This is actually a perfect light rail plan, but the cheap stakes at GoTriangle. Didn’t want to it doesn’t matter if there was a safety complaint to the Freight train tracks, they could’ve put light rail on the roads instead!
I’ve had my share of qualms with GoTriangle, but if you can tell me where the money for a multi-line light rail network magically comes from, I’m sure we’d all love to hear it.
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Hey y’all
I made a pie in the sky (but trying to be somewhat realistic) Transit plan
There are several main components:
-
Light Rail
North-South Line stretching from around the 70-401 split, through Downtown (Underground) along Wake Forest and then over to North Hills - No idea how the ROW would work but if Atlanta could figure MARTA out we can figure this out (Probably elevated piers or similar to Charlotte’s North Line extension)
East-West Line starting at the New Bern Wake Med Hospital through Downtown (Underground) past NC State and snaking through Cary and Morrisville (Good luck getting those residents on board), passing RDU and RTP, up to Durham, Duke and follow Tobacco Road down to UNC -
Commuter Rail
Lines on existing rails to Zebulon, Clayton, Fuquay-Varina, Sanford, Wake Forest and Hillsbourgh -
Streetcar
Lines through Downtown Raleigh ad Durham
I think the huge issues here would be the underground Downtown sections and ROW issues through Cary but this is the type of plan I think the region needs to start with if we want to be a serious player.
Black is Commuter Rail
Yellow and Greenish Brown is Light Rail
Oranges / Pink is Street Car
Pins are proposed stations
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It’s funny that you picked what you did, since your light rail line is basically the same thing as GoTriangle (then TTA)'s regional rail plan from 2005 and their Raleigh-Cary light rail idea that also met the axe.
It’s so similar that… oof…
Too soon. GoTriangle tried to make this segment happen for real, but the General Assembly and Duke leadership basically killed it (see this post for more details). As a Chapel Hill resident, I’m still really salty about this 
Back to the DTR RoW though: Leo wrote about this back in 2011, when GoTriangle and the City were taking the idea seriously. They ended up choosing an elevated route that looked like this:
(Also, you can tell how old that pic is, since Union Station is still just a shack)
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Why a freaking college wouldn’t want Light Rail near them is beyond me! But DUKE is a bit different
But yea the light rail outside of downtown will probably never happen because outside of Downtown the people (NOT ALL) just don’t care because they’re afraid it’ll bring “crime”. But even just having that North-South line and the East-West from Fenton to the Hospital along with the street cars would be huge for the feel and connectivity of Downtown
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p o l i t i c s
Duke’s old leadership used to be more receptive to DOLRT, but then they got a new president -and started complaining about right-of-way issues after environmental studies were already complete. It also didn’t help that he appointed a racist anti-transit vice president to be their liaison to GoTriangle, either.
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SO annoying! and wow I really did have the same routing basically in mind. When will people realize that Transit helps so many more things than it hurts.
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Haha ah man, yeah, you’ll strike a nerve when you talk light rail (or really any rail) in the Triangle. This area has been promised rail transit for nearly three decades and still only has Amtrak (though much better Amtrak service than what we used to have).
That being said, I think the tides are changing… for real this time. Like @keita said, there’s some promising shifts happening in NCDOT and USDOT. I’m still a bit nervous about the Durham-Clayton commuter rail project (mostly because of Norfolk Southern), but I’m very optimistic about the S-Line.
One thing I will note, and I’m probably in the minority here… I actually don’t think Raleigh needs light rail. At least, not any time soon. I think Bus Rapid Transit, if done properly, will fill that light rail void quite nicely. It’s working really well in areas like Richmond and the San Fernando Valley, and I’ve actually been really impressed with the intentionality of Raleigh’s planning process (the center-running busway, for example, is going to be a huge win for the New Bern project). I believe it was actually Jarrett Walker’s team who talked us out of light rail and into BRT. I don’t see it as a loss, but that’s just me. (DOLRT, on the other hand, was a huge loss, and I get kinda depressed thinking about it sometimes.)
