Listened to all four yesterday. Nice to hear a transportation journalist who seems to understand that car infrastructure actively works against transit infrastructure.
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Here’s a link to a triggering video that is sort of around that same topic, but goes after electric cars as the latest antagonist against rail.
I have no idea why this youtube isn’t linking. If you are interested, go to YouTube and search for Electric Cars are Not Sustainable and they’re Terrible
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Yessss, big fan of this video and Alan Fisher. My company has a few employee groups and just added an environmentally-focused one. I’ve been working on a presentation about sustainable transportation for them, and the first few slides are basically “electric cars won’t save us and actually bring a new set of environmental problems for us to fix.”
Electric cars need to happen, and I’m glad their they’re happening, but they can’t be viewed as the permanent solution that a lot of powerful and wealthy people are peddling them as.
Edit: noticed I used the wrong there/their/they’re and felt ashamed.
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I think even Elon admits electric cars just put a bandaide on the problem.
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bUt wHaT iF wE pUt tHEm iN tUnNEls
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Fixed the link. Typically it works better if you click the share link on YouTube rather than the URL in the browser. I can’t explain why but that’s what I’ve noticed. 
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GoTriangle’s leaders are meeting in their monthly meeting tomorrow, and it gives us much more context to Durham’s hesitation in pitching in $260M more to the commuter rail project. It seems like there are three reasons:
1. Daily bus riders and people of color in Durham support commuter rail, but don’t see it as a priority.
Durham County’s manager for its transportation programs wrote about their recent work in updating their county transit plans. It included this summary of citizens and stakeholders’ thoughts, among other things, on the commuter rail project:
2. Going more into debt would screw up Durham County’s credit.
Durham and Orange counties also have to rewrite financial agreements as a part of their transit plan revisions. This revealed an unexpected bug in the system: GoTriangle currently gets to call its own shots in financially managing Durham County’s transit tax district. Neither Durham County’s taxpayers nor planners in the DCHC MPO currently have a direct say in how these dollars get spent.
Naturally, the three parties are trying to fix this by creating a new interlocal agreement powered by a new financial model. But one byproduct of this change is that, unless they want a drop in credit ratings, Durham County has to set aside more rainy-day funds than it currently does.
This means, as an unintended consequence of switching to a fairer way to share power, Durham County essentially lost “at least $50 million” that they used to be able to budget for future transit projects.
3. Durham County’s still reeling from that time they tried to build light rail.
The other narrative that’s been getting popular, as @Christopher mentioned earlier, is the sticker shock from the Durham light rail project that got killed off in 2019. Durham and Orange counties lost $157 million in learning their lesson -more than enough to make up for the funding gap for commuter rail- and we now know why.
The former Durham light rail project didn’t just go through planning, but also had detailed environmental and engineering work and purchased some land for a maintenance facility before it got killed off. A detailed breakdown of how we lost so much money is also on the agenda document. Here’s a table that summarizes that:
Over $130M of that went to management and design ($83M of which did to a single contract with engineering consultant HDR). After a 2017 renegotiation, Durham County footed just under 82% of that bill.
As an aside, Durham’s MPO is trying to do a corridor study that, in part, should make the case for BRT where light rail was once proposed. But according to their own documents, they had to put that project on ice for two years because they could only scoop up $50,000 -nowhere near enough money to attract consulting firms to work on that project.
There's also a $270M question on how to design the train platforms, so that's another thing to think about too.
In happier news, Norfolk Southern’s been getting back to GoTriangle, and staff memos are showing signs of progress in modeling rail traffic and service impacts! That should help us learn how smoothly, quickly, and frequently trains can run, and what sorts of infrastructure investments are necessary.
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On that note, DCHC MPO is also meeting today, and they’re also getting a rather compelling presentation in favor of commuter rail. The presentation basically argues what we’ve been arguing here, which is that commuter rail would essentially form a regional spine that the rest of our transit network is built off of. It also has a ton of opportunity for TOD.
I fully understand Durham’s concerns, and I’ve said this before, but I think that, in the long run, a rail spine actually goes a lot further in addressing those concerns than allocating that funding towards GoDurham’s existing network. The primary reason for this is that it would essentially reorient our development focus for the entire region. When you have developers eyeing proximity to a new rail corridor, and you give them the tools they need to make that work, you shift job and population growth to that specific (and in this case, rather underdeveloped) corridor. This shift in development focus slows gentrification in places like East Durham and allows those folks to stay near their current bus line instead of having to move further out of the city (and thus forcing Durham to extend their existing lines).
And, if you can really get regional development (and specifically job growth) centered on these rail stations, you’re opening up more job opportunities to transit-dependent folks who don’t even live on the corridor, because, in theory, most of those people would only need a single transfer (bus to rail) to get to any of those new jobs.
This is kind of pie-in-the-sky thinking, I know, but this is also what actually happens when you do regional rail right and couple it with proper land use: you tie a region together and make it accessible to everyone, not just drivers. It is super impractical for a transit-dependent person in Durham to commute to Raleigh currently. It’s doable, but it’s slow and unpleasant. That limits job opportunities for most transit-dependent Durhamites to Durham. But, if you can get the whole region within the reach, man, that’s a game-changer.
I really think this goes further in benefitting Durham in the long run than prolonging the project for the sake of better bus frequencies. Both are necessary, and really, they should be trying to do both simultaneously, but I really don’t think inward focus is what’s best for this region in the long run. We grow better as a unit, not separate entities.
