A little of both I believe.
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I think it was planning on using the existing rail corridor parallel to Atlantic Avenue
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Will be commuter rail and not a light rail.
How far deep is the bedrock in the Beltline? Appearantly a common 7 meter wide boring machine designed for subways can be had for as little as $12 million in Europe. Anything bigger is custom/bespoke and much more expensive.
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No clue, but Iād imagine that would require some sort of land survey study.
I tried doing a quick search through the US Geological Survey, and the closes thing I could find was this survey of bedrock depths across the US.
It seems like thereās public data for eastern Raleigh (minimum depth of about one meter, or 3-4ft), but thereās not a lot of data ITB. (maybe someone with more time or experience could do better than me at finding that?)
Even if a boring machine can be bought for relatively cheap, though, it would probably still cost a ton to run it (like $10 million a mile, right?). Not sure if thatās something voters would be too happy aboutā¦
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True, but all we need is a cross, 1000 ft down/under Fayetteville st and then 1000 ft from under Union station toward east Raleighā¦ 
Where will you dig the eastern/western portals?
How do you connect those portals to the rest of the rail system/BRT busway/whatever else you want?
And are you willing to spend millions of more dollars to buy easement rights to do all of this digging (or even get permission from land owners to do this in the first place)?
The early ideas about a Raleigh-wide light rail system was shot down because the costs outweighed the benefits. ā¦so I donāt think itās reasonable to do things thatāre even more expensive unless thereās a REALLY good reason besides āoh itād be cool, ya know??ā. Iām not tryna start a circlejerk again here, after all.
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Rail is only going to matter when there are dense, walkable nodes of development and services that enable it. Unfortunately, it doesnāt look like voters can be convinced that rail stops will enable/create those nodes.
Right now, there only seems to be 3 nodes in play: Downtown (well, maybe thereās more than one node downtown?), NC State/Hillsborough/Cameron Village, and North Hills/Midtown. All of these areas are relatively close to each other and a strong argument could be made to connect them with a rail service. I can imagine something that follows from North Hills down Six Forks, to Wake Forest Road, and onto Capital Blvd. into downtown. Then, I can imagine a branch running from downtown through the Hillsborough St. Corridor. At key locations, I can imagine RLine type circulators intersecting it to serve broader associated communities.
I can imagine Crabtree emerging as another node, but its walkable credentials just arenāt there yet.
It might seem like an unambitious plan, but itās one that I think could provide a solid foundation, and more importantly, one that is actually used.
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Donāt forget about the utility conflicts. I donāt think some tunneling is out of the question, but I donāt think it could ever be extensive.
Iām hoping they can get the ROW they need to do the BRT right. The BRT lines could conceivably become light rail in the future, and re-use the BRT rolling stock to expand with new routes. If they had the ROW it might be possible to grade separate the major intersections.
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Not sure what the voters have anything to do with it at this point. We have already passed the transit sales and use tax. Itās just a matter of bureaucratic malaise to see it through. Hopefully within the next 20 yearsā¦
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Ultimately, everything needs political will, and votes are the measurement of the political will.
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I agree. And the voters gave the political will with the passage of the transit tax. I am not sure what else is needed. So I disagree that we need any more votes to get it done. It needs bureaucratic will at this point. And hopefully not another disaster that sets everything behind another decade.
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Iāve kind of have this internal countdown in my head where I expect most, if not all, aspects of the 10-year Wake County Transit plan to be up and running inā¦ 10 years. Right or wrong, I expect the countdown to start on the month that the county raised the sales tax, April 2017.
Will it all be 100% on April 2027?
āIn transit, nothing is set in stone,ā Iāve heard David Eatman, our cityās Transit Administrator say multiple times. I want to be positive as well but with so much funding at the state and federal level being applied for, you just never know.
Iām actually so glad we took on a project like BRT as it should (god, hopefully) be something Raleigh can take on rather than a larger project like light-rail. Letās hope and help the New Bern BRT line be a success so that it sets up the others as well.
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I donāt expect the transit tax alone to be enough money. Iād love to be wrong about that.
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I think there will be federal funds for the BRT. Iāve heard the big deal is that we wonāt require state funds, which can be much more difficult to come by.
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Well, and this is where political will expands beyond the local. Itās needed at the federal level for sure, and it wouldnāt hurt to have it at the state level if it could be had.
The Republican-dominated legislature has not been as outspoken and critical about commuter rail (which serves their suburban constituencies) and BRT (which they see as more cost effective - aka cheaper) as they have been about the DOLRT. I would expect some state contributions are possible for BRT but they may come with strings attached (such as: no reductions in car lanes.)
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Sunday morning before church I was talking to a friend who lives in Knightdale, and we got talking about transit, and I mentioned the commuter rail, and he said, āWhatās the commuter rail?ā
By the time I had finished rattling off my vision for regional rail in Raleigh, we had missed the first three songs of the service.
Anyway, sample size of n=1, but this Knightdale resident was pretty excited about the idea of trains connecting Zebulon to Wendell to Knightdate to East Raleigh to Union Station. And that line runs right through downtown, such as it is, in each of those three suburbs. I think you could accomplish a lot with this line.
How would/could we best incorporate Apex into regional rail? Seems like it would be good to integrate downtown Apex, too. Then youād just have Holly Springs and Rolesville as the only municipalities in Wake County that didnāt connect to the rail network. Thatād be a pretty comprehensive network.
Also, one of the interesting things about this forum is that discussions ooze across different threads, and it can be tough sometimes to find a particular post that youāre looking for. But this post was actually the first time I had ever heard the phrase āwrong-way transferā (obviously I could figure out the meaning from context), which actually proved to be an extremely handy bookmark for locating this post. 
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Extending commuter rail to Zebulon should definitely be explored. The challenge is that among all of the existing rail lines eminating from Raleigh, this line would likely require the most work to bring up to commuter rail serviceability requirements, maybe with the exception of the line to F-V.
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When the Eastrans idea was floated back in the 1990ās whilst Triangle Transit was working on their Regional Rail plan, they realized that the original NS line was so curvy, that the expense of bringing it up to spec as a commuter line was going to be too great. So, it got dropped.
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