No, I mean those corridors should be defined before developers do anything.
Developers don’t just plop a development anywhere they want; there’s a ton of questions they have to answer to evolve an idea into a proposal. One of those variables is cities’ comprehensive plans. In North Carolinian cities, the policies and design standards it has like complete streets cross-sections have legal power. Developers have to follow those guidelines whenever they want to rezone or get construction permits (or convince city staff to grant them an exemption).
My idea is to rearrange how that process works, and where transit is(n’t) in the grand scheme of things. From what I understand (and again, I’m not a transit or planning expert; I just like to be responsible and informed), this is how things work now versus what I’m proposing:
TL/DR: it seems to me like transit is still not baked into the city/regional planning pipeline. Roads are explicitly outlined in Raleigh’s future street plan, for example, and updated by default in the same cycle as other policies about land use. Transit doesn’t get the same treatment (with exception), though, so GoRaleigh and GoTriangle are left to do their own thing. That is what I’m suggesting we should change.
You could design the basic framework of how buildings should look, and make developers follow them in return for less red tape. That sort of policy’s called a “form-based code”; a part of Chapel Hill actually uses it but it can be abused to easily make ugly buildings.