I’ve worked as a full-time professional economic developer / business recruiter. There are few regions in the world (not hyperbole here) that work together as well as our region. The simple fact is that there is one winner and dozens/hundreds/thousands of “losers”. Durham wins a lot. Raleigh wins a lot. Cary, Morrisville, Johnston County all win a lot. I can say with 100% certainty that Raleigh wins when Durham wins. And vice versa.
Would it be nice for more wins to come to downtown Raleigh proper? Heck yes.
I think it’s important for all of us to remember that this area is incredibly fortunate and successful. And with that said – MORE PLEASE!
A higher order transit connection between the two downtowns would make them as one. Residents in and near either would get the benefit of everything in both.
For more space… since RUS BUS is such a nebulous mystery, maybe that could shift to two office towers instead. And then you’d have a ton of potential train commuters.
25 floor residential north tower → 19 office floors?
12 floor residential south tower → 8 office floors?
The above quote might actually be on to something.
The Charlotte/Raleigh trains have proven themselves and I know that that DTR/DTD are really physically close, but the idea IMO is really worthy of further thought and scrutiny
RUSBUS could help with that since CRT is dead for the foreseeable future. I always GoTriangle having it own footprint or terminus in Raleigh was a good idea I’m glad they won’t be sharing with GoRaleigh anymore.
Duke was blocking light rail between Durham and Chapel Hill, not between Raleigh and Durham.
IMO, we need regional rail between Raleigh and Durham (AKA commuter rail, AKA heavy rail). A regional rail between the two downtowns on the existing rail corridor, with a stop in Cary and a stop in RTP, would be a great first step in the Triangle’s transit future. As the system proves itself, additional stations could be created along the route & beyond, and certain stations could connect to future lines or other transit solutions like buses.
It’s already in place, we take it all the time just for dinner, people don’t use it.
Everything doesn’t need to be some fancy light rail or whatever. We should utilize the current rail infrastructure currently in place and maybe more investment would follow. Not the other way around.
That may be an optics thing. Amtrak is typically for long distance (city to city) travel, rather then thinking of Amtrak as a “commuter/regional” option. There is an opportunity here for locally branding it as the latter and get more folks using this service for DTR to DTD for a night out or attending events.
…which was eventually going to then connect to Raleigh in the future. That future plan obviously disappeared when the Chapel Hell-Durham rail was canceled.
IMO, Durham to Raleigh is too far for light rail. It needs to be heavy rail.
Even if Durham to Chapel Hill was a light rail proposal and then killed, how would that affect a heavy rail solution to Raleigh?
If a light rail extended from Raleigh to Durham, I would suppose that it would have many stops along the way and would take forever to get from one city to the other. A heavy rail solution with just a few stops seems to make more sense if we want to connect the two cities’ cores.
This does seem blindingly obvious, and has since the early 80s, and yet here we are. The Ral-Cht is a huge plus that can be built upon. It does seem like addition trains just between DTR and DTD would be a logical, simple solutuon. I do feel that the failure of light rail between Chapel Hell and Durham took the wind out of the sails, even as it was a much different proposal.
This was the original proposal: two light rails – one in Durham/Chapel Hill, one in Raleigh/Cary. They were never planned to directly connect. Wake voters declined to fund their light rail, and it was later replaced with BRT. Durham and Orange County voters approved funding their light rail with a tax increase in 2011, only for it to be killed by Duke/Norfolk Southern years later.
The Commuter Rail (heavy rail – operating on existing right of way) still moved forward for a couple of years after light rail died. Because costs had risen so much, they had proposed splitting the route into two phases. But the final nail in the coffin was the feds declining to provide funding because the route did not meet requirements for density and potential ridership. This happened last year and was not related to the failed light rail projects at all.
