Great write up about downtown Raleigh community election watching party goer Colby taking the new bus route from North Raleigh to IQUVIA in RTP. Also, a ton of stuff packed into the. Article last that on what has been happening transit wise. Your transit investment in action – the many highlights of 2019 | GoTriangle
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I also found some interesting things in the draft minutes for the GoTriangle Board of Trustees meeting due later this month:
This post is specifically about BRT-related things -and interestingly, some new momentum to get more input from lower-income communities and people of color, who are (purposely or not) often left in the dark about these sorts of things until shovels are in the ground.
If any of y’all care, I should also note that I couldn’t cross-check this with GoRaleigh’s latest records. The meeting minutes for Raleigh Transit Authority board (GoRaleigh)'s latest meetings from Jan. 9 seems to be corrupted, if not straight-up unavailable.
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Paralyzation by analyzation. It still amazes me the amount of studies and citizen input that are required to get any public transportation infrastructure built.
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It’s a long read, but this piece argues the same thing: that we can no longer build any large projects in the US (except highways for some reason), because the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction after the abuses of Robert Moses and his ilk.
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It’s not stopping BRT, the New Bern corridor is about to enter final design soon, and preliminary design will soon begin for the South and West corridors. But they are really, really trying to get public buy-in to make sure this doesn’t look like a real estate play designed to push the poor out of these neighborhoods, especially considering most of the people who use these buses are poor.
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In my opinion, gentrification in Raleigh NC gives people more options than they had before. These properties were worth next to nothing before. Yes, you have an increase in property tax but at least the original homeowner has the opportunity to make some real money if he chooses. Schools amenities also increasingly become better for those who stay. I guess I just never have bought into the gentrification is bad for society argument.
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In theory, I’m actually with you on this one; I also don’t think gentrification (aka local demographic shifts) is inherently bad, if it weren’t for other factors playing in.
Like for this case, you gotta assume the vast majority of people own the roofs over their heads. Otherwise, your options for where to live is no longer fully in your control; there would be holes in your usual assumptions about a fair, free market.
And about half of people who live in Raleigh don’t have ownership of their homes.
Glad to hear GoRaleigh’s lack of records is probably just a clerical error. Politically, I totally get this and it seems like a reasonable and careful strategy, and I trust Raleigh’s ability to work on a tight schedule much more than GoTriangle… (sorry Kevin, but we all know where this bias comes from)
Sometimes, I wonder why we don’t have lots of people bringing up NUMTOTs… they also always have a field day with bashing on Robert Moses.
I completely agree with this article. but then I wonder… what does a compromise even look like? People like the appearance of democracy -even if they don’t have the bandwidths to be a responsible, consistent part of it.
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N&O article on BRT today. " GoRaleigh, GoTriangle and GoCary propose to spend $114.2 million to improve bus service in the fiscal year that begins July 1. They’re asking for the public’s feedback on their ideas at goforwardnc.org/wake/get-involved/ by Feb. 29."
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article239753958.html
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$67 million for carrying the New Bern Corridor in East Raleigh through completion. If the project receives federal funds, design should finish by the end of 2020, with construction beginning in 2021 and the services operating by late 2023.
4 years is a longer wait for the first bus line than I’d hoped, but I’m glad that the lines aren’t all going to take until the projected 2027 end date. Hopefully the first line is successful; I’m worried that they’ll really pare down or even do away with the other three lines altogether if it isn’t.
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that is my worry with BRT, is that its really really easy to start tearing it apart, or half-assing it… people think I just hate busses, and prefer trains… but when you have intermodal traffic its easier to make concessions. Even look at on-street rail like they do in Kansas city. You will see folks complain about when cars “hit” the train or break down and block the train. Like I wonder if busses would be as attractive if we had to build a separate road for them that never interested with traffic, I imagine the cost difference would be way less, and at that point you could just build LRT…
BRT creep has been linked to before, but I think it is important that everyone reads this and shares it with their friends, neighbors, etc: Bus rapid transit creep - Wikipedia
The inevitable will happen somewhere where the BRT line has something taken away from it, then people will complain that BRT sucks when its just BRT creep… then you start punching holes in it until its just a slightly better bus line.
