Assessment of Urban Districts in Terms of their Compliance with Public Transport Based Development Principles; The Case of Tehran Kooy-e Nasr District

In recent years urban development approaches based on public transport (Transit-Oriented Development) have attracted attentions. Despite the emphasis on the term ‘public transport’, rapid transport systems and their proximity alone is not enough. In this research complementary public transport principles and measures in these approaches are studied, including the changing attitudes in design, compactness, population density, mixture of uses, interconnected street networks, cycling networks, and pedestrian networks. Assessment methods based on these approaches and published by the International Institute for Transportation & Development Policy are then explained. Bearing in mind differences in the physical, economic, and social context of our case study with those of new approaches’ origin, original assessment measures are investigated. Also, to clarify the application of the proposed method in Kooy-e Nasr district, data related to each measure are collected from both the field studies and documents and then analysed. According to results, the district has scored less than half of the full score, and does not, therefore, enjoy desirable conditions. Despite the district having suitable compactness and population density, the quality of pedestrian and cycling network is way below desirable. The method used here can undergo a localisation of measures’ details and then be applied to other Iranian urban districts.