I think it comes to connection points this rail won’t get to everything. But I had heard Austin train sucked for a few years but then the suburban people said oh we can get drunk in downtown and not drive we might have to sell that point to the citizens here. If the feds help us and that other NC city at least fill the state gap maybe we can accelerate this project. Also buses and park n rides aren’t attractive.
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I’m not sure I understand your point. No one will be forced into transit dependence. It will just be another option.
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Sure, currently.
How does that happen? Have you looked at the price of cars lately? They aren’t going down.
So we shouldn’t do things because they are hard?
The proposed commuter rail will hit many of these areas. Clayton, DTR, Cary, fair/ PNC, airport( with a good shuttle connection), RTP, Durham, Hillsborough. Sounds pretty good start to me.
Gotta start somewhere to keep from turning into the sprawl nightmare like Houston.
No thanks.
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Houston is more popular than ever despite this. Especially for immigrants. May not be to your tastes, but I would argue that it may be more of what a majority of Americans seek.
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This is one never ending circular convo. Just Wow…
I’d personally prefer the CHOICE to have transit in the quiver for my getting around needs.
Likely never giving up my car, similar to the majority of local citizens, but still…options are good for all.
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My opinion is the choice option would only benefit a small minority that would consider it at an exorbitant cost to the many that would not.
I am neither shocked nor surprised by your reply and, although it will change nothing, simply agree to disagree with your venerable perspective. I hope you find your shangrila out in Chatham, away from the misappropriated urbanity of it all…
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People vote with their feet
…and their dollars but neither of those things makes them necessarily very good at long range decision making. Humans are a paradox.
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Not to mention everyone I know has a failing transmission right now 
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They can’t vote if you don’t give them a choice… I firmly believe a lot more people would choose to walk, bike, or take transit if only we invested in that infrastructure enough to make it a viable option.
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Yep. Not sure why this is so difficult to understand, but maybe this isn’t about your needs today. Infrastructure is a long-term investment in the future, and few of the people who will benefit from it over time will be around when they just open. We pay for schools and ballfields that benefit generations of future kids, not ourselves. Taxpayers built RDU Airport in 1943 when flying was something only an elite few did; it opened with two flights a day, and probably the majority of passengers who’ve ever used it weren’t even born when it opened!
Transit can’t replace driving on Day One. To give a personal example: my dad moved to Raleigh in the 1970s as an assistant professor at NCSU. He ended up settling near South Hills in Cary, because Buck Jones was an easy driving route to campus (I-40 didn’t exist then). No, commuter rail will not improve his trip from his house to campus; he’s already optimized his life around driving down Buck Jones. But BRT+CRT would definitely influence the housing choices for a future assistant professor at NCSU. She might choose to live near the train station in downtown Garner, or in West Raleigh near the Jones Franklin BRT stop.
And the number of people who will be making travel decisions based on the future’s infrastructure, rather than today’s infrastructure, is huge! There are one million people living in Wake County today, and close to two million in 30 years. Most of those 1.89M people in 2050 will not be doing the exact same commute that made sense in 2020. Creating those new options now will allow some of the 2.8 billion trips they’ll make in 2050 to not be on the roads!
Over time, fixed route transit creates a marginal accessibility advantage for transit-oriented locations, and more things locate close to transit. In the Future Prof example, the availability of transit results in her demand to live near transit, and she creates more demand for more retail near her transit stop. You can see this in bigger decisions: in recent years, over 90% of new offices in metro DC have been built along Metro – locations that never would’ve been special had the system still been on the drawing boards. Or in recent years, the new museums in LA have been built along Metro rather than up in the hills.
Those are examples of how fixed-route transit creates a virtuous circle of accessibility, where adding things near transit makes the transit more useful, which increases transit use (as well as walking/biking) and draws more things. (In fact, most of the travel benefits aren’t the transit trips per se, but the walk/bike and even shorter/combined car trips that go to TOD areas!) That’s quite unlike cars, where adding things near roads creates more traffic: a vicious circle.
Something very similar to this particular project was proposed in the 1990s, and back then was supposed to open in 2008. Imagine how much more popular downtown would’ve been if that virtuous cycle had been at work for the past 14 years.
