This would be great for me personally, and it’s a start. But people who are against rail are going to poo-poo the ridership numbers because we won’t be getting the durham commuters.
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To make the cost and timeline reasonable, Durham needs to wait for the state to make certain track and road improvements. That, not their hesitance, is the reason why downtown Durham isn’t included in the RTP-DTR segment.
Maybe, but we already know that an exclusion of downtown Durham (and more importantly, Duke) isn’t expected to give us as much riders as the Raleigh-Clayton segment.
Besides, the draft Durham Transit Plan (which isn’t factored in above since it came out around the same time as the latest rail ridership estimates) recommends all-day 30min buses (or more frequent) between potential future rail stations and key parts of Durham. If those buses are timed together with the trains, then you have a good-enough stopgap solution while we wait for an extension to Durham.
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Yeah, I think the Central option is the obvious choice, for a few reasons:
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There’s a lot of TOD opportunity on this segment. Proposed stations on this portion of the route are Union Station, NCSU, Blue Ridge (Fairgrounds), Corporate Center Dr, Downtown Cary, Morrisville, RTP (Regional Transit Center), and potentially Ellis Road. Five of those eight stations have plenty of room for development, two are downtowns, and the last is a university. Morrisville is a bit of a wildcard here: they’re pretty decentralized by design, and that may not change. However, the Hub RTP project indicates to me that the Park knows they need to densify to survive, and the two stations in West Raleigh will likely undergo TOD studies similar to what the City is doing with BRT. If even two or three of those five stations build some TOD, I’m willing to bet we’ll smash those ridership projections (remember, ridership projections for this project are based on existing traffic and development patterns, so they don’t really take potential TOD opportunities into account).
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Transit ridership between Raleigh and Cary is already pretty steady. Route 300 usually fares well even during off-peak hours and weekends, as it’s probably the most critical route for transit-dependent folks in Cary. And, for those who aren’t transit-dependent, both downtown locations still make for a nice car-free visit on a weekend afternoon or evening thanks to their walkability and access to local businesses. I expect you’d see more folks in downtown Raleigh who would consider going to downtown Cary on a Saturday to get a drink at Bond Brothers if they didn’t have to drive there, as long as the schedule is frequent enough to be reliable.
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If the goal is to reduce car-dependency, this is the most affordable choice. I’m pretty sure the Western option is already off the table, as it’s both the most expensive and the highest risk. As for the Eastern option, I envision it’s going to be more of a park-and-ride model. Yes, transit options are more or less nonexistent in Johnston County currently (JCATS is strictly demand-based), so this would dramatically change that, but very few people are going to be walking to these stations. I don’t really expect Clayton or Garner to make strong TOD efforts, at least not initially. So you’re not really reducing car-dependency; you’re mostly just giving commuters free parking and the option to skip US-70/I-40. The Eastern segment would probably be dead on the weekends (though I hope I’m wrong).
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It leaves us options for Phase 2. If you start with the Eastern or Western options, the Central route has to be where you extend next (unless, of course, you decide to go further outside of the Triangle, which will inevitably have weaker ridership projections). This is really as close to a “core route” as we’re going to get for Phase 1, hitting two of the three largest downtowns on this corridor.
So yeah, Central is a no-brainer for me. And, like I’ve said before, I’m willing to bet Durham works harder to make it happen once they see a successful route in operation. The big thing here, hands down, is that it needs to run all day and on a consistent schedule and be paired with TOD. I think you blow your ridership projections out of the water with that one-two punch, and I think you probably get national recognition for it, too.
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Has anybody seen anything more specific than this about the cost escalations? If they are uncovering billion-dollar escalations at this stage then what does the future hold?
It doesn’t feel like there’s anybody at the controls driving this train. I mean GoTriangle has a president and they have staff and consultants working on it - but nobody with any political capital seems willing to spend it on this rail project. And without any political muscle behind it, it gets pushed around: They have no choice but to kowtow to everybody’s demands. They are caught scrambling to appease all the stakeholders, none of whom are willing to budge an inch on their demands, and the budget blows up and/or the scope gets cut back.
