I think those are big reasons why NCRR, NS, and many others would give that a hard “no” (as amazing as @orulz’s idea would be). The slide on criteria for figuring out Durham’s layouts says exactly that:
The fourth point is a reference to Durham’s original plan that directly connects the bus terminal and rail station. That grade separation would get ruined, too, with elevated rail.
Ah, yeah, I didn’t even think about Norfolk Southern… they’d probably file lawsuits over a closure.
It would likely be possible to build a new two-track elevated structure, south of the existing tracks, without interrupting service on the existing tracks at all, beyond perhaps a short segment of bypass tracks, or a slow zone. TTA planned to do something very similar in Durham back in 2005.
The tightest squeezes I can see would be right at Gregson, where you could easily start by moving Pettigrew 20 feet to the south to get it out of the way, or at Mangum, where you could easily move the existing tracks 20’ north on a temporary bypass to make more space. Both have about 40’ to work with, and with the extra 20’, 60’ total should be plenty to work with.
Building a viaduct next to existing, live tracks is… very much commonplace.
Definitely wouldn’t have to be closed. Might need a bypass track in the vicinity of Blackwell, Mangum, and Roxboro. Temporary relocations/bypasses are always involved in grade separation work on railroads anyway, so this is a nothingburger.
You’d build a new elevated platform (along with the elevated tracks) south of the existing station, where that warehouse is today (That warehouse is owned by GoTriangle.)
Not ruined at all. Could easily still bridge over Chapel Hill road, and then underneath the elevated tracks and connect into the station.
Imagine the tracks being built here, except on a structure 15-25’ higher than it is today.
After that is done, and train traffic is cut over to the new viaduct, that leaves space for a second two-track bridge to be built, where the existing tracks are. Last step, build in retail space underneath.
Raleigh Mayor video about Commuter rail…
Just for reference, here’s an elevation profile for the corridor through downtown Durham, from Campus Drive on the west to Alston Avenue on the east. Drawn in are my suggested uses for the spaces under the viaduct.
The three dips, from left to right, are the existing underpasses at Gregson, Chapel Hill, and Roxboro.
The fact that Downtown Durham is actually at a low point within the corridor works tremendously to our advantage when it comes to grade-separating the entire corridor with a long viaduct. Rise to an elevation of 420’ on an embankment from Buchanan to Gregson, and maintain that elevation - flat as a pancake - on a viaduct, 1.1 miles long, all the way through downtown - with the viaduct ending at Fayetteville, and descending back to ground level on an embankment between Fayetteville and Alston.
The only thing left to figure out is the uses for the space under the viaduct. An 80 foot wide viaduct, times 1.1 miles, minus the space taken by the street rights-of-way underneath, is around 400,000 square feet - which is a lot of space. But it’s the literal center of Downtown Durham, the intersection between Main Street and the Amercan Tobacco area - so it should be possible to find uses for it all.
My first suggestion would be to actually abandon the existing Durham Station bus facility, except maybe the headhouse and the Greyhound station, and put the GoDurham station under the tracks between Duke St and Chapel Hill Street, directly beneath the Amtrak and Commuter Rail platforms. Then sell off the existing platform area for redevelopment (including, probably, a parking deck for the train station.)
Next would be to fill the space between Duke and Gregson, and between Chapel Hill and Mangum, with retail. Put a new pedestrian passageway at the midpoint between Chapel Hill and Blackwell. This could serve as both a connection from Five Points to the American Tobacco area, and also part of a connection from the Tobacco Trail to the Belt Line Trail.
East of Mangum, you’re getting out of the “core” area of downtown Durham, so maybe the viability of retail would be reduced. Some retail would probably work, but not everywhere else. Fill the rest with office space (for both public agencies and private companies) and, perhaps (distastefully but necessarily) the parking to go with it.
Thanks for the detailed drawing and narrative! The elevation map definitely helps you imagine what a viaduct could look like, and it’s interesting that the rail bypass could be built without buying tons of right-of-way.