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Wake is actually already pushing 1.2 M people! It was 1.15M 18 months ago.
What frustrates me is that anytime something new and different is proposed, there’s always those loud voices that think that somehow everything is going to change for everybody (meaning them). You are absolutely correct that this is about choices and the future.
The irony is that new development models that leverage transit options, walkability, density and more tax productive development will actually prevent our vast car oriented built environment from getting worse than it needs to get. If people want their driving experience to be better, then do everything you can to take other cars off the road. Create more communities where people can choose to live independent of cars and (perhaps more realistically for Raleigh) car light. Why is this so difficult for some to understand? It’s maddening.
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Let me emphasize that these thoughts reflect my opinion about mass transit in general and are necessarily in response to any comments you have made, and I’m not trying to paint you with a particular label
I live in the city’s northern suburbs. Mass transit is not a convenient option for me, so I drive my car everywhere I go. At best, the BRT lines will directly benefit me infrequently. I’d put commenter rail from Johnston to Durham counties in the same category. But they will benefit me indirectly. I’ve lived long enough to be a septuagenarian, and throughout those years I’ve come to realize that the world does not revolve around my needs, wants, or desires. The greater good of the populace as a whole is what’s important. (Yes, people have different definitions of what the ‘greater good” should look like). Even though I will not directly benefit from these projects, and some will not be complete before I’m dead, there has not been a mass transit bond that I have not enthusiastically supported. I’ve also come to understand that when planning a city’s infrastructure, it’s myopic to consider only the present. Raleigh is a dynamic, changing city, with a metro that is one of the fastest growing in the entire nation. Plan for the future. Build for the future.
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Everyone except Boltman take this survey.
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I think @dtraleigh wasn’t planning on announcing this until after the Jonathan Melton AMA. But since it’s on this site, I might as well point out a little detail:
Leo and I’ve been going back and forth with GoTriangle staffers since before the holidays to make this work.
EDIT: I went ahead and made a new thread for that.
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I’m happy (or feel free to) start that thread so we can field questions now. It felt too early for me but not against it.
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this guy seem to think that houston’s existing trasnit is improved… Houston: Great Ridership News on the New Network — Human Transit
as a former raleigh resident and 17 year transit rider in raleigh i don’t have a death wish against transit. it serves some people. some decades ago Raleigh had a program for the handicapped that allowed targeted and discounted cab rides and fares so many didn’t have to get on a bus. similar could be done perhaps for super low income people if it isn’t already in place. a perhaps helpful service without route planning and politics. call a cab with and pay with discount voucher. perhaps as i try to study transits worth it comes down to how much money and what type in my opinion. if a new resident is inside the beltline or just outside of it and working in town transit can on some occasions be a decent commuting option. i did it regularly. once my employment got well into north raleigh or the park transit was useless for me. now if i just wanted to go downtown in the evening i almost always biked/bussed from about 4 miles north of the beltline. i cant speak to all examples but my time in quail hollow was 6 minute bike ride to grocers, laundry, restaurants, bus stops, haircuts, etc from two directions. one too falls of the neuse and the other direction to six forks. transit didn’t enter much into it outside of commuting times as it was so easy, for me anyway, to scoot through pleasant neighborhoods to get what i needed at the shops along the two major roads. some of the more far flung neighborhoods may not be as fortunate and i would certainly desire bike and pedestrain linkage to help that issue be constructed. but someone on here a few weeks ago stated that transit -i assume in raleigh sized markets- really has little effect on overall car usage. if more busses with maybe signal priority truly are cheaper than fixed modes why not go that route?
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Anything and everything that can be done to entice folks out of the cars with other pleasant options is a good thing. I don’t live in a fantasy world where Raleigh’s 140+ square miles of land is completely urbanized. That just isn’t going to happen. While the options you described in Quail Hollow might serendipitously happen for some, it’s more likely that we have to purposefully build those options. Providing sidewalks is a good first option for many places in the city where they currently don’t exist, and providing them in the walkshed of walkable resources should be the priority. Safe biking infrastructure/routes is another way to improve those experiences. The solution cannot just be about bus and/or rail service. It has to be more robust than that.
Here’s a long but informative video that is critical about how we got to where we are in the first place that might interest some and inflame others.
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