what Doesn’t make sense, there will still be congestion in traffic but not as much as some would think, people would still take transit, for those that can not afford a Car for one, saving on cost of maintenance is another. I have lived in LA for Years, and it doesnt seem like it is going to get any better, Just saying. which is why I didn’t need to own a car to add the headache of traffic mess. Not saying light rail is our saving grace, just a option of a means to get around better. Please, do not get me wrong and Im not trying to push any buttons, But coming from a Major city ( NYC ) to living here in Raleigh was indeed a Transit shock to the system, to be living in a "Car Dependent region " is rather daunting at best. Yes, Raleigh is not NYC, but even in smaller cities transit can be more efficient. Well can debate and chat until the cows come home, and there will still be no kind of Rail yet to be seen here any time soon.
I don’t know if it decreases traffic but it seems intuitive that it will at least decrease the speed at which traffic grows. (Of course this is all contingent upon it being utilized) Right now traffic really isn’t very bad in the Triangle. We really have predictable rush hours and even those aren’t too bad compared to some other cities around the same size but as we continue to grow and don’t find other solutions to decrease load on these roadways what will our traffic look like then? Would light rail or commuter rail help mitigate the increase in traffic on the roadways or is it adopted at too small of numbers to have a significant impact?
Just seems like there are so many potential variables it’s probably hard to come up with a definitive answer.
Interesting if you go and dive into the gotriangle annual report.
- In 2017 the ridership went down while the population increased
- The transit budget is made up of mostly grants and taxes, it does not support itself. (I know it’s not meant to)
- It has 71 buses and some other vans. Not a high demand.
- They don’t release the hour by hour ridership levels. I would be safe in saying that the demand before and after the peek hours are very low. Just look at a bus at night, may be 1 or 2 people on it. Good for them because they need the ride to work, live and survive.
It seems with the population explosion this system would be used more and not less.
So what is someone like Duke to do business wise. What is more valuable to its future, that land they have is a serious future revenue generation machine. They see more value in keeping its land than allowing transit through is property, right or wrong it’s about Duke’s best use.
So if the bus system which goes to many more places than the rail would go is not putting butts in the seats with a rising population rapidly growing; the push for rail may be too early.
With all the improvements and future improvements to the highway system around, through and in and out of the city the car still makes the most sense, that is another reason builders keep putting in the parking decks.
Rail yes, but when?
The new Santa Monica/Expo Extension Line was always crowded when I used it during my morning commute. I was late twice to work because there was simply not enough space.
The issue with Los Angeles Metro is that the key locations that need metro are years or decades away from getting metro access and most lines don’t have complete grade separation causing major delays.
Quite a few misconceptions here:
- transit ridership has dropped everywhere, not just the Triangle. This is primarily due to low gas prices, which are cyclical, and easy credit for auto loans, which will be a problem as soon as we hit a recession
- demand is what it is due to chronic underinvestment, which the transit taxes were designed to correct. Additional service has been added but usually takes 24 months to get up to true ridership levels as people get familiar and comfortable with the service.
- The land Duke was asked to donate was a sliver next to 15-501, which would be unable to have any revenue-generating purpose for decades, if ever.
The thing with all these projects is they take years to implement. If we don’t start now we won’t have it avaialavle when we do need it in 5 or 7 years.
True, but you also need to take into account changes in operating hours, places where service got cut, new roads being opened, cities around the Triangle getting bigger in the past few years etc.
Like @JosABanks said, what you noticed is true and real, but I don’t think “people not demanding mobility by public transit” is really a clear-cut thing; there are more variables we should get rid of.
(to answer @dtraleigh’s point, though, this is also super hard to quantify unless you invasively monitor every thought and actions of every resident in the Triangle)
With that said, though, I think you’re onto something for another part of your post (emphasis mine):
You basically just brought up induced demand, which is apparently a thing in economics, behavioral psychology, and transportation planning.
It’s an extension of the idea of “if you build it, they will come”. For example, if you make a highway wider, you might make it less congested based on who uses it now…
…but more people who didn’t previously use that road might want to use it now, too. Since even more people use the road now than before construction, your demand for that road got worse once a bit of time passes; by making the highway wider, you ended up making congestion worse.
I think it’s impossible to tell if rail can ease traffic anywhere in North America -mainly because any effects it (or any kind of public transit!) might have are dominated by car traffic changes due to induced demand.
I guess that Durham and Chapel Hill better start planning their BRT instead.
To me, light rail is to allow dense areas to continue to grow and prosper past the point they could reach with automotive transportation alone. It doesn’t prevent congestion. It provides a reliable alternative in spite of congestion.
Compared with, say, Charlotte, or even Durham, road access to downtown Raleigh is extremely constrained. The options for increasing vehicular capacity into downtown, as far as I can see, would be to (1) add two lanes to Western Blvd through NCSU, and (2) find a way to connect South Wilmington Street to I-40, and that’s all she wrote. Another cycle of growth and even those avenues will be exhausted.
If we want downtown to continue to grow, we need options with higher capacity and ridership than a standard lane of traffic.
And then as we have transit in place, we can go about strategic road diets to make the city a better place, and because of the congestion, some people will move to transit.
Light rail is an investment that prevents future traffic. It will not ease any traffic you already have. This makes it necessary in the fight to keep growth comfortable for existing residents, but makes it easy to attack because early on, it will always look bad on paper compared to investing equivalent money into roads that already get network benefits.
