Public transport makes cities more vibrant

At present, the construction and operating costs of public transportation, including subways and ground buses, have become high, which has become a bottleneck that restricts the sustainable development of public transportation in many places. How to make the development of public transport not short of money and have a lasting chance? How can public transport inject new vitality into the city? Successful TOD concepts and land value capture methods in countries such as the United States, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong have opened a window for us.

Public transport maintenance and continuous operations How to obtain more adequate funds? What role should public transport play in urban development in the future, as a supporting or guiding city development? On November 1st, the National Development and Reform Commission’s Institute of Integrated Transportation and the World Bank hosted the Bus-Guided Urban Transformation and Land Value Support Bus Financing Symposium in Beijing. The experts and scholars attending the conference on how to guide the development of public transportation (TOD) The issues of how to implement and how to capture the land value for sustainable development of public transportation are discussed.

Guo Xiaoxuan, director of the National Transportation Research Institute of the National Development and Reform Commission, said that by using the value-added part of the collaborative development of land at a public transport hub or a certain node, the public transport operation and redevelopment will be nurtured. This way of capturing land value can make public transport available. Sustained development of capital and capabilities; Only public transport is full of vitality. Cities that are guided or remodeled by public transportation can be more dynamic.

Using public transport to guide city development TOD is a model of high-density land mixed development around bus stops or hubs. It advocates the development of various urban service facilities, offices, retail stores, and housing around transportation hubs to gather a large number of passengers. And through the rational and effective bus line design and pedestrian system construction, it promotes public transport and non-motorized travel.

World Bank chief city expert Suzuki Hwang Ming said that TOD has achieved mature experience in countries such as the United States, Japan, and Singapore. These experiences show that land in the areas surrounding public transportation stations should be developed collaboratively, such as the development of properties and subway superstructures in Hong Kong and Tokyo. The economic benefits from development, access to value gains, and the construction and transport of public transport are being nurtured; Copenhagen and Singapore are reshaping the direction of urban development through public transport construction.

In our country, for a long time, most cities adopt the “development and guidance service” model, that is, build a city or a large community first, and then build public transportation as a supporting facility. As a result, the function of public transport has been weakened, which has brought with it many problems such as uncontrolled urban expansion, uncontrollable growth of motor vehicles, and severe urban traffic congestion, which has reduced the vitality of the city and its driving force for development.

Of course, there are also cases in China where the TOD concept has been used successfully. Shenzhen is one of them.

According to Lin Qun, deputy secretary-general of the China Urban Transport Planning Academic Committee and director of the Technical Committee of the Shenzhen Urban Transport Planning and Design Research Center, the TOD philosophy allows them to insist more firmly that urban functions must be coordinated with the rail hubs, especially high-speed rail hubs. The location of an orbital hub is particularly important. At the same time, it is necessary to consider various factors such as the matching of city function levels and the improvement of time series. Once misplaced, the function of the city is difficult to perfect, and if you want to adjust it, you will have to pay a higher price. When Shenzhen selected the site of the Beijing-Guangzhou-Shenzhen high-speed rail hub, it fully used the TOD concept and negotiated with the railway department to introduce the railway to the city center. The high-speed railway station was finally set up in the central area of ​​Shenzhen, Futian District, and the underground railway station was built.

Lin Qun introduced that in constructing the traffic system around the high-speed rail station, Shenzhen has fully used the TOD concept to conduct mixed-use land development in offices, businesses, shopping, and leisure in the surrounding area to build a reasonable rail transit connection line and ground bus. Route, pedestrian trail system. On the one hand, it highlights and strengthens the functions of a first-class commercial center in Shenzhen and guides the further clustering of various elements. On the other hand, through the construction of a comprehensive public transportation and trail system, traffic congestion due to motorization is avoided.

Dredging and agglomeration are equally important. Shenzhen Futian High-speed Rail Station has more than 30 entrances and exits. At the same time, there are 5 subways connecting with the high-speed rail station so that the passenger flow can be gathered and sparse.

In addition, Lin Qun believes that not all hubs have the commercial conditions of high-density integration of surrounding land, attracting passengers to gather and stop, and some hubs can only exert the function of rapid passage of large numbers of people.

University of California, Berkeley professor Robert Thoreau agreed with this view. He said that although bus stops can gather a large number of people, it should be considered in the design that not every site has commercial functions. The planning and design of TOD should follow a principle of developing a green, efficient and modern square near a community hub that has a stop-and-consume, and minimize the establishment of a large community at the transfer station.

