If you know anything about GoTriangle’s history (especially of its first and second failed attempts at regional heavy rail, as well as the Durham-Orange light rail), you’ll know that there’s a critical mass of people who would answer “no” to the question in the title of this thread.
Even on a more micro level, GoTriangle’s poor performance has gotten so bad that even they, themselves, will admit that:
After having fired two CEOs in the past six years, GoTriangle has finally took a long look at itself in the mirror, and realized that its problems run to the core.
…and it has a solution: a strategic plan that aims to help get its shit together. It acknowledges painful shortcomings included, but not limited to:
Its executive summary includes the following key objectives that it wants to meet in the next 3 years - think of this as its goals for redeeming itself between now and when we’ll host the 2029 World University Games.
But across all of these threads, there’s been a theme of discussions wher GoTriangle is critical for making downtown Raleigh’s enhancements have a regional effect - yet, it’s repeatedly fell short of doing so.
So I thought we might as well bring them together and gather information to hold them accountable in one thread.
I’ll be honest, I live downtown, I like public transit, I’ve used it to get around in almost every city I’ve ever lived in or visited, I didn’t have a car for a year when I moved to Raleigh…
…and I have never once used GoRaleigh. It’s poorly signed, infrequent, I have no idea what the route map is, it just doesn’t seem to do all that much. Even for a sprawling Sun Belt region it’s as toothless as public transit gets.
I’ve sometimes believed that the Triangle is kind of following a similar model of regional integration to the Seattle area, build an airport between the two biggest cities in the area and then try to tie the region together using a single transit agency for regional transit, separate from local, something that I’ve found to be rare in the United States. GoTriangle is even rare-er because they operate their own vehicles (as much as anybody in NC does), whereas Sound Transit mostly contracts with local transit agencies for that.
I mostly ride GoTriangle (just rode them today), living at Moore Square and working in RTP will do that and have often found the buses cleaner and more reliable than GoRaleigh. However I’ve also found them often still wearing TTA paint, having dated seats, the schedule is confusing, and the scheduled frequency/span is just atrocious. I look at their plans and don’t really see a plan to improve them. A little bit, but they’re almost always tied to capital improvements.
I went to a focus group for GoTriangle a few weeks ago and instead of embracing their current status as a bus agency they went on a spiel first about the dead Commuter Rail and then second on a potential for BRT on I-40. Why can’t we just run the Core Routes we have more frequently, right now? Peak only service is expensive and I doubt we are willing to run them all day every day, while also having the Core Routes. So I would spend more on the Core Routes than the Express Routes.
Sound Transit passed Sound Move, 3 years after their creation, in 1996. I feel like this was similar in scale to the Transit plan that was passed in the Triangle, at a regional scale. So it kinda makes sense that GoTriangle feels a lot to me like what if Sound Transit had never passed Sound Move and yet still had the same self conception and mandate. Deliver big transit capital projects, rail, for the cities of the region. Sound Transit had the advantage they got funded sooner, had a better role-model in King County Metro and a more receptive state DOT.
I will never stop being amused and annoyed that the url for the commuter rail study is “ReadyForRailNC.com”. Frankly, I’m not ready for rail. Especially not rail that’s less frequent than the existing bus, like the Commuter Rail was going to be. I’m ready for better transit, of which rail can be useful but can not the only element and which a hyper-fixation upon is counter-productive.
I haven’t been a regular rider of GoTriangle since about six years ago when a change of situation made me pivot to WFH, and driving when I do commute.
For the longest time they had these horrific Thomas Built buses that were built in NC, but mechanically were school buses- and were just not up to the task of heavy-duty daily transit use, especially the kind needed by TTA: high-speed highway operation punctuated by idling in rush hour traffic jams. The A/C never worked, and they overheated and broke down constantly. I wound up stranded on the side of the interstate what felt like weekly (but in truth was probably more like once every month or two). These buses were not used by many transit agencies, for good reason, and yet somehow TTA wound up stuck with them for over a decade until the wheels pretty much literally fell off. Must have sounded like a great idea at the time to buy “made in NC” buses, but the actual result was not great.
Anyway, given that, and the obvious 0-for-3 record on rail, I have always thought there must be something structurally wrong with GoTriangle. I think that the agency is top-heavy, and too political. The board is typically a consortium of mayors, councilors, and commissioners, appointed by their town and responsive to their specific constituents, who each bring their own agenda to the table. The only way to get anything approved is large, grandiose plans, with something for everyone, that the agency does not have the resources or expertise to actually implement.
A revised focus on “just run the damn buses” might be a welcome change TBH.