Portland is probably the textbook example of a mid-sized city that introduced rail transit and had success with it. Cities like Atlanta and Los Angeles that started too late had too much extant development that couldn’t benefit from it, and their struggle is very different (though both are getting better). The goal is to reshape growth towards development that utilizes the transit system, which pays off many years down the line in terms of reducing the future strain on roads.
Arguably, any transit* is an investment that helps limit future traffic, not just light rail.
*Transit that is frequent, abundant, and reliable.
Light rail is simply one mode, one tool in the transit tool kit. A broad frequent bus network could be argued to be more useful against increasing traffic than a single light rail line. It may not even be the best one for certain purposes. Most of the light rail built in Los Angeles may have been better as regional (frequent all-day commuter) rail, as it would provide faster service end to end. We should be more mode agnostic and support (and use) the best transit mode for the job.
That’s correct.
The thing about light rail is really the capacity benefits over bus rapid transit (which benefits over typical buses in having separated facilities from general traffic).
Great article highlighting the benefit of having the light rail for visitors during the ACC tournament in Charlotte.
I’m a huge advocate for light rail, but I don’t think Orange County will ever have or need the density to support the enormous investment. The focus of Go-Triangle should start in Raleigh, with service to smaller municipalities.
I completely agree that transit needs to start where it’s most needed.
Good point. Isn’t Raleigh a denser area than CHill/Durham?
I found it curious that there’s a case to run a line from UNC Hospital to Duke Hospital. Is there really that many workers from Chapel Hill that are commuting to Duke? (and vice-versa). Maybe so. I guess that expected ridership numbers are in the various feasibility studies.
Seems that downtown Raleigh with spokes through Capital, New Bern, toward Garner, and to Cary/Morrisville/RTP would have considerably more volume. Plus the tie-in to RUS-BUS.
To be fair just Duke University Hospitals and UNC Childrens Hospital alone are among the biggest employers in NC with 10k each. I would assume there is a fair amount of employees that would benefit from the light rail which connects the universities/hospitals with less prosperous areas in East/South Central Durham or in between Durham/CH
RTP/Morrisville/Cary employment base has a broader ride-for-convenience segment than ride-for-necessity compared
Don’t get me wrong I want all the light rail and would love to ride from downtown to RDU and beyond 
Makes sense as those hospitals are such large employers.
It’s interesting that Raleigh’s density is the highest of any city in the region, 3.1 now, heading to 3.4 just a few years. In fact the largest cities in Wake County are more dense than Durham or Chapel Hill. Intuitively, I’d have figured the college towns would be more dense.
3.1 Raleigh
2.9 Cary
2.9 Apex
2.8 Chapel Hill
2.4 Durham
You geek out on the map by clicking various cities.
https://www.opendatanetwork.com/entity/1600000US3755000/Raleigh_NC/geographic.population.density?year=2017
i.e.
2.7 Charlotte
2.2 Greensboro
2.0 Asheville
Carrboro is the densest municipality in NC, actually. 3.265 per square mile.
Has been that way for a long time, so I’m a bit surprised this isn’t more known. I’m sure in a decade or so Raleigh will eventually pass it though, since it is growing much faster.
Carrboro is a weird place, and how it got its density is also a bit circumstantial. But it has been supplemented and maintained with good urban-friendly policy… which I think the rest of the state could learn a thing or two from. For instance, allowing a developer to build denser than zoning allows for if they include a percentage of affordable housing. There is also an urban growth boundary, much like Portland OR, and bus service is fully subsidized.
I fundamentally disagree with some of these posts about Chapel Hill/Carrboro’s supposed ‘inability’ to sustain transit. The area is already more transit geared than the rest of the Triangle, with possibly the best bus service in the state. It also has utterly terrible road connections to the outside world, which will not be upgraded meaningfully any time soon, which makes a transit alternative that avoids the mess on 54 and 15-501 extremely appealing. It is a convenient urban ‘node’.
I would make the case that while Chapel Hill/Carrboro and UNC combined may only be 100,000 or so, that is quite similar to the population that would actually see service near the line in Raleigh, at least at first. ITB is what, 180,000? Some of that is fairly outlying though, unlikely to use the line. As for Garner being a better choice… preposterous. I do think the line should start with Raleigh, but it’s more sound than you might think, starting with Chapel Hill on the other end.
I’ve actually known this for years, but I’m a geek about such things.
That said, Carrboro is basically a residential town adjacent to a college town, which emphasizes, well, residents within its limits. No surprise to me since it also needs to be somewhat walkable for the plethora of residents who probably don’t own cars.
I too suspect that Raleigh will pass its density metric in the near future, though the models suggest that Morrisville will do it sooner.
The reality is that legacy cities before the automobile age (pre WW2) were more dense in their limits than they are today. The age of suburbia started moving the metrics backward in density for decades, and we are only starting to claw our way back now. The fact that Raleigh, which has seen more than its fare share of suburban growth, leads the state in density for major NC cities flies in the face of the narrative that typically accompanies Raleigh as the most sprawling city in the state. Conversely, Durham has been given a pass all this time while it’s way less densely populated than Raleigh. Just drive through southern Durham (but north of 40) to see what I mean. It’s pretty darned bucolic and VERY suburban. It reminds me of what north Raleigh felt like 40+ years ago.
Live stream of the meeting to discuss the Millions in funds needed to continue. Not looking good, but MAYBE GoTriangle will find more return on their dollar focusing on Raleigh as the center hub for this gigantic investment.