It will look like this:
FYI, it was stated in the most recent GoTriangle board of trustees meeting that (1) the project is currently on-budget; (2) operations are still expected to begin in 2025; and (3) final design and permitting of phase II are wrapping up.
Unpopular opinion, I’d like this bus station to not happen, and the Moore Square one to be disbanded and turned into housing. Bus routes all over, no bus stations for swarms of problem people to hang out. Think how nice Moore Square would be for everyone else, not to mention the surrounding streets and businesses.
Anyways here’s a crane
it’s with the developer and the architect
Unfortunately not how public bus systems work haha
Follow-up on this, the updated one-pager on the RUSBUS site indeed confirms a 23-story tower w/ 385 apartments (and a whole bunch of parking)
I’m assuming this is the final plan. I too would have preferred office/hotel uses, but the additional housing in this area is welcome.
Do you have the exact link for visibility of the one-pager by chance?
Well, now that I look at the URL, it’s still dated 2023! So perhaps not up to date. Or it is. Idk. The expected completion dates are consistent with what was reported just this week, but that could be coincidence.
I guess we’ll find out eventually
Well, it can be. There are cities that do it. But, as far as I can tell, it really only works well in these three scenarios:
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It’s a very small system with less than ten routes that all converge in close vicinity to one another. This is also depends heavily on the area in which they all converge; it has to be easy to traverse in a short amount of time. Think small downtowns like Hillsborough or college campuses like Duke.
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It’s a system so robust and so frequent that nearly every street in downtown hosts a route, nearly every route converges with every other route, and you don’t have to wait very long between transfers. Think Manhattan (Port Authority doesn’t really count since that’s mostly commuter and intercity buses) or Los Angeles (which has some transfer hubs scattered around the service area, but no real central bus terminal).
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In lieu of a central bus terminal, they have a central busway. Having a series of stops that are served by the majority of routes, preferably in a dedicated lane, keeps the buses from bunching in a single location, particularly if schedules are staggered yet frequent. The Portland Transit Mall is a good example, and, oddly enough, Chapel Hill’s little bus lane on Columbia could also qualify to an extent. Pittsburgh’s MLK East Busway also comes to mind, as some routes enter and/or exit the busway at various points. This third strategy can also be combined with either of the first two.
That said, Raleigh’s bus system doesn’t really qualify for any of these three options. The vast majority of our routes still run half-hourly or hourly, making decentralized, uncoordinated transfers rather difficult. We also have too many routes to bunch at a single curbside stop, and too few routes to cover the majority of streets in downtown. And we all know there’s no busway at this time.
So yes, bus systems can work without a central bus station, but I highly doubt ours would. At least, not in its current state.
Well I’d like it better if it did! LOL… Even though I don’t ride the bus.
What a waste of what was once was. This project really had potential to be the most skyline evolving and densely mixed use in decades - and didn’t even include office space (aka the most obvious reason any proposed building gets downgraded, but not even applicable here). Now it’s just any other 20-story blah apartment tower. Really disappointed in how fumbled this whole thing ended up.
How many 20 story blah apartment buildings do we get?
Lately we’ve seen the completion of 400H, and soon the South St apt tower. In the works are the dual 20-story towers over across the street from Dix. Don’t get me wrong - these are all great additions - but they were only ever slated to become 20-story apartment towers. This one was supposed to be special. It was to be 30-40 stories of high-end residential with a smaller 5-story affordable apartment building at the base, plus a 10-20 story hotel, all built on top of a brand new bus depot wrapped entirely with ground floor retail. Now it’s a: 20-story apartment building and maybe, maybe not another 10 story apartment building on top of a bus depot with some ground floor retail. No hotel component at all. All that potential, gone.
I guess I am in the minority in not being so up in arms about how things have gone done. It’s disappointing, but it’s clear both the developer and the city had some missteps. But, it’s also the reality for a number of cities across the world. This was announced before COVID, so it dealt with the pandemic and a major economic slowdown that resulted in materials and labor being scarce. At the end of the day, the developer can only do so much with the money they have budgeted. We are lucky they didn’t back out and sell the lot.
And I understand those of you that will push back…trust me, I wanted what was originally proposed too. I don’t want to sound holier-than-thou, but we are lucky that Raleigh is growing, especially DTR and North Hills. There are plenty of cities, even in NC, that would wish for the level of 20-story developments that DTR has seen.
And this also comes to usual debate of height vs. urban fabric…height is great, but it means nothing if it’s not walkable and accessible. Look at University Tower in Durham…it’s the tallest building in the city and it is not close to walkable. I’d rather the developer build what they can to maximize the gorgeous transit center and bring more people into DTR, and hopefully capitalize on that by then building the tower. Let’s all just breathe and be happy that something is even happening after 6 years.
didnt the human transit guy have some writing similar? a web of routes without major ‘bus stations’?
Thank you for this. The hyperventilating in this thread from some posters has been so over-the-top and tiresome.
For a city with a very small skyline and limited multifamily buildings downtown for its size, Raleigh does seem to look the 20-story gift horse in the mouth pretty often.
I forgot to book my ticket back to Raleigh for tomorrow and all trains were sold out except the 10:50am train which was 80% full!
I’d love to see how dt Raleigh compares to similarly sized cities’ downtown housing.