ATL, you are wasting your talents on here, please apply for the city manager job right away and get your ideas implemented. Outstanding analysis.
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Currently there is the Uber/Lyft subsidized program for trips from/to RTC. It will reimburse up to $10. Pretty convenient. I’ve used it for commutes.
The NRX bus was made for North Raleigh RTP commuters. I’m not sure off the top of my head what the ridership is. I believe it is not running now due to COVID.
I think it would be good to compare the success of that route vs the light rail when it starts. We would need to take into consideration the NRX is between N Raleigh and RTP while the rail would also feed downtown and Durham directly.
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Thanks! I was hoping it wasn’t too much rambling! Haha
As an outsider just coming in, I think a lot here lose focus of just how great Raleigh is, can be, and will be compared to some other cities.
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I’d love to do work for the city one day. I’m a traffic engineer but want to get more into the urban planning side once I really establish my career.
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Won’t say “I wish RTP was more dense” because RTP is so huge for economy and if it was any different it may not be as successful but I think it’s going to really hard to convince most people to use multiple modes.
Commuters to / from Raleigh and Durham’s downtowns will be good with commuter rail since most if not all of downtown is walkable from the station so no using multiple modes.
I love this so much (and clearly, so do a lot of people here) and kinda want this to happen. But I have a question that I promise is genuine and legit:
What is novel or innovative about this?
Sure, it’s never been marketed under the banner of one, ambitious portfolio except for that one time in the Amazon HQ2 debacle. Still, almost all the parts of such a plan are already in the works, not to mention the geographic distribution of existing developments, traffic, and businesses. Aren’t we, in a way, already doing the hard part of making this integrated corridor idea into an imperative?
A rundown of projects along this central corridor, for those of y'all who don't look at every thread on this site (click me!)
In case you don’t look through every thread on this site, I want to refer you to these threads (or project websites):
- Downtown South
- Dix Edge Area Study, which the City is working on now
- Raleigh Union Station’s bus terminal
- other existing projects Downtown, especially around Glenwood Av. and Peace St.
- *additional economic activity that could be spurred by SEHSR and Devereux Park
- the myriad projects of Five Points/East End, including Dock 1053 and the Iron Works
- Midtown with its new area plan that also covers Midtown Exchange and North Hills
Aside for the one starred area (i.e. between Peace St. and through Five Points), every area in the above list has at least one major project under construction, in planning/design/rezoning, or is otherwise being seriously considered with real investments already on the line.
As for how to connect these different locations? The recently-adopted Wilmington St. BRT corridor LPA and soon-to-start-being-planned Capital Blvd. BRT corridor would almost perfectly work as the backbones for this corridor. Commuter rail could work, too, but as Phil pointed out, hours are restricted. It’ll take time to get all of these components in place (let alone playing well together), but our local government is already putting in the work for this.
Maybe it’s just me and my weird personal biases or I misunderstood something, but I thought it was obvious to treat this entire corridor as one ecosystem that’s both urban and suburban (and to not see those things as dual opposites) 
Was that not how the rest of y’all perceived how things are going around here?
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I guess it is not expressly stated as building a corridor to North Hills but that is definitely what is happening. Like you said the BRT planning and then TOD that will go with it has to end up creating a formal plan for the corridor though. That is just the last BRT getting planned.
Maybe I missed it, but there have not been many direct convos on here about how the city will grow and connect different parts. We talk about downtown, DTS, North Hills, and different specific developments, but not general growth or corridor plans. I always think of the developments around the Loading Dock area as part of filling in a corridor heading ~generally towards NH.
It would be interesting to keep up with where the city plans to grow and how that is or is no happening.
The corridor that comes to my mind as actually growing in a kind of connected way since I moved here has actually been Hillsborough St leaving downtown. That street has really filled in (admittedly w/ student housing) and has great transit service and sidewalk life almost all the way to 440. If there was a corridor like Hillsborough St is heading to NH that would be an amazing amount of connection.
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It’s my hope that it’s obvious to those running the show down at City Hall but you never know!
My fear is that even after all those projects, the little gaps that will be left in between (DS to Downtown, N of Deveraux to East end area, driving down Wake Forest / Atlantic) will still make things feel “spotty” or as I refer to Atlanta development “dart board developments”.
But Rome wasn’t built in a day! I just hope whoever is in charge is looking at things like this.
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I know most don’t like it because it’s a throng of college students but for an outsider coming in, this is actually the approach that makes me most feel like I’m entering a big city. It has a really good feel and they’ve done a great job with the Hillsborough St road diet and just overall vibrancy of the area!
