Developing Transit-oriented Strategies for Sanandaj City Center, Iran

Over recent decades, “transit-oriented development” has been developed as a new approach based on sustainabilityconcepts. this approach is mainly concerning coordinated action between land use planning and transportation planningwhich 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 istraffic congestion caused by heavy movement of private cars. in this regard, this paper tries to mitigate the currentchallenges and to enhance the quality of sanandaj city center life, using tod principles. to do this, swot analysisis 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, increasingaccessibility and providing sustainable transport options along with easy pedestrian movement, and reducingenvironmental challenges have been outlined to conceptualize the suitable strategies of the research. the findingsshow that if tod is to be widely adopted as a real alternative to automobile-oriented urban pattern, it needs to capturea broad market view from both sides of private and public sectors. nevertheless, it is really the public sector that isasked to take the lead, set the stage, develop polices and offer important subsidies and assistance to support the creationof tod in the city centre.