Seems like a Western to an Edwards Mill extension then to Trinity and 40 would be faster to the arena district and would have more space to provide dedicated ROW than the Blue Ridge Rd and Trinity path?
I’d rather see Wake County complete the Raleigh BRT lines and build one on Glenwood before focusing on whatever the heck Cary wants. I’d like to see BRT lines actually get built before we start making wish lists on expansions (though nobody banned dreaming).
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Just like Western Blvd extension, this is a road link that’s been on maps forever. It would require a grade separated railroad crossing, though.
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The distance is about half a mile shorter via Blue Ridge and Trinity, plus it actually connects with the Fairgrounds and the Vet school.
I wonder if it would be possible to have dedicated lanes on Blue Ridge Road. The underpass they’re building right now has four lanes, and traffic is fairly light on Blue Ridge south of Hillsborough (11,500 vpd) so it’s possible - but I wouldn’t hold my breath for it to happen easily, or soon.
For reference, FHWA says (paraphrasing)
- <10,000 vpd: Great candidate for a road diet
- 10,000-15,000: Good candidate, double check and possibly revise signal timing
- 15,000-20,000: Possibly a candidate, capacity may be affected
- 20,000+: Unlikely to be a good candidate without major traffic impacts
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The only counterpoint to this is that there would be less BRT construction required if they go with the Edwards Mill extension. There would only be 1.4mi of work (1mi for the road extension + 0.4mi for widening or rearranging Hillsborough St.) since the rest of that 2.5mi would run on existing right-of-way for the Western Blvd. line.
Just from a service perspective, I like the Blue Ridge route better, too. But I think we’ll have to wait for this BRT extension to be designed with more rigor before we can make a truly informed choice.
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Question: how serious do we think these FAST studies are? While RTA usually seems to have a transit project or two somewhere on their priority list, it’s always ranked lower than their ever-changing list of freeway and airport projects. Their homepage doesn’t even mention transit currently.
It kind of feels to me like they do these studies for the sake of claiming a multi-modal focus, but most of their actual advocacy work centers around the priorities of business travelers (driving and flying).
Apologies for the cynicism; I’m just not particularly convinced that these guys are actually advocating for transit behind the scenes.
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From what I can tell “from the inside” lol RTA leadership is very adamant about seeing all 11 BRT projects, including shoulder running BRT projects through. Just this morning RTA’s Joe Milazzo stated in front of local leaders (DCHC or Triangle West TPO and CAMPO Board Members) that the dedicated lanes would not only help improve our transit services but also our medical services. To add, he also stressed the need for BRT to the RTA’s business members during their luncheon last week.
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I think it’s fair to be cautious about RTA’s involvement and their seriousness - and on that note, it’s probably most helpful to think about what they are: fundamentally, they’re an offshoot of Raleigh’s Chamber of Commerce. RTA is a lobbying group that solicits donations from member companies and uses their funds to makes noise to support things that are already on governments and companies’ minds. They are ultimately a cheerleading group with business-focused priorities that are powered by companies and their senior leaders. If you know how to get past the marketing fluff, they’re pretty upfront and honest about that!
In this sense, I think it makes sense that the FAST study is treated differently from the rest of the RTA’s operations simply because it’s not their bread 'n butter. They’re made to be an advocacy organization that promotes specific, existing solutions. For example, the RTA is much more used to doing things like asking member companies to fill out email templates that voice their support for specific projects (e.g. more investment in RDU). RTA never meant to be a think tank that churns out their own, new policy recommendations. If I had to guess, RTA just leaned in on the opportunity because the engineering firm McAdams offered to volunteer its time and resources + GoTriangle and NCDOT begged for help in thinking outside the box. They knew this is “weird” for them from day 1, but it just kept working so they’ve kept at their efforts.
Going back to the RTA’s transit interests more broadly, out of the 39 substantive slides from their latest annual meeting’s slide deck, 16 of them were about transit (as opposed to 6 for highway upgrades, 4 for RDU, 2 for policy). That, on top of how the RTA has earned the trust of all major governments and transit agencies in the Triangle like @trueurbanist mentioned, should tell you that the RTA is serious enough about transit that they’re doing something that’s unusual for them.
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Good insight from both of y’all, thank you. And yeah, based on their model, I didn’t really expect them to have an incentive to care about transit beyond “having a rapid transit line makes the region more marketable.” As such, it makes sense that most of the noise they’ve made historically has been over completing NC-540 and building a new runway. But it’s encouraging to see early indicators that the energy in the room is shifting (which I also think is happening on a national level, to some extent).