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The Wake Forest Rd and Atlantic stretch coming off Capital Blvd reminds me of the area around the Lynbrooke Marta station back in 2009. I graduated from Tech and a few friends lived at an apartment next to Marta and it was a really random hodgepodge. The only thing to walk to was a strip club called Tattle Tales lol. There was a Home Depot, Target, Home Goods, and Chick-fil-a and a lot of stuff ways up the road. Now there are just apartments and new stuff everywhere around it.
The area around Capital Blvd leaving town is a tricky one. I think it is all zoned to be buildable at pretty high density, but I think it is all in a flood plain and no one seems to want to build there. To get to better land you get into neighborhoods that will fight it hard.
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Before your arrival in Raleigh, and here in this DTRaleigh community, there was a lot of chatter about your very concern. While I think that there is definitely excitement about DTS across the participant community, I think that a lot of folks would have prefered that this sort of investment was either in DT proper or immediately adjacent to it, to densify or expand the DT footprint.
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Yep, which is why Downtown South is so important to the city why the commuter rail plan needs to move forward. Just look at the success of South End in Charlotte.
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I wish we were getting Light Rail or even a streetcar network along with Commuter rail for this reason.
The light rail has stops every few blocks and runs all day into the night which is why it’s been huge for Charlotte, while the commuter rail only runs during rush hour and has stops every few miles.
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The difference with Southend in Charlotte is that it doesn’t have any “blockers” in the way between them and uptown. The area between dtraleigh and DTS is pinched and blocked, especially by a freaking cemetery. There’s no real natural way of connecting the urban experience south to north without making some serious decisions that will likely be very messy, both politically and socially.
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Isn’t south end and uptown Charlotte bisected by 277?
That’s not the same thing. South Boulevard just continues over it but the contiguous development isn’t interrupted on either side. DTS has serious challenges to feel connected at all. They aren’t impossible to overcome, just really, really difficult.
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Downtown Raleigh has roughly around 11,000 people living there. Pretty much all the rest of us million plus people in Wake County enjoy the suburban life. There is no hurt whatsoever. It is what we want.
No, they have no choice. Anywhere from 11,000 people to 1 million people in Wake County could ‘want’ to live in an urban space and it would look no different. The supply of urban housing has never been close to parity with demand for the region. I’ve lived in suburban places most of my life and never enjoyed it.
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I am guessing that you must think the developers and builders have no clue then what people want. Or do they? Still mostly building apartments and very few condos. I have worked downtown Raleigh for 19 years and I would not want to live there although I do enjoy working there.
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I own 2 condos downtown and have lived downtown since 2011. I absolutely love it and would never go back to a suburban home. DTR is lovely with new and old buildings and tree lined streets and many walkable streets and parks. It feels like a city and a small town all at the same time. Love it better than anywhere else I’ve lived.
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(NOT MEANT TO REPLY TO TEDF…THIS IS FOR VATNOS)
but i dont know how to change it
if there is a need or a market, someone emerges to fill the need. That’s how private development works.
It’d be NICE to have more options to purchase high rise condos or any type of dense condos downtown other than the townhouse style real-estate-intensive offerings that exist now. If there was more of a chance for investors who pay for the downtown housing to get built, to earn a return on their investment, then they would. Or better said WHEN there is a better chance to get a return, they WILL. It’s happening in downtown Cary with the million dollar rooftop patio condos overlooking the new city park.
If people wanted to be downtown badly enough, they’d go live in what ever is on the market downtown, whether it’s apartments or houses or townhouses. The offerings perhaps haven’t “caught up” to the demand, but I agree with TedF the developers and builders know things that we don’t know. It’s like road design and transit things. For MOST of us, this is a hobby. Very few of us actually have income dependent on being right about our ideas to develop downtown or reduce sprawl.
It’s reasonable to conclude that there’s less risk to make decent money by offering what is currently being offered. Till that changes, that’s what we’ve got.
Interestingly, the NC State economist that was interviewed on the WRAL announcement about Apple’s new RTP campus said that the 3000 new Apple employees that will move here* to work for Apple will likely spread out when they choose their residence rather than concentrate in any one place…Partly due to RTP being RTP and having so much land available to build houses on out there near RTP in Western Wake, and partly due to COVID WFH new way of working. I think he’s right, Apple won’t create density, just more people and more sprawl…>That Apple will expand the Triangle “outward”. about 1:15 on the clip. Economist: Apple campus will attract more companies to Triangle :: WRAL.com
*(or replace those Apple steals from local companies who already have them here)
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