Austin’s rail system is sort of a disaster. It’s really set up to fail…what sort of rail system has no service on weekends and the last train leaves downtown Austin at 6:45 PM except for Fridays.
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Worthless except for worker drones.
Oh, good. I was jealous for a moment.
Any at-grade system is bad, Austin’s especially bad.
Raleigh HCR will at least be in a system that eventually be grade separated.
Charlotte: At-Grade
Austin: At-Grade
San Diego: At-Grade
All have in common? Slow and delayed by car and ped accidents.
Charlotte message board always has a posting about a car accident delaying their light rail.
Example: Charlotte last week:
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This thread is great because every few months someone comes along and talks about Rail to the airport.Great, because this is a very real conversation out there in the real world! Everyone likes RHEL to the airport (me included). Then people come back with how it is a bad idea, and the person who brought it up say, that sounds dumb because why wouldn’t we do rail to the airport? Then it gets into the real conversation on how some regional commuter rail is the highest priority and getting that in itself will be really really hard, so adding on 30-40% of the cost and engineering struggles to get to the airport is going to make it even harder to make it happen.
I am finding something like 90% of the conversations on transit I have with a people I meet for the first time generally follows this track.
Them: “Raleigh is so dumb, people hate buses, we need rail and lots of it. Why arn’t we doing that?”
Me: “You can actually get to a lot of places on the buses, I agree that it is not perfect, but I am excited about lots of the bus lines moving to every 15 minutes service in the next few years. That will make not using a car much easier. The BRT lines are a big deal too”.
Them: “Why waist money on buses? We need light rail”
Me: “The BRT is actually going to be very hard to implement and there are multiple forces who could stop that. There is also a big plan for commuter rail from Garner to Durham.”
Them: “When is that coming?”
Me: “Current plan is around 10 years”
Them: “That is to late! We need light rail now”
Me: “Light Rail would take that long to do as well. The BRT could actually start in 2024”
Them: “Raleigh is so behind!”
Me: “Yeah, we need to get moving on making improvements. I like the BRT because it could actually happen in the near future and we won’t be here in 10 years talking about how it was a thing we were “going to do” 20 years ago and still isn’t about to happen”
I am also slow to react to conversations like this, so I do a much worse job explaining my thoughts. And I have found that people don’t see where the BRT lines will go as places they care about. 
All this to say. I like public transit and actually agree with the general sentiments that we are behind and really need to get our buts in gear on building public transit. People are moving here faster than we are building public transit (and I think that is a real big problem). But, it is also just a strange experience to be plugged into the actual plans for public transit (getting just the New Bern BRT line right is going to be a big big effort y’all) and then people show up and say what we really need is a railroad to the airport!
Anyone on the we just need rail to the airport leaning have any advice on how to have this conversation better/more effectively?
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We need rail first. Period. We don’t have rail yet, so there is no point talking about rail to the airport. Once we have rail, then an airport link can be discussed.
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Honestly, I think this is the billion-dollar question for ANY public works project in a functional-ish democracy. We’re not like China or Singapore where you can just decide to do things (opposition be damned), and we’re not like Japan or Britain where passenger rail companies can strong-arm their way through and sell to their markets. -so we’re left with having to work with a body of constituents, but the average person doesn’t fundamentally care about this enough to make it a priority.
Think of it this way: when you’re a community college grad who’s busy paying bills (and desperately trying to not go to the hospital despite urgent medical needs), why would you care about a new, shiny bus to the airport?
Remember that every one of us on this site are bigger civics/local politics/development nerds than your average Joe. If you’ve kept up with this thread, you’ve read more about the state of the Triangle’s public transit options than like 2/3 of people in Wake County will their entire lives, and you care about it more than a bigger fraction of 'em. I think that is at the core of this problem.
[response to @CanesFan’s comments deleted, since it turned out to be confusing and irrelevant]
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Basically I was saying you can’t have a rail line to the airport without, at the very least, having a rail line. Edit: Hopefully if/when the project is given the official go ahead, they will create a website explaining the size and scope of the project as well as having a FAQ section answering questions like this.
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Right, I get that. I thought you were also implying that people outside of this site need to get with the program -but I guess I was reading into it a bit too much? 
No, I was concisely answering ADUsSomeday’s last paragraph about a simple answer to the rail to airport question.
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Most people don’t care about much outside of their day to day. The people who need public transit the most, care about it the least. Its almost like people have just accepted the burden of car ownership as necessary and unavoidable. Being an employer in the construction industry - Its one of, if not the most concerning issues. Trying to find an employee with reliable transportation and an active drivers license is almost impossible.
