There’s no doubt in my mind that the Burlington MSA could join the Triangle’s CSA as the Triangle’s growth continues to outstrip the Triad’s.
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Yup! I spend most of my time in Chapel Hill (despite being on this Raleigh-centric forum lmao), and I’ve noticed quite a few people using the PART buses before the pandemic. During rush hours, it honestly felt like I saw them just as much as GoTriangle buses to Durham or Raleigh, if not even more. If this will help Alamance County become Orange County’s bedtown (and spark organic growth for itself too!), then I’m all for it 
Chapel Hill (and Orange County at large) has “rural buffers” where they’ve blockaded themselves away from expanding and developing past their current boundaries. I’m having a hard time finding the article that mentions it, but this could partly be because NCDOT tried to plow I-40 through Chapel Hill back in the 1970s before residents fought back.
As a lifelong Tar Heel, I feel like I need to point out that Chapel Hill’s rural buffers don’t automatically make us die-hard NIMBYs. If anything, the limited chances for land development forces our town to be creative with how efficiently we use the land we have. We’ve been working with form-based codes near 15-501 so that there’s enough housing and walkable spaces, and we made (and recently updated) really robust transit and greenway plans long before Raleigh.
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I am going to catalog that one away in my memory. Not wanting a freeway plowing through town is certainly NIMBY, as it was with the Oakwood folks who successfully killed the N/S freeway through DT Raleigh. That said, the idea that these examples exist certainly makes one think about whether or not all NIMBYism is created equally.
FWIW, I’d be interested to learn exactly where 40 was supposed to go relative to the town. See what you can find out. Thanks.
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I think there were a few plans in the 70s to connect 40 from 85 to the Park. I know one plan involved Duke Forest before facing pushback.
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I couldn’t find the original article (I thought someone mentioned it in passing in the Indy, but maybe not?), but I did find some dude’s blog that mentioned this. Here’s a part of a 1973 figure from when the NCDOT did what we’d call an Alternatives Analysis today:
Alternative 1 is the most similar to I-40’s modern path, though it splits off from I-85 several miles to the east of where it does today. Alt. 3 is what we call the Durham Freeway today, and Alt. 4 is the East End Connector/I-885 that should be open in a few months. Alt. 6 is the path that got shot down for passing through Duke Forest that @JeepCSC is talking about; ironically enough, the number 6 is written right where the Forest is.
Let me say this again: Alternative 1 is different from what we know as I-40 today. This means NCDOT fiddled with its design, which clearly involved bringing it closer to Chapel Hill. I thought the controversy I’m talking about happened in the 60s, before this AA came out, but who knows…
Here’s the link to the latest known working copy of the PDF where I got the above image from, since the URL on the blog itself is broken.
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my jobs in the early 2000s were all in between durham and raleigh
Over in the Downtown South thread today there’s the usual talk about population size and pro sports teams and whether Raleigh is doing enough to market itself, and so I went back and looked at population data from old censuses, and it’s just truly mind-boggling how rapidly Raleigh has caught up to cities that used to be much, much larger.
By 1900, most of the U.S. cities that today have major pro sports teams, which is basically also just a list of today’s big U.S. cities, had populations well over 250,000. In 1900 Raleigh had a population of just 13,643. Sure, Raleigh has grown a lot in surface area since then, but so have some other cities, and I seriously doubt that the land Raleigh has annexed since 1900 had a lot of people living in it in 1900. So it’s really amazing how rapidly Raleigh has zoomed up to the edges of the big leagues, both literally and figuratively.
By 1920, Phoenix, Miami, and Tampa had all surpassed Raleigh in population, so at that point single every city with a modern MLB team (for non-baseball fans, this is pretty much synonymous with “today’s large U.S. cities”) was larger than Raleigh was at the time. (I’m counting teams technically located in the suburbs as part of the large city they’re close to.)
So I’d say we’ve done quite well for ourselves, particularly considering there was never any feature like a major port or a canal that would have made Raleigh an obvious destination for a boomtown. It was pretty much all smarts and hustle.
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When you are living it, it might be more difficult to see how fast Raleigh and Wake have grown. I like to use Wake numbers sometimes because the boundary of the county hasn’t changed, and growth can’t be attributed to annexation (a la Omaha).
I think that I’ve put this in previous posts, but Wake County was just over 300,000 in 1980. Chew on that number for a hot second to realize how insanely fast the area has grown since then: closing in on 400% growth in the last 40 years.
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John, would you happen to know Johnston County population in 1980?
According to Google, 70,599 in 1980. Now it is 209,339 (as of 2019 estimates).
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Wikipedia is a great resources for all NC counties, and all population by decade.
That’s actually a bit of old news. Not sure how you missed it. It was all over the news in Raleigh when it was announced.
There’s no excuse for my ignorance.
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Current Wake County city limits in square miles (for those statistical nerds) :
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me, me, me, me, me, me, me…
This is like a Christmas present!
(BTW, @dtraleigh we need an emoji wearing glasses so that we can respond with nerd/brain/geek)
Some observations about that land areas:
- Interesting how Garner, Holly Springs, F-V and Wake Forest are all so close in size. From the population of the others, there’s no reason that Garner can’t easily be over 40,000, especially as close as it is to DTR. #gentrifygarner
- Raleigh needs to pass 3,369 ppl/m2 to reach 500K within its current limits.
- Raleigh’s added less than 6 square miles since 2010 (Census website says that land area was 142.9 in 2010, but not sure if the 148.4 is land area or if it includes water?) In this same time period, Raleigh’s added over 70,000, so there’s some significant densification going on as the city grows.
- Does Cary’s number only include the Wake County portion? For that matter, how much land area does Raleigh have in Durham Co.? It can’t be all that much.
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Notice that Fuquay Varina is now 4th. I still predict that FV will eventually be our 4th largest city population wise also. Although that will take somewhat longer…
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I think the City of Raleigh is preparing to expand into east Wake County in a big way in the next year or two. I remember listening to a city council meeting about it. CoR wants to apply city standards now instead of more rural Wake County standards so that future development along the county border/540 expansion is more urban.
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Yes. I believe it will be between Knightdale and Garner and will take advantage of the new NC 540 corridor that will be built as the final phase.
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Would this really be just an expansion of Raleigh’s ETJ for now? It’s interesting how Raleigh’s limits and ETJ poke peninsula of jurisdiction between Garner and Knightdale. I don’t know that I’ve ever considered that.
https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=db9adb52f6044cb3b3c78a4439cc714a&extent=-79.1526,35.5928,-78.1385,36.0482
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