I do, however, want to see a full regional rail buildout (I went on a freaking tirade in this section for some reason, so I'll collapse it to condense things a bit).
With all these lines converging in downtown Raleigh, there’s no reason we shouldn’t strive for true regional rail. I’d even expand on what you have long-term… add Mebane, Selma, Franklinton and even Butner/Oxford to the mix. The lines are already there. Frankly, I’d like to see the whole state aggressively pursue regional rail (like, who the heck took commuter rail between Greensboro and Winston-Salem off the table?). Time to get ahead of the curve and stop acting like we’re a small rural state. We haven’t been for awhile. And North Carolina has the perfect layout for a strong rail system: a lot of midsize-plus cities on existing lines, most of which are growing at astronomical rates. And we’re mostly flat. It wouldn’t even be that hard, and it’d be way cheaper than building bypasses around every freaking city we have to shave off five to ten minutes of drive time.
And before someone says it: I get that we’re not New York. We’re not trying to be New York. We’re trying to be a better, greener, friendlier, more equitable North Carolina. Scotrail has over a hundred trains running between Edinburgh and Glasgow every single day, and neither of those cities are anywhere close to New York (Edinburgh has a smaller metro population than we do).
This is more than doable; it’s common sense. Electric vehicles, unfortunately, aren’t enough to prevent climate change (plus they generate their own list of resource problems, like cobalt mining), and they’re not going to stop cars from killing people either. Autonomous vehicles are not nearly as close to being widespread as a lot of techbois and politicians seem to think they are. And neither EVs nor AVs solve the geometry issue (cars take up a stupid amount of space, and no technological enhancement is going to change that).
TL;DR: Solutions exist, and we have to start getting creative. Endless highway expansion isn’t working, and it hasn’t for decades. North Carolina has an opportunity to lead, and they should. The end. Thanks for coming to another one of my TED talks.
Also, @atl_transplant, really love seeing you so active on here. Your insights as a newcomer have been great. Having a like-minded fresh set of eyes on all the things we get excited about around here has been super refreshing. Keep it up fam.
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I have come to the conclusion that light rail may just not be the right mode for anywhere in Raleigh. For now, we should focus on:
(1) Good regional rail along the NCRR and S-line. Electric trains running every 15 minutes all day, stopping every 1-3 miles - to Durham, Wake Forest, Clayton, and possibly Apex.
(2) Good BRT on key corridors (the 4 called out in the transit plan). Meaning nearly 100% dedicated lanes, running at least every 15 minutes all day
(3) Good bus service everywhere else important. The corridors are mostly called out correctly in the transit plan, plus a few extensions a bit further outside the beltline. Again, every 15 minutes all day.
The NCRR and S-line corridors are well enough located, and BRT will provide enough speed and capacity on other corridors, to propel us forward for the next 20 years.
At that point, if (and only if!!) we make the right choices regarding land use and limiting road expansion, I could see an automated light metro like Skytrain in Vancouver making sense, to augment or supplant the busiest BRT lines.
This does leave the question of what to do with the NS-lines toward Fuquay-Varina and Knightdale/Wendell/Zebulon. These see very little freight traffic, so they’re appealing in a way, and they do hit a few destinations (like WakeMed, Wake Tech, and the downtowns of Knightdale, Wendell, Zebulon, and Fuquay-Varina) but besides that, they are curvy, slow, and long, and just don’t pass through enough density to justify frequent service. My thoughts on this range from just skipping them entirely, to conventional hourly peak-only commuter trains, to some sort of a tram-train that runs like a tram in the city (along New Bern and South Saunders, by adding rails to the BRT busways) and then on the railroad further out, but I’m just not sure. At any rate, these are a low priority.
