I shall be the lone dissenter on this forum. I am very skeptical of ridership numbers especially in the short term. Other than the regular bus riders who will ride it? Especially at a couple of dollars per ride. Traffic along New Bern Ave is negligible. Could be a real estate play similar to Charlotte, but not sure bus is as glamorous as a train that will attract developers. Unless there was a fast way to get to RTP, where I admit is painful commute, don’t get it.
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Are you a dissenter, or do you look at the world through a thick car-centric, status quo America lens?
I understand being skeptical of a 9 digit project’s projected ridership numbers, but are you proportionately more skeptical of NCDOTs 10 digit highway expansion projects and their saved time and economic expansion projections?
You’re questioning/dissenting is reaching meme status. If free parking and vehicle access is so chiefly valuable, why aren’t all the abandoned K-Marts bought up and reinvested in?
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I was not a big fan of BRT u til I used it effectively here. They learned a lot of hard lessons. BRT powers that be should take a trip here. Great integration with other modes of transport, fast, reliable and innovative after fixing its initial mistakes.
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The idea that only undesirable people ride the bus will decrease once we have more people living in town. That’s what I believe is the main issue. I’ll definitely be riding the bus, it’s been proven to be more sustainable and I don’t want to have to drive everywhere just to sit in traffic in 2030+/-.
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I’m sure I’m not the only one with that opinion, given the amount of northerners, etc. moving to town.
Ridership is a bit of a misnomer used by naysayers of public transit in America. The ROI from the vast majority of large public transit projects is from the tax base created around rail stops. The anti-transit folks (not saying you are) like to skip over this stat because it doesn’t help their illogical argument. When one factors the tax revenue base created by the billions in density real estate projects, the “cost” of transit drops significantly. ONCE the density occurs which can occur in parallel with the transit project, ridership jumps dramatically. Sometimes a bit of chick & egg
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Yes sir. I will add a bit of opinion here that I believe is quite factual, but because it challenges power structures, I’ll leave it as an opinion .
Humans are particularly bad at predicting outcomes within complex dynamic systems. The economy, weather patterns, traffic impact, and ridership numbers all fall into the same category of completely complex systems made up of millions of individual decisions/variables.
Confirmation bias, the availability heuristic, and anchoring effects all act as blinders to our ability to predict accurately within these systems.
If anyone has read thinking fast and slow, you may know some of what I’m talking about here.
There could be a bus bombing tomorrow, and ridership numbers would drop. Or there could be a 10 car pile up on I-40 where casualties reach into the double digits, and ridership numbers would increase.
The one thing we do know with certainty is that a spine of frequent and reliable transit along a walkable land use pattern produces a virtuous cycle of investment and population growth, which then supports newer and better transit. As has been said many times, bolting on a transit appendage to the dysfunctional auto dependent land use body is a recipe for failure.
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The success of BRT in Raleigh, and really almost any transit project anywhere, hinges on land use. Stations need to be located in walkable places that people want to visit or live in. This project will fail without proper land use, and that’s why it’s so critical that the Station Area Planning effort clears all hurdles intact.
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That why we’re taking the risk if it’s a connector to jobs. And put walkability to be near by it’s brings investments. There has to be things nearby within distance, TOD and land use ours that together too.
Shoppers who need to make a last-minute grocery run, people who want to go to nearby parks or hospitals, people who may live in (for example) central Morrisville but want to go to events at Frontier RTP or downtown Cary without worrying about driving home drunk,… the difference between regular buses and BRT is that it’s more frequent and more reliable. Like @softfurrykitty said about Seoul’s BRTs, it works just like light rail if you properly give it the chance.
There’s a case study on that, by the way, if you’re interested:
Wrong project; we’re talking about possible extensions at RTP-Cary and Garner-Clayton.
But even for New Bern... (click me!)
…the idea is that we’re making mobility and traffic better before they become problems. The seeds of traffic, growth, and development density problems are sown years (if not decades) before their cancerous problems take root. By the time you notice them affecting your commute, you’ve already lost precious time in doing something about it.
Your big concern is about traffic (lots of people moving slowly on roads), right?. If you want to get to the root of the problem, you can pull on two levers:
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you get people moving faster, or;
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you move more people in a fixed amount of time.
We now know that building highways and fatter roads doesn’t help as much as we thought it would nearly a century ago. Sadly, we didn’t learn that lesson until after we learned that encourages developers to go all-in on cookie-cutter homes in unwalkable suburbs that rots away local economies and gives us no choice but to use cars every time we step out of the house. If that describes your lifestyle,… isn’t that …kinda …sad? Don’t you want to do something about that?
And if you’re going to do better for yourself by reversing 90 years of demographic trends that were served to you and your ancestors on a golden platter, isn’t it normal fort that to take a bit of work, and maybe some growing pains along the way?
That is what BRT is about: a way to have the public service of transit -and the private developments and public infrastructure that surrounds it- work for more people (even if that “more” does not include you, or if it includes homes that haven’t been built yet). The goal of this transit service, according both to the general public as well as stakeholders including elected officials and business leaders, is to do something where our local government can improve the lives of its residents. It is not trying to run a profitable business; not everything in life has to be about making money.
I agree with you; you should be. (click to see why!)
Those numbers (like the 2200/day thing for the western corridor with through service to Raleigh) are conservative estimates for 2050, after people’s habits of using BRT has stabilized.