Using Land Value Addition to Increase Public Transport Development Sustainability At present, Singapore, Japan, and the United States generally adopt the capitalization of land value to provide adequate capital for the construction and operation of public transportation. China should strengthen the coordinated development of public transportation and land use, and build a sustainable public transport system and a modern city.

Li Hui, director of the Beijing Institute of Urban Design and Design Institute of Urban Transport and Architectural Design, said that in recent years, Beijing has achieved certain achievements in the coordinated development of public transportation and land use. In the integrated design of the Daxing Line and Tongzhou Core Area, through the discovery and capture of land values, the relationship between urban resources was re-sorted, high-intensity development of the land near the subway station was carried out, the regional volume ratio was increased, and a bicycle was established. The trail system has solved problems such as transfer and shorten the travel distance.

Public transport and land use are the most successful collaborative development in Hong Kong. Wei Dacheng, chief executive officer of the Hong Kong Railways Corporation Limited (MTRCL), said that combining the public transport system with the development of the community, the MTR has not only achieved sustainable financial development, but also achieved sustainable environmental development. It is reported that the development of the public transportation of land revenues - the "recovery of premium" model of MTR, makes it a profitable public transport.

By using the "metro + property" land value acquisition mechanism, through the development of plots along the subway, the value-added gains from the opening of the subway to the land will be obtained, and this part of the revenue will be put into the construction and operation of the newly opened subway. This model allows the MTR’s investment, operation and maintenance costs to come from the list price and other supporting real estate development income.

For the Hong Kong government, which owns 77% of the MTR’s shares, the MTR is not only responsible for its own profits but also brings sustained high returns to the government. It is estimated that from 1980 to 2005, Hong Kong received a return of nearly 140 billion US dollars. When the MTR was listed, the Hong Kong government invested only 32 billion Hong Kong dollars in start-up capital. Since then, the land has received a revenue of 97.9 billion Hong Kong dollars, an open offer of 10.5 billion Hong Kong dollars, a dividend of 14.1 billion Hong Kong dollars, and the current market value of the shares held by the government was 124.6 billion Hong Kong dollars. The revenue reached 214.9 billion Hong Kong dollars. In addition, Hong Kong’s social returns in reducing urban sprawl, air pollution, energy consumption and higher traffic flow far outweigh the government’s direct benefits.

The successful operation of the MTR has attracted many domestic cities. However, the existing land management system in China makes it difficult for the “MTR + Property” model to land. Although Beijing and Nanchang have successfully implemented the metro superstructure, how to find a feasible path on the basis of existing national policies will still be the future research direction.

All localities should understand and rationally introduce TOD as soon as possible

At present, land prices in first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou are extremely high, and the transportation network has a large scale, and the urban layout has taken shape. How do we introduce TOD concepts and land value capture methods?

Lin Qun said that TOD concepts can be introduced in the outskirts of large cities or satellite cities. For cities that have not yet completed the construction of the urban public transport system, they should not follow a development model. They should assess the degree of market acceptance and build different TODs according to the actual situation.

Delegates generally believe that the difficulty in implementing TOD in China lies in the coordination of multiple entities and the current land management system. Sites near public transportation sites or hubs were acquired by different developers, and it was difficult to integrate land functions and “integrate” the value of land for development, hindering the integration of public transportation and land use, and limiting the function of TOD.

The delegates agreed that subway or public transport companies lack advantages over real estate developers and that it is difficult to obtain first-level development rights for land along the MTR; in the secondary development of land, they need to coordinate interests with a number of land property rights parties to reach consensus. Pushing TOD is difficult and the yield is low.

Representatives of Chongqing's public transport companies hope that the land department will give more support to the subway or public transportation companies in the land bidding and hanging links so that the enterprises can obtain more income in land development to make up for the funds needed for bus operations and construction. In addition, it is recommended that the government play a coordinating role in the overall development of urban public transport and seek a win-win situation for multiple entities.

As a new thing, TOD has drawn more and more attention. Li Hui said that not only must TOD see its role in promoting economic development, but it should also pay attention to the problems of long construction period and large capital investment. Therefore, two principles should be followed when planning and designing: First, BRT construction can be implemented in areas where ground transportation can meet travel requirements, and the road network structure can be rationally planned to maximize the utilization of resources within the regional space. The second is to grasp the rational spatial structure and advance order. As the "premium recovery" policy of land can supplement public transportation operations and construction funds, it has a huge driving effect on the economy along the route. Therefore, it is necessary to resolutely stop the blindness and catch-up momentum in some cities and comprehensively assess whether TOD is suitable for "local settlement" in the local area. .