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I am totally for transit-oriented development and rail, but I will say the DRX route is pretty good. I used it for a year to NC State and back every weekday. I also know someone else who pretty consistently used it from NC State to downtown Durham before covid sent everyone home. The only issue was that as a commuter route, its hours weren’t great. That’s why personally I don’t like the language of “commuter rail”. It seems to imply no trains are running in the afternoon or evening. I probably wouldn’t ever take the train to get coffee in downtown Durham and back, as great as Cocoa Cinnamon is, but I would absolutely take even a bus to DPAC and back if it ran that late and wasn’t three buses and two hours. As it is now, one of Google maps’ recommendations for late night public transportation from Durham to Raleigh is the Piedmont Amtrak route…
Though honestly, looking at that, I could get to downtown Durham in 36 minutes by dinnertime and back to downtown Raleigh in 38 minutes later that night for $14. The way gas prices are, that might not be a bad deal.
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With you on this. My issue with the DRX is the same (and really only) concern I have with “commuter” rail: the peak focus. I don’t think the demand for peak service is ever going to go back to where it was pre-pandemic. There’s much less of a rush hour period on key highway corridors in the Triangle these days; now they’re just kind of moderately congested all day. If and when folks go back to the office, a lot of them will be doing hybrid work, which could mean two days in and three days out, or it could mean they just go in around lunch time. Commuter rail doesn’t offer that kind of flexibility. We need regional rail.
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Live in Raleigh and have a Durham wedding coming up. Was hoping to take the train but the last ride is around 935pm and we’d have to leave early. Would be great to have a 1030 to 11pm train to spend evenings in Durham. Would be extremely convenient for Bulls games as well.
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I just plugged the budget hole for the commuter rail:
The bill for my consultation will be approved in next month’s board meeting. You’re welcome.
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SEVEN percent? What, do you think NCDOT has the money for that kind of thing? They have to build a bypass around Fuquay!
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Personally, I agree 100% and I think this is the smarter move that Durham should be taking.
But I think too many of Durham’s residents distrust “the system” to do that, and their city council is deeply sympathetic to that perspective. They’re all unwilling to gamble on long-term changes like commuter rail, and the transit plan survey implies they refuse to wait until 2030 to see those results pay off.
Click here to see what I mean.
With many census tracts near downtown Durham having average household incomes below $33,000/yr, it’s hard to assume they have the means or patience to take their time to show results that realize in the span of decades. After all, Durham’s mayor and several City Council members were voted in on a platform that prioritized quick, local infrastructure updates; I struggled to find any planks that mentioned regional interests or long-termism.
Recently-elected mayor Elaine O’Neal’s campaign platform shows this too: nearly all of her proposed policies involve reallocating funds or optimizing services with short-term results. It’s almost as if Durham’s voters are laser-focused on damage control from Covid and racial justice -but they see it as an immediate, zero-sum situation even when you could be playing the long game?
I think Durham and GoTriangle could be communicating this MUCH better than they are. We know to assume that gentrification and displacement will happen no matter what due to the immensely growing real estate market here, but that’s partly because we’re nerds who read and learn about this to unusual degrees. I bet most people think development is episodic, rather than a part of a greater trend with momentum, so they may not even realize that systemic problems require systemic changes and solutions. Planners have to educate the public on this front, and I haven’t seen signs that they’re handling that mantle of responsibility as well as they need to.
For that same reason, I’m worried that this reads as a threat to these sorts of communities and leaders. Through a zero-sum lens about spending more transit money on non-immediate returns when they could be invested elsewhere, I wonder if some people could read this sentence as saying “rail could open up more job opportunities, but you won’t be able to live near them to benefit from it”.
EDIT: I also looked more closely at the slide deck you posted (thanks! I don’t think that was posted, yet, when I went on that page). But I feel like that analysis is a double-edged sword? It makes it clear that this rail project could serve and improve lots of communities’ qualities-of-life, but it also doesn’t look at the difference in land use, affordability etc. with(out) rail. Without that, rail opponents could still use this data as evidence for more bus investment instead of rail, no?
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Thanks. That’s the first time that a link didn’t work for me. 
And, in their defense, a majority of Durham’s transit-dependent crowd consists of minority groups, and local governing bodies have given those groups very little reason to trust them. They have every right to be skeptical of Durham City Council, GoTriangle, and every other decision-maker in this process.
This is a good point. The alternative to transit-oriented development is sprawl, but the average person (read: not development nerds, like us) doesn’t necessarily understand that. And, in Durham’s case, sprawl means that neighborhoods like East Durham keep getting flipped/gentrified, and existing residents of those neighborhoods get displaced to the outskirts.
Durham has limited TOD opportunities near downtown; certainly not enough to keep up with existing demand. And this, once again, is why regional collaboration on development is critical and could be a game-changer. Morrisville is a pretty boring place to live in right now, but if you can walk to a train that will get you to downtown Raleigh or downtown Durham in 15-20min, that’s much more appealing, especially to newcomers. Dense, walkable hubs around stations could mean the difference between a Durham for everyone and a Durham for wealthy young professionals.
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This is the critical point to hammer home: new people are going to arrive, and that’s good! More customers, more potential employees, etc. But those new people will be making new trips. Commuter rail provides a structure for that new growth that doesn’t further burden the road network - and even though commuter rail will only be a fraction of their trips, it beats having even more people on the roads.
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And it could launch a few light rail corridors in Raleigh and Durham.