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I have been reading some of the Comments here since posting this topic, and there are some very good comments and not so good ones, AND…I have been just scratching my head going, why has this and other rail topics have been such an uproar about having mass transit in the area. ( RAIL in particular ) I’m all for good clean discussion on how we as a Triangle region can find ways to better get around and use transit, but is rail such a stepchild that know one wants to take ownership of. The whole idea of having rail or even talking about it is to have another means of getting around, and not just a sole reason of having it. Buses alone or even adding more buses is not the solution to one’s commuting ease especially if traffic gets more congested during rush hour, Keep in mind the ever growing population in the triangle each year. Look…Im all for smart planning and weighing in the pros/cons, etc…etc… 
I just do not want the Triangle to look like a gigantic parking lot during heavy rush hour, but I guess its a way of life I suppose. 
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I am all for rail. Even rail to the airport, eventually. But demanding that rail to the airport must come first is a something that comes up SO often, and just makes NO sense when you actually look at it, that people here, myself included, are (I think) justifiably frustrated that we are still fighting this fire.
If people can’t give up on the idea of having rail to the airport on day one, then we will never have rail transit in the Triangle. Period.
For some people I actually think that is the point. They don’t want rail at all, so they pick one thing: “herp, derp, it doesn’t even go to the airport guys! herp, derp, dont those transit guys have any VISION???!1111 LETS KILL THIS PROJECT AND BUILD SOME MOR LANES ON 40!!111” ughhhhhhhhhhhh if I had a dollar for every time somebody did that on city-data or even in real life discussions I would be a rich man.
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My own personal conspiracy theory. McCrory, when mayor of Charlotte, took an absolute $hit ton of heat for the light rail project. I think politicians took notice of that and would prefer to not potentially go through that themselves and just pass the buck.
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I really do feel the same way, this will the last time I post anything in regards to rail. I just simply feel that having some kind of rail would be a addition to having transit other than Just Buses, BRT, Uber or whatever.
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Geographically, with RDU being offset from the major east-west axes, direct rail connection from either Raleigh or Durham is challenging. Using the NCRR as the main spine, a fixed guideway segment (or BRT/shuttle) would have to turn out in western Morrisville and weave its way to the terminal complex along the Airport Boulevard corridor.
Then, there’s the issue of where to put the terminus. Fortunately, with RDU’s announcement this week about moving forward with the CONRAC (L3A, L4, and L5) and the two Ground Transportation structures (L1-ALT and L2-ALT) an opportunity is opening.
If anybody knows about the downtown Seattle Bus/Transit Tunnel, they will see what can be done with a phased approach.
Or, go big with a PRT system:
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This is the magnum opus I did for the public comment period on the RDU Vision 2040 plan back in 2016. It’s a longish Power Point presentation (in .pdf format) filled with lots of graphics (porn) of American municipal transit systems and their solutions in getting the Train to the Plane. Enjoy!
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This could be a good compromise idea. (Glad someone new arrived at the same conclusion on their own lol)
For the people who don’t want to scroll through 215 pages of pretty pictures, this is Dean’s big takeaway message/suggestion, basically wedged in between existing roads and parking decks:
I think this could work out pretty well, plus it’s probably not too hard to start trial runs for this sort of program. GoTriangle, the Research Triangle Foundation, and/or RDU just has to get some frequent circulator buses running between RTP Park Center, nearby hotels, and the airport that runs every couple of minutes, and maybe slap on a few perks like Boston did with TSA express screening, and hopefully get ridership increases that would justify a BRT-ish guideway.
The only two things I’d keep in mind would be:
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wrestling through the FAA to amend the development plan the airport spent millions to submit, and;
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some financial realities which were brought up at a recent RTA meeting:
Keep in mind, this impending budget nightmare is just for terminal expansions/CONRAC and runway rehab. Without any of the sprinkles on top we like to keep fantasizing about on this site.
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@keita Thanks. I’ve been lurking around these public comment meetings on transportation infrastructure for quite some time (starting with the Triangle Regional Rail plan in the 1990’s). There’s always these pretty pictures and big ideas that usually crash in silence. However, the folks at RDU have always been there stating that they are ‘interested’ in the discussion.
I’m not a transit engineer, but I do use those systems when available during travel for work and pleasure. So, I go back and look at what others have accomplished in comparison to where we have stumbled in the Triangle. (I guess that’s what to expect when we’re trying to suggest ways to spend other’s money.)
I spent the summer of 2016 trying to coalesce my thoughts into a rambling narrative and share with the Airport Authority. Never sure if it went anywhere or not. But, when I stumbled into this group of like-minded and enthusiastic thinkers, I thought that it would a good place to share my idea.
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I think that planning for a fixed airport transit link is a good idea, but it’s far from the top priority for regional transit sales tax funding. However, if it is built with airport money (which is statutorily required to go towards airport projects) I say go ahead.
It’s a tough project to get right, due to geographical constraints, as I have mentioned before in this thread and your PowerPoint also acknowledges. Putting it as a stop on a Durham-Raleigh route is basically a non starter because of how much of a diversion from the straight-line route it entails. So tying it in with the transit network as seamlessly as possible is therefore a challenge.
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