We have scooters. More efficient than streetcars . Streetcars too expensive.
Scooters are probably expensive if your going from Downtown to North Hills, those are for denser areas like going around the CBD to a museum or the train stations or maybe the iron district.
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Oof, I loathe those things. People drive like morons on them, leave them all over the sidewalks, either hold up road traffic or play kamikaze with pedestrians. I saw a guy literally break his skull on one hitting a curb. One of the worst travel âinnovationsâ of recent years.
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In fairness, I think the popularity of the scooters incentivized some cities to beef up their bike infrastructure, so thatâs a plus.
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The rental ones and some of the people using them can be reckless, but you would never imagine how many people ride those home from work leaving downtown. Obviously using their own scooter, but I see it all, business suits, work dresses and fancy shoes. Your less likely to affect your clothing or get sweaty on these.
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I think my biggest pet peeve is that they basically get discarded around downtown. I know someone is supposed to come and pick them up but I feel I pass a bunch that have been knocked to the ground all the time.
On Glenwood South there is a fine for not parking them in a âcorralâ and itâs made a noticeable impact. But I avoid traveling down Glenwood south since they implemented that 1/2 speed zone restriction, the scooter can barely make it up the hill.
Usually I see shit kids kicking them over and laughing while running away just to be destructive. Thatâs probably more what you see.
Sydneyâs latest light rail is exactly what we should be building if we decide to get a light rail system:
âSydney Metro offers a new generation of fast, safe and reliable train services. Metro services are high-frequency, driverless trains, which can quickly take you between Tallawong Station and Chatswood Station. With frequent services you can just turn up and go. The metro stops at 13 stations along the Metro North West Line, including 8 new metro stations and 5 upgraded stations.â
Itâs 100% automated.
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Iâm personally all for it and signed the petition.
But a dose of reality - This region has fumbled several opportunities in execution. Orange County Light Rail, Regional commuter rail, and now City or Raleigh having issues getting BRT off the ground.
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Sorry to be 
but this comes across as completely blind to the context of transit in the Triangle, beginning with the framework for mass transit weâd been working toward since the 2000s. Do you know why attempts at building all three of those lines have failed, after decades of planning and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on design? Is this map supposed to be adopted in lieu of the approved Bus Rapid Transit projects that are already underway? Where do you propose the roughly $50 billion to build this map should come from, especially when Wake County voters previously declined to fund a proposed rail line that cost only 3% of that amount, and the federal government declined to fund commuter rail in the Triangle because we do not meet density/ridership requirements? (The average cost of the dozen or so light rail projects underway in the US right now is over $200 million per mile. So that single red line on your map â that alone would cost around 8 billion dollars to build).
Promoting transit in this forum is preaching to the choir â all of us understand its value and could only dream of achieving whatâs laid out here. But I feel like youâd be taken more seriously if you acknowledged some of the realities of where weâre at. Transit is so much more complicated than drawing lines on a map, especially when it comes to rail. Thereâs a reason our planners are focused on BRT right now. Itâs not because we donât want rail; itâs because there is no feasible way to get to it right now.
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@Nathanc, Iâm curious if youâve read any or all of the discussions in this forum on these various transportation topics. I know itâs a lot of information to catch up on if youâre starting now, but there are some incredibly educated contributors in this community that I swear know more than some of the people attempting to execute some of these ideas. You came to the right place for feedback, thatâs for sure, but it will come with criticism at best.
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I love this! Iâll see you in 20 years to sign the next petition!
(light ribbing but not at your expense, I just have absolutely ZERO faith in this city/metro area regarding ACTUAL decent public transpo)
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I second that! Itâs 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. Itâs not a matter of a lack of public willpower; itâs 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 (weâre a sprawly, predominantly-suburbian Sun Belt metro; youâre inherently playing the trainsit-planning game on âHard Modeâ)
âŚand you have to do a very careful, complex, and fragile balancing act if you want to get anything done.
Dylan, @orulz, and Iâm probably responsible for a major chunk of this backlog of posts across several threads on this site. Iâm happy to help you understand this more if you want to DM me particular questions about specific topics, and Iâm sure others on here will say the same.
But either way, youâll 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. âŚand 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, youâll learn that the reason we donât 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 âlight-rail-or-dieâ 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 systemsâ 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 transitâs dependence on good land use laws (e.g. transit-oriented development, affordable housing) and political considerations for those issues
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This whole map and the City of Raleigh would prioritize building the orange line to Knightdale first.
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the Orange line east into Cary is an ABSURD path across lakes and places that are full of NIMBYs. You think youâre building a rail line through freaking Lochmere after CROSSING A COUPLE OF LAKES along the way, and then up the hill to Waverly Place? The Lochmere-ladies-who-lunch are already up in arms about Hines Development Corp (who built Fenton) having a rezoning on the agenda for next weekâs town council meeting in Cary to approve a rezoning for 750 apartments mixed use at the shopping center. I may or may not have anonymously infiltrated the group of neighbors trying to block it LOL
Regardless, the creators of this rail map are about 30 years too late. sorry.
Let me start by saying that, as somebody who has spent countless hours drawing crayon fantasy light rail maps, I think this is a pretty good one. Iâd be especially interested to see what youâve drawn for how these lines come together in downtown Raleigh.
The structure and scale of this fantasy map reminds me a lot of Dallasâs current network. And of all the metro areas in the US, Dallas is probably the closest analogue for what our metro will look like in the future, on our current trajectory anyway. On that note, hereâs a few things to keep this in perspective:
The current population of the DFW metroplex is nearly 4x that of RDU. At present CSA-wide growth rates of approximately 2%, it will take us about 68 years to catch up to where DFW is today.
DFW opened their first lines in 1996, 29 years ago, when the CSA population was 5.3 million - or 2.2 times that of RDU. At present growth rates, we will reach that population 39 years from now.
(Double checking, 29 + 39 = 68. The math adds up perfectly.)
So if we follow the trajectory of Dallas, we would open our first light rail line some time around 2064, and have a network about the size of what youâve drawn by about 2093.
And itâs also important to note that while Dallas has managed to build a fairly extensive system, itâs not really viewed as especially successful. With 180 route miles in the network across DART Light Rail, and the regional lines like TRE, TexRail, and Silver Line, you would hope for far higher ridership than theyâve been able to obtain.
Now, I think everyone on here would like to see our metro be more proactive about building transit and aligning growth to that transit than Dallas has been. I would be 82 in 2064 and 111 in 2093 and Iâd really like to see something get going before then. But a critical point that canât be understated is that Dallas had the financial capacity (and traffic problems) of a metro more than twice our size when they even started to build all of this out in the 90s. So we have to plan and prioritize well, and also be willing to embrace realistic goals, in order to make anything at all happen. As fun as it is to draw a bunch of lines on the map, in the reality of Raleigh, NC, USA, in 2025, having a âvisionâ is the easy part, planning for and building financial, political, and especially public support, and directing growth in a way that would make rail as useful as possible, is by far the harder and more important task.
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