People will keep moving there until it’s so bad that it completely brakes down and brakes down the alternate routes. And even then, people will still move. Ask the northern suburbs of Atlanta lol
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You can’t convert a road to a highway simply because there’s a ton of traffic. As a topic that is constantly discussed, improving flow will temporarily help. Eventually the traffic level will still come up and overwhelm the new road. You need to encourage other modes of transport including transit or carpooling. The highway will only encourage people to live way outside the city.
I would prefer to do nothing with the exception of building dedicated bus lanes and potentially put carpool lanes on Capital Blvd to help with the traffic. There are cities that have carpool lanes at peak times even on their local access roads. There are also cities that have a whole network of city streets that carry a lot of traffic. If people don’t want to sit in traffic, then they can use the bus (with dedicated bus lanes) or carpool if we implement carpool lanes. If they choose to stay in their car as a single rider, then that’s a choice they made.
Edit to add: If they also choose to live 16 miles away from work, that’s also their choice. There’s going to be positives/negatives to living close to work vs. living away out from the city.
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I would agree but as I said, 85,000 vehicles is 85,000 vehicles. This isn’t just converting it for the hell of it.
Which I also agree that 85k vehicles is 85k vehicles, but we need to look at ways to reduce that. Not at ways to move them (Edit: quicker).
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By the conversion you’ll be reducing all the surrounding local roads. Plus with the BRT lane and adjacent Commuter rail it should be good enough to never need any more upgrades.
Also, the graphic that was shared here probably won’t be built like that.
Two lanes at freeway capacity will be fine + the BRT lane and frontage boulevards. Not the five they’ve shown.
Out of all the projects in the area, this would be the one I’d fully agree with. Mostly in the name of safety actually, secondarily in flow.
Just taking what I’ve seen from Atlanta, the do nothing approach will not deter anyone from moving there. So many people want the schools and suburbs lifestyle out there.
Pulling back on topic though, if BRT is done, it must have a dedicated guideway on this corridor plus proper pedestrian crossing and not just those hybrid beacons. I couldn’t imagine crossing this road on foot.
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If we’re going to convert Capital Blvd to a freeway, let’s:
- Implement passenger rail on the S-line FIRST as an alternate route for people to bypass the “carmageddon” congestion from construction. And since it is a highway construction mitigation project, build this commuter rail project with gas tax money, not transit sales tax money. (This is how Tri-Rail got its start in Miami in 1989. Ridership was higher than expected, and as a result, they made it permanent, added frequency, and extended its reach.)
- As a result of #1 above, forget elaborate, costly phasing and overnight lane closures to maintain full rush-hour capacity during construction. Rip the bandaid off all at once to get it done as quickly and cheaply as possible. We don’t want a repeat of Charlotte’s stupid decades-long, start-stop BS on Indepenence Blvd
- Set a firm limit of three general purpose through lanes in each direction (which should accommodate existing traffic and then some). Do not leave room for “future widening”.
- Do the BRT with some guarantee that it never gets turned into car lanes, or alternatively, a provision that it must be tolled and that all revenue from those toll lanes must be funneled to transit.
- Sorry, pedestrian crossings every half mile ain’t gonna cut it. Every quarter mile or better, please. Again, we are not trying to copy Charlotte’s mistakes with Independence Blvd.
- Bundle in a “complete streets” makeover on Atlantic, including a road diet, lower speed limits, more pedestrian crossings, curb-protected bike facilities, and dense mixed use zoning. Make it North Raleigh’s main street.
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I think that’s a pretty good action plan.
I really think you may be able to get away with two GP lanes in each direction with AUX lane in between interchanges since you’ll have full frontage roads, BRT and adjacent rail.
I wonder what some TDM runs would say about how much traffic we could pull off of the alternative routes?
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Totally agree with this approach.
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Does TDM actually do anything with the way it’s implemented now, though? How do we measure that (and compare that to the status quo or non-TDM alternatives)? And what strategies are you thinking about, to begin with?
If you don't know what TDMs are...
Disclaimer: not a transit expert. This aside could be changed if it turns out I get some things wrong.
TDM is short for transportation demand management. Like your computer (hardware) running programs and apps (software), this is the “soft” half of transit infrastructure. This include things like:
- changing the timing of traffic signals throughout the day
- public advertisements of that carpooling program nobody knows about
- employee transit benefits
- awareness events
Arlington County, VA’s Mobility Lab goes even further, saying that TDM involves all infrastructure that nudges people to make the best use of all transit infrastructures (i.e. make it more attractive for you to go places without driving alone). This means they argue that HOV or bus-only lanes, congestion pricing, variable parking rates, showers and changing rooms for biking commute hubs, and policies against parking minimums count, too.
