But even with what you said, @colbyjd3’s point still holds.
Click here to see why.
Yes, it’s getting easier to find ways to work without having to make long, daily commutes to dedicated business districts and office parks. Yes, that makes Wake County’s smaller suburbs become more attractive places to live for quite a few people. And yes, the developments planned for those places in the next 1-10 years will mainly cater to car-centric lifestyles, and it makes sense to invest in transit that can work for those communities (and like I said, we’ve been doing exactly that). But no, it is not sustainable to keep that demographic trend going without any sort of policy intervention for our changed environment.
An average of just under 35% of American workers have moved towards more remote or hybrid work positions since the pandemic started. Since federal data easily lets us see how many people in the Raleigh-Cary MSA’s labor force works in each sector, we can make an exaggerated guess that about 256,000 people (34.5% of 744.3k people with jobs) worked offsite this past October. Even if you suppose that the urban and suburban populations are split 50:50 and that Raleigh’s suburbs steadily grows by 25% every year as this Freddie Mac report suggests, that’s nearly 1.2 million remote workers moving into Wake County’s suburbs ten years from now.
Can you really say with a straight face that it’s practical to keep building car-centric single-family homes for that many remote workers (not to mention other types of future residents)?
This means there’s latent demand for a lifestyle where you have to drive as little as possible for regular needs in your life, right? So naturally, if you’re a planner in a Raleigh exurb, the smartest thing for you to do is to try and reduce how much your residents would need to drive towards zero. In other words, the smartest thing to do is to incentivize future developments to let your residents could choose to drive, just as they could choose to walk, bike, or take transit with similar levels of convenience.
At that point, doesn’t it make more sense to invest in ways to use our land (and future housing stock) more efficiently? Doesn’t it make more sense to intentionally create environments so that you have the freedom to choose not to hop in a car?
With that in mind, I think the best way to interpret the commuter rail project is to see it as a down payment for such a future. You have to see it (and bring it to life) as a package deal between a transit project and a group of related land use policies. But by putting in the effort to do both, you open up new options for yourself that you’d never have with the self-stabilizing behaviors of the real estate market.