The parallels with DOLRT and the early-2000s project are striking and unsettling. Somebody important needs to step up and stake their political future on it - or this project is going to continue to flounder.
Last month, GoTriangle’s Board of Trustees got a list of every specific reason why the project ended up being more complex than they first expected (again, see my summary of that here). Put that together with the cost estimates broken down by section and combine 'em with industry standard rates, and you can make a first approximation for the costs of right-of-way, construction etc. that would have to happen.
Remember: the billion-dollar escalation (such as how the Durham segment, alone, could cost up to $1.6B) assumes that the commuter rail project is responsible for certain infrastructure upgrades such as laying down a second set of tracks through downtown Durham. But you don’t have to keep them under the same umbrella; one of GoTriangle’s suggestions for next steps is to offload needs like that into their own projects. This lets those individual mini-projects take place separately from (maybe even faster than) the rest of commuter rail, technically bringing down the cost of the rail project.
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God I hope so. You sound optimistic, and I’m hesitant to join you, but try I must.
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TTA’s 2006-era project was a full, new, dedicated double track railroad, to be built in the NCRR right-of-way, from Raleigh to Durham, and the budget at cancellation was $810 million (with final engineering well underway, so they had most likely uncovered most of the escalations that were there to be found). $810m then is $1.2b today.
Now we’re planning fewer stations, no longer planning to build dedicated tracks, but instead only add a second track where it doesn’t already exist - and instead of trains running at least every 20 minutes all day 7 days a week, we’re looking at 2 hour midday service gaps and 30 minute peak frequency, all for the low low price of over $2 billion dollars.
Local pols were really behind that project in 2006, but in the end, with shifting winds thanks to GWB’s FTA, the tepid support from our congressional delegation did us in.
I think a lot of people were burned by that, and today our pols are reluctant to stake their personal repuatation and legacy on rail in our area.
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I agree and think GoTriangle could’ve had a stronger campaign by having one very visible person be the face of the commuter rail project -even if they weren’t necessarily in charge, sorta like how everyone associates Fauci or Mandy Cohen with Covid even though they weren’t always the ones making the final call.
At the same time, though, it seems like GoTriangle’s current understanding of the Durham light rail failure is that they should have deferred to (or at least, paid lip service to) the demands of everyone at the table instead of strong-arming a particular position. As third-party reviewers said in that project’s postmortem back in 2019:
It’s politics 101: you can push a certain agenda if you have the power (here, both in the decision-making sense as well as popular support) to do so. This means it was easier for GoTriangle (then TTA) to whip stakeholders into line in the early 2000s, back when development and urbanization wasn’t enough of a hot-button topic in our region.
But I think we’re playing ourselves if we treat the 2002-2006 political landscape of our region as the same thing as how things are today. Density, equity, and growth are much more urgent and controversial issues, and the internet and social media has made it easier for the average person to know of (and be under- or misinformed about) regional rail.
This means it’s a different ball game, so I think we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s fundamentally harder to move commuter rail forward in today’s society.
Also:
True, but unlike our design for today, the Phase I FEIS from 2002 (which is the latest version I could easily find online) said that “no public street or highway at-grade crossing of the railroad tracks will be closed as part of the Regional Rail project” back then:
This is probably why GoTriangle originally had their cost estimates the way they did: they, too, probably assumed that they could get away with the same amount of track work as they proposed in the early 2000s -only to be given a rude awakening with their track capacity study from this past year.
For example, we know that the McCrimmon Parkway grade separation in Morrisville (read: where you’d probably transfer to a shuttle bus to RDU) is estimated to cost around $200 million, and must happen before a commuter rail station can be built nearby. Important infrastructure projects like these that have to accompany the commuter rail project were not included in the 2002 FEIS, and the technology to do the track capacity simulations that suggested their need probably didn’t exist in the first place, back then.
