The exact same guy did Raleigh’s bus network & BRT redesign!
But Houston has a pretty high-ridership light rail system, too, notably the line that… connects downtown to the medical center. And for longer trips like Clayton to RTP (a commute that, sadly, lots of people do), we’d be remiss to ignore the traffic-free ROW that already exists through the center of the region.
I hope it doesn’t come to this, but in Pittsburgh the highest-ridership busway route is a bus road that runs in a rail ROW, next to existing freight tracks:
I realize that Houston is a lot bigger than Raleigh is, but for all the shitting on Houston and its bazillion-lane freeways, I would be positively delighted to have a transit system that is as dense and as widely used as the Houston Metro. Houston, like Charlotte, grew up around highways and so light rail ends up being the transport mode that makes sense for them. Raleigh grew up around railroads, so there’s an extraordinary opportunity here to save money by utilizing the existing infrastructure. That aside, though, I’d happily sign up for Houston-quality public transit.
Houston is indeed attracting a ton of new residents from all over the country and the world. Probably the single biggest reason for this that Houston has the most permissive zoning regime of any large city in America. (Officially Houston has “no” zoning, but “very, very permissive” zoning better describes the practical situation.) This means that people moving to Houston can get way more house for their money than they can in any other large, economically vibrant U.S. city. Here, again, I would be thrilled to have a zoning regime as permissive as Houston’s. (Houston can keep its weather, though. No thanks. Hard pass.)
Also they planning several BRT lines that can be converted to light rail, Raleigh should take note and a cue from them. But Houston is sporadically dense. Unlike them Dallas who was to light rail first, has much closer density. Metro also runs mostly in the street, Raleigh could’ve done it in the form of a tram.
If the Triangle’s population stopped changing and travel demand is frozen solid, then yes, optimized buses would be all that we need today. We actually know that as, due to how the FTA’s standard procedures work, it’s actually hard to argue in our federal grant applications that we have the demand to justify commuter rail for present-day needs.
But also pay attention to what I wrote in italics -and think about how we know that’s not true.
We know for certain that the Triangle is growing, with hundreds of people moving to our area every day. This means traffic congestion is expected to get worse; our roads can handle the gridlock that occur today (below is the average peak-hour congestion as of 2016; it’s obviously worse now)…
…which is showing that many roads are still regularly letting cars flow relatively freely (colored in green). However, if the Triangle grows as we expect it to, we know that our roads will not be able to handle this by 2050:
Even traffic signal priority will not mean anything if there is regular traffic sitting in front of buses. If you want public transit to work better for people (or even just keep working at all), this means bigger infrastructure investments are needed so that transit vehicles can operate in an even more separated way -either with separate lanes (BRT) or separate infrastructure altogether (trains, bikeways etc.).
We also know that 20% of all homes and 45% of all jobs in the Triangle will be located along the future rail corridor. Sure, the flip side of that is that 80% of all homes and 55% of jobs are outside of the corridor. However, that’s spread out over 96% of the Triangle, geographically. This means we could either spread ourselves thin across that much of our region, or we could get away with developing on less than 4% of the land to improve the lives of just as many people.
This means that you could make it easier for so many people to get around in a more cost-effective way by investing in transit.
i get that raleighs population isnt staying put…unlike roanoke where i am now. 99k for the past 30 years. i was wondering are there cities existing now ahead of raleigh in population and transit expenditure and has the fixed route mode cost become ‘significantly higher per passenger with less or static ridership’ ?
whereas planning differently (some form of tidy sprawl), i guess and yes…a few more roads and flexible transit expansion have shown to be ‘better’ in some way. I’m not completely literate in transit effectiveness metrics.
Although expensive to build but we have a perfect chance. Connecting using existing rail Frieght some minor double tracking, land adjustments, and NSF w FTA could cover that but as I keep preaching we have to merge the Raleigh-Cary with the Durham-Chapel Hill MSA.
Well, if all you want to do is drive around Pittsboro, you are good I suppose. You know, if you move to a cabin in Lansing it’ll probably be green forever!
I’m not sure if I understand what you’re asking correctly, but I’m going to assume you’re asking if there are cities that ended up having big fixed-route (read: rail) transit projects that cost more per rider than expected.
If that is what you meant, there are several commuter rail projects in that group, but those have things in common that do not hold true for the GoTriangle proposal. The Music City Star in Nashville and the Northstar Line in Minnesota’s Twin Cities struggled with ridership and performance since they opened. However, the Northstar only runs two trains per day in each direction, while Nashville’s train has just six roundtrips based off of an awkwardly located downtown station. Both trains also have only a small fraction of the number of stations that we’re proposed to get.
And as a LOT of people have written (like what @paytoncwrote about TODs as one randomly chosen example), the ridership of a train project does not just depend on the rail project. Land use policies are just as important, including rules like Raleigh’s TOD overlays that encourage developers to build more densely around transit hubs. American policymakers have only recently recognized that those two things have to be treated as a package, and the rail projects I mentioned, unfortunately, happened before urban planners learned their mistakes.
I mean, sure, good for you, I guess. You should remember, though, that that traffic forecast was made before Chatham Park, VinFast etc. were announced. With the developments that we know of now, Chatham County might start to see some gridlock, too -and they may need to seriously think about their own non-car-based transit systems in a few decades. But I assume you don’t care because you’d be too dead by then?
I’m self contained. I have golf . No one needs anything else in life. Amazon will provide the rest of my necessities. And no one will steal my packages as they have in downtown Raleigh.
The Indy also wrote about the commuter rail feasibility study’s findings. But this article includes a lot of exclusive quotes from Chuck Lattuca, GoTriangle’s CEO who came on board after the old one resigned after the light rail failure, that suggests some viable paths forward that we haven’t heard before:
And, to beat a dead horse one last time, the benefits of this project is to deal with a future that we know is coming, rather than the present. Thankfully, our leaders actually understand this:
I took the survey. In case anyone was wondering, it’s very short and quick to complete (a little too short, IMO, but it’s fine.)
There’s a question about what benefits of rail are most important to you. “Reducing the need for parking downtown” is not a preloaded option, but you can add your own answers, so I added that because, for me, this is one of the killer apps of all forms of public transit. If you reduce the number of people driving into and parking in the downtown core, you alleviate some of the need for parking lots, and then that highly valuable land can be put to higher and better uses than car storage.
There’s also a question about how you heard about the survey. “Evan Bost” is not a preloaded option, so you’ll have to add that one, too.
That would be the most viable option, and can get things done now since it’s our taxpayer money. I’m sure a lot of cities had some debt in transit funding.
