Have you checked out the Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) buses? I really like them. 25% of the noise and no nauseating exhaust. Go Raleigh has been rolling out a lot of them. They are also 35% or something like that cheaper than the all electric buses. The city did order some electric buses to try them out. The CNG buses don’t need charging stations along longer routes like Electric would as well. Inbound Raleigh did an episode on this topic.https://inboundraleigh.com/2018/12/20/ep-52-answering-your-transportation-questions-edition-2/
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Or you could just move to a city that has all those things already… 
Seriously who doesn’t want a Utopian perfect city. But ignoring the reality of most of America and Raleigh in particular doesn’t get us anywhere. Money is limited. Rail of any kind will not be able to help the majority of us in Wake County. Riding bicycles from our suburban towns to downtown Raleigh or RTP is not particularly feasible for 99.9% of us. Those people who do the planning for our communities need to be taught differently and a new culture and a way of seeing things needs to be developed and that alone will take many many years. I think Cary for instance has been under utilizing the land they have for decades now. They NEVER build to the density that is allowed by zoning because it’s all a game being played by the developer, town commission, and current residents. But hey now I am starting to get off track…
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Just wanted to state that there are a lot of people living within 2-3 miles of downtown, and the biggest reason getting there on a bike is impractical for them is that they are afraid of dying along the way because of the way our infrastructure caters to cars and nothing else. There are some people who just hate biking and love cars. Fine. But when I bike to work I get in so many conversations with coworkers who love biking and live within range, but when asked why they don’t try it, “too dangerous” is the reply. And when they say that, they don’t mean they are worried about hitting a pothole and falling. They are worried about getting splattered by a driver who couldn’t bear to put Instagram down for their whole 30 minute commute at 10 over the speed limit.
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I propose that whenever a lane is added to an existing highway, it needs to be for BRT or rail. Sounds dramatic. But we won’t ever get support to build BRT or rail if all we ever do is add more lanes.
When they did the Six forks corridor study, a proposal was to include a BRT lane. Residents in the area voted it down. So instead of BRT we’ll get another 3 lane falls of Nuese Rd. Awesome!
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Cary is a suburban wasteland. So many car centric restaurant spots and retail (Cary town center) continually fail tenant after tenant and the town just keeps spreading with the same lofty requirements on developers to include underused geenways to no where, unsustainable oversized utility pipes, wider lanes and gentler slopes for neighborhood streets. The facts are:
- trends are pointing toward increased demand for live-work-play urbanism
- downtown’s are increasing in density adding more jobs and living units
- people increasingly don’t want to spend their precious time tending to a large yard, maintaining their car, or sitting in traffic. The experiential economy is taking over
All this to say that transit isn’t “nice to have”, it is the future for any city looking to keep up with the Joneses. As DTR continues to add office towers, apartment buildings, attractions, and retail, transit will be that much more needed and we’re already behind. Whether you ride it or not, support it or not, it’s gotta get done. Including safe bike infra so vote for that cycletrack!
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Yeah I don’t quite get the vitriol directed at Cary specifically. North Raleigh is no different and not really any better or more “woke.” Neither are Wake Forest, Knightdale, Apex, or Garner for that matter. It is all suburbia. Cary just happens to constitute the rather large slice of Raleigh’s suburban pie from roughly 8 to 10 o’clock. Big parts of Durham and Chapel Hill are just as suburban as Cary, too. Cary may have Crossroads and CTC but Raleigh has Brier Creek and TTC.
I actually think that the wealthier stretches of NW ITB Raleigh have a worse problem with NIMBYism than most of Cary.
Suburbs, in general, are a suburban wasteland.
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From the transportation side (as someone who works as a traffic engineer), I think most of the younger folks are…
- Still being taught the old ways of doing things - we haven’t really advanced farther to implement new ideas and ways of thinking into engineering classes in college and coming out of college, people are being mentored by older folks who have always done it the way we’ve been doing it.
- Going to the private sector, which is a problem because while it is a nicer, higher paying job, ultimately the decisions are being made by people who work in the public sector. As a result, you sort of have a brain drain in the public sector and the people who are in charge might not be the best at making the decisions that need to be made. I don’t think that’s the case for Raleigh - we have tons of great people working in our transportation department, and luckily NCDOT is raising it’s pay for its employees… - but it’s definitely something I worry about in the future as the public sector isn’t viewed as secure of a job like people used to think.