Honestly, every time I write in this project’s defense, I’m trying to convince myself, too, that this will actually happen 
I’m just trying to show y’all that there is a path forward and that there is genuine logic in GoTriangle’s arguments.
But like I replied to @Boltman before, there’s genuine reasons to be concerned with how this project’s going, and questions about the margin of error for the data behind their conclusions. As soon as this project’s public comment period opens up next month, we need to hammer them with those, and hold them accountable to giving solid responses.
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What I’m not clear about: is the McCrimmon Parkway grade separation (among others) included in this $2+ billion price tag, or not? I was under the impression that this is a separate item. That is a roads project that has been in planning for a very long time. To foist it off on the commuter rail project would be unfortunate and unfair, forcing us to use our transit sales tax to pay for something that should be funded entirely from state gas tax revenue.
It needs to be said, though, that there was a good deal of grade separation work planned for the TTA rail line. They were going to rebuild bridges over the tracks at Ashe and Gorman and maybe some others that I don’t remember. They were going to build the grade separation at Morrisville Parkway including separating the freight tracks (which later got built as a separate project.) They had to build flyovers so the regional rail could switch from one side of the freight tracks to the other. They had to build bridges for the two new tracks over every road that the freight tracks already bridge over (eg Dan Allen, Hillsborough Street out by the fairgrounds, etc).
I’m really not sure why it’s so much harder to get the necessary stakeholders on board this time. Back then, they had agreements signed with NCRR and CSX to share their right-of-way. Duke had agreed to a nearby station agreement. They had a plan to get through downtown Durham (without tunneling!) and I don’t recall it being controversial at all.
The governance and enabling legislation for the Research Triangle Regional Public Transportation Authority (TTA → Triangle Transit → GoTriangle) was the same then as today. If anything, it’s stronger - because the legislature granted them the transit sales tax. However, the authority itself has little clout (some folks do ride their buses, but not that many - and your average normie around here cares approximately zero about buses) What clout they do possess is a product of their reputation and the clout lent to them by electeds, business groups, community advocates, media, etc. Their reputation was an unknown until 2006, so many were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt - but given what’s gone down since then, it seems like enthusiastic support the likes of which we saw in the early 2000s is hard to come by.
And so, they get pushed around. They have no choice but to broker a consensus by giving everybody everything that they want. And needless to say, this is proving to be expensive.
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The more I hear about the 2006 project, the more it sounds like such an enormous missed opportunity. We would’ve had some spectacular transit infrastructure in place by now had that gone through.
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Im sorry but this is comically stupid. There is no reason that projects in this big dumb country should be this expensive other than because we let them.
We’re talking about running a commuter line on the same right of way from one end of this not-particularly-big-metro to another here. For just a little more (maybe less at the end of the day), Paris built nine miles of subway and added 7 stations. This is maddening and it makes me hate living in this banana republic.
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We are caught in a world where:
On the conservative side, all transit investment is bad. If we create usable, dependable transit, then that will mean people will depend on it, and people being dependent on government services is bad. Indeed, functional/capable government itself is bad and must be prevented at all costs. (Remember when they took away our slaves, and later integrated the schools and restaurants? Now they’re transing our kids and coming after our guns and money! Don’t tread on me!) The only job that government should have is to dismantle itself.
On the liberal side, if the benefits exceed the costs (regardless of whether the costs should be able to be reduced) then it is a worthwhile project. Any questioning costs or value means you must be a transit hating conservative and are the enemy. And besides, even if costs outweigh benefits, always remember, we’re creating jobs here! Hundreds or thousand of JOBS, don’t you want working class people to have JOBS? Meanwhile, I have to make sure my patrons get their due: hundreds of millions spent on juicy consulting contracts with little in the way of expectations or deliverables. And of course everyone has to agree to the end result, so let’s gold plate it out the wazoo! Money is unimportant, but our coalition is too fragile for anybody to dare take leadership and be decisive! Process and Community Consensus is what matters, after all - not outcomes!
