Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) in Raleigh

Transit and Transportation
1939

RTP’s business park design makes transit services practically useless. Sure, the bus connects to GoTriangle’s future transit hub, but what if I work at Cisco? I’d still need to take another bus connection that adds 15–30 minutes. Between riding, waiting, and switching buses, the total commute could easily take over an hour. At that point, I’d just drive. Even GoTriangle acknowledges the issue by offering Lyft rides because they know mass transit doesn’t work well in the RTP region.

Trying to serve RTP with transit is a losing battle that only drags down the overall transit experience for the region. It would honestly be easier to reimagine RTP itself than to build a transit system that effectively serves it. Raleigh should take a cue from Charlotte and focus on making one transit corridor attractive to businesses. The corridor between downtown Raleigh and Downtown South is the perfect candidate—if the city had any real vision.

2 Likes
1940

I mean usually I take my bike on the bus in order to connect last mile. The current Regional Transit Center is kind of disconnected from the wider RTP, and getting across 540 is mess but once I am, there’s a decent trail network within RTP. So I ride my bike for the last few miles. I could probably do it more often than I do but I would ride all the way back since that was good training and when the weather’s nice quite enjoyable.

I’m unwilling to ride “RTP Connect”, Lyft is not a valid Microtransit solution. My read of that was that it was pushed by the RTP Foundation, not GoTriangle. If we were to cover my workplace with the Morrisville Smart Shuttle, I would ride that. Instead I bring my bike but that’s not a scalable solution.

RTP is also perfectly situated to provide transfers between Durham/Raleigh/Chapel Hill/RDU. I don’t support providing frequent all-day service to the office parks in RTP, but I do think an expanded Morrisville Smart Shuttle and potentially a docked bikeshare system would provide good last mile connections. I also just think the number of people moving in that area, means that the number percentage you need to attract is pretty low in order to do pretty good numbers.

I think I take issue with this. Yes we should be working to make transit corridors attractive to businesses but we should also be working to connect the region, as it exists. Not everyone’s destination is going to be in a TOD and some destinations aren’t going to move.

2 Likes
1941

are the complaints legitimate?

1942

i have two visually blind parents that took TTA to Chapel Hill for dental work when it was TTA from the Falls of Neuse Spring Forest Area…few riders back then. nearly two hour rides. is boosting transit in this particular area or manner worth the cost? maybe developing in town cheap dental work…bring the dental students to each town with a perdiem for gas with a car? ive seen debates about serving more people or serving more area. with raleighs layout…is serving more peole maybe a better option?

1943

Same. I do it every day. If someone wants to build me a free monorail from my house to my work, I’ll be the first one on board tho

1944

Wake County Health and Humans Services department provides low cost and free dental services to low income people but there are many reasons people make the trek to Chapel Hill and to cover every one with local equivalents isn’t practical. I have a friend that I met up with for dinner there a few weeks ago; I would have loved to have taken GoTriangle, but it didn’t run late enough to get me home.

I think we should mostly spend money following where existing demand is. The GoRaleigh 15 operates at standing room only at points during the day, so we should invest in that corridor to improve it. Then go down the list in terms of high ridership routes. These routes should eventually be turned into BRT, as is planned with the 15, with bus lanes, queue jumps and signal priority.

I have similar views on Regional Transit. I believe that connecting the downtowns in Wake, Durham and Orange Counties is a noble goal and is where the where most ridership potential are. So we should invest in those to make them more frequent and a better experience. RTP is accepting density and becoming more mixed use, so there is hope for it.

6 Likes
1945

Westie is bestie. :partying_face:

2 Likes
1946

I don’t mean to be negative but I find it disappointing that planners haven’t been able to better coordinate efforts in what I’m going to call the “Triangle Core”.

Hub RTP, the new planned RTC, and the reworked GoTriangle 100 on I-40 are all frustratingly close, but just far enough apart that the connection will be not just mildly inconvenient, but quite impractical.

The original proposed location for the RTC relocation was better: north of NC54. Not sure what happened with that one.

Meanwhile, Hub RTP is about 3/4 mile west. 1/2 mile is usually regarded as the limit of “walking distance”, not to mention that the infrastructure for walking is poor to begin with here.

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I can see the 100’s diversion to reach the RTC taking as much as 10 minutes from when it leaves the highway until it gets back on. It looks like a small diversion on this map but everybody on board those buses will feel the delay acutely.

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The FAST study calls for “direct access ramps” so that buses can get on and off of I-40 more quickly, - but if the RTC were situated closer to I-40, buses would not have to leave I-40 at all and could instead have a “direct access station” which would allow the most seamless connection possible between rail and buses.

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I do understand that when it comes to transit we aren’t really in the position of being picky: we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But it all just feels like a missed opportunity.

