Developing Transit-oriented Strategies for Sanandaj City Center, Iran

Over recent decades, “Transit-oriented development” has been developed as a new approach based on sustainability concepts. This approach is mainly concerning coordinated action between land use planning and transportation planning which tries to create a clean, people friendly, livable and dynamic community with growing local economy. Today, old urban centers face enormous challenges in terms of their physical and functional aspects. One of these is traffic congestion caused by heavy movement of private cars. In this regard, this paper tries to mitigate the current challenges and to enhance the quality of Sanandaj city center life, using TOD principles. To do this, SWOT analysis is the main approach of the paper to evaluate the existing conditions of the city centre to reach the suitable strategies. Considering main aim of research, three objectives including increasing spatial and functional sustainability, increasing accessibility and providing sustainable transport options along with easy pedestrian movement, and reducing environmental challenges have been outlined to conceptualize the suitable strategies of the research. The findings show that if TOD is to be widely adopted as a real alternative to automobile-oriented urban pattern, it needs to capture a broad market view from both sides of private and public sectors. Nevertheless, it is really the public sector that is asked to take the lead, set the stage, develop polices and offer important subsidies and assistance to support the creation of TOD in the city centre.