Commuter Rail - Garner to West Durham

Looks like we can never escape this problem, can we :upside_down_face:

I was reading this, and our conversations on here about high construction/planning costs popped up in my head again.

You would think this is obvious by now lol…

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The reason that China’s economy has grown so quickly from one of the poorest in the world to the 2nd largest is because of… not communism, not authoritarianism, not central management, not a system free of corruption, not disruptive innovation- but unashamed copying of world best practices in everything.

The first step to success when you are behind the state-of-the art in anything is overcoming denial about it. Not until that happens, but soon as it does, then progress will come.

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Having access to or stealing the technology and intellectual property is one thing but when you lack a democratic process you can build at will without having to deal with opposing points of view. Not sure if I’d be comfortable using the words ‘China’ and ‘best practices’ in the same sentence. Especially when it comes to infrastructure and city building.

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And yes - China has progressed economically but socially and morally they are in crisis mode.

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This is more of what I was getting at. Copying best practices around the world should be standard practice these days (and I personally think you’re just running your businesses/projects poorly if you aren’t…). If anything, that’s the first thing I crossed off my list of “potential reasons why China does public transit infrastructure better than the US”.

Other (transit-wise) developing countries like India, Brazil, Israel or Turkey are also actively hiring transit experts and consultants from Europe and elsewhere, but they’re still not seeing the same exponential gains in new project openings. Doesn’t that make it sound like China has a more systemic advantage?

Another article that made me think about this:

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Not sure what to believe. But, it seems as though the central government is betting more of their apples into rail programs instead of to highway programs. Maybe it’s more effective for the denser population. Or, it’s a means to counter the carbon output. The WSJ is suggesting that it’s like the FDR’s Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression.

At what cost, though?

And, the Chinese central banks seem to be wanting to export that model of development outside of their borders.

So, I’ll stop there as it’s close to venturing off-topic. Back to building our little rail system. :train2:

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And speaking of our little rail system, looks like CAMPO’s presentation on Wednesday included the final results for the Hillsborough-Clayton and Durham-Clayton options.

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Would have loved to have been a fly on the wall to see the responses. Can imagine a spectrum of opinions between gung-ho support to nattering nabobs of negativism.

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You know it really disappointing that we spend that we voted to put originally 2 light rail lines and commuter rail now we nixed both Wake-Raleigh (first) and Durham-Orange (second, though I kinda wanted that gone first cause I thought it wouldn’t be fare to much larger Wake-Raleigh in term of population Raleigh-Wake is bigger in population). But it sad now commuter rail is on the nix of being axed it’s sad. There no progressiveness in the county commissioners they all also need to be voted out by some young progressives that we did to the city council all they want is a quaint county not so fast, it very disappointing there letting us down vote them out next year or this year

It does beg a question about the local funding. We, as citizens, have to rely on those who are proposing special taxation for transit to understand our chances for success at getting what was proposed to a point where revenue service can start.

If our metropolitan area still doesn’t quite have the critical mass of riders and stakeholder support to meet the federal New Starts guidelines for commuter rail, then what happens to the local support money already trickling in to the system?

Does it default to BRT programs already in development? Does the taxation trickle get trimmed back? Or, are we due a refund for getting duped a third time?

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Since this is about a rule imposed by the federal government, I’m wondering if lawmakers (congressmen + lobbyists) and the DoT simply didn’t even think about it that deeply.

If I were them, I’d have just been like “oh we’ll just help expand local transit projects if local governments say it’s worth it. And if a project is actually worth it, surely it’ll get the help it deserves?”.

…so I think the parts I bolded in the last sentence are the Triangle’s weaknesses that are basically unexpected bugs in the system.

It sounds like the short answer is: nothing.

I think the feds treat existing investments separately to their grant applications. We, local citizens and/or transit nerds, see existing bus services, commuter rail, BRT etc. as one cohesive system. But it sounds like the DoT CIG program only cares about these things on a per-project basis. From an accounting perspective, it just hands out money to projects they take under their wing; they don’t have the power or mandate to shift money around, even if it makes more sense.


