This thread is the only reason why I come on this forum, so I thought it’d be appropriate. Glad you like it. Thanks
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Welcome to the community! So now that you’re here and commenting like the rest of us, let me ask you a question: do you think MAB can be the right person for this role?
Because if you’re getting a prominent power player to make commuter rail into their cause célèbre, that means their baggage will also become the rail project’s baggage. And the ugly truth is that 10,430 more people voted against Baldwin than those who voted for her in last month’s mayoral election. (This is also why I’m asking if she can become the right advocate, rather than whether she is right this minute)
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I’d say you’re right to be skeptical whether she is the right person to get it done, and I am no savant when it comes to local politics 
Regardless, I think it’s important that someone in office has demonstrated a continued interest to getting this done (and taken steps to do so). I can’t recall hearing any other public official talk publicly about this project in our area, especially following DOLRT, as consistently as her.
Please feel free to correct me as you are the all-mighty authority on this topic!
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Branch is on this board as well and having MAB back on there (she was the appointee previously when she was an at large councilor) should be a good 'pick up and run ’ stopgap for a missing advocate at least and preferably would provide someone who has a ‘platform’ to push forth the advantages for ALL citizens to rail connection as a proper NEED for our transit system. Still, this project is a hot potato since it won’t solve for everything and at this point, that’s what all the shouting is about regardless of subject…
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On a related note: the Executive Director of Durham’s MPO sent a letter of support to Pete Buttigieg, giving additional street cred to NCRR’s request for $19M of Inflation Reduction Act money distributed as CRISI grants. This request, matched by $13M of NCRR’s own money, will extend siding tracks (read: add a 2nd set of tracks) between McCrimmon Parkway in Morrisville and just past NW Maynard Rd. in Cary if it wins funding.
That letter’s dated from last month, but it popped up in the DCHC MPO board meeting agenda for next week. So yeah, there’s another obscure place where we’re trying to chip away at a part of the commuter rail project’s price tag!
Oh thanks -but I just like to put myself to sleep by reading public records; I’m, by no means, a true expert on this 
But yeah, I’m inclined to agree with you and @NoRaAintAllBad despite the problems. I just worry that some people might take this headline, and spin it so that it seems like MAB is trying to ram down her agenda down Raleigh’s throat, once again, in an anti-democratic way -but this time, by burdening our sales tax cash flow with a risky, multibillion-dollar potential boondoggle. I trust that the mayor’s up to date with this project (just like Corey Branch, our favorite discount Kanye-lookalike who also sits on the GoTriangle Board of Trustees), but that doesn’t guarantee that she has control over the narrative.
i dont know if it’s all bad. i grew up in Raleigh from the late 60s until i could drive in the mid 80s. i took busses and cabs until then and sometimes even after. the way my family moved around raleigh was based on bus routes…many would go right through neighborhoods for convenience. maybe not so much anymore. my family was state employees going downtown or near it so it was kind of easy. with so many modest-wage jobs scattered around raleigh now i am not sure how a transit system could really make any traffic difference…i dont think it can. but as far as helping lower income folks get to a place of work flexible busses seem the best route to me at least. i would say that the cost of transit does mean something.
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maybe, people, here can post to the numbers who would benefit from such rail and who would never use it at all. my transit experience begins basically with my folks years ago. my mom would have to take a bus from north raleigh and transfer to a bus downtown to a western blvd bus to get to work and walk a bit to her office on ashe ave as a partially blind woman. Going home was a walk to Hillsborough st from ashe ave to catch a bus to moore sq station to get home. she practically had to skip down ashe ave to meet an inbound bus to meet her connection at moore sq…a falls of the Neuse bus. after her office moved to capital blvd near Atlantic ave her connections became even more difficult, bion. if density patterns are increasing downtown and downtown residents are working Downtown then i can see a need for more downtown transit, otherwise fixed route stuff seems expensive and not helping the greater need for transit users.
Thats a pretty big chunk of paving the way for Raleigh-RTP service. I wonder where the rest of the money is going.
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Traffic is not the main goal of commuter rail; its main purpose is to give people in the Triangle more options for how to get around and live their lives. The ability to beat traffic is more of an added bonus (since trains are immune to how most of our main roads are estimated to get gridlocked by 2050), so that’s really only a small part of why this project could be helpful for all of us.
