True, though RDU (but not Umstead Park) and parts of RTP are a part of the Raleigh urban area, and Raleigh and Durham’s urban areas already touch each other in Brier Creek and near the Cisco headquarters. Here’s RTP according to Durham’s 2010 official urban area map. Note that the two urban areas already touched each other -and back then, the NC147-540 connection wasn’t even open yet, and mixed-use developments like Hub RTP and Park Point were just pipe dreams!
I wonder if you could flip your logic about constricted census tracts on its head? If we have non-residential obstacles that geographically limit where Raleigh and Durham can come together to potentially unify, I think the opposite is true too: you could make a better case for unifying the two urban areas if there were more people living in those limited numbers of census tracts, and their residents often commuted to their non-home urban areas.
Translation: I feel like we could make a much stronger statistical case to unify the Triangle if we:
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annex land, then build more densely in specific census tracts in Brier Creek, northern Morrisville/Cary, and southeastern Durham
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incentivize residents of those areas in each county to commute to the other (through convenient public transit?)
Based on the decade-old map, it seems like the tracts we should target are... (click me!)
Wake County census tracts:
- 536.01 (between NC-55 and the Chatham County border)
- 536.02 (near Apple’s expected future headquarters)
- 536.09 (between NC-54 and I-40, including Perimeter Park)
- 536.10 (Brier Creek)
…and Durham County tracts:
- 18.09 (south of Glenwood Av., up to the East End Connector)
- 20.28 (between RTP and 540, including Top Golf and the Umstead Hotel)
- 9801 (the Durham part of RTP)
- 20.27 (NC-55, up to I-40)
Notice that many of those tracts have become the new home of tons of businesses only in the last decade, too, so we’ve already been making progress on this front. So if we’re lucky, maybe we’re on our way to have a solid case for a revised definition by the next census -especially if the idea for better buses between downtown Cary and RTP can move forward, and encourage more transit-oriented developments?
re:Demographia - It’s good to know that some demographers are putting in the effort to combine Durham and Raleigh into a single statistical entry (and I’m sure @Boltman feels vindicated there lol). I have to imagine that’s more of the exception than the norm, though, so it would be reeeeeally nice if the Census Bureau took a better look at their unintended consequences…