It’s really dysfunctional.
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The French have a great word for this:
dépaysement m (plural dépaysements) the feeling of not being at home, in a foreign or different place, whether a good or a bad feeling ; change of scenery. (obsolete) exile.
I’ve felt this for a long time (pre-moving to Raleigh…)
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Except for roads. Roads are just fine to be built by the gubmint.
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Yes, it is included, according to memos on presentations by the feasibility study’s team to CAMPO and the DCHC MPO (I can’t remember when they mentioned it last, but you should be able to find it if you look up their meeting minutes). But no, we’re not being taxed any more than we already are for those separate projects.
I agree that it feels misleading to do so when we want to know how much our region will actually spend for commuter rail, specifically. But it’s also an incredibly potent accounting trick that helps us raise the odds of winning federal funds. Yes, the McCrimmon grade separation etc. will happen regardless of whether commuter rail becomes a reality -but if they’re counted as a part of the budget for this rail project, then the state and local taxpayer money that goes into those projects get counted as a part of the 50% “non-federal match” for the federal grant.
Put another way: that $3B estimated price tag for commuter rail includes things we’ve already been paying for. So the real question is whether you want that to “count” for a part of the project costs (thus also artificially increasing the apparent price tag). Without it, we’d effectively be contributing less to this project as a region, so the feds would also give us less money. To prevent that from happening, GoTriangle’s being… well, 
generous about what is exactly considered a part of this project.
Click here to learn more if you feel ~some sorta way~ about that.
While we’re on this topic: GoTriangle shouldn’t (and probably won’t) admit to that strategy publicly. GoTriangle has to submit every piece of PR that they do as a part of this feasibility study for review by the FTA. This means if it becomes clear and obvious that they’re fudging their cost estimates and local contribution numbers without good reason, this entire enterprise gets shot down. This seems like more of an open secret rather than a sneaky risk, by the way; GoRaleigh did the same thing about sidewalk and road upgrades for the New Bern BRT, and clearly they got an FFGA just fine.
Changes in Norfolk Southern and Duke’s leaderships definitely didn’t help -especially since the Durham light rail’s woes really took off as soon as Vincent Price, Duke’s current president, took the university’s helms. There’s also more hostility to mass transit from the General Assembly, too, that wasn’t anywhere near as strong two decades ago.
From a regulatory perspective, what began the end of regional rail in 2006 is the Bush administration pulling out the rug from underneath GoTriangle’s feet by changing how projects are graded and funding through the SAFETEA-LU. Changes in the FTA’s policies forced our old rail project to score much more lowly than it was originally expected (and the fact that TTA asked the feds for 60% of the costs, which is not allowed today, probably didn’t help).
This old TBJ article had an interesting tidbit on that facet of history:
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Merging the Raleigh-Cary MSA with the Durham-Chapel Hill MSA will get us more funding. Also that was maybe on the minds back then. Both NC city are having trouble getting funding from the state.
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Somebody over on the UrbanPlanet Charlotte forum is reporting that Mayor Baldwin has been appointed (appointed herself?) to the GoTriangle board. I haven’t seen this reported in any newspapers, but these sorts of internal machinations may fall below their radar given the limited resources the papers have these days.
Is this correct? Have we discussed this here already and I somehow missed it?
Here is the comment: CATS Long Term Transit Plan - Silver, Red Lines - Page 233 - Charlotte - UrbanPlanet.org
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Yes. At the evening city council meeting on Tuesday, the mayor asked to be appointed and Councilmember Branch appointed her to fill out the remainder of a term served by a resigning member. She will serve on the board for what’s likely to be a little less than a year.
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This seems like a pivotal year to have someone of that stature on board. As someone lamented above, we need someone to use their political capital to get this thing through.
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Welcome! That’s an awesome name, too. 
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