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This is my big worry with the BRT. And since rail and separated grading are more permanent, it’s presence affects the decisions of people and companies buying, building and setting up shop here more than something like BRT.
When buying a house, or taking a job, or opening a new office somewhere, it’s a safer assumption that a nearby light rail stop will still be there in 5 years time, as opposed to if it’s a bus route/stop. If people don’t believe that it’s definitely there to stay, they won’t allow it factor into their long-term decisions much, which in turn makes the economics of densifying development around those transit stops/corridors harder. On the individual level, it makes doing away with the extra expense of a car (and extra cost of a parking space for that car) harder to justify. Once you’ve decided you’ll need to pay all of the overhead and maintenance costs of a car either way, it makes paying for a bus pass on top of that less attractive …And then people decide it’s not worth the expense and just decide to live further out.
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I 100% agree with you Mitch. I feel like we are on the same forums 
My brother lives in Atlanta and if you proof of what you just outlined →
When buying a house, or taking a job, or opening a new office somewhere, it’s a safer assumption that a light rail stop near a potential new house or new office space will still be there in 5 years time
look at high buildings in Atlanta and where the Marta stops are. If anyone tells you Marta is not working they are full of bullshit. There is hundreds of buildings around every Marta stop and its continuing to get more and more dense around rail, which is why its a long skinny line of tall buildings b/c they only have two lines (a N-S and E-W). It forced density, but only along that weird skinny line.
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Yeah I’ve definitely seen you posting over on the buildingbullcity.com forums! Always the enjoy seeing picture updates on the progress of the Van Alen
An yeah, I used MARTA as much as possible when I was down there last year visiting family+friends in Sandy Springs and Decatur. It really covers a lot of ground!
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If you’ve seen the New Bern plans, you’ll know they are not half-assing this whatsoever.
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The outer lane from Sunnybrook Road to DTR being bus only is huge. That being said, that kills on-street parking along the route through Oakwood. Haven’t seen the responses from those homeowners being impacted.
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Same -but as soon as they finished the feasibility study in 2018(?), this has been their target date. They’ve been consistent about this, at least? (unlike a certain other regional transit project…)
Either GoRaleigh’s doing an unusually good job with outreach, or the NIMBYs are somehow still not aware of this happening.
…we’ll see which one it is, the closer we get to groundbreaking 
This is true, but the city’s setting aside money/plans to build bus-only lanes and mini-stations for BRTs; as long as we don’t skimp on these like New York did and we fight to keep them, these should be just as big and permanent as light rail stations (which aren’t that fancy, either, when it comes down to it).
…which is why, if you ask me, it’s really important to keep reading public records on GoRaleigh’s engineering studies carefully as soon as they come out 
The only way to know for sure this won’t happen is to keep seeing the evidence (and asking for 'em, if you gotta).
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Hopefully it stays that way. As you informed us, commuter rail just got pushed back 3 years. And has Chapel Hill’s BRT is delayed? I was checking their site and it says they were supposed to have started engineering by now and should start construction in mid-2020, but the project status is still showing “design” and there don’t appear to have been any updates since mid-2019 at the latest.
That what I’m afraid of I think everyone just wishes that the current plan had a bunch of light rail lines. But the Nimby in the Wake County Commissioners screwed that over a long time ago.
And at that time will be working on our first light rail line.
If we had been building rail lines since the 1980s, we could be building our fourth or fifth rail line by now. But we haven’t and so we aren’t. We can only operate in the present, and in the present, the NCRR between Raleigh and Durham is overwhelmingly the best place for us to start.
Transit works best in places where parking is expensive and/or inconvenient. Allow me to list the places in the Triangle where this is the case:
- Downtown Raleigh
- NCSU
- The fairgrounds (during major events)
- PNC Arena during major events (close-ish but not quite so
) - Carter-Finley (the station is far but people park that far away too, so )
- RDU
- Downtown Durham
- Duke University / hospital
- UNC / hospital
- Downtown Chapel Hill
Am I missing any?
6/10 is not bad for a single line.
Adding RDU makes it 7/10, which is better still - but not worth a billion dollars, in my estimation.
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