Clearly our legal system needs to be changed to disallow most kinds of litigation over projects but also greenfield HSR by a private company has very different political and legal challenges from design-build contracts by the government for urban rail.
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Exactly. And low operating costs are something that could benefit with the triangle’s staffing issues for public services, no need to find and keep train drivers lol.
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Hope we will get some kind of news soon about what the plan is one way or another.
Shane to hear about the conflict of interest issue… hopefully they will clean house a bit and GoTriangle can start to become a more functional organization.
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If this is true, this is extremely telling.
Next time any urbanist is bored, zoom in with satellite image to a random place in France. Green, green, green. And yet they have way higher population density than the average US state
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I believe the biggest point of contention was that the 2008 referendum had explicit provisions for connecting communities in the Central Valley, but the French wanted to build along the I-5 ROW with spurs to the existing lines that connected to the towns. The French plan was probably better and cheaper, but including the Central Valley was the only way to make that politically feasible.
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Just wanted to say that that letter is 
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Reading that letter, it sounds like Bret is accusing them or someone of embezzling tax funds (or attempting to) without outright saying it. Claiming money was used when it wasn’t, overestimating by millions, etc.
Welp. Hope the BRT works out.
BRT to connect this entire region with 3 million people is hilarious.
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Do you think the old TTA Regional Rail proposal from the 2000s would have met the same fate with the Feds if it was submitted today?
That one seemed like a better fit than the latest proposal (inflation aside, though now we have the Wake Transit tax)
Had to look back at your old post (#28 in this thread) for the Wayback machine’s archive of that project webpage:
The TTA Board decided to construct a dedicated two-track system which can support more trains and provide more service. Initially, the service will run every 15 minutes in peak hours and every 30 minutes in off-peak hours and on weekends. In the future, headways are expected to increase to 10 minutes during the peak hours and 20 minutes during the off-peak and weekends. The service will begin with approximately 18 hours a day, 7 days a week. The trains will average 34 miles per hour (includes station stop time). This can be compared to typical bus service that averages 10 to 15 miles per hour (with stops and associated traffic).
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They just need to dissolve go triangle and start over. Top to bottom.
2 big rail projects failed within 5 years.
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Whomever runs the FTC clearly was dropped on their head as a child. This region is a chew toy that is always deprived nice things and this proves that the Triangle is a hopeless bridesmaid. The FTA, OMB, MLS, GOP and other alphabet soup groups sure like treating this area like crap.
People think this place is like Connecticut when its actually like Arkansas.
High-speed trains operating within long-range corridors as an alternative to flying between major destinations I can accept as an interesting transportation objective. Cost per something or other would of course be high. But airports and planes aren’t cheap either.
But I have always struggled with accepting local rail as a worthy objective. I just do not grasp how it would be used in a manner that would justify its cost. Corridor and therefore potential destinations just seems too limited to be useful except for a small subset.
Yeah, fun to ride Tweetsie to Durham. But at what real infrastructure/operating costs that everyone has to bear via heavy public subsidies?
A really, really nice bus (or re-imagined substitute transit vehicle) seems like a much more worthy regional transportation objective. Adaptability and scalability are just so much more intriguing. Start now, upgrade in a deliberate manner, connect everything.
The local rail corridor will still be there if needed.
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" A company hoping to help California with its high-speed rail built one in North Africa instead, saying the region was ‘less politically dysfunctional’" Headline from Business Insider, linked before. @skeezicss is correct that the dispute over the route was at least partially to blame for their withdrawal, and the route was being driven by political concerns.
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The ability to operate completely independent of traffic on the roadways is the main point of trains for a region like ours. The secondary point is capacity per cost of labor (fewer train employees per passenger than bus drivers).
Once you start talking about 100% separation for buses, AVs, monorails, PRTs’ or whatever - you run into the same problem of cost.
Rubber tired, roadway based transit options can be cheaper because you can punt, and just run in mixed traffic where dedicated lanes would be most expensive - but those are usually the spots where dedicated lanes would provide the most benefit.
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I think the Feds are against Raleigh, and this area it’s the second time this has happened. The Governor, the senators, maybe the legislature are conspiring to tell the feds to not give anything to Raleigh because they don’t want us to grow. Now if the same is happening in the other NC city too then okay maybe it just a feds problem. But they have to brblind to the growth here?
Wake County Democratic Party for sure a conservative party in disguise.
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What’s infinitely more likely is they don’t see it worthwhile to give a demonstrably incompetent transit agency a 50% match on an outlandishly expensive project.
I would like to say this would have been much more likely to happen if somehow this were under the management of NCDOT Rail Division
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All very most likely true, but couldn’t they have told us that fact 30 years ago 
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They need a youth movement overthrow like the state party and some of the suburban parties have had. Notice how much press attention Anderson Clayton has gotten since she took control of the party.
Wake can do so much better than it already does.