The Routes Committee of the board overseeing GoRaleigh met today, and heard updates from transit consultants at HDR who are figuring out whether it’s worth it to extend BRT into North Hills and/or Triangle Town Center, and how that could happen.
Since the consultants started working in March, they came up with these potential routes as starting points to dive into more rigorous design work:
I noticed some interesting things from this map... (click me!)
-
The consultants wasted no time overturning one of the options from an older plan for BRT in Raleigh. The 2018 study led to an option to run BRT along West St., but that didn’t make it into this first draft of alternative alignments.
-
But instead, an option to serve some interesting routes popped up that don’t seem intuitive to me, at first:
- Going through Glenwood South and Lassiter Mill Rd. to get to North Hills
- Building a new connection across 440 through Barrett Dr.
- Bypassing North Hills and making awkward turns through Dartmouth and Hardimont roads
- Using US-401 to bypass Triangle Town Center and other future key developments along Capital Blvd. to get to Wake Tech’s northern campus
Speaking of that Wake Tech connection…
Remember, though, that this is still month 1 or 2 in an 18-month process; a bunch of engineering simulations, market analyses, and investigations on land use need to happen before we know which of these routes, if any, can be useful for a meaningful number of residents and workers as BRT. For example:
Here’s the timeline they’ve proposed for this project:
Now - Summer 2022: find and eliminate alignments with fatal flaws. This seems to mean that, if any combination of lines drawn in red cannot support buses or frequent BRT services, this is when they’d get eliminated from further consideration.
Summer - Fall 2022: refine and compare (screen) alternatives without fatal flaws. The remaining potential BRT routes will be refined further (e.g. sketching out just what it takes to extend Six Forks Rd. towards Capital Blvd.), and compared against each other. This alternatives analysis will conclude this Fall, when the consultants will hopefully come up with a shorter list of a couple of potentially viable options for BRT to the north of downtown. We’ll get to chime in about which alternatives we (dis)like at the end of this phase of work.
Winter 2022 - Spring 2023: screen the most promising alternatives in more detail. Standardized ridership models, cost estimates, analyses on land use and opportunities for transit-friendly developments etc. will be used to predict how each of the remaining routes could score in the Federal Transit Administration’s priority ranking for funding transit projects. If the screening process feels weird or there are counterintuitive results from this work, the city will ask us to show 'em where it hurts at the end of this phase.
Spring - Summer 2023: figure out which route(s), if any, work the best, and how they should be developed in phases. The feds won’t even consider projects for funding unless it scores above a certain threshold, so this will be important so that we know how to put our best foot forward. The city knows this leg of the BRT system will be the most expensive and complex, so it’s pretty much assumed that this will happen in phases -but we won’t know how that’ll happen until we get to this point. Once the general public and leaders at GoRaleigh and city council approve of the results of this step, that will be the big game plan for the northern corridor(s?) of BRT in Raleigh.
Late 2023 - Mid/Late 2020s: develop a more detailed business case, engineering designs, and land use plans? If this study shows that it makes sense to build BRT to North Hills and Triangle Town Center, we’ll have a vision of such a service at this point. But a lot more still needs to happen before it can be shovel-ready -physically, socially, financially, and politically- so construction probably can’t happen until the late 2020s (some CAMPO documents say 2029, but we’ll see if we can actually meet that goal on time).