That DMV lot did come to my mind as I was thinking about this. Seems like a logical choice, doesn’t it?
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It would be a City Council decision, likely with input from transit stakeholders.
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I think the DMV lot is the best, most logical, option. This would not only add a community benefit, but the City of Raleigh could reimagine what a bus station should look like given the “lessons” learned at the current location. There are options to recoup some funds through private acquisition and partnerships. Imagine a bus station paired with a grocery store… one could dream.
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holy cow that’s not even downtown. It’s halfway to big wake/wakemed. That’s where all the downtown buses you’d propose would connect riders?
I wish it could just be a giant grid like cities such as Salt Lake have mastered. They really seem to have transit done well, even if it’s not as frequent. Just a great easy way to connect there without having to experience a Moore Square situation. Now there are crazies and homeless all over the metro, but at least they’re not all mixed in with a bunch of travelers who have to navigate among them.
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I don’t know why but for some reason I thought they meant a different lot, are we all talking about 1100 New Bern Ave? If so I agree, that’s unacceptably far from the ‘core’ of downtown…
We had a work session on Moore Square Station and a follow up discussion at our retreat a few weekends ago. Short term, focusing on securing the existing station through changes to the built environment, increasing officers, and expanding ACORNS (they currently only work more limited hours). Long term, we had a high level discussion about two changes: modifying routes so not so many depart/arrive downtown (this also allows for more direct and convenient options for riders) and a new station that’s built differently and easier to monitor and secure (like RUS BUS facility). I think a possible location for a new station is the site of the existing municipal parking deck (that entire block is earmarked for redevelopment as part of the new municipal campus). That location is just my idea, for now (please don’t write a news story about it).
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Is there anything neighbors can do to make sure the next council continues these ideas? I really like and agree with a lot of your recommended approach here.
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Ok. Maybe a stupidly question:
What is an ACORN? Besides a nut that falls off an oak tree?
I expect the entire Council will return other than my open seat. But watch for agendas where this item will be discussed.
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If you don’t mind… and if you’d prefer it, a private message would be fine - but I’d love to know your endorsement for who you’d prefer to take your open seat this election 
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I have evolved from my original “fix it in place” position on the Go Raleigh bus station issue.
I am now intrigued by the benefits of a “lessons learned” design, particularly at the city hall parking deck location.
• centrally located between east and west downtown subareas (10-minute walks to Moore Square and Union Station)
• more easily accessible by busses (bounded by Morgan, McDowell, and Dawson)
• multi-lanes on McDowell and Dawson allow bus-only lanes in vicinity of entry/exit points
• redevelopment of the existing bus station location could be transformative for the Moore Square subarea
I frequently ride downtown using two or three routes and never go to the actual station. Just navigate using stops in my area of interest.
So support the cross-town routes approach. And the more central station location fits that pattern of use as well.
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We do not need another bus station downtown…I’m all for public transit but I think we get trapped in this 20th century mindset and I do mean some 1900’s thinking of building some grand central station and that is just not where we are in 2026. Multi-modal transportation, on demand rider service, Work From Home, chauffeured burritos via GrubHub, …
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Trying to get rid of the bus station, or put it somewhere non-central like the DMV site or wherver, makes absolutely no sense based on the geographic realiy of our city’s street network.
- Raleigh’s road network is mostly radial, meaning that nearly all of the major roads fan out from one place - and that is why we will always need a central bus station
- The place that all of those roads fan out from is downtown, and that is why the bus station has to be downtown.
If we had a gridded street network like Dallas or Denver then we could build a more decentralized bus network that follows the grid- but trying to make that work here is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
Now, as we’ve discussed, it doesn’t have to be exactly at Moore Square. Anywhere downtown is just about as good as anywhere else. The City Hall parking deck keeps coming up a lot because it’s a huge, old, functionally obsolete, low-slung parking deck owned by the city, on a block that’s currently under redevelopment, which also happens to be in a location that’s arguably better situated both for walking access to the rest of downtown, and also from a transportation perspective, being both much closer to the train station, and also directly adjacent to some of the highest-capacity streets in Downtown.
I understand that moving the bus station would be a costly endeavor, so I don’t think the city needs to be in a hurry to do this, but I do think it absolutely should be on the table as part of the overall master plan for the municipal campus.
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I know what the roads look like. However, what does ridership data look like? Where are riders actually going, and does that trip actually need a central hub for connections?
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I don’t know enough about city or bus network design to counter much of anything you said.
My issues with the Moore Square bus station as it exists is that it’s already fitting a square peg in a round hole. Unable to be secured and open-air access on 3 sides. In an area of downtown that wasn’t designed to support a central bus station for a city of this size.
On Blount Street and on Person Street now, overflow buses sit in the bike lanes on a constant basis because of how overwhelmed the station is with buses.
Overall, I’m in agreement with you that my preference would be a bus station downtown that is secure with access to streets that can handle the load. The bus station is a major major impediment on that area for so many reasons beyond what people typically complain about.
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i’m curious and haven’t seen any soooo…
anyone want to create a human-generated map of what a bus station at the city hall parking deck could look like?
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The fact that we are talking about spending 10’s of millions of dollars to relocate/rebuild a public facility that can’t be secured and managed in a central downtown district is 
and needs to be handled. The potential for the same issues and illegal activity can follow just as easily to the new location. The Raleigh PD and Council need to handle business, because I’m not convinced we won’t see the same issues at a new location. 
The bus station in and of itself is not causing a problem. It’s the environment and nefarious activity that looms around the station and amongst the riders. Why would a new station fix this?
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fixed that for you…
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Linked trip data (mapping final origin to final destination for each trip) is hard to collect for a transit agency. But the idea of staying away from transfer centers because “that’s not where you’re going” is a fallacy.
When you’re driving from downtown to the airport, you drive on I-40. Are you trying to get to the Aviation Parkway interchange? Of course not, that’s not your destination - but you travel through it because it’s the most effective way to get there based on the transportation network. The fixed-route bus network, is out of necessity not going to cover the entire road network, and to be able to access anywhere from anywhere, transfers are absolutely necessary.
As for why we can’t do away with fixed routes and replace it with on demand, door-to-door service, and why we won’t be able to do this even in a world of fully automated vehicles: it’s very inefficient! The amount of deadheading required, and the sheer number of vehicles and trips required to give each person something close to an on-demand, door-to-door level of service will be extremely prohibitive from both a traffic perspective, in terms of how much road space there is to work with, as well as from a capital perspective - buying, operating, and maintaining these fleets of on-demand vehicles won’t be cheap, you know!
To achieve anything approaching functional efficiency, you have to organize the operations and into a structured hierarchy of trunks and branches where people walk to and from shared boarding points. That sounds like microtransit, which has been done in many places, including wake county - and I challenge you to find even a single example, anywhere in the US, of an on-demand tranportation network (whether shared, like microtransit, or private, like Uber) that is even half as cost efficient as GoRaleigh (which itself is only middle-of-the-pack as far as cost per rider is concerned, averaging about $5 or so per passenger trip systemwide on its fixed routes). Most microtransit costs $20 to $30 per trip to operate, and even the very most efficient are in the $12 range per trip.
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