I believe our biggest problem is that the area you mention is actually pretty large with very low density and a street system catering only to vehicles. In cities with established public transportation that is utilized, the density is much larger and the first/last mile is not a chore or dangerous. You simply walk out of your door and have a .5 mile walk on sidewalks and crosswalks to get to the stop. Where is the incentive for a person in Cary, FV, even North or South Raleigh that has the means to own a car, to give it up in favor of the bus system? And that is even assuming that BRT is introduced and the frequencies are greatly increased. There is no infrastructure to do this.
The damage is already done. We let developers build and dictate our infrastructure here, without any regard for future pedestrian use. And this isnât just the so called suburbs. The vast majority of Raleigh is indistinguishable from Cary. There are only a handful of areas that are walkable, and shockingly (sarcasm) they are in the most demand and out of the price range for most.
So how do we fix this when the upgrade costs to make neighborhoods pedestrian friendly after the fact, is insanely cost prohibitive? On top of this, we actually have Nimbys that are anti-sidewalk, with elected officials backing them. We could identify high growth areas and corridors and build transit around them, which seems like our best shot. However, this always gets shot down by nimbys with âtraffic concernsâ. Itâs hard enough to allow density in our urban core here.
Do not see much in way of transit in Cary until commuter rail is running and then only a few bus routes to connect to rail. Cary is, as much as they do not want to admit it, is just a huge suburb. Mostly SF homes and 2 story apartment complexes, spread out strip shopping centers, and a down town no bigger than most 10k pop towns in NC have. I suspect their transit plan is to just keep widening streets as most suburbs do.
I see very little difference between Raleigh and Cary when it comes to suburbs and mass transportation. So what you say about Cary you can pretty much say about Raleigh as of this point in time. Cary also has not built two story apartment buildings in a very long time. The difference in population density between Cary and Raleigh is not all that much.
Yes, indeed I first response to post a couple. Iâll hold off. For those of you who went to high school in Raleigh probably know - or can imagine - the coarsest of F-Vâs nicknames. Actually, it mightâve been a jr high kind of thing, lol.
Itâs hard to imagine F-V being larger than Cary. But two points make it a possibility: Cary is landlocked now, and I donât see those folks falling in love with density. F-V has a lot of farm land left to gobble up. Second, is no in the 1950s Cary growing to this size. Iâll still hold that its unlikely, but certainly not impossible.
I think Cary grew because of the location. Itâs relatively close to downtown Raleigh and RTP. Fuquay and Wake Forest are at the edges of the Triangle metro area.
Here is a map of the current routes. Cary also does Door to Door for fixed prices to anywhere in Cary, Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Morrisville, Apex, Durham⌠etcâŚ
Lol, I grew up in Fuquay, we had plenty of coarse nicknames for our town.
Fuquay probably wonât catch Cary but it is expected to race past 100,000 people without absorbing any other towns. Itâs aggressively gobbling up unincorporated land in southern Wake and northern Harnett Counties. There are also plans to link downtown Fuquay and downtown Varina into a single, urban downtown. I think there are currently about 7,000 new residences in development.
