I’m trying to think of an interim solution they could do without wasting too much money / redoing stuff but the best option may just be waiting it out and just running some very high frequency stuff and maybe some transit priority signals for now.
Also, do you happen to have some links to more details on this capital blvd plan?
Love the BRT lanes but whew this could be a billion dollar project once you deal with ROW getting those interchanges in. But definitely a game changer for the area.
Assuming this is in the early stages, I wonder if they’d consider just an elevated BRT / managed corridor down the center similar to what is being constructed on Gandy Blvd in Tampa. https://www.selmonextension.com/
The Capital Blvd. North Corridor Study (which is still ongoing) seems to go much farther -and their last public presentation talked about median-running BRT-exclusive lanes with inline stations at key intersections.
The City made an ArcGIS StoryMap that goes into all the neat details about that corridor plan, too (first posted here by @thehappysmith). They’ve been silent about their progress since then, though, and their last sign of life I could find is this discussion on bikeways around that corridor back in February.
If the BRT-related suggestion survives and makes it onto the adopted study report, then NCDOT would have to put in a significant amount of money into these upgrades. I bet GoRaleigh would run BRT to North Hills first like @pierretong suggested, and treat the Capital extension as a separate branch line. Maybe this could be a part of a package of BRT extensions, alongside the RTP and Clayton ideas?
Reminds me of the Silver Line (J Line) in Los Angeles. The Harbor Freeway Station.
Maybe this will be a multi-billion dollar project! I’m not a fan.
If we’re going to do the conversion here and spend this amount of money at least it appears they’re trying to plan it “right” with the BRT in line stations. Could end up being a valuable investment rather than just a conversion which would still cost 75%
This whole plan just seems ill conceived. Selling a freeway conversion as a transit project? Gimme a break. Trying to build an eight lane freeway and claim that it will become the heart of a dense urban corridor, but yet, they’re apparently planning for a full half mile - or more - between places where pedestrians can cross? I mean, half a mile isn’t much worse than what we have today, but it’s also not lined with the midrises and skyscrapers that the corridor study calls for either.
There’s an underused rail line, that the state is about to buy outright, and planning to fully grade separate, about a mile west of this. How about we do something useful with that first? Put in some stations along that, and focus the development around them?
I wouldn’t say they’re trying to pitch this as purely a transit improvement. It’s an urban expressway with transit options. This corridor is currently one of the busiest roads in the state. It simply can’t function safely as a non-limited access facility much longer.
So if we’re going to spend the money, why not add in the transit facilities where there’s already development that supports heavy bus use (lots of low-mid income strip malls)
The rail corridor needs to happen too but the Blvd BRT would have a much different user base.
Well, my point is that I don’t think we should spend the money at all.
Rush hour traffic on Capital Blvd was bad when I came here for a high school track meet in 1997. It was still bad when I moved here in 2000. It was bad in 2010. It’s still bad today. But has it gotten perceptibly worse? Maybe somebody who drives it at rush more often than I do can answer the question.
I really just want to see a rail line happen first, before we spend a dime more on this absolutely massive freeway project. All the energy that is going into this should be spent on planning rail first. Twice now, rail transit projects for our region have gotten mired in bureaucratic hell. And yet highway expansion continues apace. The longer we spend without so much as a skeleton of a fixed transit system in place, while continuing highway expansion exactly as usual, the more the development will focus exclusively around the highways and the further behind on transit we’ll fall.
Fair points but I’m looking from a safety and operations stand point. This is a virtual corridor that operates terribly because it’s forced to carry freeway level volumes that will only continue to increase. Also it’s our main low to medium income stop and go shopping corridor which the rail line will have 0 benefit for while the BRT on this corridor could serve as a lifeline for them to get to shopping and working.
Doing this won’t have any affect on the rail like IMO because it’s two totally separate things looking to solve two totally separate bodies of the population.
In this case I see both as completely essential from a safety, mobility and equity standpoint.
I fully believe the rail fan should and will happen and needs to be a priority along side this.
