Ultimately I like the pedestrian experience on St. Albans near North Hills. It feels like the apartments are fronting a park, there’s on-street parking, bike lanes, front doorsteps for the residential units, and all in all its a thoughtful transition to the SFR neighborhood beyond it. But yes, Six Forks in the North Hills area is basically a freeway.
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I’m of two minds about all of the midtown development. On the one hand, I understand that it’s not really urban, and that it nearly demands auto-dependency for everything if you don’t live in the developments themselves. On the other hand, I am all for taxable development within the context of our existing city footprint and basic infrastructure to combat further sprawl, and better position Raleigh for managing and maintaining that infrastructure well into the future. I’m also encouraged by development that can supported by alternative transit to cars, and that requires density.
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If you do not live in downtown it is just as much auto dependent as midtown.
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I really don’t understand how anyone can say the area east of six forks is not urban. I question if those people have actually walked the area. There is now a pretty significantly sized residential population there, as well as hotel and office. Large scale office lines the busy street as that makes sense. Inside and along St. Albans, I’d even go as far as saying the residential development has a much better street feel than anything that has recently been developed downtown.
It’s small, yes. But it’s brand new. What’s important is that the framework of a true walkable urban area with density has been laid. Hopefully this will continue to spur development with a commitment to walkable and neighborhood focused street level design to the east and to the south.
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I would like to say that even living in downtown can be just as auto dependent as other parts of Raleigh. A lot of it is dependent on the person themselves.
There are quite a few areas I think people can live without a car:
- Lynn Rd/Creedmoor
- Lake Booke Trail/Wydliff Rd
- Hardimont/ Wake Forest Rd.
- Triangle Town Center and immediate area
- Crabtree Valley Mall
- Cameron Village (is this considered downtown?)
- Duraleigh/Pleasant Valley Rd.
- Near Spring Forest/Falls of Neuse Intersection
One problem is that people don’t want to give up their cars because they are lazy and don’t want to walk half a mile to a mile. Generally I think walking at least 3 miles per day (which is about 6k steps I believe) is acceptable.
The other problem is that there are a lot of areas that don’t have enough pedestrian crossing areas.
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Color me a little bit skeptical of the idea that major arterials like six forks should be the focus of retail development.
I would say that focusing the pedestrian experience around the creeks and greenways in there is the right call. The best case scenario is to have the retail along a corridor that goes from somewhere, to somewhere, from the perspective of somebody on a bike or on foot, but is separate from the heaviest flows of auto traffic.
One way to do this is to remove some or most through traffic from a street, diverting it somewhere else. Like how Fayetteville Street or Glenwood South are not especially useful for long distance through traffic (most people use Capital/Dawson/Morgan) or how Hillsborough after the rebuild carries less traffic than it did before.
Another is to take the road diet to the final conclusion and convert a street to a pedestrian mall.
I lived in Hiroshima for a year. They have streetcars and light rail running all over their downtown, but it is usually in the median of some very busy streets with a lot of traffic. While businesses don’t entirely ignore these big streets and there are especially some department stores lining these streets, the pedestrian experience is not great. The main pedestrian experience focuses on Hondori, which is a multi-block pedestrian mall spanning downtown from east to west. It is much narrower, and feels safer and more intimate on foot compared with the big arterials. If you’re walking east-west through downtown Hiroshima, generally you walk on Hondori.
But since North Raleigh doesn’t really have many streets that would be a good candidate for such a corridor, the greenway is actually a pretty good alternative. They’re doing that here, and the Midtown area plan also does that along Crabtree Creek and the creekside drive vicinity.
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Yea but Downtown is the image of every city though!!! We were on that track till the covid disaster!!!
Good point. As someone who lives in west Raleigh, I drive to North Hills, DTR, and DT Durham, and then walk around. Most people who aren’t carphobic and don’t live in the specific district just drive places and enjoy them, spend money there, etc. I like downtowns, but they exist from centuries of planning, sprawl, and change. I’m happy to have new districts that are connected by car centric roads, and certainly like the idea of rail connecting them if they get big enough. But I’m not bemoaning the fact that a developer isn’t trying to recreate some ideal form of connected, downtown-esque, high-rise-to-stepped-down-residential approach that connects with existing neighborhoods.
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but downtown isn’t a self contained development
I wish it was. Original boundaries, border wall, no jerks allowed in. Oh damn, I’ll probably be stuck outside it…
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Real cities have neighborhoods. Up until recently Raleigh had a small downtown and outside of it was full on suburbs with strip malls as the only retail centers. The only outliers were Five Points and the area near NC State. Of course everybody wants a bigger and better downtown, but Raleigh also needs to establish real neighborhoods if we want to continue to grow and densify. Because outside of a very small footprint, it still is hard to distinguish 90% of Raleigh’s built environment from that of Cary or Morrisville.
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With our mythical wall, we could also have one of these!
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I wish Raleigh had this kind of history! This is historic preservation I’m 100% in favor of. Go Feliks!
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Too have a good and healthy urban city, we of course must have vibrant neighborhoods. But imo Raleigh lacks a truly strong DT/heart/center compared to it’s actual city size. DTR seems more like a city of 250,000 then almost 500,000. And of course I think that we are on a much better path toward that DT urbanization then we ever have been. (well except for our first founding) To the future, the Undiscovered Country! 
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If Raleigh’s downtown feels like a city of 250,000 to you, then we’ve made significant progress because, for years, it had been a downtown befitting of a 85,000 person city. If we didn’t have the state government here, it would have felt even smaller.
I’m very bullish on downtown’s future regardless of what happens at North Hills/Midtown, or any other node in the city.
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Apparently Sunday is the last day the mall will be open, except for Dave and Busters.
Also, this article below makes it sound pretty unlikely anything resembling the Carolina Yards project will happen.
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article248774105.html
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Recent update on Fenton. Mentions when the 12 story hotel and 357 apartment building will open. Among other things.
https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2021/01/26/paragon-theaters-coming-to-fenton-in-cary.html
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Honestly, I don’t get that impression from the article. This is surface-level journalism with nothing concrete from Epic about what the actual plans for the site are. The council members may not be in the know and seem to be commenting speculatively.
Also, yikes at the comment from this councilman:
“But in the end as the dust settles, I think Cary comes out farther ahead and the neighbors will end up probably enjoying it more, because there will be less traffic down Walnut Street and it will be kind of a quiet corporate area,” he told The News & Observer in an interview
So, the neighbors will end up enjoying this site more because they’ll no longer be able to access it? Nevermind all the public amenities, entertainment, and retail, traffic takes priority. 
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If this becomes a corporate campus only without any mixed-use spaces, I would be very disappointed. Then the consolation prize would be the hope of re-energizing the retail and vacant spaces in existing shopping centers of Cary Village Square (in blue below) and Barnes & Noble + FedEx Office (in red) beyond just the high-end focused new Fenton development.
My house is also in this screenshot. So as one of those neighbors, I’m fine with traffic if it means increased retail and entertainment amenities that are available to all. This area area was built for CTC traffic. I was excited for the redevelopment into a mixed used area. Walkscores matter to me.
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My god. You could land a 747 here.
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