"Residents of award-winning, transit-oriented development say no to transit."

And you were surprised?

See that wide median running down the boulevard?  That's where the light rail will go.  Or not, as it may turn out.

So much for the widely-touted concept of “transit-ready” development.  The residents of an acclaimed new urbanist village built around planned light rail (or bus rapid transit) stops have decided that they don’t actually want the transit their community was designed for.  So let’s be more careful about the claims we make for master-planned suburban development, shall we? via sustainablecitiescollective.com

Honestly, I well understand the transit-oriented development concept — it would be nice to live near public transit — but I have never understood why anyone would want to live in a place characterized as "transit-oriented" or closer than a block from it (assuming it is surface and generates noise. And yes that definitely includes diesel buses.).

Sure Doug Kelbaugh's label was good as a working-draft way of describing building public transport along with new housing. But I always thought the name was a non-starter in terms of market appeal and definitely not something I'd want to live right next to. A block or so away, yes.

Or right next to it? Maybe if I come to it, and can see the impacts beforehand, OK.

But when it comes to me? After I live there and like the park — median for transit? It's a park!!! — and in my vivid imagination of everything that can go wrong? No way.

The lesson for me is that urbanism starts as an acquired taste and that an awful lot of people do not want cityness imposed on them but want to drive to it. Irony acknowledged. The situation (described above) reinforces my view that public consciousness is an essential — perhaps the essential — element of urban placemaking. 

The even bigger lesson is one that emerged out of an accidental but interesting on-line exhange of emails see —
The holy grail of planning: Transforming the auto-dominant strip-mall arterial
— in which some genuine experts were forced to acknowledge, that no one, anywhere in the USA, is aware of having done (or even well-launched) a complete reversal of a suburb built around a through arterial. Now that's a different question from the one above but it is related in terms of the large politics of suburban change.

The lasting question for me is to consider exactly when and how far to spend time and money on retrofitting suburbia rather than focussing on working primarily on the inner-ring of settlements which already have an urban form? I'm working through the question and have no settled answer yet, but as a matter of priorities, we might need to consdier triage and to work only on the places which have a chance.

I imagine someone has already developed a working list of priorities for retrofitting i.e. which places and under which conditions offer the greatest likelihood of success.