It seems like some of the questions in that article directly came from our conversation on this thread - so it’s nice to see that there’s some influential lurkers in our community!
Another factor that could work in favor of potential contractors (though it’s unclear if they even have the capacity to pay attention to things like this): Chapel Hill Transit won a federal grant to help develop its BRT line!
This grant is not the $138 million blockbuster that the Biden administration asked Congress to fund last year, but it’s still a significant step forward to make the Triangle serious about building BRT that works.
The Chapel Hill project’s expected to be shovel-ready in less than two years - so this means that, if our region wins all the BRT grants that it wants, there should be 3 new BRT lines under construction to some degree in the next 5-10 years. If that’s not enticing to contractors, I’m not sure what would be.