I should say that recent developments shifting the burden of managing major capital projects onto NCDOT is encouraging. NCDOT will certainly be managing any BRT construction on interstate highways, and the direction for rail has pivoted toward augmenting NCDOT’s service and investments. This is (my guess) much better, as NCDOT has a long history of actually completing projects.
This is a fair perspective, but I have had the opposite experience; recently (past year or so), after the significant improvement of several routes, I’ve been able to regularly commute using GoRaleigh (and occasionally GoTriangle – I’ve taken it to the airport with reasonable success). Biggest complaint is that, for some reason, the GoRaleigh buses are always super dirty. GoTriangle and especially WolfLine do not have this problem. I’m honestly not totally convinced that they clean every bus every night.
Anyways… otherwise, it has been reliable, for me at least. The 15 minute frequencies on the several routes that now have them make an enormous difference.
A regional transit system that isn’t based in Raleigh, let alone, Wake County, will not serve Raleigh well. You can try to make it ‘even’ in the leadership but the majority of workers will be from nearby–which is Durham.
Quite frankly, I’ve lately been liking GoRaleigh more than GoTriangle (though, please, CLEAN YOUR BUSES, GoRaleigh!). When it comes to “running the damn buses,” GoRaleigh has really stepped up its game in the past year. The fact that we now have 10 routes that run every 15 minutes puts Raleigh ahead of a lot of American cities. Another thread here discusses car-light living and, especially in the last year, that is becoming more and more possible around here.
GoTriangle isn’t bad, and I genuinely like the service (and clean buses, take a hint, GoRaleigh). But, lately, I feel its gotten worse. They seemed to have resolved the driver issue enough that they’re finally expanding service this coming March. Unfortunately, a lot of the new drivers aren’t doing a good job of driving the buses. Since the beginning of the year, I’ve had three cases of drivers driving past my stop like it’s not there. Also feel a bit sour about how their service ran during the past snowfalls (canceling service even when there was nothing on roads; GoRaleigh at least keeps running until it’s clearly unsafe). And my biggest gripe with GoTriangle is that it feels like GoDurham 2.0, seemingly more concerned with Durham County and leaving Wake County completely in the dark. Oh, and the fact they’ve tried three rail projects and all have failed miserably.
The composition of the board is:
Town of Cary - 1
Town of Chapel Hill - 1
City of Durham - 1
Durham City and County - 1
Durham County - 1
Orange County - 1
City of Raleigh - 2
Wake County - 2
Secretary of Transportation - 3 (nonvoting)
So among the voting members, there are five from Durham/Orange, and five from Wake - in spite of Wake’s population being more than double that of Durham + Orange combined.
A fair apportionment would allocate approximately one representative per 170k people.
1 for Orange County;
2 for Durham City/County;
7 for Wake, broken down as:
->3 for Raleigh
->1 for Cary
->1 for the rest of south/west Wake (Morrisville, Apex, HS, FV)
->1 for north/east Wake (WF, Rolesville, Knightdale, Wendell, Zebulon, Garner)
That said, I am not sure this representational imbalance is the root of the issue, so much as the highly political nature of the beast in general.
I’m more sympathetic to the latter explanation; the representational imbalance bit feels to me more like a philosophical problem than anything concrete (also see: the Connecticut Compromise that structured the House and the Senate in Congress into how it is today). Plus, you can explain away the 5-5 split between Durham/Orange and Wake counties based on how GoTriangle primarily serves two MPOs, each of which is represented equally by constituent governments.
I think this begs a different question, though:
I agree - and the facts seem to support this, too. This is partly because:
GoRaleigh and GoDurham had about the same number of total riders in 2018, 2019 and 2023 - despite Raleigh obviously having a higher population. This implies that, per capita, Durham residents may be more likely to ride buses versus Raleigh?
Put this together with what @core2idiot said (and also what I experienced from previous GoTriangle surveys etc., too), and I feel like:
GoTriangle is stretched too thin, and its staff are just barely holding it together. Their planners are just focused on doing the studies that they’re told to do, their drivers are struggling to stay on schedule etc., and they’re not empowered to act in everyone’s best interests.
Elected officials are attracted to cool, fancy megaprojects like moths to a flame, and there’s lots of downward pressure to “make the numbers work” to the detriment of the whole region; see @orulz’s point.
The loudest voices win - and for social and political reasons, it “feels worse” to disappoint specific, existing bus riders (who skew to be Durham-based, Black, low-income workers and/or men) whereas it doesn’t feel “as bad” to drop the ball on hypothetical future riders (including regional travelers).
I’ve seen this informally with my friends. I do feel like my Durham friends have less stigma on riding the bus than my Raleigh friends. I have to wonder how the Moore Square situation affects this and I wonder how Moore Square being dark (compared with Durham Station being open air) affects that.
