Great. Where will this event occur and are there any materials to read before the event?
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Forgot to mention that the location is still TBD. I’ll update once they know but wanted to get it on people’s calendars.
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Seems like the plan has already been presented to City Councillors already and the 4 options can be seen here:
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I’m curious about why the northern corridor doesn’t extend father than it is planned to (Crabtree Blvd). It seems to me that extending it past 440 should be considered, and also that much of Capital between Crabtree Blvd and downtown consists of places where no one will be around to ride transit.
4 options for selection by the city appear pretty bland and kinda trying to take the easy way out. Personally, I prefer Orulz’s plan (shared here from the other topic - hope you don’t mind). Also, hope the city considers separated busways wherever possible - ala Alexandria/Crystal City Metroway.
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Some of those routes appear downright illegible. Among the ones listed, the one that focuses on Dawson/McDowell and Edenton/Morgan scores the highest from a legibility standpoint (and probably operations as well) but it just outright skips both Union Station and GoRaleigh station at Moore Square which I’m not too keen on. Blount/Wilmington is legible enough and hits Moore Square, but completely skips the biggest growth area right now and the west side of downtown.
The biggest downside of the loop proposal is that you can’t interline the routes. To me interlining is a nice-to-have but not at the expense of serving the existing transfer points. If interlining is treated as an immutable constraint, though, then a loop is out.
I hope to attend the meeting tomorrow and make my case to the planners but I have a pretty tight schedule tomorrow so it may be tough.
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I like your idea Orulz especially with the fact that you cover both RUS and the GoRaleigh station at Moore Square and the fact that the routes are on overlapped on a single loop of streets.
IMO - the 4 alternatives are too confusing and create trade-offs between coverage of Union Station and the GoRaleigh station.
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I went to the public meeting last night. Here are a few of my takeaways.
There was a pretty good turnout. The alternatives presented were exactly as we’ve discussed here, and as I’ve mentioned before I wasn’t too keen on any of them.
First, the broad issues that apply to all alternatives.
I asked about how serious the city is about dedicated bus lanes. The staff said that for now, they are assuming 100% dedicated lanes when analyzing the performance of alternatives, but the decision of where dedicated lanes will actually be built is not being made at this point. They are shooting for at least 50% dedicated lanes, as that is the threshold they will likely need to meet to get federal funding, but how much of that will be downtown is still up in the air. There will probably be some places where traffic issues make it so bus lanes are not possible. The decision ultimately rests mostly with city council.
The idea so far is that the lanes will only be enforced during hours when traffic would actually cause significant delays, and that businesses will be able to use them for loading and delivery outside of those hours. While that makes sense in a way, I think it will also cause confusion and make enforcement difficult.
Ah yes, enforcement. Basically, they staff acknowledged that enforcement is extremely important, but how strict they will be and what method will be used is up in the air. They are looking at separating the lanes from general traffic with more than just paint, but it needs to be something that can be cleared by emergency vehicles as well as by vehicles accessing driveways - so a permanent full curb is out of the question. Options under consideration would be things like reflective highway road studs, raised lane markers, or maybe a speed bump installed parallel to the flow of traffic.
When I started talking about the alternatives themselves, and my dissatisfaction with them, I got kind of mixed messages on some things. One staff member said literally “The ship has sailed on alternatives, these are it.” Another said “We’re open to tweaks and slight changes but these are the basis.” Still another said “Your idea looks very interesting, can you e-mail it to me please?” I really couldn’t get any clarity on how final these alternatives are and how open they are to looking at something completely different.
At any rate, if any of you all feel like I do I would strongly encourage you to put that in your feedback on the survey. https://publicinput.com/3476 Chances are if I’m the only one advocating for an alternative that looks nothing like A-D, then they’ll just dismiss it as coming from an antisocial uncooperative lunatic (me!). If they get 10 or 20 people saying the same thing, then I suspect they may pay attention.
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As someone who has participated in public meetings before from the consultant side, you usually have to hunt down the person managing the project from the public side or someone with influence on the public side to get a serious response regarding something like new ideas or alternatives (like Eric Lamb for example). As a very junior engineer, I don’t have any say into what alternatives will be selected moving forward or studied (I just do the work that I’m told and am there to answer questions about the alternatives that are there since I’d be familiar with them) so I’ll usually deflect any other ideas or give a generic response that “we are open to your comments/ideas if you write them down and submit them to us”.
Thanks for the link to the poll! I’ll add my input.
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I completed the survey and imbedded my google map, which is very similar to orulz’s.
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One thing I just thought about - let’s say that BRT doesn’t serve Raleigh Union Station. How will that affect the GoTriangle multimodal transit center that is going to be built next to Raleigh Union Station??
I don’t see any way that it makes sense for the BRT line to not have direct access to Union Station. If the GoRaleigh Bus Station is going to remain in operation where it is, it too should have direct BRT access.
I submitted my input on the public input portal as well as by email to the project manager for the city. Thanks for the recommendation, @pierretong. I am skeptical but hopeful that this can get any traction. This is really important, it’s literally where the rubber meets the road at the interface between transit and the city.
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Can you share your alternative for our consideration when replying to the BRT survey?
(Posted it to a different thread before.)
One key point is that the shared one way loop concept is extremely flexible. Any entry point for any line will work. The streets I have shown (Wilmington, Lane, West, and Martin) seem like the best balance to me, but there are other possibilities too. This plan is counter clockwise, but to go clockwise use Blount on the eastern edge instead of Wilmington. On the north, Jones or Edenton would work too. Same for Harrington or Dawson on the west, and Davie and Hargett on the south. I think focusing on the concept rather than dogmatically insisting on a specific plan is probably the best way since it invites further investigation and study, and is harder to just reject outright on the basis of some specific nitpick.
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So the most ambitious thing shown in the orulz alternative is the new connection between Morgan and Western, between Morehead School and Central Prison. That is an old idea and I think it would be a great addition to the BRT network but it would also be expensive.
Here is an alternate version that requires no such significant new construction like that:
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If you really wanted to make that plan cost-effective and minimize the length of road you’d have to repave, you could even merge the western and southern branches south of the “loop”.
Basically, instead of having the western branch pass through McDowell/Dawson, I was thinking it could just keep going down MLK and turn north at Wilmington. This has the added marketing benefit of providing extra service to the Convention Center and the Duke Energy Center.
Looking at the presentation and its press coverage, though, I’m getting the impression that the biggest possible drawbacks to the Orulz idea would be potential parking impacts… do you have any ideas how bad that could be/how you could mitigate that?
Yes, you are right the west and south branches could be combined on approach to downtown. Your suggestion of Wilmington/Salisbury makes sense, but they could be combined onto Saunders/Dawson/McDowell or even the West Street extensiom too as an alternative. It’s all about the flexibility.
Sharing the route of the South line could also be considered the temporary plan for the West line, until the Western Morgan connector can be built. That connector is ambitious but frankly it’s not nearly as ambitious as the West Street extension which will be really expensive due to how it will go under (rather than over) active railroad tracks.
My honest opinion about on street parking impacts is that people should go park in decks or take alternate transportation. The N&O article does make a fairly big deal of how narrow the streets are downtown. If that’s the case then why are we using so much of it for storing empty vehicles rather than for things like bus and bike lanes that will actually contribute to mobility? Nevertheless I expect the status quo to die hard.
At any rate I don’t think my plan is too extreme in terms of parking impacts.
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Honestly, this is a far better solution than any of the four scenarios presented on Wednesday. I added my comments suggesting such an alternate in the survey, and I hope others will too. This needs more attention.