If we pretended we’re the FTA and we took this idea seriously (and we’re gonna do that 'cuz I love this idea and really wish it could happen), I think the two problems would be:
Impact on registered historical sites like Brightleaf and the American Tobacco Campus. As Durham’s light rail stint showed, a historical site does not need to physically be in the way of a transit project to be “impacted” by it. Federal laws on environmental and historical protection demand that places like that are documented (like this) and impacts on them are kept to a minimum. By that standard, keeping today’s rail grading has a major advantage of being un-“disruptive” enough to not cause regulatory headaches 
Durham stakeholders who saw Durham’s light rail cancelation as a victory. One of their key complaints were perceived harm against historical sites (see above) and potential disruption of downtown traffic, both temporary and permanent. I personally think this is a non-issue -especially since, like you said, the opportunity for construction under the train tracks makes up for that by far- but I’m also not a constituent with outsized clout.
@orulz, what would you say to people who throw that back at you?
I recall hearing at some point, probably during the DOLRT debacle, that there was opposition to having rail bridges or anything elevated running in Downtown Durham because of the effect it might have in mentally, if not physically dividing the city. Considering the urban fabric has never really recovered from 147 being rammed through Hayti, this seems pretty reasonable to me. @orulz how could this be built in a way that satisfies some Durhamites’ fears that it would just be another wall dividing north from south in the city?
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.
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:
quickly bringing in more buses in more places faster, more frequently, for longer
more reliable, faster buses thanks to more investments (e.g. BRT)
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.
You’re right, the knee-jerk reaction to anything elevated is always “Elevated?! zZOMG Berlin Wall! Blight!” Any proposal to build something elevated in Durham (or Raleigh) will have to get out in front of that. The best way I can think of would be to start with a feasibility study of the concept that anticipates and counters these concerns, particularly by including realistic renderings of what this would look like, as well as reference images of places like:
In these cases, well-done elevated infrastructure has been built with overpasses high and wide enough to let natural light in beneath, and active uses have been placed beneath the viaduct. This combines to make it feel like an amenity, rather than a blight.
The typical American way of building elevated infrastructure through engagement in a traditional NEPA process almost always winds up adopting the premise that the elevated infrastructure should be as low as possible, to reduce impacts, which is dumb because it doesn’t reduce impacts, and also increases costs because it involves lowering streets to pass under a partially raised overpass. The best case scenario for this is something like:
But more typically you wind up with something like
…where, ok, yeah the Berlin Wall comparison is actually kind of apt. When DOLRT looked at doing something like this before, what they proposed was something along these lines. So, yeah. Not so great.
It’s going to require a PR campaign, to be sure, but the nice thing about doing a feasibility study first is that you don’t have to follow the glacial NEPA process where you have to avoid showing bias for any particular alternative. This feasibility study could also demonstrate the extreme cost and infeasibility of the trenches, tunnels, and “Do Nothing” plans that people will no doubt suggest as alternatives.
When the NEPA process begins and you start talking about elevated viaducts as one among several alternatives, you have the attractive renderings in hand (and in peoples’ minds) to counter the “Berlin Wall” reaction.
@keita: As far as dealing with impacts to historical resources, NEPA’s EIS process is horrendously broken, so is always a minefield. Its dependence on lawsuits (or the threat of them) to address concerns means that there are too many opportunities for disingenuous interloping NIMBYs with tenuous (at best) standing, to make specious claims on literally any grounds, that the planning agency must then expend considerable resources responding to.
Furthermore, my impression is that, as a result of its highly reactionary nature, the NEPA has come to look at history as fragile, static, and complete, rather than the robust, constantly evolving, living, breathing thing that it is. If somebody says that “Building a railroad bridge in front of this building is a major impact,” then it’s taken at face value.
A more rational approach, in my opinion, would be to note that we are not proposing to demolish or alter any historical structures, nor to do anything that would amount to a greater impact than building a new building across the street from, or next door to, a historical structure. After all, if doing…
…across from American Tobacco or Brightleaf is not just allowed, but welcomed, lauded even, then why should building a viaduct with retail underneath be viewed much differently? It’s essentially just building a new building across Pettigrew from the Old Bull Building.
There should also be a reckoning with the fact that this is a 200’ wide railroad right-of-way, that has been in place since about 1850 - and that if the Southern Railway had the need and money to do this back in 1870, or 1925, or 1962, they wouldn’t have hesitated, for even a second.
Having acknowledged the above points, we should treat this infrastructure as adding another layer onto the rich and varied history of Downtown Durham. We should work to make sure that this new layer is as nice and contextual as reasonably possible - but if you reference the Chicago example above, I think it would be quite possible to build something that could blend in well in the historical context.
