Projecting a General Image of Transport Policies to Transit Oriented Development in Iran: The Ideal versus the Real

Transit Oriented Development (TOD) has certainly become a prominent planning concept to link transport and land use planning worldwide in recent decades. Togetherwith other developing countries, Iran, as a newcomer to TOD, has recently set the number of national policies on TOD. It is agreed that such a development strategy ispromoted by a series of integrated policies in background aiming at delivering liveable communities. Of which, transportation policies tend to have an important role on bothsupply and demand sides which seems to be forgone in such policies, according to the primary studies and observations of Iranian cities. The present study, therefore, aims toshed light on urban transport policies, planning process, and its integration with the built-environment policies in the structure of Iranian policymaking system usingliterature research and policy content analysis. Projecting a development-oriented transit in Iran, the results confirmed the hypothesis and pinpointed that a variety of thecorresponding entities, laws and regulations formulates urban transport policy and planning in Iran, which has partly made a kind of dissonance in the planning process.