I didn’t mean drink on the trains of course I meant that if you want to go out in Durham for a night or afternoon you can have some drinks etc and not have to worry about driving home. My wife and I are getting 10 trip packs so we can use the current train to go between Raleigh and Durham for dinner or an afternoon of brewery hopping.
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How about BRT for Chapel Hill and Duke to downtown Durham and focus on commuter rail from Garner to downtown Durham?
Also, I think that a multi-nodal city such as ours can benefit perhaps even more than a single downtown center city from mass transit. London is a perfect example of multiple hyper-dense nodes connected by mass transit. I think the central downtown node with spokes to suburbs sometimes is less utilized.
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This keeps coming up, but as much as this would be nice, GoTriangle literally cannot do this unless they throw away the Durham light rail project and waste yet another $100 million in planning.
As a review, this is how the Federal Transit Administration’s “New Starts” program to federally fund public transit systems works (to elaborate on what @orulz responded to @OakCityDylan)
When Durham and Orange county governments chose their LPA, they systematically ruled out BRT because they had to in order to go through these steps. If GoTriangle wants to scrap light rail and make the Chapel Hill-Durham corridor into a BRT project, they probably can’t just call backsies without violating federal guidelines.
That’s why they gave this out to elected officials:
TL/DR: converting the Durham light rail project’s charred remains to BRT may be nice if you weren’t breaking federal guidelines.
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Thanks Dook!
Way to derail the transportation plan of the entire region for years.
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DISCLAIMER - I’m about to get a little conspiracy theorist here, so please take what I’m saying as my own personal opinion:
The Koch family has been killing public transportation projects across the country. A quick Google search will show that their Americans For Prosperity political advocacy group has been actively opposing efforts everywhere.
NEW YORK TIMES › How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country
Perhaps it’s coincidence that Duke just recently received a $5 million grant from the Charles Koch Foundation to help expand their Center for the History of Political Economy.
To be fair, UNC also receives money from the Charles Koch Foundation and yet they were OK with the light rail project on their campus. So I really could just be dreaming up a conspiracy theory. It’s something to think about, though.
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Ah yes spend $150 million on a light rail project that connects a small city to the second largest city in the triangle through an extremely wealthy private university full of Conservatives (predictably anti-rail or public projects) and old money without prior consent from said university and totally not servicing either the airport or the 1,000,000 citizens of Wake County. Crippling Wake County public transportation options for decades. Let’s not forget that heavy commuter rail funding efforts were delayed a year to help this light rail effort.
We will never get that $150 million back. Imagine what rail improvements that would have paid for.
Don’t screw dook, they know who they are, screw Durham/Orange county.
Connecting Raleigh, Cary, and Durham should have been #1 priority.
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Wake County voted against the light rail! I don’t know how many times we need to say this, both the county commissioners and the voting public decided on a transit plan without light rail, so talking trash about the Durham/Orange plan for not connecting to Wake is a moot point. Wake wanted to do other things with transit like BRT, so Durham and Orange did their own thing.
Also, GoTriangle didn’t need Duke’s blessing before the state decided to cut its share of the funding last year in a fit of anti-urban s**** and giggles, thus forcing GoTriangle to beg to Duke with hat-in-hand to donate the land instead.
I’m all for good faith criticisms of the DOLRT plan, but at least get the facts straight.
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I never said light rail to connect Wake to Durham. I said transportation efforts. Shame on everyone involved.
I was under the impression the Durham/Orange LRT connection was prioritized because voters approved it in those counties. While there is overwhelming support for light rail among voters in Wake, at the time these plans were conceived, the Wake BOC had a tea party majority that blocked any attempts at rail, and by the time they were voted out, we had a federal and state government that were hostile to rail funding instead.
Ultimately this comes back to gerrymandering. If we had a normal state government, Durham could just eminent domain the land they need from Duke to end this. It would be another $13 million–trivial after what we’ve spent already. Right now though, if they tried to, Duke would inevitably run crying to the general assembly–which has been consistently hostile to the cities, who would respond swiftly and severely.
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Wake County voters overwhelmingly approved taxes to pay for mass transit including commuter rail from Garner to downtown Durham in 2016.
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I wouldn’t call a 53% vote “overwhelming,” but there is definitely a broad consensus across the county that we need to invest in transit.
My point is that I as a voter voted to tax myself with the idea that the transit plan be implemented as described in the referendum. I should expect my tax money to go toward what I voted for. Durham and Orange separately voted for their transit plan. I just expect as a voter that the failure of their plan shouldn’t stop our plan. I know it’s more complicated than that but I hope that Durham’s stumble won’t affect our plan.
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Everyone I know that voted against the tax did so because they wanted a more progressive form of tax instead of sales, but they supported the transit itself.
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Sounds like “those” friends voted against there own interest…I believe that most people do, sadly! 
I fully agree with their position, for the record, but ultimately caved and voted for, because I saw little chance of improving the tax code under NC’s current government and transit had to happen.
My point is to say that a large percentage of the ‘No’ votes are not necessarily anti-transit votes.
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Well… now that Duke screwed over Chapel Hill/Durham for the foreseeable future (also to get this thread back on topic), what does this mean for Raleigh? Is there a landowner (or some other force) we need to keep in mind while the commuter rail project goes through its alternatives analysis?
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with “Light Rail” being such a skidist topic, nobody is not seeing the benefits of it, 1. ease of traffic congestion during rush hour, 2. quicker response time with frequent stops or express routes. sure, there are pros and cons with light rail, or commuter rail But overall,people need to move around more effectively and safely. the whole reason I posted this topic is for DTR and Raleigh have better options of Transit than what we have now. Would love to see a rail route from Garner to Durham, at least its a start, and besides the Population in the Triangle area is Growing every Year, sooner or later, at some point, we will need this means of Transit to offset traffic flow in the Area.
Could we spend some time on the theory that having light-rail, or any rail, in your city eases traffic? I feel like this is a false statement that transit advocates like to use to support projects. I am a transit advocate, don’t get me wrong, but saying it eases traffic just doesn’t make sense to me because if the traffic eased up, some people wouldn’t take transit, they would continue to drive.
Let’s look at LA, where folks are passing transit taxes in waves yet not actually riding the transit.
I do believe we could ease traffic if the transit that’s put in place is seriously competitive when it comes to people’s time and their wallets. At the same time, I’m not aware of a city, at least in North America, that does it that competitively.
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I don’t know why they just don’t run it along 15/501 and 147 next to Duke, and into DT Durham. I mean 147 goes right up against Duke’s North Pavilion building, which is being expanded right now.
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