On the topic of a BRT AMA, I’m unable to organize that. However, if we can submit a list of questions, I can try and work with the transit planners to get some comments related to what people are interested in.
I’m keeping this simple with just one question for anyone. Please submit one or multiple questions here in this Google form. I’ll leave it up for about a week and then I’ll aggregate the responses into a kind of FAQ style writeup.
Let me know if you have any questions.
This went better than I thought. I got 22 responses, some of your submitted one or many questions.
I quickly summarized what I saw, with the help of ChatGPT, and will see if I can get those answered. Once I have that, I’ll post it here for you all to read.
So, uh, any updates?
We need answers it’s been a A year
The questions you all submitted span multiple departments. Therefore, it’ll take a sec.
Patience, please.
Big News per the City of Raleigh Instagram
Today CC authorized City staff to accept federal grants for planning, design, and development of the Southern and Western corridors. Each grant award is for $8,134,600 in federal funding plus the 20% local match of $2,033,650, which is funded through the Wake Transit Plan.
This is really great news and proves that Raleigh and Cary are committed to building BRT lines.
Here are the links to the dedicated pages for each corridor:
Western BRT Corridor -
Southern BRT Corridor -
Just to be clear, these are planning grants.
The city’s still not done with the detailed engineering designs, yet, for either of the two corridors. This is especially important since the southern line has to be timed together with NCDOT extending Wilmington St. Also, this grant does not change the fact that we’re still ultimately applying for the grant that would split the estimated costs ($174M southern + western cost estimates not yet clear) 50-50.
Though to be fair, this is a great sign that the FTA’s doubling down on their formal declaration from earlier this year that they’re getting good vibes from the southern corridor proposal. So this is clearly an important win, but let’s be clear: we still have a ways to go before we can get more shovels in the ground.
Doesn’t matter New Bern BRT is funded and full planned and still hasn’t started construction.
We honestly believed we could do light rail when busses but slightly better is a struggle. 
I didn’t know about the Wilmington Street extension. But I did know that the West BRT involves connecting Western Blvd to Cary Towne.
Does ‘authorized to accept’ mean the money is in hand, or that they’re prepared to accept when offered?
Not to be too cynical but I’d rather get any federal money we possibly can before the next administration begins.
It means the money will be in hand.
Even if the money is “offered” (which happens once you win the competitive grant process), you still need to have a contract in place between the city and the federal government* and to execute it so that we actually get the money. But if you look at the city council agenda item that the Insta/Twitter post is based on, though, the city council action is for amending the budget to reflect the grant. It doesn’t make sense to do this unless you’re further along than just “getting the offer”.
Side note: this is why, when we won the New Bern BRT construction grant, the official terminology is that we were selected for a Full-Funding Grant Agreement (FFGA).
I understand how long it can take to get answers across multiple departments, but have we received any answers at all? I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m just looking to get a general update on where the BRT stands since they opened back up for new bids.
Would love to hear what answers we have so far, if possible. Thanks! Appreciate your help here!
No, no response back but I wouldn’t expect much here in December.
Is there something that this update below doesn’t answer for you?
Haven’t seen this! Thanks for the link!
Edit: The update I was looking for was where the New Bern BRT stood since they reopened bids. Looks like he answered that at about 17:00 in the video. For those who are curious, they received one bid and it is currently under review. And that’s all they can share for the time being.
So, fingers crossed it all works out! Thanks Leo!
Unfortunately, it looks like that bid was too high. According to the N&O plus city documents, city staff seem to be moving towards trying another bid.
That second request tried to break up roadwork and station-building into two separate bidding opportunities. The problem was that the lone bidder for the roadwork half wanted to charge more money than for both halves of the project.
The next game plan seems to be to give contractors more time and smaller chunks to work with:
If the third time’s the charm, we should see asphalt being dug up this coming summer, and we should be able to ride BRTs by 2028 - fingers crossed. After all, the article also mentions that we’ve already bought the seven BRT-specific buses to do this (though I’m not sure if all of them are in Raleigh now).
Wow. Thanks for the update. Anyone out there at all optimistic about this third attempt? Because I’m having a hard time believing this will start within the year (but would love to change my mind).
I wonder how much of this bid-reject-rebid stuff goes on behind the scenes for things like NCDOT highway projects.
Anyway - this seems like a troubling sign for what should be a home run project.
I wonder how much of this bid-reject-rebid stuff goes on behind the scenes for things like NCDOT highway projects.
Probably not to the same extent given there’s no shortage of contractors that know how to build highways.
I’m sympathetic to reasoning that contractors are focused on WNC right now. I’m also sympathetic to the idea that requiring an NC based contractor for the first BRT system in the state is scaring off contractors.
The other thought comes to mind is whether the city’s expectations are unreasonable. Has staff underestimated cost and time needed? Really hard for myself as a layman to tell where to place blame.
Perfect, it’ll only be 2 generations behind from what is actually needed lmao. I’m really not optimistic about this at all. It’s gonna be half-assed, then ridership will suck because it’ll be a half-assed SINGLE STREET bus line that is useful to no one, then further BRT lines will get canceled, then this New Bern BRT line will eventually hault.
Then maybe in another 20 years the city will discuss how badly we need better public transportation and how behind we are on it, and this whole charade will start over and waste another lifetime of essentially zero public transport (unless you count the current abysmal bus service we have).
Sorry to be so negative, but it’s objectively embarrassing for a city of our current size and growth rate to lack any sort of urgency on providing legitimate public transpo.
Do we know if they’re willing to open bids to non-regional contractors now? I know part of at least one of the previous items mentioned their preference and focus was on getting NC-based contractors. If they’re all focused on WNC right now, it makes a lot of sense to have this opened to other orgs out of state.