MetroUrban

Bneid alGar

By October 27, 2010 No Comments

There is a great opportunity for the metro to revive Bneid alGar into a sort of transit oriented corridor. The area is very linear and you can walk the width of it without a problem, meaning that a metro stop at the Fahaheel Expressway side of it will be accessible by everyone living near it.

The only problem is that there is such little room between the highway and the buildings. A quick look at a typical station in Dubai shows that their development allowed for a lot more room on either side of the highway, which made it easy to build an above grade metro. I don’t think we have this luxury in Kuwait.

The obvious advantage of having lots of stops along this dense area of Kuwait is that it will link workers to the city and where they work and has the potential to encourage investment in the area, which is actually very strategically located and has the potential to be very valuable. Transit oriented development (TOD) also reduces transportation costs of the low income residents that live there. This frees up income that can be used on food, education, etc. The main reason, though, is to allow a continued development of highly dense areas without having to suffer from crippling parking scarcity and traffic gridlock. You can do that if you can pack more people into a dense area without requiring most of them to own cars, and this is the great value of transit oriented development.

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