A nationally recognized land-use expert on Thursday advised Montgomery County — and other like-minded jurisdictions — to increase the size of the area around Metro stations on which they’re willing to build major developments, citing new research into the speed of pedestrians reaching the stations.

For years the industry standard has been to implement transit-oriented development within a quarter-mile radius of transit stations.

But Chris Nelson, co-director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, said that logic is fast becoming outdated.

Planners tend to use 10 minutes as the amount of time transit riders want to walk to their desired station. They used to estimate that riders cover a quarter-mile in that span.

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Now, though, the quarter-mile distance is seen, in many cases, as too slow, according to Nelson.

“We have identified three categories: the saunter, which is walking a quarter of a mile, the business walk, getting one kilometer in 10 minutes and the New York walk, three-quarters of a mile,” Nelson told The Examiner, adding the business walk is most common. “We should design our TODs around that, which will increase the total area three times.”

Montgomery County as well as D.C. and Northern Virginia have been ahead of the curve in implementing TOD, he said. But they all keep their development to a distance of a quarter-mile out from Metro stops.

His PowerPoint presentation to Montgomery’s Planning Board was part of a series the county will continue through the summer as its planning staff revamps Montgomery’s existing growth policy.

According to Montgomery’s Planning Board Media Relations Manager Valerie Berton, the idea is to allow planners and planning board members to hear from experts in the fields of growth, population, infrastructure and housing so as to incorporate the latest knowledge into their policy suggestions.

The series began in March with Dick Tustian, former Harvard University’s Lincoln Institute of Land Policy fellow with 50 years’ architecture and planning experience.

Next up will be Robert Gibbs, a leading urban consultant.

dlevitz@dcexaminer.com