[UPDATE:] Some good coverage of the initial steps towards TDRs in today’s soon-to-be-paywalled HeraldSun.
6:30pm Tuesday, May 9th, Battle Courtroom on Margaret Lane, Hillsborough, NC
The county is starting a dialogue on a transfer of development rights program (TDR) for Orange County.
Last year, the county recruited local citizens to the TDR taskforce. The membership is comprised of a who’s who of folk interested in local development.
Overly touted by some, the program essentially trades your right to develop one piece of property (say your farm) for the right to (over?) develop another.
The real estate industry has prepared a summary that covers TDRs fairly well from their perspective.
Locally, Nick Tennyson,executive vice president for the Home Builders Association of Durham, Orange and Chatham Counties weighed in observing “TDR is a concept that in the abstract people find interesting, but when you really start working on where it’s going to apply, it has fizzled many times in the past.” (via today’s HeraldSun).
Though troubled a bit by the eminent domain issues around TDRs, I’m interested in the concept as a potentially valuable planning and zoning tool.
Tonight Orange County will present their first pass analysis of using TDRs – I look forward to seeing the proposal.
I’ve been reading through the town’s Request for Proposal (RFP) for our new Real-Time Passenger Information System and Automatic Vehicle Location system for Chapel Hill Transit.
There’s some interesting goofs (missing section 3.B.6) and specifications (Microsoft ODBC) in a document which appears to be a cut-n-paste of Triangle Transit, Federal and local requirements.
From the RFP we see
The System shall undergo functional testing onsite in a test environment for a minimum of 2 weeks prior to May 1, 2006. Confidence testing shall occur during production use of the System between May 1, 2006 and June 15, 2006. Every route must be assigned an equipped vehicle and data collected for comparison to the actual. CHT will issue written Acceptance of the System within 15 days of establishing that the System meets all contract requirements and upon completion of the Confidence testing period.
I’ve yet to see the actual results of the functional testing, the results of evaluating the RFP’s stated criteria (including the ADA requirements) and whether we solicited bids from vendors known to use WiFi/WiMAX technologies but probably not be aware of our town’s interest in their RTIS/AVL systems.
Ellen, over on OrangePolitics, wonders if NextBus will deliver digital signs with audio alerts for “a person who is blind gets there and tries to access then and cant read it or a person who cant read but can hear and understand verbal communication”.
While the RFP mentions ADA 49CFR Part 37.167 and 49CFR Part 38.5 , both which require some kind of audio notifications, we won’t know for sure if those requirements were adhered to as part of the evaluation process until we see the results of the functional testing.
It’ll be a shame if, on top of a wasted $950,000 opportunity, the town has to kick in extra funds to be ADA compliant.
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