Durham’s MPO will meet later today and hear an update about Durham County’s transit plan redo -and it’s hinting at some problems for our favorite commuter rail project.
Essentially, it’s showing that commuter rail is seen as a big interest or Durham County, but not the top interest. Transit service coverage and frequency are just as important (if not even more so) for a solid chunk of their residents. …so much so that a solid number of residents are fine with ditching commuter rail if it doesn’t sacrifice better local services.
Click me if you want to learn more, but. you don't want to read the slides.
As a reminder, last summer, Durham Co. showed people three extreme future visions for transit in their county and learned what people liked/hated about each option. You can summarize the plans as:
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quickly bringing in more buses in more places faster, more frequently, for longer
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more reliable, faster buses thanks to more investments (e.g. BRT)
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heavy on costs + regional investments (e.g. commuter rail; buses to Chapel Hill every 15min)
Durham planners conducted online surveys as well as getting in touch with hard-to-reach communities via community ambassadors. The idea is that the features people (dis)liked in each of the 3 “choices” will shape the county’s final transit wish list.
In general, survey respondents said they want transit services that cover a wider area. Then, they want those buses to run faster, more frequently. Plans that can quickly bring about bus improvements seemed to be very popular, as were BRT and buses with BRT-like features like traffic signal priority.
What about commuter rail, though? This is where it gets weird, and it depends on what question you ask. People are inconsistent, emotion-driven creatures rather than hyperlogical machines, after all.
Commuter rail generally has support by stakeholders and respondents alike, including key sub-populations like people of color or daily transit users. But concerns about the cost of the project and its impact on other, local transit needs were thee biggest road block.
When survey respondents were asked “what else do we need to fund” if a Durham-Garner passenger rail service is funded, the 3rd most popular response was that everything on a list of other improvements is “more important than a passenger train”. Plus, among respondents of color, this was the MOST popular answer.
Download the slide deck here if you’d rather draw your own conclusions. But to be clear, we won’t know about what the new transit plan will include (and if/when it will fund certain things) yet. We’ll see whether Durham Co. is still truly committed to commuter rail when the draft transit plan is released for public comments in winter 2021-22.