Lastly note that I am not including RDU in my list of disappointments. As @core2idiot (and Jarrett Walker) have pointed out, RDU is a cul-de-sac and it’s difficult to serve as a stop “on the way” from anywhere to anywhere else. As such, a high frequency shuttle connection is probably the best solution. Over time, perhaps we can make the shuttle connection shorter by improving the infrastructure and perhaps moving the connection point on I-40 closer to the airport. For example, the FAST study shows “direct access ramps” there as well.

7 Likes
1947

GoTriangle had that proposal in their first RAISE grant, but that one didn’t get funded. Between that attempt and the attempt that did get money, I assume that CBRE (which owns Park Point) dropped out of that partnership with GoTriangle and the Research Triangle Foundation. That’s the simplest reason I can think of for why they moved to the current site: unlike Park Point, the RTF actually owns that plot of land, so there’s no need to negotiate complicated private-public partnerships with finicky developers (especially one that dropped out of the deal).

I agree that it’s a missed opportunity. But then again, there’s ways to salvage it. We know that UNC wants to build a new hospital across the street from the Frontier, so that pretty much brings NC-54 50% of the way to being the main street of an urbanized core for RTP. All you need is either:

  • BD (which is in between Hub RTP and Park Point) realizes what the part of its property that faces 54 could be, and plays host to local businesses or something
  • Fidelity (across the street from BD) has the same revelation, and opens a grocery store or something

and we essentially have a mini-downtown. Once you have that, I think a detour off of 40 would be pretty defensible (and plus, the RDU shuttle would also act like a nice, R-Line-like circulator around this downtown). That’s not as bad, right?

2 Likes
1948

That’s what I was thinking too – I think the long-term upside of this is that the area between the new RTC and Hub will be ripe for infill.

1 Like
1949

Our issues with transit use are unfortunately larger than the barriers that RTP gives us. When I go to Manhattan for work, I fly into Kennedy so that I can take transit to the office, but my colleagues don’t. They just take taxis from LGA. When I fly into Atlanta, I take MARTA to a stop that’s just one city block from the office, but my colleagues either rent cars or take taxis. Even my colleagues in Atlanta won’t take transit to the office, and then they’ll complain about paying 8 dollars to park. I’ve traveled to Europe with friends who would never take transit if I don’t push them to do it. We have huge cultural barriers in this country to taking transit for folks who don’t already use transit where they live.
Transit is usually seen as a last resort, not a first choice. How do we change that?

7 Likes
1950

It would honestly be easier to reimagine RTP itself than to build a transit system that effectively serves it.

That’s exactly what’s happening! I’ve written about the new RTP development framework here. RTP is going to look drastically different in the coming decades with many high density nodes and walkable mixed-use development, and our transit plans should account for that. I think it’s a fair critique that it’s not a transit priority today though.

7 Likes
1951

Build a transit line, build mixed use development around it.

2 Likes
1952

Yeah, I think that we all understand the components that make transit work, but that wasn’t my question. How do we change the resistance to it? How do we make it people’s first choice, not last choice?

2 Likes
1953

Focus on making it the best choice.

  • Cheaper (fares vs tolls/fuel/parking/car payment)
  • Faster (vs traffic, including time spent waiting for transit to come)
  • More convenient (closer to destination)
  • More comfortable

And more people will choose it.

You can accomplish this by improving transit, or by making driving worse.

Even in NYC there are people who hate transit - and the only thing that convinced them to use it was the congestion charge, which was put in place recently, and tipped the balance to make driving too expensive.

You don’t have to go that far, though - one way to more passively make driving worse is to reduce spending on road improvements (which will cause traffic, and therefore driving, to get worse) and increase transit spending.

6 Likes
1954

If we start with your bullets (good list), but I’d add that people need to feel safe. We already have real or perceived safety concerns that are often discussed in this community.

As for the “make it a better choice by either upping the experience of transit, or by making driving more miserable”, that’s a much taller task. Already we see Raleigh listed among (or at the top of) the best cities for driving. To make driving worse, you almost have to have a targeted sabotage that would likely end up being the biggest poison pill in the history of politics.

I’d suggest that we have to create EXCELLENT dense nodes of development that are already walkable to attract the sort of residents/businesses who are likely already transit inclined. The resistance that I see out there seems to come from those who are happy to be in their car dependent bubble, and that seems to be even more so when that bubble is close to downtown and their personal driving is currently easy and convenient.

IMO, if we focused on building excellent high density nodes (starting with downtown), and began by connecting them together with a transit solution, we would provide a comprehensive example of a daily life with less car dependency. As it stands, it seems like we are pushing the bolder up the hill with a cooked spaghetti noodle by trying to transform low density neighborhoods near predetermined stops when the folks who live there are largely happy with their status quo.

4 Likes
1955

My point is that to get more people to use transit, there is no education, PR, public outreach, or grassroots organizing that will move the needle meaningfully. It all comes down to the built environment, and the service.

Bear in mind that we have focused on the automobile as the main mode of transportation for about 100 years, and that development patterns have evolved in parallel: Raleigh’s streetcars were in decline by the late 1920s and were fully decommissioned in 1933; Cameron Village opened in 1949. It’s taken a long time to get to where we are, which means that the consequences of this century-long focus can’t be undone in a year, in a decade, or even probably in any of our lifetimes.