I would also probably say that too much of their staff isn’t staff and is instead, consultants. I was amazed when I went to my first GoTriangle focus group and they made no mention of how to take GoTriangle to get there. The invite wasn’t even from a GoTriangle E-Mail address, it was from a pppconsulting.net E-Mail address. I don’t even think there was someone actually from GoTriangle there.
Whole heartedly agree with this. I often feel like they don’t expect people to ride until a big capital project is finished (BRT, Commuter Rail, Light Rail, Triangle Mobility Hub, etc) and so assume everyone is driving in the meanwhile. So they make shiny videos about how capital project is coming soon but they seldom make any note of the existing service they offer. GoTriangle made some of the best short explainers about different transit technologies but they don’t really spend much time explaining how the routes they operate support the community today.
It feels like they’re expecting, to pull from the Seattle Example, to build Sound Transit’s Link, without Sound Transit Express, King County Metro RapidRide and the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel. I think if we don’t work to build a network, we either end up closer to Hampton Roads Transit, The Tide, or we get nothing because the project fails. This is not a plan I can support.
I support a focus on existing bus riders and people adjacent to them in life but evidenced by the GoTriangle data saying that 45% of riders have recently replaced a GoTriangle trip with an Uber/Lyft trip means that we’re failing them too. I have other options. Some people don’t. The choice to take transit is not a purely rational one, it’s also a social one.
I know one person who takes transit on a regular basis in Raleigh. I think people whose friends more often take it, could be more easily convinced than some of my friends. Invest in existing riders, and I think you’ll find more riders.
Without getting too into the weeds, because I still know people who work at all of the various transit agencies, there was a massive amount of mistrust between GoTriangle and the other agencies. The main thing you need to know is that GoTriangle is tasked with the actual finances (dollars in, dollars out) of the Wake Transit Plan and were constantly muddying the waters (perhaps unintentionally) with where money was going and how much was coming in. Many suspected that they were taking from the Wake Transit pocketbook to cover their own previously-run bus service during Covid…that’s a huge problem, obviously. They would submit requests for dozens of new FTEs for the Wake Transit annual workplan yet constantly struggle to fill those jobs. That’s money that can go to other things like actual bus service, and since it’s ongoing operating funds it comes up again year after year. The jobs they do end up filling don’t last because it’s impossible for them to hold on to talent. Their benefits are not as good as even private sector firms around here, and the general mood in the entire organization seems toxic. Honestly, they always seemed more concerned with winning PR wars than they were with putting good transit service out into the region. They need a strong executive to come in and shape things up, but I feel like with the composition of their board being the way it is, there isn’t any unified vision coming from the top.
Y’know how we mentioned a while back that GoTriangle sometimes hasn’t focused enough on Wake County? CAMPO, the middle man between city halls and NC/USDOT for transportation policy things in the eastern Triangle, will show up at this afternoon’s GoTriangle Audit and Finance Committee meeting to share how it’s changing which government agencies decide certain parts of how our transit sales tax gets spent.
This is in response to how GoTriangle has done a bad job of keeping track of its own responsibilities. This draft Lead Agency Matrix, among other things, will require GoTriangle to:
Make a new, separate 'Tax District Administration' arm so that they don't try to take any more money that isn't 'theirs'
Due to how the Triangle’s transit taxes were written into state law, GoTriangle is both a transit agency that runs buses and paratransit, as well as a tax agency that controls how taxes are spent. You’d expect GoTriangle to have kept its responsibilities clear-cut, but as @Kevin pointed out before:
This past year, they hired the business accounting/consulting firm Deloitte to figure out why that was happening, as well as what they need to do better. And they came back with some infuriating discoveries that are hilarious to read in a schadenfreude-y way.
The estimated transit-specific vehicle rental taxes across Wake, Durham, and Orange counties for FY2024 was around $404,000. Multiply this by two years and give yourself some wiggle room, and we can assume that somewhere around $800k could have been sitting around, being unused for far longer than it should’ve been (though I couldn’t find the exact amount of money that was actually mismanaged).
I respect that Kevin doesn’t want to name-drop and whatnot, but… well, you can see the government sources I pulled all of this from. Also, the internet doesn’t lie about how there’s a name listed on the GoTriangle website for the implicated role in April 2024 that’s no longer there that August.
