Transit-Oriented Development 2.0: The New TOD Playbook

Transit-oriented development as most people still talk about it—“put more housing near a station”—is already outdated. In 2026, the most interesting projects are no longer just about proximity to rail or bus. They are about where housing, high-capacity transit, and energy infrastructure actively converge, and how that convergence shows up in cap rates, debt costs, resilience, and political support.

That is the territory Oliver Bennett Agency calls Transit-Oriented Development 2.0. TOD 2.0 is transit-oriented development that behaves like energy-oriented development at the same time. In a TOD 2.0 corridor, dense housing rides on a transit spine, but the buildings are designed as all-electric or near-electric from the outset, EV infrastructure is treated as core program rather than an afterthought, and the district is intentionally positioned to plug into grid upgrades, microgrids, and clean-energy incentives.

The reason this has become a 2026 story rather than a 2035 fantasy is that policy and capital have quietly moved. Under the federal infrastructure law, the Federal Transit Administration expanded its Pilot Program for Transit-Oriented Development Planning. In 2024 alone, it awarded roughly $10.5 million to 11 projects in 10 states, with several awards covering up to 100 percent of planning costs when affordable housing sits at the center of the plan. These are not abstract studies; they are a maturing pipeline of sites where station-area entitlement, affordability mandates, and infrastructure funding will soon collide.

For cities and agencies, TOD 2.0 is a way to concentrate housing production, emissions reduction, and resilience in the same geography instead of managing three separate programs and three separate stakeholder fights. Transit agencies facing ridership volatility can create new revenue streams and demand anchors by treating station areas as energy and EV hubs, not just fareboxes. States that have enacted TOD or housing reforms, from California to New York and several East Coast and Midwest corridors, now need a credible story for how that new land-use capacity becomes bankable projects.

The Oliver Bennett Agency’s lens does not treat TOD 2.0 as a design exercise; it treats it as a zoning, energy, and capital-stack problem at the corridor level.

Once those three layers exist, certain nodes begin to stand out: a station where zoning now allows significantly more units than current built form, a substation slated for capacity upgrades within a few years, a city commitment to structured EV hubs, and a state or federal program that will subsidize portions of the capex. Those are TOD 2.0 nodes—places where housing, transit, and energy collide in ways that can be underwritten, repeated, and scaled.

From OBA’s perspective, the question for sponsors and public partners is no longer “Do we have a TOD site?” but “Which of our corridors can credibly claim a TOD 2.0 profile, and how do we move those first?”

If you are holding land or legacy assets near transit and you are not screening them for energy adjacency, EV potential, and TOD-aligned capital tools, you are already leaving value on the table.