All the bus stop should have digital bus updates and schedules as well.
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…bus updates that are accurate and actually working.
I mean, when’s the last time you checked a digital sign (or God forbid… TransLoc…) and you realized you’ve been lied to? That’s a complaint I keep hearing that somehow never makes it onto the news/public discussions, but -at least on college campuses- really shapes perceptions on public transit around here.
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Signs with arrival time predictions tend to be useless, in my experience. Same for arrival times in apps. The transloc maps showing where the buses are, on the other hand, are really useful. It makes transit so much more usable. Sometimes you’ll get a bus that doesn’t show up, but that’s like 5% of the time or less.
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I usually use live trackers (NextBus, Transit, and TransLoc) to see where buses actually are, too. They’re still definitely more reliable than the digital signs, but even then, the frequency that buses “disappear” or don’t even show up on the map in the first place are much more than 5%.
(I’d say at least 30% on Chapel Hill Transit, 20% on the GoDurham RSX, and maybe 10% on the GoTriangle 400 from my experience in the past month… but maybe we should look at this as an actual guerilla study instead of pulling numbers out of thin air)
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@Francisco this would really align with the Keep Raleigh Boring branding.
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hahahaha
Well played!
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someone call Elon Musk’s Boring Co.!
That won’t even help, though. Even if you ignore the Boring Co.'s pointless ski-things and look at their boring machines, they don’t have any proof of their machines having better performance than what’s already out there (let alone having any of those machines on the market).
I’m down to wait and see how that goes if we’re cool with waiting to start project development 20 years in the future (add 7-10 years to that for shovels in the ground, and another 5 years for operational service). I don’t know about y’all, but I’m not that patient.
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The possibility of NC being the first state to use hydrogen trains is mentioned in this interesting article:
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Looks like the author just did a quick Google search to find that.
We talked about this earlier on this thread, and personally, I still don’t think the source of that news is reliable…
Could be true, but the person who wrote this is a scholar of rail (Andreas Hoffrichter | MSU Broad College of Business), is the Burkhardt Professor in Railway Management, Executive Director for the Center For Railway Research and Education at Michigan State University and has written extensively about hydrogen rails (see below), which suggests to me that he would do more than a quick internet search. But hey, at least I can hope!
https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/4345/
Coombe, D., Fisher, P., Hoffrichter, A., Kent, S., Reed, D., Rowshandel, H., et al. (2014). Development and design of a narrow-gauge hydrogen-hybrid locomotive. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part F: Journal of Rail and Rapid Transit . doi: 10.1177/0954409714532921
Hoffrichter, A., Miller, A., R., Hillmansen, S., & Roberts, C. (2012). Well-to-Wheel Analysis for Electric, Diesel and Hydrogen Traction for Railways. Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, 17 (1), 28-34. doi: 10.1016/j.trd.2011.09.002.
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One of the things that those of us who have been around trains all our lives know very well: don’t believe everything you hear. The railroad business leads the nation in rumors. There is no litigation underway between NCDOT/NCRR and Norfolk Southern. Amtrak has been litigating against the freight railroads for years, but so far nothing has come of it except big legal fees. North Carolina is not the focus of that litigation. Over the years, NS has varied from tolerant of passenger trains to intolerant. At present they’re in the intolerant phase, but suing them isn’t likely to solve anything. Sue for what, on what grounds? Breach of contract with NCDOT/NCRR? Better read the contract.
NCDOT did provide funding about 15 years ago to stabilize stations in Marion, Morganton, and Old Fort. Whether NCDOT/NCRR still has title to any of those, as well as Hickory, I’m not certain. I believe the Biltmore station was sold off. The Statesville station was sold and moved to a new location. The Barber Junction station near Cleveland was moved to the NC Transportation Museum in Spencer.
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I was looking for restaurants in Asheville and found one that’s the old Biltmore train station.
The Asheville station was torn down in late 1968. After that time, the Biltmore station a mile away was used for Asheville. Usually you don’t see two stations so close together, but Vanderbilt wanted a station closer to his property.
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With careful planning and Proper funding, commuter rail can become a success in the long run, NC has to make that push for Investing in rail. I fully believe in it I just wish folks give it a chance before shooting it down.
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Some interesting tidbits in this article out today.
“DOT is also interested in fostering commuter rail between downtown Raleigh and Wake Forest and perhaps to Apex on a little-used freight line owned by CSX, says Jason Orthner, director of NCDOT’s Rail Division.”
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article230947248.html
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Can’t they just extend it into Granville so that DHHS employees don’t have to move there? 
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This seems like a really good idea. It’s so sensible, it just might work!
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It’s in the long-range Metropolitan Transportation Plan, but is currently unfunded. Future updates of the Wake Transit Plan might have it in there, but we’ll need to wait and see how Wake-Durham Commuter Rail fares before the region starts committing to building out the network.
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It says that the state is interested in buying the corridor from CSX. We already knew that they were planning to buy the line from Norlina to the state line, but this is the first confirmation of speculation that they might be interested in buying more of it. I wonder exactly what would be the southern extent of the purchase?Would it be Apex, with CSX retaining the Durham & Southern line to Durham? Would the D&S be bundled in, and the point be somewhere south of there? New Hill? Moncure? (There are some pretty big industrial customers there.) All the way to Hamlet or the SC border even? What about the abandoned right-of-way from Norlina to Weldon? Inquiring minds want to know!
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