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Disappointing to read this but not unexpected. I almost think that real change could happen if NCDOT starts to vendor out certain projects rather than take it on themselves. However, I view them as an org that wants to do things themselves.
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I agree with you here for the most part, except I will add that the reason North Raleigh is not as bad as Cary, Apex, or Holly springs, is because the major corridors of North Raleigh which define the retail areas compared to the neighborhoods are generally oriented with respect to downtown Raleigh. in my mind there is hope for North Raleigh because as downtown becomes a large employment center capital, falls, six forks, and Glenwood can become dense Transit corridors.
Maybe someone can make the same argument for Cary with 54, but Cary parkway and Maynard for example are massive roads to no where that just meander around suburbia aimlessly. And it all looks the same.
Also, as the state’s seventh largest city by population ahead of Wilmington surprisingly, Cary is the poster child for sprawly suburban cities.
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NCDOT has been giving out projects to private consultants for a few years now (started after I graduated from college in 2013). However, there are still people at NCDOT who manage/coordinate the projects and will review our work/make comments on projects. Therefore, there’s still a sense that we need to do things how NCDOT wants to be done since they’re the ones paying the bills so we do things by their book.
(And even if that wasn’t the case - Point #1 still doesn’t help things out. It’s sort of a bleak situation with how it’s likely the status quo is going to continue unless the people higher up the chain decide to make some radical changes)
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So when I think about incentives to help them nudge away from that, the only thing I can think of is political will at the state level. Top down approaches to an organization that is basically a monopoly will most likely be badly implemented but something.
I’ve been defeated in thinking that a bottom up approach will ever work. 
(yeah, I’m pessimistic whenever we have to work with NCDOT)
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Cary is more dense population wise than Charlotte, Durham, Greensboro… etc… and they are not all that far behind Raleigh…
I find that hard to believe. Not doubting your statement. Just don’t see how? Cary is the definition of suburban sprawl.
I have previously listed reasons for the current drop in transit ridership in this thread. Please go back and read before you make uninformed comments like these.
Yup, got that, I’d rather read the reports from all the cities I have studied (from the year end reports of the agencies) and go with that.
Interesting in Charlotte that once the rail came the bus ridership went down and rail went up, seems like ppl like the rail.
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Raleigh as a whole is not much denser than Cary. Sure downtown Raleigh is much denser but when you throw in all the other parts…(who gets credit for Umstead?)
Clearly it belongs to Raleigh
I certainly agree with the danger keeping a lot of folks from biking to work. I used to bike commute to work a couple days a week and it took me 25 mins vs 15 in a car. I saved money, got excercise in for the day and basically had a good overall feeling about what I was doing. I’ve always tried to live within a 30 min bike ride of my work, because I don’t like to be car dependent for everything.
In 2016 we had a son and a couple months later someone I knew was hit by a car and will never be the same. A couple of other local bikers were hit around that time as well. I haven’t bike commuted since then.
Perhaps suburban living is not for everyone, but apparently it’s for over 80% of Wake County residents. Note further that the north Raleigh OTB zip codes actually have most of the city’s apartment stock.
I’m happy for the 25,000 people or thereabouts who live within 2 miles of the Capitol, but politically they’re a drop in the bucket. Moreover, although their numbers are growing, so is the suburban population that they look down at.
What @orulz was saying isn’t about dreaming about a utopia, though. Choice and freedom are nice things to have, until the freedom for certain people to do things endangers or disadvantages other people -it’s a less extreme version of why you should not have the “freedom to commit murder”.
If studies on markets and demand were perfect, scientific, and omniscient exercises, then yeah, finding a lack of demand for a potential project would mean it’s not worth doing the thing. But social sciences are never objective. You can’t treat it as absolutely as you would say that gravity makes things fall down, because the assumptions you need to make those claims are nowhere near as waterproof.
This is absolutely true (also see @pierretong’s comment from earlier). And…
…reminder: the comment that started this whole debate was not about trashing on people’s choices of living in suburbs. Instead, it’s about the existence of suburbs, itself, and what it enables and perpetuates.
In case y’all didn’t read the first sentence:
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