Commuter Rail - Garner to West Durham

Transit and Transportation
131

AaaaaaAAAaAAaaaaaAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh.

  1. The closest the existing rail line gets to the airport is 3.5 miles. So you are at an absolute minimum of 7 miles of greenfield alignment to get from the NCRR to RDU and back. I guess we could plant some money trees.

  2. If you consider other alignments like I-40 or Glenwood then the airport is less of a diversion but then you are talking about even more new right of way which will probably both slow trains down and raise costs into the multi-billion range.

  3. Even if cost is no object, there is a 2 mile radius around the airport where there is nothing other than empty undevelopable land and airport facilities (exception: the very closest parts of brier creek are 1.5 miles away.) So the best case scenario is 3.5 miles of rail with nothing on it but an airport stop.

  4. Regardless of route and money, Serving RDU on a through route from Raleigh to Durham involves either a massive detour adding miles and many minutes to the route, or forces you to bypass RTP. Go ahead and try to draw a sensible route that covers Cary, RDU, RTP, and Durham. I spend way too much time doodling maps of this sort of stuff. I am convinced that it is not possible.

  5. The runways are oriented exactly perpendicular to the straight line route between R and D. This is by design, so planes won’t overfly the densest parts of these cities at lower altitudes, but it doesn’t help.with transit. The terminals are poorly (for transit) sited right between them. To get there you have to either build an expensive tunnel under the whole shebang, have a slowness and tight curve so trains can turn around and get back out, or else travel parallel to the runways for upwards of 2 miles, exactly perpendicular to the direction you want to go, which is as straight as possible from Raleigh to Durham.

  6. Umstead. It is awesome to have such a huge park in the center of our metro area, but this makes it so a transit line along I-40 is dead letter, as half of the catchment area is populated only by squirrels, raccoons, deer, and other such wildlife. It also means that the land to the east of RDU is entirely off the table for building a rail connection due to impacts to the park.

In summation, AAAaaAaaaaaaAaAAAUgh! it is so frustrating at this point to still hear people demanding that transit is DOA unless the airport is connected in phase 1.

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