Do you have a link to the N&O’s position piece? I’d be interested to read it.
The more stops on the line through West Raleigh and Cary, the more useful the line will be to me. The existence (or not) of the West Cary station probably makes the difference between me being an (approximately) daily user and an occasional user.
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To extend that thought. You might look at the West Cary station and say, “PFFT… half its catchment area is a golf course and the other half is a strip mall.” But you’d be missing the fact that several major existing and planned greenways converge near there, and that (assuming the station goes just south of Morrisville Parkway) there are, by my count, 3,193 apartments within a half-mile walk, another 825 if you extend that to a mile, and still 636 more if you extend it to a 2 mile bike ride along an existing or planned, grade-separated, greenway. And that is not even counting owner occupied houses and townhomes.
There is also about 50 acres of low density light industrial uses near there along Morrisville Parkway that could conceivably get converted to high intensity office or residential use if a station were to show up.
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Same here. My commute is from N HIlls to RTP. Have looked into taking the bus but it’s just not feasible time wise right now. Ideally for me it would work best for me if the line to WF were included, and then I could get on whatever stop would be near Duke Raleigh Hospital. But for now, I would need to bike it to NCstate station, hop on, then bike the last mile through RTP.
@daviddonovan It was the header of the FaceBook posting of their core article.
’ GoTriangle estimates a transit system from Garner through Raleigh to Durham could carry 7,500 to 10,000 passengers per day. Would you use it?’
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Have we confirmed that the proposed West Cary stop will in fact go at Morrisville Parkway? The only maps I can find are older maps that don’t show any stops between downtown Cary and McCrimmon Parkway. That makes sense (aside from nomenclature issues meaning that the Morrisville stop is not the stop on Morrisville Parkway), but I didn’t know if anything had been decided yet.
But, see, this is why it’s so good having the forum so I can talk about trains with a diverse bunch of people. That was one of the stops that had initially looked extraneous to me, but now that you describe that way, I think that makes good sense.
@dbearhugnc Gotcha. I misunderstood initially. My bad.
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I’m looking for the numbers to come out for FY19, but I saw the quote of 7,500-10,000 riders a day for commuter rail, I would love to see if that number is new riders. Or, is it going to cannibalize ridership from other modalities. And, once commuter rail comes on line, will there be cutbacks on other routes.
well I think I saw in the Wake County bus plan that the DRX is going to be eliminated once commuter rail comes online. In 2018, the DRX daily ridership was 470
the map in this post puts a station somewhere closer to Cary Parkway. That’s close, but IMO that’s not as advantageous of a location as Morrisville Parkway. If I recall correctly the 2005 plan did have a station at Morrisville Parkway.
Also worth noting that the GoTriangle 310 RTC-Cary bus route (see pg. 28 of the FY2020 Work Plan) is expected to run down that portion of NC-54 and should have all-day service. It’s expected to be extended later this year (still waiting on the NCDOT portion of the McCrimmon Pkwy extension). That route could easily be tweaked to stop at the West Cary station once CRT is implemented, providing even more connections in the surrounding area.
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I do like the idea of a station near Park West Village.
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There is actually a surprising cluster of apartments near there. I count nearly 3200 apartments within a half mile walk. It bumps up to nearly 5000 if you include biking distance (on greenways.) Is that earth shattering density, no, but there is almost certainly not much else like it in any of the Western Wake towns, and there is certainly plenty of opportunity for it to get denser.
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@orulz Curious that about the housing as you noticed. I’m wondering how many higher density areas got developed because of proximity to the planned transit stops from the 90’s.
Or, as less land is available, the density has to go up to compensate for the increased land price.
Chicken and egg
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Before Park West Village was built the plan was to have a stop set aside as part of the development and potentially even oriented around it, but the developers and council chickened out and we got typical suburban blandness with the tiniest bones of what could have been with that minuscule “main street”
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Weekday ridership projections on 7,500-10,000 would place our system solidly at #16 in terms of weekday ridership, sandwiched between The South Shore Line (Chicago-South Bend) and The TRE (Dallas-Fort Worth.) and #11 in terms of ridership per mile at 202/mile average (TRE averages 200/mile.)
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But, I still get back to one of my earlier concerns. In the unscientific sampling of our little corner of the world, we’ve come to the conclusion that there wouldn’t be too many folks using said commuter rail project. And, we’re talking about something which is going to run somewhere in the range of $1.4B.
With 7.5-10K riders a day, we’re talking about 3.6M riders served a year, and 36.5M over 10 years. So, that’s $3.88/ride/10 years. I know it’s sloppy, but it’s a talking point. And, that doesn’t even cover operational expenses. (Also, I’m still not satisfied as to where they’re are drawing this ridership figure from.)
So, it boils down to municipal priorities over the entire region, and not to mention the increased track capacity that NCRR gets in the bargain. I’m trying not to sound skeptical, but GoTriangle has their job cut out for them to try and spin this.
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Even if you cut the projections in half, say somewhere between 3,500 and 5,000 boardings per weekday, that still puts our proposed system in the top 20.
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TRE is probably the closest parallel to what’s under consideration here.
Looking at TRE’s schedule, they have 33 trains per direction per day. 5 of them don’t operate the full line end-to-end, but for the 28 trains per direction per day that do, they run a 9-5-9-5 service pattern. Half-hourly peak headways, hourly off-peak, with service from roughly 5am to midnight.
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TRE definitely comes to mind, yes. But, I don’t think that there is any freight traffic on the line. It was an abandoned Rock Island line, but still has some rail connections to the outside world. So, the equipment has to be FRA Tier 1 crashworthy. Interestingly, there is an interlocal agreement on track ownership. But, Herzog Transit Services, actually operates the equipment. (Which also might be something to consider in this circumstance, as I’m not sure how well GoTriangle is going to be able to run a railroad.)
The Portland Downeaster also comes to mind, as the Downeaster uses the MBTA’s Lowell Line from Boston’s North Station to Wilmington, the Wildcat Branch to Wilmington Junction, and the Haverhill Line to the Massachusetts–New Hampshire state line. From there to just short of Brunswick, it uses the Pan Am Railways Freight Main Line. The last mile of track in Brunswick is owned by MaineDOT. All of these lines were once part of the Boston and Maine Railroad; the part south of Wilmington Junction was once the mainline and a branch of the Boston and Lowell Railroad, and the rest was the mainline of the B&M. And, again, the same FRA equipment rules apply.
So (without confirmation), there is some mixture of freight and passenger service on this line. This is a closer approximation of what’s finally being proposed for us in Wake/Durham.
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Downeaster is an intercity line with a huge transit city at one end. Not quite the same thing.
The main similarity with TRE is the bi-centric region and the line’s length; differences are that their trains are just downtown to downtown, rather than running out into the suburbs on either end, and that DFW has about 4x the people of RDU.
SunRail has 20 trains per day in a metro comparable to ours (2.4 million vs 2.1 million) but they aren’t bi-centric. They get 6000+ riders per day with a 7-5-7-1 service pattern that runs from about 5am to 9pm.
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