A lot of people point at photos of car-choked Amsterdam from the 70s/80s, then look at their bike-first transportation system today, and say “They did it, why can’t we?” Well: we can! But you have to realize that they were only on a cars-first path for about 30 years, from the end of WW2 until about 1975- and what you see today is the result of an ongoing, concerted, incremental effort to prioritize bikes, walking, and transit, over the past 50 years

Therefore, incremental changes are the only feasible path forward, and they cannot be expected to yield better than incremental results. Take heart, though: each increment matters, and over the course of years and decades, they can and will add up.

This is going to take time. There will be setbacks. Stay the course.

What you have laid out is the exact formula that needs to be followed:

  • High density nodes,
  • Linked with dense corridors,
  • Connected by transit that is:
    • frequent
    • fast
    • safe

Every step forward, in any of those categories, will yield an incremental bump in transit ridership.

7 Likes
1956

i expect to some degree raleighs workforce is changing…maybe more WFH. when i did some pharm research lab stuff in the 90s, i cant recall exactly, but some compounds being worked on on a given day would not allow women who were pregnat or thinking about getting pregant to enter that that day. i know bio tech in the triangle is growing but i wasnt sure how siting such places affects density or proximity to residences…this was out in RTP at the time. i also did some blueprint delivery in the 2000s. i think now with CAD and even large architectureal printers can be aquired without a large print house that many need to drive to, to then have a vehicle deliver the prints to a site or office. if a splatter gun transit option was jsut decided on…more miles, more routes, more frequency…20 minute at worst on the most uselss route, how much would car drivership lessen, realistically, in raleigh?

1957

I was looking at a recent update from the Regional Transportation Alliance (RTA), and realized that the slide deck from this year’s RTA State of Mobility presentation is available. If you’re not familiar, it’s essentially an annual pat-on-our-own-backs event from the transit advocacy offshoot of the Raleigh Chamber of Commerce. Since the RTA has been working especially closely with regional governments and the state Dept. of Transportation in recent years, it also means that it’s a good preview for what we could see more details about in the near-ish future.

TL/DR: We might get concrete plans for a BRT line that goes to the state fairgrounds and the Lenovo Center in the near-ish future!

This year’s presentation includes, among other things, BRT-related updates - both things we’ve already mentioned in this thread (e.g. new BRT funding for Chapel Hill and Durham), as well as a new preview of engineering designs from the ongoing FAST 2.0 study some interesting slides.

First of all, the FAST 1.0 study from 2022 was meant to be high-level survey of creative ways to make buses run faster and in more useful ways (both for the Triangle and as an example for the whole state). This follow-up expands on that by zooming into the 10 BRT corridors in our region that are already funded to some degree (or are explicitly defined in planning documents), and seeing how roads/highways could be modified to let buses run more smoothly. This map shows those corridors:

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If you look closely and compare it to maps from FAST 1.0 (most recently the one posted by @orulz), you may see a few differences. Some of it’s not surprisingly because they’re related to changes that happened after FAST 1 (e.g. the study on extending BRT lines to Morrisville and Garner/Clayton, or how commuter rail was found to be too expensive).

Then, there’s discussions on how certain highway upgrades could be BRT-focused. The only one with new information is direct-access ramps (“T-ramps” since they’d be T-shaped on a map), and five places were mentioned as possible places:

One of these is not like the others - the Trinity Rd. one, where it’s nowhere near any known BRT or possible express bus routes. What the heck?

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We currently know of three existing BRT lines in development, the potential lines on Capital Blvd. and North Hills, and the Morrisville and Clayton extensions. But this proposal means Raleigh might get an 8th BRT line, one that goes to Chapel Hill/Durham/RTP by partially running on the Western Blvd. line and going past the state fairgrounds, Lenovo Center etc.

Since the goal of the FAST studies is to recommend infrastructure upgrades that could support transit, the slides gave the current crossing of Trinity Rd. over I-40 as an example of what could happen:

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The RTA also announced that the full FAST 2.0 study results will be released in their annual transportation brunch, scheduled this year for August 8 (Fri).

14 Likes
1958

The Trinity connection makes tons of sense!
Western Blvd is in many ways a superior route to downtown for an express bus than Hillsborough. Hillsborough needs frequent service, but it’s slow, so it’s a better fit as a local route. (Hence, the #9)

What doesn’t make sense is Cary’s Harrison-Kildaire Farm BRT. Cary does run a bus every 30 minutes on both of those roads but the ridership is mid, and the density is just not there. The anchors (SAS, downtown Cary, and WakeMed Cary) are decent - but the density between them is negligible, and there’s not any initiative I’m aware of to increase it either.

Unless they’re talking very minimal infrastructure (eg: a queue jumper at the two or three worst intersections) I can’t see how the investment would be worth it.

9 Likes