Yeah, I agree that a proper rendering of the viaduct will help people see your logic. Plus, land value capture’s legality seems unclear in North Carolina, but this idea just might push the General Assembly to change that and encourage such a practice (just like what the NC FIRST commission recommended).
(Also, do you have any recommendations on free terrain-rendering software? I’d love to give this a shot at drawing this when I get some free time.)
Speaking of NEPA and NHPA… omg yes. I hate how the entries in the National Historic Registry are written and how that becomes a silver bullet for NIMBY activists acting in bad faith (e.g. the fact that Brightleaf’s characteristics depend on being next to railroads, and how that can be weaponized against this sort of project), too. Political thinkers on the left and the right are calling for serious reforms in this space, but I don’t know how feasible it will be in this Congress, but I guess it’s easier to just think about working in the bounds we have 
Another potential complaint would be the cost of this kind of project. This could be a problem since that is starting to sound like a potent reason for Durham to pull out of the commuter rail project. The value-capturing bit sounds like it could offset this, though, but I wonder if there’s other unconventional sources (e.g. startup incubators, local investors, a revived state infrastructure bank) that could also play into this?
A mile of rail viaduct is definitely going to be expensive and disruptive, no way around that. But so will any solution to grade-separate the railroad through downtown Durham. There’s actually a good chance that a mile-long viaduct would be both the least expensive and least disruptive solution.
As for how to model terrain, I did this once back when Sketchup was a Google product and you could import directly from Google Earth. That feature no longer exists. I also did this once in the student version of AutoCAD Civil3d, importing contour shapefiles from the Wake Open Data website. I remember it being quite a hassle.
If I were to do this today, I’d get the contour data and start here:
Topo shapefiles are readily available for Wake, but it looks like Durham will make you jump through a few hoops to get it.
Thanks for pointing out all of those resources! …unfortunately, I took a look at them, and I’m starting to realize that I don’t have it in me to draw out my idea in the way I’d like 
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking about, too. It’s interesting that there are plugins that interpret GIS terrain data now, but it’s disappointing that you can’t easily do this for free anymore.
Times like these are good reminders why civil engineers and planning/geography pros are paid what they make 
I’m grateful that there are people out there love doing this for a living.
You guys need to check out Windy.com. Windy: Wind map & weather forecast
First off it’s hands down the best weather app out there. Forecasts from all the main weather computer models, wind, waves, clouds, radar, pollution etc. you name it they have it.
There is a also a Windy Maps sections, which is a great Map app on it’s own. but it let’s you do topo profiles, like my pipe dream to make tunnel for all the through traffic on McDowell and Dawson.
I subscribe to Windy … I really wish they had the HRRR forecast model though. I’m always having to go to the NOAA website if I want to know what the weather will do in the immediate, near-term future.
You can do elevation profiles in Google Earth as well. Draw a line (or a path) and then right-click, show elevation profile. That’s what I used for the above.
How does CSX affect this project? I heard things about Norfolk Southern being a thorn with this project but are there any on-going issues with CSX?
I don’t think CSX has any lines in the area. Thought it was all NS and short lines
Mmm, not quite: the CSX “S” line shares the right of way with NS between Cary and the Boylan Wye. One of the two tracks technically belongs to CSX, although these days they operate it as a shared, double track railroad. The lines towards Apex from Cary, and Wake Forest to downtown Raleigh are CSX, also part of the S-line. The yard on the east side of Capital Blvd as you head north from downtown Raleigh is part CSX, part NCDOT.
The S-line was severed and abandoned between Norlina, NC and Petersburg, VA back in the 1980s so it sees no through traffic, and traffic is pretty light light overall, with few big customers north of Moncure.
The branch line from Apex to Durham roughly parallel to NC55 is also owned by CSX. There are only a few active customers left on this line, none of them very large. But it does connect with the Norfolk Southern/NCRR main line near its north end in Durham.
So yeah, CSX has a presence here for sure, but it’s not a big one. Word is the CSX is considering selling some, or all, of this to NCDOT.
How did I miss all that? Not sure what RR map I was looking at but dang that complicates things. Hopefully they do sell off some of their lines.
Ready For Rail (GoTriangle) is hosting a webinar on November 18th from 6pm-8pm discussing the proposed commuter rail stations. They’ll be discussing an overview of the project, where it currently stands, and what to expect next. You can register here.