Deloitte’s conclusions seem to be taken well by GoTriangle, seeing that they’re now negotiating contract extensions to do additional work to build onto their recommendations. So I guess that’s a step in the right direction for fixing financial mismanagement? (GoTriangle got lucky that this is so in the weeds that no journalists have really zeroed in on this - though it’s kinda concerning from a civic justice perspective…)
and;
Give up their role of developing multi-year plan for how buses are expanded in Wake County to CAMPO for future years
To clarify, this particular change was made at GoTriangle’s request - presumably since they’re getting stretched really thin, geographically, in trying to do this. This change is in response to how:
This change should let Wake County-based public servants have more control over how and when new bus services are introduced (without those ideas having to fight proposals for Durham and Orange counties while they’re still half-baked). I don’t know how well CAMPO is equipped to taking on this role, but I’d assume that any attempts at getting non-core responsibilities out of GoTriangle’s hands as they go through a corporate culture detox is a good thing?
For better or for worse, we have the same situation in Durham County, too. This work program shows tax district administration-specific roles for the Triangle West TPO (the new name for the DCHC MPO, Durham/Orange counties’ counterpart to CAMPO), too, but I couldn’t immediately find any signs of a similar inter-government treaty that also acknowledges how GoTriangle needs to reorganize itself.
I’m curious but skeptical about whether these changes will do a lot of good - especially if you look at the recent changes around the last issue @Kevin pointed out:
I seems like VTA is someone you don't want to be caught dead being considered a peer organization as. (click for details!)
I had to look this up, but it turns out that VTA has been:
Embattled by persistently sprawly suburbs
Stuck with poor connections to other regional transit services (though they’ve finally started changing this with upcoming BART and Caltrain connections)
So, on one hand, this is a pretty off-putting comparison - despite how our other supposed peer is Sound Transit, a pretty prolific agency that’s been aggressively expanding its light rail, BRT, bus, commuter rail, and ferry services.
On the other hand:
I think this analysis went too far in how it filtered out potential peer agencies. (click me!)
This is because it seems like Deloitte ignored agencies that:
It’s no surprise, then, that this leaves just two peer agencies.
Note only that: lot of “good” transit systems in America (think New York’s MTA, Boston’s T, Chicago’s Metra etc.) are legacy systems whose revenue models are still built around fares and real estate. This means that the idea of primarily relying on other revenue sources is still relatively “new” (at least to the point where Bloomberg and McKinsey are acting like they’re some wacky new innovations). Plus, a lot of cities that do have dedicated transit sales taxes are for smaller than the 1/2 cents that we currently levy.
What’s really weird to me is that it almost feels like our transit sales tax is one of the few places where GoTriangle is ahead of the curve versus the rest of the nation - if only we could get it right.
Are you negative on Brian Smith? I can’t find a strong opinion from him, which does worry me. I hope that he grows to the occasion.
This matches my view of Sound Transit and GoTriangle being very similarly structured. I have a pretty favorable view of Sound Transit, although it has been declining, especially with Dow Constantine installing himself as CEO, and the drastic changes to the projects they’ve been working on to make them worse.
This is because GoTriangle is different from these. GoTriangle receives the tax revenue that they then dole out the cities for transit projects. Being a Tax administrator is adjacent to operating transit service.
I think the lack of strong opinions is exactly what’s making me pause.
The two core issues of GoTriangle’s struggles are (1) poor company/agency culture and (2) unproductive relationships between staff, the Board of Trustees, and external stakeholders. To solve both of those problems, I think we need a strong personality who can put up and enforce clear procedures and expectations so that everyone in/around GoTriangle can do a hard reset on how they see themselves and how they interact with each other.
To be fair, I appreciated the conceptual thoughtfulness that he put into his PhD dissertation on the attributes that make for good leaders in transit planning, as well as his 2018 presentation on the same topic to the APTA. However, that’s all that I could find; I couldn’t find anything signs that he can act upon those principles instead of being a good listener who’s functionally a pushover.
For a lot of the examples I listed, that’s true. But don’t Portland and Austin’s transit agencies act as their own tax administrators, too, but with different forms of taxes?
I’m naturally distrustful of people who talk about Innovation which seems like is mentioned a number of times in his presentation.
I think he’s a wild card. This is clear career advancement for him, so he could end up being the leader GoTriangle needs, or he could be middling. I would like to see him on GoTriangle buses and decrease GoTriangles focus on capital projects, which I could see given his experience. The Tide for HRT, feels like it hasn’t been the greatest investment, so maybe that could give him a push to focus on operations? I don’t think we know, I just hope.
My understanding is that Oregon Metro is the one who levies at least Capital Project taxes in Portland. They have the right to eventually operate transit services but have chosen to let Tri-Met continue to do it.
I believe that Austin provides some direct funding to CapMetro, but I’m not certain. Austin is also largely a single agency region, CARTS kinda sorta exists but CapMetro runs the day.
To my knowledge GoTriangle is unique in that they levy taxes for the entire region, are a regional focused agency separate from local, and operate the service under their brand (as much as anyone in the region does). Even Sound Transit doesn’t operate most of their own service, instead contracting with local agencies for that.
