Maybe drilling for oil? 
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When does construction starts
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Starting to think this project is only for meetings and no construction lol.
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And I think this project is for development but no worry we can ask during the meeting
I’m not sure if ‘bust’ is the best word for it but this project has absolutely no juice whatsoever to me and I’m skeptical it ever amounts to what was envisioned - at least over the next 10 years. I haven’t kept up with all the latest so maybe I am being pessimistic and someone can change my mind.
Phase 1 is some apartments and an office building - which is fine - but not much of a draw to choosing to live or work here (over comparable places) for a long time.
Sounds like there won’t be a stadium in the next 10 years unless I’m missing something.
The biggest concern to me is that it feels very isolated where it is. If you don’t do a lot to connect it to greater Downtown, Dix Park etc and revamp the South Saunders experience I think this will start to feel like Briar Creek South more than how it was pitched. Would love to be wrong though.
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To be fair, briar creek doesn’t even have any 5 over 1 style apartments or office buildings that aren’t isolated parking lot islands.
Look at North Hills, that has taken 20 years and is still evolving and developing.
I think this will take a similar trajectory. It’s going to take a lonnnnng time but eventually I think there will be a seamless urban experience from 40 up Saunders, to the park, through downtown, up west street, and to midtown. It’s just going to take a lot of time.
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I’m neither holding my breath nor broken up over it. DTS is not downtown & it’s just not my priority. It’s a nice to have, but not a must have in my book.
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What needs to happen: CoR needs to take over design and management of 401 from the state from the 70 split all the way up to 540, and it needs a major road diet with dedicated bus lane, pedestrian islands, on street parking separating bike lanes, etc. And remove all the stop lights in exchange for an average design speed of 15 mph through the city. Safety will increase, transit/bike/ped can thrive, and drivers will still get through the city in roughly the same time because they won’t constantly be stuck at red lights. The necessary gaps for cross traffic and ped crossing will come from road diet and reduced speeds.
I understand that this sounds impossible, but it would make the entire corridor of 401 through the city limits so much more economically productive and safer.
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The city thwarted plans to widen Saunders a few years ago (yes the state wanted to make it 4 each direction)
The only issue with that is you have to have a state / US route somewhere though Downtown to serve as your truck route. Also I don’t know if financially the city could afford to 100% take on the cost of maintaining and completely redesigning this road.
At the very least, we do have a huge cross section to work with so the road diet, bus lanes, bike lanes, etc can all be worked in.
This is one of (maybe the only / biggest) drawbacks of not having an interstate serving downtown. One of your roads has to serve as “the corridor”
Our best hope is that the BRT is frequent, reliable and fast enough so that commuters opt for it over driving and that through traffic feels uncomfortable enough that they opt to use 440.
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Good Lord, grateful we don’t have 8 lanes to deal with. I don’t see trucking a legit reason to justify an effective highway design through DTR. I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but what we effectively have in Saunders is a 60 mph design with a posted 35 mph speed limit. And then a series of red lights to allow for gaps in the speed for cross, taking the average speed of the whole section down to probably something in the 15 to 20 mph range. Why not design the system for 15 mph with enough complexity that drivers are forced to think about their driving instead of cruising on autopilot when they see a green light at dangerous speeds through an urban area.
Do travel lanes have to be wider for 51’ trucks?
In other words, would accommodating for semi trucks be counter to narrowing through lanes enough to naturally reduce speed?
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I think the lanes themselves are already at the minimum 10-11’ through the entire section. Even in the smallest of towns, streets etc you don’t see lanes smaller than that. Fire departments will usually require 10.5’ minimum and the smallest I’ve ever seen is 9’ on some City of Atlanta minor side streets. Usually they’re 12-13’ so we already have the narrow lanes going for us.
It’s just the perfect definition of a stroad. A road we’d like to be a street.
I’ve played with some proposed cross sections and connectivity excitements to make Saunders safer but also spread the other through traffic out.
I haven’t fully developed the idea yet but essentially by building out your grid network you have a nice even distribution instead of a funnel and a nice building block to develop Saunders, Wilmington, Hammond, and Centennial as streets instead of stroads.
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This sounds like good news to me. Saunders, and other similar stroads are already accommodating freight trucks with minimum lane width. So increasing complexity and naturally slowing traffic down to better accommodate other modes of transportation could work.
I can see the argument that the off-ramps for 40 on to a lower speed Saunders could cause backups onto the highway. I would counter that by drawing attention to the off ramp at 440 and Capital boulevard heading north. Because of the high speed of Capital boulevard, there are few naturally occurring safe gaps for drivers to merge into. By slowing things down, you can organically integrate more mergers without the need for a red light to artificially create a gap.
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While there are issues to deal with on 401 through the city, I will say that the resistance to plowing a freeway through downtown is the most consequential civic battle of the last century in the city. Raleigh would simply not be the same place it is today if the freeway had succeeded. I’m glad that we are having a more nuanced discussion about what to do with the 401 corridor rather than trying to figure out how to fix a downtown that a freeway destroyed.
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the ‘Carolina Blues’ MLB, organs playing ‘take me to the ball game’, mlb near downtown…i think raleigh should be scraping and clawing.
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Is it opposite day and nobody told me?
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As someone who grew up in New England, New York, and Atlanta and frequents many other cities, I 100% disagree with this.
Raleigh is by far the easiest city to get around.
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Maybe but only if you are in a car and even still - I’m willing to bet every penny that NYC roads are safer by every available metric. Prove me wrong.
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By design, NYC slows car movement. The grid has tons of intersections with lights and traffic is mostly heavy. There are also pedestrians and bikes nearly everywhere, and that also causes traffic to move more slowly. It’s been proven many times that slower is better for safety with regard to injury/death metrics.
That said, there is also some crazy crap that happens in cars on NYC streets. Cabs threading the needle, cars creating temporary “lanes” at crowded entrance/exits to bridges & tunnels, and some crafty shenanigans that happens sometimes at intersections, all add to the slowness & safety of NYC streets.
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