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has any city used a combination of a BRT/bus lane/'more than one person in a vehicle l.anes as a ‘cheap’ way to not have to add extra or more specialized infrstructure? would that be viable?
Tuesday, Feb 11 at 4pm.
During the work session staff will present a project status update for all four (4) BRT corridors, along with next steps and key upcoming milestones associated with each project.
https://go.boarddocs.com/nc/raleigh/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=DDMLM8572E69
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It looks like city staff have uploaded the draft slide deck for this update! Here’s what I thought was new or otherwise interesting (citations and interpretations inside the dropdowns).
Starting with the New Bern corridor: we have more details on what the next round of construction bid solicitations would involve - and how potential bidders will be engaged throughout the process so that they won’t wimp out of it.
Click for the full text, with my annotations.
The city is laying down the foundations to try to make this third bidding attempt successful, now, so that the first portions of the 4-part bids will go out this March.
Next: southern corridor: engineering and design work’s still in progress, but it seems like we should know more about what detailed road designs etc. will look like by next summer. The Wilmington St. extension seems to be causing quite a bit of a headache, though, which goes to show why it was smarter to start with the relatively-simpler New Bern, after all.
Click for full text, with my annotations.
The western corridor is on a similar boat as the southern corridor (but is even more complicated). There’s not as much updates here, but they did mention two interesting things:
Click here to see what those things are!
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Electric buses: (presumably due to budget issues) the 7 buses we already have for the New Bern corridor + seven additional buses for the southern corridor will run on compressed natural gas - but the city is looking into how they could make the Western Blvd. line run using electric buses!
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FTA ratings coming soon? The city submitted a Small Starts rating application that scores the likelihood of this route winning a federal grant last August - and we can now expect the result of this to come out this Spring. We need an overall rating of “Medium” (essentially a 3 out of 5) or higher to stay in the running to be awarded a grant, and our two previous rated lines have both received “Medium-High” (4 out of 5).
And then we have the northern corridor(s) - and we’re narrowing down the corridors that could see BRT services to two options for each branch.
Click here for more details!
Before that, though, about the “s” above: while it was all but implied previously, (unless I’m forgetting something) the city is using language for the first time that clearly states that both a route from downtown to Midtown AND downtown to Triangle Town Center are being studied. (Before, it was harder to rule out the idea of this being an either-or situation.)
We now know that the city narrowed down options for routes from five options to 2+1 for the Midtown route (2 alternatives or a combination of them), and from five options to 2 for Triangle Town Center. See the screenshot at the end of this post for more on this particular point (and thank you, if you’re actually reading this lol).
Remember that, unlike the three previous corridors, the northern ones are undergoing a Major Investment Study (MIS); we’re still trying to make the business case for whether it’s worth the investment and what a successful case would look like. We are not in the process of getting grant money from the feds, yet, and we won’t be there until this MIS is done.
Once we have those LPAs and they’re baked into regional planning documents, we’ll finally be able to start the federal grant process.
Important note: recent city and regional planning documents have started to be unclear about whether the Midtown and Triangle Town Center lines should be considered separately or as two branches of the same corridor. This might be important to keep in mind if anyone tries to dig into public records about the northern BRT corrridor(s?) from December-ish 2024 to now.
And because people seem to not want to read things and understand the nuance, but y’all just want pretty pictures: here’s the two routes proposed for the northern corridor.
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Lol how is there even a debate about going to North Hills vs Triangle Town Center? Is the entire point of BRT to connect the worst parts of Raleigh with downtown, or to actually get people to use it? And of course the crucial West route to presumably NC State, Dix Park, Lenovo Center, DT Cary, Fenton, etc is in limbo forever. This whole BRT thing is incredibly frustrating to me.
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I hope both happen, but to be fair, route 1 gets a ton of ridership up and down the length of Cap Blvd (to TTC). It makes sense in the same way that the New Bern BRT makes sense.
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Will any of these routes hit Glenwood South at all? Considering the amount of housing that has been and will be built there, it would be disappointing to leave that part of town out.
The Northern Corridor especially seems like it could circulate down Glenwood or West pretty easily in the downtown shared alignment section. It could turn onto Johnson Street from Capital and follow West Street down to Union Station.
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Reliance on federal grants is also feeling a lot scarier lately, it kind of feels like Murphy’s law in practice with this whole effort.
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That’s what I’m saying, though; it seemed unclear if there was a debate - but now it seems like the city wants to make both North Hills and Triangle Town Center routes happen.
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I’m completely fine with that.
You didn’t click the “Click here for more details!” did you? They are considering adding both northern corridors.
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