Agreed, i mean the roads are meant to be driven on, right? Are some destinations or roads more noble than others? I don’t understand @Brian’s point either.
His point is that drivers choose McDowell instead of the marginally quicker 'round the beltline route.
Admittedly, I sometimes choose to drive through DTR instead of around the beltline to look at downtown developments 
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I am also guilty 
as I prefer the DTR route for the view… 
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I guess I live in Eadora.
The couplet pair of roads (south on Dawson, north on McDowell) were the compromise to plowing a freeway through downtown 50 years ago. It sounds to me like they are working as intended.
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Yeah, Raleigh in 1965 was planning to build THIS NORTH/SOUTH FREEWAY thru downtown just east of Person right thru the historic Oakwood neighborhood between Bloodworth and East Street. The Oakwood neighborhood had a celebration in 2012 back celebrating its defeat viewable here. The actual planning document is downloadable here. Here are some pics from it. I got no problem with people driving McDowell for wherever they’re going: local, cuttting thru, avoiding traffic, whatever. This failed N/S freeway thing looks like something that belongs in downtown DC. The planning document “NC State Capital Plan 1965” adopted by the state capital planning commission, seems like Disney’s tomorrowland: the future that never was LOL. I read somewhere that this planned freeway that was never built is the reason the I-40 Person street interchange is so unnecessarily massive today…designed to take tons of N/S traffic thru downtown that now goes other ways.
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Thanks for sharing these. The proposed Beltline looked like it was going to make Western Blvd part of it. Is that what it’s showing?
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@John it looks like you’re right. There’s NO MENTION of interstate 40, just a BIG ASS interchange off of “western” at an intersection near Person St for the N/S freeway that never was. That entire planning document looks like something Disney planned for Epcot to be, with a downtown government campus with ACRES of water in downtown lakes and open green spaces. Kinda wild, isn’t it?
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It’s very weird indeed. The only state capital city that seems to have followed some weird 60’s plan is that dystopian Empire State Plaza in Albany.
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The stat about trips through DTR doesn’t surprise me either, but I also don’t like it. Perhaps I’m supposed to like it better than the alternative highway cutting through downtown but I don’t accept that’s still the only option. I think we discussed a while back trying to make DTR safer specifically around the context of McDowell and Dawson. Because people use them for a through-way to get north of or south of DTR, they’re taking the route as fast as possible. The timing of the lights to move traffic more efficiently through DTR also create a challenge for those familiar with the route (those taking it regularly to get north of and south of DTR) so it becomes a freeway almost. Those roads essentially segment DTR and make pedestrian traffic unsafe. The light timing needs to change, speed limit minimized, and hopefully GPS apps like Waze stop making the downtown route more desirable. We want traffic downtown but for those destined for downtown, not passing through as fast as they can.
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Most of the things in these plans are pretty horrific and I am glad basically none of this came to pass as envisioned. Frankly that is a big thing that sets Raleigh apart from other cities. It’s really cool how downtown just kind of flows right in to the neighborhoods to the east and west. For as much as we gripe about Dawson/McDowell and its interchange with MLK/Western, basically everywhere else actually in this country followed through with their downtown freeway plans, and consequently has it much worse.
Not gonna lie tho, I don’t hate the idea of a Wade-Glascock connection. Not as a freeway for sure, and maybe not even for cars at all - but there is no way to move east-west across town between Peace and Whitaker Mill, over a mile and a half, and that is stupid.
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Not the only North Carolina city that got lucky. Greensboro was spared a downtown freeway also. Neighborhoods butt up right against it. They are turning Murrow Blvd , which is a divided 4 lane road that was designed to quickly get cars in and out of downtown, into part of their downtown greenway. Winston Salem however got an interstate right up the gut…
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GSO sounds like a progressive downtown area
Land values have not skyrocketed there. Good neighborhoods surround downstown, Fisher Park, UNCG college hill, A&T University on east side.
Back in the 70’s Greensboro was the place to be in North Carolina. But Piedmont Airlines decided to put hub in Charlotte USA and the merger of a Greensboro bank and Charlotte Bank firmed NCNB which also moved to Charlotte. The rest is history. What could have been…
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Maybe “stunning” isn’t the right word. The words used in the DoToSo Transportation Town Hall were “eye-opening” and “striking”. The point is that the volume of cut through traffic contributes significantly to making S. Saunders inhospitable to people on foot and bikes. Which is at odds with the environment that DoToSo hopes create.