…thus assuring that people will just say that they are taking the bus, and not differentiating this from any other bus route. It’s also a lost opportunity to to build enthusiasm for ridership, and public support of its expansion.
I disagree.
BRT needs to be about Making Buses Better, not Making Something Better than Buses.
If people think “BRT, I’ll ride that… but regular buses? PFFT, that’s for riff-raff” then we’ve completely failed at branding and marketing.
Then we will agree on disagreeing. 
I was a Capital Blvd commuter for 8+ years. The daily commuter traffic was predictably bad. At first my Capital Commute was from Thornton Rd to Millbrook, then I changed firms and had to commute to near PNC Arena, so I took Capital from Thornton Rd to either Wade Ave or Peace/Hillsborough (the Beltline in the mornings was out of the question, but I did typically take the Beltline in the afternoons). Over the course of time, I didn’t personally identify a change in the length of my commute. But there were days when I would bail from Capital and take Atlantic Ave or Louisburg Rd. Heaven forbid that there was wreck on Capital between 540 and Durant, and I’d just be stuck.
From the safety point of view, I have much greater concerns. I actually called one of the TV stations about folks darting out into moving traffic AT NIGHT between crosswalks RIGHT AFTER the City upgraded the crosswalks and crossing signals along Capital. The conversation with the TV station petered out after a few emails. Then I kid you not, a few weeks later while driving into work one morning the traffic was really bad. I missed my opportunity to get off Capital before I got completely stuck. About 20 minutes of crawling later I saw first hand why traffic wasn’t moving. Someone had been hit on the other side of Capital and the road was fully blocked by cops and paranedics north bound. So yes, I saw a dead body in the middle of the road on my way to work that morning. I nearly turned around and went home. That is a scene I never wish for anyone to have to see. (Unfortunately it happened to me again this fall on I-40 hear Greensboro.)
Point being, pedestrian safety on the 540 to 440 stretch of Capital Blvd is a MAJOR concern for everyone. Anything we can to do to get pedestrians and fast cars from interfacing needs to be the utmost importance for this corridor. If that means pedestrian crossings, grade separated bridges, BRT, fairies carrying folks over the road, underground tunnels, whatever, we really need to get pedestrians out of traffic on Capital.
100% was just on Capital the other day and saw at least three mid-block pedestrian crossing attempts. I get it…the distance between signalized intersections is a lot, so people are gonna roll the dice. But there’s got to be a better way. Capital is the most dangerous corridor in the region by a landslide IMO, and to tie this post back into the topic, one thing the BRT will need to do is make it easier to access median-running stations (if that’s how they decide to design it).
85,000 Vehicles per day on Capital Blvd north of 440. Simply can’t function safely or efficiently as a road with traffic lights.
For reference, that is more traffic than I-540 @ US 1, the Wade Ave Freeway portion, and Durham Freeway through RTP.
I guess the question is, is it worth the money to convert it to a freeway concept? and what sort of impacts would there be to the corridor as a result of the projects in terms of added congestion temporarily due to construction and local businesses/neighborhoods? (since northeast Raleigh is increasingly more lower income)
It’d be a mammoth undertaking but one I think is necessary.
If you construct the Local access roads on either side first, and then the freeway I think you can minimize the impacts. Thankfully, there seems to be a huge setback through most of the corridor.
After the conversion I could see this corridor pulling over 100k vehicles per day since you’d be pulling people off of Atlantic, falls of Neuse, old wake forest and more surrounding roads thus making them safer too.
Doing some more digging, I don’t even see any arterials in Atlanta pulling 80k a day. This is a truly unique corridor. Even the independence Blvd corridor in Charlotte south of the NC 27 split is at 63,000
yeah I’m just thinking about the traffic control nightmare it would be to maintain 85,000 vpd throughout the how many number of years it would take to complete all of this haha.
The alternate is really just to do nothing though and use the congestion as a deterrence from people moving up to Wake Forest/Rolesville and working downtown