As for jobs being scattered around Raleigh? There’s two ways to think about that; click each section for details.
1. Investing in mass transit lets the Triangle preserve and strengthen the clusters of jobs it still has.
This is where it becomes super helpful that GoTriangle (and partnering organizations like CAMPO, the Triangle J Council of Governments, and NCSU’s ITRE) went out of its way to thoroughly learn about the transit market for the rail corridor: despite how the rail corridor only makes up 4% of the area of land we call the Triangle, it’s the home to 30% of jobs in the Triangle (including 23% of jobs earning less than $40k/year).
By your logic, if lower-wage jobs are getting more and more diffuse around due to our car-dependent lifestyles, it becomes incredibly important that we preserve the geographic areas where that’s still not true. Naturally, the best way to preserve that lifestyle is to reward the transit-supportive neighborhoods by making such lifestyles easier to have.
Then in response to this bit…
2. Transit can be used to build neighborhoods that are more easily served by transit.
I’d argue that it’s a bit misleading to talk about how you could still lead a transit-centric lifestyle in the 60s-80s. You grew up in the middle of the decades after WWII when much of America turned into a decentralized, car-dependent sea of suburbia, depriving us of the freedom to not drive in many situations. For the Triangle, it wasn’t until the 80s that the Beltline and I-40 became what they were, leading people’s daily habits (especially commuting) as well as development preferences to cater to it.
And if it took decades for our communities to lean into an auto-dependent lifestyle, doesn’t that also mean the reverse could be true, too? You can use new transportation projects to encourage denser developments; that’s the whole goal of transit-oriented development (TOD) overlay policies in Raleigh and beyond.
The adage of “if you build it, they will come” is only half true; “they” (residents and developers?) will only come as much as you let them. If we shape the rules so that we reward people for building and moving into more places where they can live car-free lives, you can shift the conversation.
The rest of what money?
If you mean the CRISI grants, that’s a competitive process that the federal Dept. of Transportation accepts applications for every year (though it got beefed up thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act). We won’t know who will win that money until they announce it next year, so we’ll just have to wait and find out.
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I’m mentally subtracting the CRSI grant from the TTA number for the project. Seems like that grant covers lot of the wish list (Mcrimmon GS and Fetner-Clegg double track).
Oh, if you meant the “actual” cost for building commuter rail, I don’t think we know, yet.
You can probably make a partial guess by subtracting out an even bigger chunk of the estimated cost of the $200M for the McCrimmon grade separation project (according to the Board of Trustees presentation), though I’m not sure if that includes this NCRR siding extension. You could do math like that for all the other upgrades we’d need, but you’d get stuck because we don’t know the estimated costs or funding strategies for many of them.
For example, the relocation of the Regional Transit Center to Park Point in RTP didn’t win a federal RAISE grant. But does that mean we’ll ask the state to match the money we collected locally? Will we change that project’s scope (and thus, the cost)? How much of it will continue to be factored into the math for commuter rail? I understood the Board of Trustees slide deck to suggest that doing that strategy-building should be GoTriangle’s next step.
This is the point most people don’t understand in the US. Transit, including our BRT lines and regional rail, are civilization building strategies. There is a reason Raleigh like many US cities had CP&L streetcars 100 years ago. Those were hard times compared to now, and transit was a logical solution!
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…and a much smaller city footprint…IMO
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Correct, which means their transit coverage was much greater than it is now!
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Right. You’re building to alter future growth and transportation patterns, not current ones. Someone who currently lives off of Leesville Rd and works in RTP is probably never going to use any of the corridors that are proposed if they still live there in ten years. But a family or company that decides to move here ten years from now could have the opportunity to settle within walking distance of a station.
We know those individuals and businesses are going to be moving here regardless. Do we want to give some of them the option to be car-light, or do we want to force every last one of them into the outskirts of Holly Springs or Wendell, thus making your driving commute even worse?
You may not stop driving. Most current residents may not either. But the thousands of people who are moving here might have the option to not make your daily gridlock worse. That’s a win for everyone, right?