Still, there’s an old saying in statistics where all models are wrong, but some are useful. Remember that our only goal in this study is to see whether this is worth further investment of taxpayer money, and how much work it would take to make that happen. That means it’s much better to be approximately correct than to be precisely wrong; all we need is the right order of magnitude and a comparison of which Alternative is better than others.
Besides, you can’t meaningfully predict what ridership will be like immediately after service starts, anyways, due to math reasons (you’d be trying to solve an complex, unstable system which you have no useful clues about initial conditions). In that sense, the ridership estimates (plus maybe 3x the margin of error that they reported) may be wrong but are good enough to help us make the decisions we need to make today.
…and to riff off of @evan.j.bost…
Click here if you care.
I feel like we’re at the point where you’ve done this so many times without engaging in other people’s replies, I’m struggling to tell if you’re engaging with us in good faith.
Look, man: if you’re seriously willing to challenge your own thoughts or have genuine debates in the first place, you’ve got to think about how you word yourself. Since I’ve never had the pleasure of chatting with you (or most of y’all on here) in person, I want to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don’t mean to come off as being an abrasive, dismissive budget version of the “change my mind” meme.
Being cynical and skeptical of public works is totally fair, especially since post-Reagan America’s really dropped the ball on that. But I think we should keep it in perspective; here in the DTRaleigh Community, we often talk about new ideas days to months before local journalists publish about it way below the headlines. Unless you consistently do the same thing with other major cities around the world, you’d get an inflated view of our local struggles and falsely think that everyone else has it easier.
You’d never know that, for example, England’s attempt at country-wide high speed rail is held together by duct tape and decades of false starts while being jeopardized by their recent changes in prime ministers. You’d never know that Silicon Valley, with all its private investments from tech companies, has been struggling to extend their subway since the 80s (and it may not be complete until the 2030s!). You’d have no idea that a major rail line between Singapore and Malaysia’s capital has been stuck in an on-again-off-again relationship for years. Even China’s recent explosion in high-speed rail is showing signs that it might lead into a debt spiral, as well as for local subways.
I definitely get the value of having a minority of naysayers to balance out the optimism that many of us have in this community. But it definitely sounds to me like quite a few people here are, at least, concerned about the way you’re showing it and what you’re bringing to the table in return. We all want to have fun and make for a better Raleigh and Triangle, after all, right?
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Anecdotally, I’ve convinced my girlfriend & several other friends to hop on the GoRaleigh buses when convenient, e.g., going to class or going out drinking (who knew, nobody likes paying $50 in Ubers every time you want to go downtown and not drive drunk!). Even if most of the buses we’ll take are not always convenient with 30-60 minute headways, I’ve definitely seen typical “non-transit users” be convinced of the value of transit when it makes sense, even if it’s “just a bus.”
I’ve always wondered how large the contingent of people is in the US who would take rail transit but not bus transit because of whatever preconceived bias they have about it. These BRT routes, on paper, should be just as functional as any average US light rail, so this will be a good test. However, I’m optimistic that if you get people to just try it, and it really does provide convenient service, then those biases will start to disappear.
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I used the CAT bus a lot growing up. A stop was less then a block from my house and ran where I wanted to go, either to my friend group out ridge rd or DTR. But as a rule I avoid the bus, esp if rail is avaliable. I hate sitting in traffic, and if I have to I want to be in charge. I think alot of folks feel that way, the bus is slower and more frustrating in traffic. BRT has the chance to change that. I hope this experiement works.
And so right about Uber. When I am here in R’wood I am lucky enough to have been hooked into the Gucci xpress. 
(thanks again @GucciLittlePig and @GucciLittlePenguin !!). Back home the Goober service is unreliable and I dont like sitting in a lawn chair bolted to the back of a pick up.
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Based on the number of people I’ve talked to who say things like “we have no transit in the Triangle, we need a light rail that goes straight from Wake Forest to downtown Raleigh!” I’d say it’s probably a pretty massive contingent.
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That checks out, unfortunately.
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I really wish I could take a bus more directly to DT from the house, but unfortunately this is what I have to work with. I’ve always been amazed that there hasn’t been a bus route over I-40 on L. Wheeler Rd.
I guess I could walk to the farmer’s market and pick the bus up there…
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I’ve also wondered often why Lake Wheeler doesn’t have its own route past the Farmer’s Market (there’s not even anything in the Wake Bus Plan, last I checked).
I’d say bike and pick up the 21, if anything. My nearest bus stop is almost a twenty minute walk, so taking my bike on the bus saves me quite some time. That said, in your case, you could probably just keep biking if you get that far.
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im not sure what type of demographic changes Raleigh is seeing the most…i assume younger people from bigger cities, used to transit, perhaps foreign born tradesmen and a fair number of retirees from bad climates? i dont see new bern being great brt. there is still a lot of near acre sized lots lining a good portion of it. ‘few’ will ride a straight bus downtown to be spewed out from dowtown to another workplace with raleigh being rather spread out and work patterns changing. maybe tower sc re-dev will help if that happens? i would throw out more frequent bus service on most routes perhaps especially those where the shadows are getting longest the quickest as bait first before fixed route moolah. but better bike access and greater frequency on new bern as-is i think would be a better start.
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Maybe they had it right in 1902
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No one has ever accused the Germans of being slouches in engineering.
I love this, but why isn’t it a thing anymore? There’s got to be a good reason, right?
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Today a system like that can be a lot less intrusive. This one was quite the affront to city (not to mention the shadows! LOL).
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