As for commuter rail, specifically, what do the other projects that fail New Starts/Small Starts look like?

Another part that weirds me out is that GoTriangle has flopped on their grant applications multiple times. Obviously there’s multiple local reasons for this (Duke, NCRR, the General Assembly etc.), but it sounds unrealistic to me for the Triangle to be the only metro region in the country to keep tripping over their own feet like this.

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When the TTA Regional Rail proposal failed in ~2000, there was not a local taxation mechanism in place. The State legislature then allowed regional municipalities to establish special taxation districts. So, the Wake Transit Plan was created, and a local funding stream was established.

Now, without going back to review the proposal, I do not recall anything said in the PR campaign for that election that indicated we were going to go back to the feds once we got our local funding rolling. I assumed, wrongly, that we were going to do BRT and commuter rail without outside support.

All I can see that we’ve done with our investment is to finance the continuous study of commuter rail by GoTriangle.

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Then you didn’t actually read the plan. 50% federal funding was always assumed for the major capital projects such as BRT and commuter rail.

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Yup. Seriously missed that.

Is it time to dissolve go triangle and start over? Or at least kick out the leadership and appoint new leaders.

I have more or less lost confidence in them to get anything done.

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The leadership from the DOLRT era is already gone. Jeff Mann “resigned” with quotation marks doing some heavy lifting there. They’re still looking for a new CEO last I checked.

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Oh man. If this were CNN and you were a pundit, the newsroom editors would have so much fun with all of your sound bites :joy:

Sometimes, I wonder if we’ll soon start to see some world-class politicians coming out of North Carolina -since it sounds like we’re turning into the 21st-century version of corruption/drama-infested Albany, NY.

Strange question: do you know how Atlanta and their equivalent of GoTriangle (MARTA) got their shit together? I was under the impression they were also stuck inside a dumpster fire until a few years ago, when they suddenly started to pass lots of transit/housing tax-related referenda and hired a CEO who seemed to know which shots to take.

This sort of change (which we need now more than ever lol) takes much more than just replacing the leader and hoping changes trickle down from the top, after all…

Also, on the same vein as RDU’s cry for help at Friday’s RTA meeting, is there anything GoTriangle, Raleigh etc. could do to start acting like the federal/state government aren’t going to help?

Congestion pricing like London or New York, more opportunities for advertisers to work with GoTriangle (why do GoTriangle buses never have exterior ads?), town/county takeovers of state-owned roads (or towns insisting on adding bus-only lanes) during NCDOT road repairs etc… if credibility and appearance is what’s causing a big challenge, then it sounds to me like there’s a need for strategically splashy and far-reaching symbolic actions.

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I also found some interesting (but low-key disappointing) things in the draft minutes for the GoTriangle Board of Trustees meeting due later this month:

This post will mainly be on the slides talking about updating what’s basically the to-do list using funds from the Wake Transit referendum. I’ve posted more relevant things for other topics of interest in their respective threads (read: BRT things will be in the BRT thread, etc.).

Also, status updates are important.

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Speaking of the NCDOT’s presentation on the Southeast Corridor, S-Line Initiative on 01/16, I can’t find any blips about it. Was overshadowed by RDU’s 2040 update.

I 100% agree with this assessment.

GoTriangle is competent enough at service planning and operations. They are just not set up to succeed at a major capital program. Bootstrapping one from scratch is really hard, their staffing level was thin to begin with (and indeed, even thinner after DOLRT’s demise) and the board members are all taking this on as a tertiary role or worse, so they don’t have the proper time to stay on top of things and oversee it properly.

I actually emailed the board members representing Cary and Wake County last week to suggest exactly what you have said- hand this over to NCDOT.

However, GoTriangle cannot simply vanish. They are the organization that our transit tax funnels into and I imagine that if GoTriangle disappeared, the transit tax might disappear as well.

Their role in the commuter rail project should shift from primary sponsor, to stakeholder (=source of funding, operator, service planner) with NCDOT taking on the role of project management. This would be basically handing off the commuter rail project to NCDOT Rail in the same way that they handed off BRT to Raleigh.

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