Privately owned train stations and rail service like Japan might be another alternative to explore but there needs to be some stipulations to make sure they maintain a train station and train service.
CoR/Wake will lease large track of property to a rail company for 99 years for $1 and have generous development freedom so long as they build a train station and provide at least 2 trips an hour 1 way or something like that. Rail company may also have freedom to build smaller stations between RUS and the private station if an agreement can be reached.
The money isn’t in the ticket fare but property leasing income and ability to own several revenue streams. For example, in Japan, rail companies own large department stores and malls next to or on the train station.
Why not go underground with the subway inside of Raleigh proper? Seems like more up front, but much less red tape and veto points and long term better for ridership*
*These are assumptions. Hopefully someone with knowledge can explain.
Subways are exhorbitantly expensive to build in the US. The ability to build subways for anything approaching affordable costs started to evaporate with the end of the Carter administration, and is long gone by now. It will take decisive action on the federal level and years of work on rebuilding institutional capacity at all levels of administration (federal, state, regional, and municipal) to correct the situation. It’s not something a mid sized region with a struggling transit system can possibly hope to take on alone.
If we were Spain, Norway, Turkey, or South Korea, there is no question a subway could be in the cards here. But this is the US, and right now, the US can’t effectively build subways.
Sooooooooooooooo… no subways, no heavy rail, no commuter rail. Another words, if you can’t get there on foot or by car (and goodness knows buses are laughable) your up the preverbally creek without a paddle, hope or prayer
Roma would like a word . . . that C line subway has taken more then 4 decades to get partially completed. Of course, Rome does face extra hurdles.
Let’s get Muxk’s Boring company here and start tunneling!! As much as I’d love a subway, I agree with @orulz they are just to dang expensive.
Sky Gondolas!! We need to go in that direction. Go right over the traffic with the added benefit of scaring the dickens out many riders as they swing and sway.
Don’t read too much into this. The core message is that “peak-focused commuter rail is dead.”
Proposing peak focused commuter rail (4-1-4-1 or 8-2-8-2 or whatever) was a mistake for our region in the first place. I’m frankly glad that the FTA has put the final nail in this coffin and sent a clear message that the only transit they will support is one that provides decent service all day.
Thanks for the context and I was actually very aware of this with regards to all development and infrastructure. Although it does not seem like an unsolvable problem and we have a lot of momentum for deregulating and state capacity starting to build.
Do you have any insight into cost creep in above ground vs underground train systems? My limited understanding of what drives costs up has a lot to do with interacting and solving for vested interests who will be impacted by the process. (environmental, land acquisition, logistics etc).
If we are trying to build cheaper, deregulate etc would it be true that the path to reducing those drivers of cost is easier to solve for underground than above? Anecdotally, it also seems like subways have higher ridership numbers for long run cost projections. Thanks for the insight!
I agree that commuter rail should be run more steady throughout the day. then the 8-2-8-2 service.
But whoever at ‘the feds’ is saying traditional commuting is dead since covid WFH, does not make the commute from Raleigh to RTP on I-40 every day. Just anecdotally, I would say the traffic back-ups on my commutes are nearly at the same level as pre-pandemic.
I recommend everyone to look into what automated light metro is, RM Transit youtube channel has a few great videos about it. Its basically the same service as a subway but smaller, cheaper trains and thus smaller stations, but it’s self driving and can be as frequent as every 90 seconds thanks to the computer automation. Ever since I found out about this I thought it would be a perfect fit for the Raleigh <—> Cary <—> Durham route. However, Honolulu is building one right now and has f*cked up every possible thing about it they could have and sent it way over budget for a pretty lackluster rail line, so I don’t think the press would take kindly to this being put on the table. On the other side of it though, Canada is building tons of these things and they’re working excellently.
That’s exactly the point that orulz is making in that we just don’t have the institutional capacity to efficiently build and manage any public rail projects in this country right now.
We need to start hiring European and Japanese companies to build our rail and have them fly in/import literally everything and everyone they use. Not a single American involved in the contract, and maybe that will teach the American rail industry to get its shit together.
Isn’t a Japanese group involved with the Texas Central Railway between Dallas and Houston? They’ve just ended up being thrown into a whole bunch of legal battles instead of getting anything done.
Doesn’t help as long as people can get the legal or political system involved.
Sorry if someone else already said all this (I’m kind of in “yeah I ain’t readin’ all that” mode), but I’m with you on this. Scrap the infill stations and the branding and all the other trappings and just focus on getting more trains running between existing stations. Grade separations, double-tracking, new switches, raised platforms, whatever. Keep doing quick incremental upgrades to Piedmont services and the corridor itself until the ridership justifies adding a more localized service with additional stops.
Bare minimum, I’d like to think NCDOT could get Piedmont trains running every two hours in less than a decade (hopefully sooner, but Norfolk Southern is in the mix and also this is America so who freakin’ knows anymore). And oh, Hillsborough finally finished their station? Cool, now taking the train to an afternoon meeting in Durham is fairly reasonable. Oh, studies show demand supports a stop in downtown Clayton? Cool, let’s get that in there and extend the Piedmont, and the Carolinian and Silver Star can just bypass it so out-of-state service doesn’t get bogged down by another stop. Oh hey, that’s going well, what if we bought some DMUs and just had those suckers run the Hillsborough-Clayton segment in between Piedmont runs? Maybe drop an additional stop in downtown Mebane? Perhaps the new intercity services to Wilmington or Fayetteville can make stops in Johnson County and supplement commuting to Raleigh as a result. Cool, you now have a state-run commuter network on par with some of the existing services we currently see in California or Connecticut. Is it as good as what GoTriangle was proposing? Maybe not, but it works, it scales, and it actually exists.
I really, really wanted to believe that GoTriangle was gonna pull this one off, but they proved yet again that they don’t really have a clue what they’re doing. And, to make matters worse, today I learned that GoTriangle board members received a pretty damning letter from Bret Martin (former CAMPO staff, now works for the FTA) back in May accusing staff of conflicts of interest and purposefully misleading board members and stakeholders. So yeah, I’m kind of done with GoTriangle as a planning org.
Admit you failed, hand all your stuff over to NCDOT, and focus on improving your bus network. As much as I wanted to see the development of a solid regional network with rail as its spine, even just getting a more consistent service between the three existing Triangle stations (Raleigh, Cary, and Durham) would still be quite valuable.
I’d love to see something like the SkyTrain (Vancouver), REM (Montreal, opening next week), Ontario Line (Toronto), or HART (Honolulu) built in the Triangle. The great things about these are that the operating costs are rock bottom compared to the light rail systems you see around the country, with the trade off of higher capital costs. But since federal funding highly favors contributing to capital expenses over operations, it works in an automated system’s favor.
Don’t let GoTriangle so much as go near something like that though.
