Raleigh In The News around the country/world

Been saying that the greater Raleigh area traffic is not that bad for years. I have lived in several cities and visited others often enough and they are all worse than us. Some much much worse. While we don’t do particularly well with mass transit, we do well with our road network. Of course we all know it cannot last.

3 Likes

I think that the suburban/multi-nodal nature of the Triangle helps with traffic. You don’t have the vast majority of workers traveling towards the same general area, so things don’t get as clogged in one direction as most other major metros.

Gives us a smaller Downtown, but at least it helps with traffic.

10 Likes

I agree. A lot of cities, take Atlanta for example, is a single citie with huge sprawling suburbs. And most folks commute from the suburbs into the citie. In this triangle region there are multiple employment centers. Raleigh, Durham and RTp being the main ones.

I work in RTP and I work with folks that commute in from Clayton to hillsborough, Fuquay, Butner, Apex, Sanford, etc. Meanwhile those areas also feed people into Durham and Raleigh. this spreads out the load on the roads and keeps it from being a complete cluster of everyone trying to get into (or out ) one area at the same time.

But there are definitely huge gaps in public transit (namely commuter rail) that need to be filled in to prevent the huge cluster in another 10-15 years.

4 Likes

Yeah - all those high speed 6 to 12 lane boulevards without sidewalks or any other pedestrian infrastructure carving up our residential neighborhoods are super great. Not to mention we are at or near the top in fatal auto/pedestrian accidents (city and state). I would say we have one of the worst planned road networks in the country and some of the worst drivers to boot.

I think another pedestrian was mangled over the weekend in Downtown. I don’t know details, hopefully not killed.

3 Likes

A bit over dramatic but I get your point. If you go by deaths by population per 100,000 NC does rank #16 and is relatively above average. If you go by deaths per miles driven, NC is barely above average. I think that this shows that because in NC we HAVE to drive and have little options that we are driving a lot more than many states which increases the odds of fatalities. Personally I think our roads are just fine, and like everything else in the world, improvements would always be a good thing.

1 Like

Here’s a good read on the arrogance of traffic engineers and why we end up the the crap that we have. This describes Raleigh perfectly. Good that you think our roads are just fine but the reality is that we are stuck in the dark ages of urban design.

6 Likes

Cross posting from Retail thread. Raleigh named ‘Most Optimistic’ on return to ‘normal’ for small business.

2 Likes

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/north-carolina/articles/2020-03-26/census-wake-passes-meck-as-n-carolinas-largest-county

Not necessarily “new” information but still a reminder that probably irks the crap out of “queen napoleon city” :rofl:

5 Likes

Happily, Raleigh ranks highest of any city in NC, SC, VA and TN.
I found this on City-Data forum. The link above only goes through the top 10, but someone was able to get the entire report and give us this information.
in North Carolina: Raleigh (25th), Charlotte (34th), Durham (44th), Greensboro (87th)

8 Likes

4 cities in the top 100 ain’t shabby!

7 Likes

and yet they still got the Metro population wrong…

charlottes “highlight” is the nascar museum…2000 left turns qualifies as “highlight”?

2 Likes

The link actually goes through the top 100. lmao at their Durham description tho…

In a city that ranks #6 for Educational Attainment and #35 for Weather, it’s not surprising that the 55-acre Sarah P. Duke Gardens and lively neighborhoods like Rockwood and South Square are mere steps away from the campus.

they literally chose to highlight a demolished shopping mall and a residential neighborhood

3 Likes

Oh, that’s cool! Another link that I first clicked only had the top ten. I figured that this one was the same. Thanks for pointing that out to me!
The Raleigh write-up was nice, and I’m happy that they used a different shot of downtown! It’s almost as good as a @OakCityDylan drone shot!
Raleigh’s MSA number is a year old, but Durham’s is way off since the OMB added another county to Durham’s MSA recently.

2 Likes

I have that same shot from a few different flights, but don’t think that one is mine. :joy:

1 Like

We clearly don’t see the famous @OakCityDylan watermark.

2 Likes

Apparently we are the 11th least segregated city in the US FWIW. Detroit, New Orleans and Philly were the ‘most’.

This article’s comparing the “percentage of the non-hispanic white population in a county […] to equalize the racial distribution between white and non-white population groups”. So the article and this figure are interesting, but I don’t really buy the authors’ narrative behind that headline.

Since they’re looking at the central county of a metro area -Wake County for Raleigh, King County for Seattle etc.- this article shows nothing about how the size/shape of counties are very different depending on what part of the US you’re in or, more importantly, differences within a county. After all, t doesn’t take a genius and a detective to know you’re less likely to find a Black family strolling around in Morrisville compared to southeast Raleigh.

Since that sort of context gets lost in numbers like these, I think the authors make it easy to have a wrong, rose-tinted impression of how (de)segregated Raleigh is :confused:

5 Likes

Not to mention that cities like Richmond aren’t even in a county, and are independent cities from their suburbs in adjacent counties.

2 Likes

That was your take? Wow. That’s not at all what this study (for its definite flaws) or anti-segregation advocates are saying. And I know my friends from Buffalo would be pretty surprised by your claim.

12 posts were merged into an existing topic: Gentrification and Displacement