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By the way, I loved your “freaking tirade” and agree 
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I’ll be honest, I’ve never really actually seen BRT firsthand but it seems (in my ignorant opinion) like just a glorified bus. I fear the public will view it as such and it’ll just end up a big waste of money even if we build dedicated guideways and high frequency. Even the Atlanta StreetCar system has turned into a complete waste and homeless shelter. Hopefully we can try to do it right.
The rail - yes I wanted to expand all these lines but I was like “eh let me control myself!” haha
I got some more ideas coming! Just have to find the time to put them to paper.
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I’ve seen a really good BRT in Hartford, CT of all places (was actually born there) where they took an old rail line and converted it into a Busway. I think that is BRT done perfectly. I don’t think any of our attractive rail lines would be going extinct anytime soon but I think we have to try to get the BRT off some of these actual roadways.
I know the ENS signs at least at the crossings on the Wendell line have “Coastal Carolina Railway” on them and not NS. From my experience doing rail safety down in GA, the shortlines are money hungry and if they’re not really using the line - which this one really seems inactive - they may be willing to sell.
Has the topic of StreetCars come up at all in Raleigh. You don’t need any ROW and it can be a very attractive option of downtown circulation.
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Probably? Some of the light rail corridors for Raleigh included on-street RoWs, so I guess those would technically be streetcars. Raleigh had streetcars in the turn of last century, and it seems like there used to be a historical tour about it (though it’s no longer offered).
For modern full-streetcar options, though, I’d imagine the Wake County light rail project’s Alternatives Analysis talked about it (yeah they got that far before the county gave up on them). I couldn’t find a digital copy of that, though, but the Eva Perry Regional Library in Apex seems to have a physical copy of it.
Going back to what @orulz mentioned about tram-trains, this sounds like an interesting idea for the short lines to me, too! It seems like it won’t work as well on mainline tracks, though, according to a comment by a NCRR staffer:
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The “NS” lines to Fuquay/Wendell are named as such because they were built around the turn of the century by the original Norfolk Southern. Kind of like how that “S” line is so named because it was part of the Seaboard Air Line, or the “H” line got it’s name from… well, actually I don’t know that one…
The Coastal Carolina was only recently (like less than 10 years ago) sold off by the modern Norfolk Southern. Norfolk Southern still owns the line to Fuquay.
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Since I know this will do better here even though it technically belongs in the “show off things from other cities” thread, here’s an interesting idea for how we could raise money for more infrastructure projects like transit: selling its data. Unlike social media, privacy is not an issue since it’s already a public resource!
What if the City or County did something like this to make some extra cash on the side for transit and infrastructure projects?
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I disagree with this. What “doesn’t work” When you expand a highway? Clearly road conditions get better, traffic improves, commuting time shrinks. I mean this is proven all over the world.
Look, I get that people would like to have transit. More transit, better transit, any transit. But putting a blanket statement out that highway expansion “doesn’t work” Isn’t credible. Transit is an add-on solution to road expansions that will never stop.
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Expanded highways reduce congestion for a short time, but new development quickly follows, until not long after, congestion catches up.
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Gotta agree with you here since - well, it’s my real world job to improve traffic flow lol
With that said, there comes a point where it simply doesn’t work anymore.
For example, I-75 North of I-285 in Atlanta has 9 lanes for a short stretch. And it’s still slammed because of upstream conditions. Instead of endless widening, we need to look at improving the source of the congestion, for example tight radii, short merges, weaving distances etc. I-40 between NC 147 and I-540 is a great example. 4 lanes is probably sufficient, but you have 6 exits in a 5 mile stretch causing way too many lane changes.
There are though some roads and highways that do severely need actual widening in this area though and that just is what it is.
Going forward though there needs to be a better analysis of what the road really needs before just widening and more travel options.
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Sell the naming rights of the Transit Agency!
The Red Hat Line, GoTriangle by Duke Health
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How did Charlotte get their system done when it seems like some of our huge hurdles are the state?
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