Commuter Rail - Garner to West Durham

Transit and Transportation
809

It just grates my nerves that GoTriangle keeps leaving out Park West in Morrisville as a station location in report after report. This study even highlights it as a great opportunity - it has one of the highest concentration of housing of the entire corridor, in the form of “naturally affordable” market-rate apartments within 1/2 mile walk of a station location. The area is surprisingly dense, extremely diverse, and also given the preponderance of inexpensive apartments, (and contrary to the image of Cary and Morrisville as wealthy), solidly working-class.

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It would be unacceptable, negligent - borderline criminal - to leave a station out here.

In contrast, I have a feeling the park-and-ride focused “West Raleigh” station at I-40 & Corporate Center is going to be a relative flop. These days more apartments are getting built near here which could save it, but to me this just doesn’t make sense as a park-and-ride.

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810

Big agree. PW actually has everything one needs to survive within walking distance

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811

Thousands of apartments have been built since 2010 nearby, and still more are planned. I mean come on. What process could possibly lead to putting a station at McCrimmon Parkway as a top priority, but skipping Park West?

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812

And consider that a station at Park West would be fairly close to the MetLife buildings that Apple is about to move into, along with all the other major employers along Weston parkway

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813

Park west may be one of the best thought out / laid out Lifestyle/ strip mall plazas I’ve seen. Would be great to have more accessibility around there.

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814

Wait… what if we, just like the World University Games thread, we ask them these things, directly? GoTriangle’s blog post for the affordable housing study said:

What if we do just that? Maybe we could ask one of their staff to do an ask-me-anything here, in our community?

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815

I’m not exaggerating when I say that when Park West was built in place of the long-abandoned factory that used to be there, the traffic problems that had plagued the area for years disappeared - and still haven’t come back.

Somebody at the developer, NCDOT, Morrisville, or Cary was really on the ball there when this was planned.

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816

The radio towers near Cary Parkway and the railroad tracks were recently approved by Cary for about 600 more apartments. Given that the radio towers are going away, and that the domino of high-intensity residential development has fallen here, we can expect that the rest of Towerview Court will, over time, also get redeveloped.

If I could be planner-king for a day, I would redevelop the low-intensity industrial and flex uses along Morrisville Parkway, between the railroad tracks and NC54, into high density mid-rise apartments or offices. Morrisville has plenty of other undeveloped land (eg along Southport) suited for industrial development so that this is no loss.

Continuing with the theme of “planner-king for a day” I would punch Weston Parkway through to Morrisville Parkway across from the entrance to Park West, as shown here, and add some greenway connections to connect with some of the adjacent residential areas and existing greenways.

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817

Just had a chance to ask some planners why Park West is excluded. The answers are:

  • It hasn’t truly been excluded yet: decisions like this haven’t been made yet.

  • Their modeling has shown that it reduces ridership by making travel times longer. Having stations spaced “too closely” has a deleterious effect on the service. They want 3-5 miles between stations so it doesn’t slow things down too much.

Their models are, however, based on lumbering locomotives pulling bilevel coaches which accelerate slowly and have long dwell times because they lack level boarding. There are technological solutions to these problems.

In addition, I suspect, though I couldn’t confirm, that their models are based on block or precinct level data from the 2010 census, which (in such a fast growing part of of fast growing metro region) is extremely out-of-date.

There are 5.5 miles between Cary and McCrimmon. Park West is literally at the midpoint, “bending” the station spacing rule from 3 miles down to 2.75. If we can’t do this, for the largest concentration of affordable housing on the entire line, then WTF are we even doing thinking about commuter rail in this cursed corridor?!

  • The tracks are curvy there and they want straight platforms.

There may be ways around that, though, by either compromising and allowing a curvy platform, or building a straight stretch to put a platform on.

Basically, though, they are doing their best to follow the data and analyze this empirically, which I do applaud. I am just a dude out here who cares a lot (too much?) about transit. They are working hard doing their job.

If there really is no way to make this work, then so be it. But we should definitely give it another look first (and it sounds like they probably will.)

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818

The other question I had was about Durham. Basically Durham County is re evaluating their transit plan after the failure of their light rail project. There are 3 hypothetical alternatives being put before the county for public input, and only one of them includes commuter rail. At this point, these alternatives kind of seem to represent the frequency/coverage, service/infrastructure tradeoff that Jarrett Walker helped Wake County through several years ago, rather than three concrete, set-in-stone options to pick from, but it does seem like at least a decent chance that Durham will decline to spend their money on commuter rail.

And if that happens, according to the planners on the call - the project will be sunk. So, that seems to be the highest priority risk facing commuter rail at this point, even before the federal FFGA process. Hopefully Durham can answer the question of whether they’re on board or not quickly, so we can either move forward without losing any more time, or else stop wasting our time on something that’s never going to happen anyway.

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819

Good grief. At this rate we will never have commuter rail. The RTP region has too many entities with different agendas. There needs to be a comprehensive effort to get transit done for the region. Stop screwing around with all the different ‘go’ brands. Go Raleigh, go Durham, go triangle etc. merge it all into one and develop a comprehensive regional transit system that includes bus, rail, BRT, etc. Synchronize schedules, fares… everything. We will never get there if we keep this hodgepodge strategy. At this rate I will be retired before I can take the commuter rail to RTP.

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820

And these are…? Please and thank you!

821

https://engagedurham.com/durham-county-transit-plan/transit-options-survey/

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822

Something else I have been thinking more about for commuter rail is a Plaza West Station.

If they’re dead set on keeping the station count down, if push comes to shove, I think that this station is more valuable than both Blue Ridge and West Raleigh. It’s at a transportation nexus for both roads as well as current and planned bus routes. It connects with BRT, while nothing else other than Cary does otherwise. It’s close enough to I-40 that it could be a major park-and-ride (on the north side of the tracks.) It’s even still relatively within walking distance of the fairgrounds - although infrastructure is lacking.

It’s 3 miles from both NC State and downtown Cary station.

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823

I will be livid if Durham tanks the commuter rail project - seriously?

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824

What does Durham have to lose by NOT going for Commuter Rail?

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825

They could do more BRT, which is more of a Durham-first strategy, or run a bunch more local buses with higher frequency, which could conceivably be seen as a bigger social justice win.

In either case it would be a win for local interests and a loss for regionalism.

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826

Just thinking…but would regional BRT really be that bad of a thing considering how frequent the commuter rail schedule was going to be anyways?

827

What would cost more: A region-wide BRT network when Durham’s plans seem to be nowhere near Wake’s or Commuter Rail? Also consider that in the lifespan of a train car you’ll have to deal with three generations of buses.

I swear that if Durham gets away with this because they have PTSD over Duke screwing them I swear I’ll avoid Durham as much as possible out of spite. Who’s with me?

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828

I won’t be joining you - I love downtown Durham

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