to create two comprehensive design guidelines that brought together many of their previous and disconnected standards and guidelines with contemporary best practices. The Transit Passenger Facility Guidelines focuses on transit facilities and the Transit-Oriented Communities Guidelines focuses on neighborhoods and cities with transit service.

How we helped

Steer led a multi-disciplinary team to develop both guidelines, which were developed with support from various departments within TransLink and stakeholders from the region’s 22 cities.

The guideline development process was meant to coordinate and win support from across the large, complex agency and its subsidiaries, in order to produce a usable and clear mechanism for encouraging high-quality, integrated design.

The Transit Passenger Facility Guidelines cover all aspects of facility design and were developed in a way that encourages users to flip back and forth between various topics, case studies and sidebars to engage users in understanding a range of design considerations instead of focusing on a single element of interest.

The complementary Transit-Oriented Communities Guidelines use the 6 Ds – Destinations, Distance, Design, Density, Diversity, and Demand Management – to focus on how urban design, development planning and community planning can be conducted in a way that most effectively supports transit systems and ridership.

Successes and outcomes

The design guidelines completed in 2012 have been an integral part of TransLink’s facility planning. They have been used as a municipal liaison for how transit planning relates to community development and a resource for both internal and external stakeholders during facility upgrades, improvements and new construction. The Transit-Oriented Communities Design Guidelines have also served as a valuable resource to local municipalities when conducting their own policy and development planning work. Both guidelines are available on the TransLink website.

Recently, Steer has led the development of an update to TransLink’s Transit Service Guidelines which will be a key tool for the Network Planning and Service Planning teams to analyze, plan and implement bus, rail and ferry services. These guidelines provide an innovative approach to service planning by incorporating the 6 Ds framework from the Transit-Oriented Communities Design Guidelines.