These future development images really stand out to me:
Highwoods area:
Mini City:
TTC area:
10 Likes
Anything which discourages mid-block pedestrian trespass gets my vote. Capital Boulevard has way too many fatalities because of this.
3 Likes
It’ll be important for the lane separations of Capital Blvd. (the “multi-way boulevard” in the GIS page) to be funded together with the BRT lanes. If the NCDOT and General Assembly are as anti-public transit 10-30 years from now as they are today, I’m worried they’ll force them to be treated as two separate projects. The city, then, has to spend massive amounts of time and money on just a fraction of the benefits -only to have to close lanes and do even more work in the future.
I hope we can get the political planning right to make this proposal work.
4 Likes
Yeah - Hope it doesn’t turn into the six forks corridor study. Where they recommended BRT lanes to be included, but then local NIMBYS raised a stink and they took them out.
4 Likes
The areas around Six Forks and Capital are very different. With all the congestion that already exists and has existed for years on Capital, I think the neighbors will welcome the improvements vs Six Forks where North Hills rebirth has happened so quickly and encroached on the neighborhoods there is more resistance.
I’m glad they are going to essentially turn it into an expressway with grade-separated interchanges for thru-traffic. Will make access to the north of town much easier.
4 Likes
I’m having flashbacks of when they rebuilt the North Central Expressway (US 75) in Dallas back in the 80’s. TXDOT had to dig out the old 50’s/60’s route and its narrow ROW while keeping the traffic flowing. Craazy!!!
This could be that ambitious if the BRT component is included in the same build.
1 Like
Being that this is my backyard, I hardly recognized it. The proposal fills in the parking lots at Mini City while the big boxes stay in place. Puzzling, where do I park when going to Lowe’s? Under the other structures taking their place? Or, does it become a fulfillment center and everything gets delivered.
Same for TTC. It really appears that the mall structure is going to get demolished and completely RE-done. Not surprising since malls are becoming extinct.
1 Like
I used to live in Uptown Dallas. I was thinking the exact same thing! The ROW is so narrow the access roads hang over US-75. We should have more Texas U-Turns also. That state knows how to design roads.
1 Like
Yeah, I just assume 100% of any of these hypothetical buildings would be 50% parking deck lmao
1 Like
These are just conceptual, future developments. They just put some boxes on the map. The road work is probably 10 years out, and any other development another 10. By that time Lowes or any of the other big box stores may be long gone.
2 Likes
Capital Blvd makes the most sense of any artery in Raleigh to create a series of dense nodes in support of transit. This doesn’t go for just the area between 440 & 540, rather the entire stretch starting with Smoky Hollow.
10 Likes
My first firm in Raleigh was located in Mini City on Green Road caticorner from the PetSmart. The old vision for this area is a far cry from what was actually built. I am hopeful that it will densify in the decades to come and replace those monstrous parking lots.
3 Likes
I was wondering if there was any example for this sort of thing, arterial → freeway with densification and transit. US75 seems like a perfect parallel.
They have parallel light rail, and we are talking about BRT in the freeway median.
One problem that comes up in my mind is that there are currently a lot of affordable apartments in this corridor. It’s actually quite dense by suburban Raleigh standards. This seems to propose replacing at least some of those complexes. Those apartments weren’t built to last forever, so redevelopment is expected - but is there some way to do this without displacing the people?
Next, it strikes me that even with all of the grade separations and interchanges, this will still be a pretty miserable road to cross on foot. For example, the Mini City area is called out as a focus area, and planned to have redevelopment up to 12 stories in height, but there is still planned to be 2000 ft between crossings of Capital Boulevard from Calvary to Spring Forest, and actually nearly 3/4 mile from New Hope Church to Calvary. Since they are clearly going for an urban concept here, I think the city needs to pick a number (maybe in the range of 1000 feet ~ 1/4 Mile?) and guarantee (or at least have a stated goal) that there will be a safe place for people to cross the road at least that often for the entire corridor. Really I think this should be a city-wide, comprehensive plan-level policy, but Capital is among the worst offenders in town so it’s a great place to start.
Lastly, how about tolls to finance it? It’s not an interstate. Why not?
7 Likes
I think they could do tolls on the through lanes. Set it up like 540 where they scan your sticker and not slowing down / stopping at booths.
2 Likes
If they start putting tolls on Capital, then traffic will shift over to Atlantic and it will quickly overwhelm that road. Southerners don’t really like to pay for roads. 
1 Like
It could also force more folks to use the BRT line, especially if a round trip through the toll roads is more expensive than a day pass. I kind of like this idea.
2 Likes
But that assumes that folks coming down Capital are just heading into DTR. What about those coming down Capital to hit the Beltine? BRT won’t help those folks at all. It sounds good in theory, but until we have a comprehensive network, transit will continue to be a challenge unless your destination is within the vicinity of a BRT stop.
4 Likes
Oddly, the other legacy road project(s) which come to mind are the Dan Ryan, Kennedy, and Eisenhower expressways in Chicago.
Granted, they were built to a larger scale than the Capital Boulevard project. But, they have some of the same features - express and local lanes with transit functions in the median.