I took the opportunity to mark the two downtown transit centers. Do we know where layover is planned? I don’t particularly love either routing but I do like the alternate route better I think. I definitely think that’s better for through routing and with the mess of one ways/dead ends, it’s hard to have a perfect through routing.
It also leads to a one block walk from GoRaleigh Station (GRS) to Go+ which I don’t like. Has staff considered a South Blount and South Wilmington alignment, so that it’s centered on GRS, improving transfers? I don’t see many people transferring at RUSBUS, but I think serving it on the way to Cary or South Raleigh could make sense.
I mean my top two destinations on transit are Regional Transit Center, since I work nearby, and Ridgewood Shopping Center, nearby my church, on Wade Ave, which is why I get really protective of the 4 and the 100. I also go to the Raleigh Wegmans on the 2 from time to time.
Working with RDU to make the bus stop more obvious with a detailed advertisement showing routes, schedule would do wonders to gain airport ridership numbers. Most people don’t know the service exists, they don’t trust public bus, and the tiny bus sign is so insignificant enough to convince people to order an uber instead. Even if these service enhancements come with an airport surcharge to get RDU to play nice.
I’ve met with the rail division of NC DOT about making the seasonal fair stop there permanent, or at least using it more often for Canes and State games, and concerts.
Would need to have some kind of sidewalk or multi-use path along Youth Center Dr. Right now, people would have to walk around the fairgrounds along Blue Ridge and Trinity.
I marked the Raleigh Municipal Complex which is where I think GoRaleigh station should go.
Although Wilmington/Salisbury gets closer to Fayetteville Street, Dawson/McDowell is close enough to Fayetteville and much closer to Glenwood South and the Warehouse District. Moore Square is kind of the eastern boundary of downtown. The municipal complex is much closer to the geographic centroid.
I was looking at this, and I liked it until I thought about space. I don’t know if there’s really enough space there for all the service we operate, especially if we’re going to layover buses at the transit center. I want to know more about our long term service plan before I endorse a location.
Right now we operate articulated buses on the 1 but those were going to be BRT buses.
Are we planning to only run articulated buses on BRT routes?
Right now we treat it as if all routes terminate in downtown, even if the bus has a 0 minute layover before starting another route at GoRaleigh Station
Are any routes planning to through route, or are we terminating all routes in downtown?
Right now in the evening we’ll sometimes keep a spare bus to inject when a route gets too delayed to prevent that from cascading.
Do we need to keep spare buses at the center?
We have 10 frequent service, 7a-7p, every 15 minute routes right now and 23 routes total that serve GoRaleigh station with an average frequency of every 30 minutes.
How many frequent service routes do we need to build the station for?
If there isn’t enough space in a full half-block (which, mind you, is already quite a lot larger than Moore Square) then how about a two-level complex?
I’d love to see city and regional buses at ground level, and intercity at -1 or +1.
Also, where else downtown can we readily (or even feasibly at all) acquire a parcel larger than a half block that isn’t situated drastically worse? It’s already city owned, it’s a mere three-level parking facility so it’s not all that valuable to begin with, and it was built in the early 80s so it’s about fully depreciated and likely due to come down in the next 5-10 years anyway.
The money saved on property acquisition would go a long way towards building that second level.
Acquiring more of the current GoRaleigh station block might be possible, but that’s a larger, more recent parking deck, and the block also contains some of Raleigh’s best historic architecture. Maybe the RFP block east of Moore Square? But that’s two full blocks further from the center of DTR.
The problem is that Dawson/McDowell functions as a pair of one way thru-streets that come together at either end. Having plentiful stops along this already clogged route at heavy travel times sounds like a disaster to me. And, if we don’t plan for serviceable stops along either route option, then it’s inconsequential for downtown residents, workers, and visitors whether one option is chosen over the other since they both end with the same E/W square loop.
While Wilmington/Salisbury is another pair of one way streets, it’s not a thru-corridor in the same way as Dawson/McDowell.
On a side note, and as annoying as one-way streets are for cars and buses, I feel safer as a pedestrian crossing wider one-way streets than wider two-way streets. Depending on the crossing, and whether or not it’s at a corner, there are fewer scenarios where a car can make a bad decision and cause me harm.
The idea would be to get rid of all parking along Dawson/McDowell and make the cross section for both be 3 travel lanes and 1 permanent, dedicated bus lane.
And we don’t want “plentiful” stops. We want three. One at the south end by Lenoir, one at the north end by Lane, and then RMC station itself. A fourth at Peace but that’s technically Capital Blvd, not Dawson/Morgan. A quarter mile (about 4 blocks) between stops.
That would definitely be better, but they’d also have to deal with the turn lanes too that sometimes use the same lane as parking.
Still, I think it’s still worth considering pushing the route closer to destinations and residents. The Dawson/McDowell corridor is not ideal if this is also intended to serve actual downtown residents.
I would say we at least need 1 bay for every 2 frequent service routes and maybe 1 bay for every 4 infrequent. So at least 5 frequent bays and 3 infrequent bays, 7 might be a first approximation but a bay for an articulated bus takes up more space than a 40 foot bus, maybe 1.2x or 1.5x. I would probably want at least the equivalent of 10 bays, since I don’t want to think that we’re done with expansion and room for staging makes sense to me. I also want to use sawtooth bays, since that make it take less time to get in/out, rather than the flat bays we use now, but that takes up more space.
Which AI is estimating around 30,000 Square feet, probably with additional maneuvering space since this assumes that we could lay them out linearly, which would be at least 735 foot wide when we only have 450 ft. A double sided island could maybe fit, but might a little cramped, 380ft x105ft estimated and I’m not sure how accesses would work. We have 350ft x250ft. (Assuming 8 40ft bays and 2 60ft bays.)
The problem with a multi-story center, is that then you need room for ramps, and that would easily eat up most of our space. Ramps for buses are bigger than ramps for cars.
We already have considerably more frequent bus service than charlotte, but they also assign about one route per bay, if I remember right, which we don’t have to do.