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this part i get…traffic wont really be affected much. im not a transit engineer and i dont think most transit riders are either. "ie, two solid anchors on this route is good. oh no, anchors dont matter, its the boardings and unboarding along the route that really matter, <jargon, jargon, jargon> etc… my question is when does the equitable part become extravagant? a big dose of brt fancy stuff on new bern or just more frequent bus service on existing areas to serve more people and a little bit more easily dispatchable busses as testing the waters on other areas less dense but likely areas that suffer from form car congestion where citizens might desire an alternative than driving.
I’m afraid the run-on sentence after this question just didn’t make sense; I have to take a wild guess and assume that you think it’s helpful and cost-effective for more people if you serve people across a wider geographical area.
This goes back to what we were talking about in the community engagement thread, though; suburban infrastructure tends to mooch off of urban tax bases in the long term. Sure, capital expenses for huge rail projects are more expensive initially, but we gain more through economic and intangible benefits (more residents + businesses, more upward mobility for jobs, more efficient land uses, less time wasted stuck in traffic) to the point where it’s just worth it, philosophically.
Besides, we already have on-demand shuttles that anyone in less-dense areas can ride, and all three main Triangle counties’ transit plans also plan to increase their availability using our transit tax (the same way we’re saving up for a big chunk of the commuter rail project); this is NOT an either/or situation. Here’s a quick map of the on-demand shuttles (I purposely didn’t include the Morrisville Smart Shuttle because it uses specific shuttle stops rather than letting you board from anywhere you’d like):
Also, Wake County’s transit plan has already been setting aside money for smaller towns that want to implement small-scale transit projects like Morrisville. It’s just that many municipalities haven’t submitted grant applications to the county yet.
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ohhh, hadn’t thought about that as an incentive to, as I wrote above, throw in “a kitchen sink’s worth of other asks… and then we wonder why they’re so expensive”.
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firstly, i would think the at-home work wave should keep progressing for jobs that can do that (biotech has to be at an office/lab) box retail requires a commute, etc. but more at home stuff could reduce driving trips to short errands/workouts.dining in holly springs and reduce bottlenecking congestion. second, put more business parks (in holly spring to disperse commutes.
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But even with what you said, @colbyjd3’s point still holds.
Click here to see why.
Yes, it’s getting easier to find ways to work without having to make long, daily commutes to dedicated business districts and office parks. Yes, that makes Wake County’s smaller suburbs become more attractive places to live for quite a few people. And yes, the developments planned for those places in the next 1-10 years will mainly cater to car-centric lifestyles, and it makes sense to invest in transit that can work for those communities (and like I said, we’ve been doing exactly that). But no, it is not sustainable to keep that demographic trend going without any sort of policy intervention for our changed environment.
An average of just under 35% of American workers have moved towards more remote or hybrid work positions since the pandemic started. Since federal data easily lets us see how many people in the Raleigh-Cary MSA’s labor force works in each sector, we can make an exaggerated guess that about 256,000 people (34.5% of 744.3k people with jobs) worked offsite this past October. Even if you suppose that the urban and suburban populations are split 50:50 and that Raleigh’s suburbs steadily grows by 25% every year as this Freddie Mac report suggests, that’s nearly 1.2 million remote workers moving into Wake County’s suburbs ten years from now.
Can you really say with a straight face that it’s practical to keep building car-centric single-family homes for that many remote workers (not to mention other types of future residents)?
This means there’s latent demand for a lifestyle where you have to drive as little as possible for regular needs in your life, right? So naturally, if you’re a planner in a Raleigh exurb, the smartest thing for you to do is to try and reduce how much your residents would need to drive towards zero. In other words, the smartest thing to do is to incentivize future developments to let your residents could choose to drive, just as they could choose to walk, bike, or take transit with similar levels of convenience.
At that point, doesn’t it make more sense to invest in ways to use our land (and future housing stock) more efficiently? Doesn’t it make more sense to intentionally create environments so that you have the freedom to choose not to hop in a car?
With that in mind, I think the best way to interpret the commuter rail project is to see it as a down payment for such a future. You have to see it (and bring it to life) as a package deal between a transit project and a group of related land use policies. But by putting in the effort to do both, you open up new options for yourself that you’d never have with the self-stabilizing behaviors of the real estate market.
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