My understanding is that it’s super rare in the US, but is well-known as a possible solution to the costs issue. I’m sure there are plenty of reasons why it is very difficult to do or get started with unless you’re a huge city. I think SF has some success recently doing some design/engineering and construction work all in-house.
FWIW, the city did start some sort of urban projects team that does a lot of small projects themselves – traffic calming, sidewalks (I think?), bike lanes, etc.
Bad bad idea. For one, it’ll jeopardize the whole project because the city used the justification of already having the lot for the Park-n-Ride at New Hope Rd in their bid for Federal Funds. You take that out, you have to start the grant process over I bet. (Under a new administration that doesn’t like mass transit, I might add.) The purpose & need statements given to the USDOT are based heavily on tying together three main regions: Downtown, WakeMed/Health Dept campuses, and Eastern suburbs. You can’t just delete one.
Secondly, I think the areas east of WakeMed is the part of the city the most neglected historically in terms of munipical infrastructure. The city has been touting this project as an example of their goal to correct decades of bad neglect. It’ll benefit from this more than downtown will.
Yeah, I think I had been referring to articles that used the phrase “Contractors that work in NC”. Which is not necessarily the same thing as contractors based in NC.
(Apology if that added to any confusion.)
if the bids keep failing, Reno, NV did a ‘BRT lite’ on existing Virginia Street. the street still has a #1 route that stops at all stops and a longer articulated bus at 10-minute frequency that only does 5 stops. may be an option for new bern until the building shadows along the avenue actually occur.
Just need to make sure that doesn’t end up being the permanent solution
Exactly. Chipping away the parts of BRT that makes it run like trains is called BRT creep, and it’s one of the biggest reasons why BRT has a bad rep. Phased construction makes sense, but we have to be careful not to let that become a slippery slope into making us become a part of the problem.
Also I don’t know who here has ridden the 15, but there’s a lot of riders going past WakeMed.
What I don’t understand is why we don’t start operating Go+ Buses on the 15, tomorrow? The 15 is the (or one of) most popular routes in the system and could use more capacity today. Build the Busway, keep working but start now.
Maybe have those 60-foot buses run on the 1, 7, 9, and 15 (maybe add the 6 to it too?) and wrap them as “Future BRT” or something. Maybe once construction starts, have BRT service (artic buses, 5-10 minute frequencies) while BRT infrastructure is being completed.
I don’t think we currently have enough to deploy them on more than a single route. Since I think we only ordered New Bern but let’s not mothball them until we have a Busway. Literally we could make a new platform out of wood if we need to, since they don’t fit in Moore Square
I’m don’t think it’s safe to assume just because buses have been ordered means they have been delivered and are currently just sitting idle. These are probably all custom built and have a good lead time before they get delivered. They are not just sitting on a dealer lot somewhere waiting for someone to buy and drive home. Could be wrong.
My understanding is that they’re Common Off-the-shelf New Flyer XDE60s (or maybe XD60s). Now New Flyer does have options like the ability to kneel or have a ramp which if we were building the best BRT possible we probably shouldn’t have bought the buses with but we didn’t buy high floor buses, and most of these buses are outfitted with them just in case to ensure ADA even without infrastructure.
King County Metro operates these on RapidRide but also frequently on non-RapidRide services.
Now driver training to my expectations would be the most difficult thing, as driving a bendy bus is harder than a standard 40 footer. Also finding stop space in downtown might be tricky too but you could even stop on Wilmington Street next to TAZ’s/the cut through.
Edit: I’m wrong, these are XN60s. Still COTS and operated in other places: New Flyer Industries XN60 - CPTDB Wiki
Wouldn’t we be shooting ourselves in the foot with that, though? That’s where the BRT station will be, so the 60ft buses would become unusable, again, as soon as construction begins.
(And that’s assuming we do have all 7 buses in the Triangle. GoRaleigh definitely has at least two of them, as we’ve seen from previous promotional pics, but it’s not clear if the other five are in their possession, as well, or if they’re just paid for.)
OK - well nevermind then. Maybe they are just sitting idle…
We even could operate a mixed fleet of 40 footers and 60 footers, if not all buses are in the triangle yet and I would think that the station downtown would be one of the first or one of the last stations to get built, so I don’t see that it would harm construction. You could even build the designed station early and leave it off the bid, it could even show trust with contractors.
Why is this orange? What are we now, dutch?
Well, the Dutch do transit a lot better than we do, so why not? 
It’s to honor our new Messiah, Donald Trump. 
For a serious answer, it’s one of the only colors that hasn’t been taken by other GoTransit co-branding efforts. To reiterate what I mentioned a long time ago, the idea is that each GoTransit brand should “own” its own signature color. When the system was first announced, they gave green to GoTriangle, teal to GoCary, dark blue to GoDurham, red to GoRaleigh, and reserved yellow/gold for the overarching “GoTransit” branding system:
Note that there’s not a lot about this rebranding effort that still exists online. This webpage from the old Durham light rail project website (archived by the Wayback Machine) and this article are the only online evidence of details that I could easily find.
Note that, when the design was originally announced, they left an option for Chapel Hill to join the co-branding system (light blue). Chapel Hill Transit hasn’t (yet) shown much interest in this, for now, but this could change if their BRT project wins federal funding.
Between that 2015 announcement and now, a few other colors have been taken, too. First, gray was taken up by GoTransit Partners, GoTriangle’s short-lived nonprofit fundraising arm that ended up becoming the lightning rod as the Durham light rail project took its last breaths…
Then, purple was taken by Wake County’s on-demand mobility service GoWake Access…
Best practices for designing around colorblindness, visibility/contrast etc. tells us that we don’t have much, left. After all:
So, really, orange is the only color left. At the time, I hoped that our governments would leave it reserved for Orange County’s attempts at improving their transit services, but we’ve known in this community since at least 2022 that Raleigh would usurp the last single color for itself.
Then again, I think orange for BRT is perfectly fine - especially since what’s happened since has just been objectively ugly. Just take a look at GoApex, which had to deal with an awkward mix of yellow, green, and blue (clearly the work of pencil-pushers than anyone with a design background)…
…as well as Wake Forest, which looks like a weird Frankenstein’s monster palette of GoCary plus GoTriangle.