My question, though, comes from how that’s not the image most people seem to have of TDMs -if they even realize they’re being used in the first place. Because of that question plus debates on what counts as TDMs, it’s hard to even agree on what words to use for the questions that matter, like “what benefits do TDMs, overall, bring?” or “are they useful (and how do you measure that)?”.
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I just learned a whole bunch! I was talking about Traffic Demand Modeling though which is a system we use to model different future scenarios.
For example if a new bypass was constructed , how many vehicles would use it and how many vehicles would still use the traditional route. Or you could even code it for transit to predict how many users would use the transit line and how your roads would fare. My thinking here would be to code it with the rail line, BRT, and conversion and see what the impacts would be.
But obviously the TDM you’re speaking of would be a great idea here too! No reason a road of this magnitude shouldn’t have at the very least bus queue jumps already.
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Of course there’s another similar acronym that has a totally different meaning 
You may have to do some digging around in the city or CAMPO’s meeting records, but I’m sure this was a part of an earlier presentation for the Capital Blvd. North Corridor study. It probably doesn’t include BRT and commuter rail, though, so yeah, I’d love to see more accurate traffic modeling results too.
If only that was something we could do now, for free…
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Wait, what? 85,000 VPD? 
I’m struggling to think of any successful surface streets with that kind of volume. That’s akin to Route 7 through Tysons Corner, or Wilshire Blvd near UCLA. How do you fix that? I don’t know, but I also instinctively don’t want to trust NCDOT’s conclusions.
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It shocked me too! It’d be the busiest non-freeway in Atlanta too!
Fun fact I found while looking through volumes was that 40 between Page Rd and 540 is the busiest freeway stretch in NC as well.
But yeah, there’s no “easy” way to fix this and there’s no one way to fix this. IMO you really have to do all 3 (freeway (for flow and safety), rail (get 10k+/- cars off) and BRT (local trips to the stores)) . We’ll easily be looking at 100K a day within 20 years with the growth we’re seeing, which will just make the surrounding roads worse because of people ditching Capital for alternate routes.
Just FYI - SR 7 in Tysons has about 85K, Wishire has about 60 Traffic Counts
2019 Traffic Data - Info | Virginia Department of Transportation
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Was going to ask – what are the busiest GDOT non-freeways? When reading your banter above, I was thinking Buford Highway would be a good example (also a stroad, also strip retail, socioeconomically similar) but it carries ~1/3 the volume.
LA City DOT has a pretty confusing AADT map interface. Upside is that you can get lots of historic data, since of course LA collects lots of data. Wilshire at Gayley was last auto-counted at ~85K.
Those two stroads came to mind because they’re both super-busy and urbanizing with heavy rail, but they’re also not completely comparable to Capital because both have parallel expressways.
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Thornton Rd right at I-20 has 78k in Douglas County ~ 15 miles West of Atlanta but quickly splits just past the interstate. There’s a bus line for Cobb County but I don’t think it’s widely used.
Jimmy Carter right at I-85 NE of Atlanta has 75k. Gwinnett County notoriously keeps voting down any forms of Transit.
Buford Hwy has 85 a mile parallel but I do think a BRT line is planned on Buford Hwy.
The thing that sets Capital apart, like you said is that there are no other main routes. It’s the major artery for commuters and daily activities which make it very unique.
Even with Wilshire, most of those people may be using the street for short bursts to get to their destination since they have so many freeways around unlike Capital where you have long-tracked commuter traffic.
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Let’s not forget that Capital Boulevard is also US-1 which runs from Key West to Maine. We (Raleigh) sit right in the middle of that route and Capital is our direct link to the North (RVA, DC, etc, etc) via US-1 to I-85. US-401 runs with Capital through most of town, and splits off in Mini City, but really doesn’t go anywhere past Louisburg. The other northern link out of Raleigh is Creedmoor Road to I-85 via Creedmoor and 25 mph through town. I’ve driven both many times heading north, Capital is my hands down winner (north of WF of course). We really don’t have any other connections going north whereas heading south from Raleigh you have I-40, US-1, US-401, and NC-50.
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Exactly! So while we did luck out with having no interstates that have a lot of background traffic, we do have one of the most principal US routes running straight through.
Not having an radial interstate approach to / from downtown does hurt us connectivity wise while helping in some other areas. Unfortunately, even with transit (rail, BRT anything we come up with) improvements, that lack of interstate access especially in this corridor will become glaring.
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Square Loop
My god the city does something smart for once. Shame Salisbury can be straighten at this point.
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Now the next level would be to connect Lake Wheeler to that southern leg of West St. Then there’d be another direct connection from 40 to downtown
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