I second that! It’s not that the Triangle has never even thought about rail at all; you can dig through public documents all the way back to the 1980s to find evidence of decision-makers and advocates trying to make this happen. It’s not a matter of a lack of public willpower; it’s that you have five broad groups of variables:
- Citizen and political will;
- The physics of engineering (civil engineering, geology etc.);
- Access to a limited amount of money (and ways to make them);
- Rules 'n laws around who can use land to build what (landownership, zoning, eminent domain etc.), and;
- Geography (we’re a sprawly, predominantly-suburbian Sun Belt metro; you’re inherently playing the trainsit-planning game on “Hard Mode”)
…and you have to do a very careful, complex, and fragile balancing act if you want to get anything done.
Dylan, @orulz, and I’m probably responsible for a major chunk of this backlog of posts across several threads on this site. I’m happy to help you understand this more if you want to DM me particular questions about specific topics, and I’m sure others on here will say the same.
But either way, you’ll really want to take some time and patience to understand what came before you. Many of us have lived in the area for decades, work in the field, and/or have had direct contacts with relevant decision-makers like city/state officials and transit agency employees. …and even then, we can all tell you that you need to do your homework if you and your ideas are going to be taken seriously.
Another warning: as you keep learning more, you’ll learn that the reason we don’t have light rail in Raleigh is deeply connected to several other regional issues. This includes:
- GoTriangle in general
- The previous attempt at light rail in the Triangle - and more specifically, how the North Carolina General Assembly, Duke University, the parent company of WRAL, certain groups of local residents, and a transit agency CEO with a “light-rail-or-die” attitude all brought those initiatives to its knees
- Our historical attempts at commuter/regional rail
- On how buses are being improved in Raleigh and the Triangle at large
- Bus rapid transit (BRT) as a compromise between light rail diehards and a bus-only world, and how even that has been a struggle
- The complexities behind building just one multimodal station, Raleigh Union Station
- The overall state of passenger rail in North Carolina
- American transit systems’ reliance on government budget allocations and federal grants
- How public comments, lawsuits, and the National Environmental Protection Act can be weaponized to prevent transit projects form happening
- Public transit’s dependence on good land use laws (e.g. transit-oriented development, affordable housing) and political considerations for those issues