This topic is discussed specifically in the Town Hall presentation at 18’:10", 40’:00" and 50’:36".
The Kane folks and others in the Town Hall (David Meeker) are hopeful that DoToSo becomes the catalyst to start redirecting the cut-through traffic and getting NC DOT to start taking steps to making S. Saunders a safer street.
S. Saunders is a classic “stroad” as defined by the folks at Strong Towns. A highway-style road way in a street-style location.
I agree that Dawson/McDowell are better than a freeway through downtown (as others in this thread have noted), but that “win” was more than 50 years ago. Time to rethink those roads and the MLK interchange.
As a side note - Eric Lamb noted in the Sept. 21, 2020 BPAC meeting that 2019 was the worst on record for pedestrian fatalities and serious injuries in Raleigh. He essentially said any way you slice the data 2019 was a bad year for people on foot being hit by people driving cars. We need to do better.
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Yea I get what the intent is, but its a very oddly cherry-picked stat and overall meaningless.
Like for this actual development, wouldn’t the stat be like 98% of all trips go past “Downtown South”? Like its weird to cite whether trips go more or less than 2 miles further north than this project site.
Just a small point, but seems like weird framing to me.
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The couplet has been discussed many times here, but it’s always good to keep that conversation going.
Count me among those who don’t feel unsafe because there’s a couplet of one way roads going north/south through the city. Personally, I feel safer on foot because these are one way streets. I know that I only need to look in one direction when crossing a road that would be the same width, even if it were two-way.
I believe that the safety issue on the couplet is calibration of the lights. If you drive this couplet regularly, you soon learn that the lights eventually stop you if you are going the speed limit, which is opposite the intention of the calibration. So, if a seasoned user of the couplet comes up to the first light and barely makes it through, they are going to speed up to make sure that they make the next light, and so on. If you drive 40 instead of 35, you can make it through without stopping in that situation. Add to this that the couplet has some wonky spots and lanes that dip as you move through the hills and valleys, and that’s where the danger is amplified at higher speeds.
What if speeding up punished you by making you stop instead of rewarding you for doing so? What if the light calibration was adjusted, and slowing down assured that you’d make it through all the lights without stopping? I predict that regular drivers of these two roads would figure that out pretty quickly and the traffic would slow down.
Slow, calm, one-way streets in downtown would make the pedestrian experience better and safer, and would create less noise. Let’s get the calibration of these lights fixed to encourage slower speeds, move the traffic through the city that needs to use it as such, and make our core a better experience!
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the answer to making roads safer and more pedestrian friendly on streets built for traffic to drive on (regardless of its destination around the block or cutting through ) isn’t to un-synch the stoplights. It’s to use technology and improvements for benefit of pedestrians. If mass numbers of people are getting hit by vehicles (are they?), or there’s some mass movement of pedestrians needed at key intersections, there are warning lights, decorative pedestrian bridges and plazas, and signs/warnings for pedestrians that can be done. Downtown Raleigh might be well served with ideas from 18 Pedestrian Bridges & Footbridges with Amazing Designs | Architectural Digest and https://www.pinterest.com/ouoldman/pedestrian-bridge/ rather than “punish” cars. More cars idling exhaust longer at de-synched stoplights CAN’T be good for the environment, global warming and all that jazz.
DoToSo or FeFiFo or HoDeDo (or WTF we have to abbreviate it as) is already proposing building large pedestrian plaza and pedestrian bridges to “march to the game.” I’d rather see ideas like that vs intentionally trying to inconvenience cars and drivers. A large new decorative and functional bridge or plaza, if one is needed, that carries pedestrians over a busy road, could create new open function/gathering space in the couple places people mention traffic moves quickly.
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1 way streets are WAY WAY WAY safer for pedestrians to cross than 2-way streets. I agree that tweaking timing on the synch can help reward those who drive the speed limit, but I am NOT for what others have proposed, which is to intentionally destroy the efficient flow of traffic thru synchronized signalled intersections
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Back when I lived in Winston Salem, I would go down to Old Salem for band practice every week. I learned that if you stopped at the Broad Street light on 4th, and drove 17 mph you could go all the way down to Liberty without hitting the brake. 
Of course, back then downtown Winston was pretty dead in the evenings. I honestly haven’t been back to see how it has changed over the nearly 20 years since I lived there, but my brother lives near downtown Winston and it sounds like it is a completely different city now. (Much like Raleigh of 20+ years ago)
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