Maybe an unintentional omission? Neither the DRX nor CRX were a part of the proposed realignment for the 100 I mentioned above, plus I feel like the CRX has always been the forgotten middle child of GoTriangle’s regional express routes
In that vein…
Unrelated, but I think that’s one intangible, societal reason for having trains over buses that I’m still sympathetic to: trains are distinct and semi-permanent, so they’re pretty damn effective as symbols that a city cares about mobility.
If buses can be changed or done away with on a whim, then that’s not a very reliable or symbolically meaningful commitment to public mobility that can be seen throughout a city. RUSbus doesn’t work that (despite the millions of dollars of investment that it got) because it’s a symbol that only exists within a particular corner of downtown Raleigh, and no amount of bus stop improvements will help because those are only really perceived by people who already use buses. Exclusive bus lanes, more frequent buses etc. would give you the visibility that you need to fight back against that - but with our BRT lines still not yet under actual construction, it’s hard to say
A few weeks ago there was a copy-paper level “sign” affixed to the Hillsborough/Glenwood bus stop (in front of Char Grill) that service to this stop by the GoTriangle 100 route was planned to cease by some date in April and how to provide input.
That Char Grill stop is also served by GoRaleigh routes 4, 8, and 16. And the 100 will then still have a nearby stop a block away at Morgan/Glenwood, also served by GoRaleigh 9.
dumb question but why do we need SEPARATE transit organizations and separate facilities? Can’t there be one unified bus system serving the entire Triangle, even if it’s always ONLY going to be buses? This seems like such a bureaucratic waste.
I guess i never paid attention but I thought Go Triangle and Go Raleigh and Go Cary were all the same, just different local governments contributing $$$ to a regional bus system.
They also changed the grant requirements for the funding that was sought for the West Street Extension and effectively killed that project for the foreseeable future. You can thank them for that, too.
Nope, the whole “Go_____” thing is just a joint branding effort. Under the hood, all of those agencies are still running as if it’s 2015, when they still ran under their own brands (Triangle Transit, CAT, C-Tran etc.). It’s literally just a marketing ploy to make people aware that the entire Triangle has effective-ish options for public transit. Judging from your comments, it was an effective one!
Not a dumb question at all. If anything, I think you could argue that the company that we call GoTriangle today (which is also technically a government agency) was formed by the state government to do exactly that.
The problem is that this would imply that, by making GoTriangle do everything transit-related for the entire Triangle, that would be the same thing as asking one government agency to take over the roles of another. After all, you can’t imagine the City of Raleigh asking the City/County of Durham to run its affordable housing program for them without massive political backlash, right? I think it’s the same thing here; the Raleigh City Council would never approve that, no matter what.
Also, GoTriangle has a 0-for-3 success rate for winning federal grants that involve building more than one building (Raleigh Union Station, RUSbus, and the Triangle Mobility Hub don’t count), plus they’ve now burned through two CEOs in the past five years (Jeff Mann and Chuck Lattuca). I would absolutely love it if the Triangle had a single, stronger authority for transit and land use decisions, but those issues would even make me hesitate before being like “hey I want a branch of my city government to be run by those guys”…
I’m not saying that you can’t have inter-government agencies; GoTriangle already has statutory authority to do this, after all. The problem is that you need local governments to agree to that.
For the Port Authority’s case, the federal government had to bully the states of New York and New Jersey into forming it when they got tired of the two states having decades of fights and lawsuits over border disagreements. And this was a dispute that got so bad that it happened during World War I.
Thankfully, Raleigh, Durham, Cary, Chapel Hill etc. don’t have turf wars that are that bitter. But I challenge you to build a working coalition for transit-related issues that can convince people to get over their localist egos… just look at how many people online - and even this community - talk about Cary or Durham with disdain, wanting to keep them at an arm’s length away from Raleigh (or vice versa)
FWIW GoTriangle does manage GoDurham, Durham’s local bus system. How’s it working for them? Dunno, I haven’t really been following it.
And then on the same side of the Triangle, but on the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s Chapel Hill Transit, which completely declined to even come on board with the “Go_____” branding change ten or so years ago, although they do still somewhat work together to coordinate routes, stops, and schedules.
Is GoTriangle GoDurham's little bitch? Or...??? (click here!)
I looked it up, and GoTriangle has entirely different staff and leadership rosters than the staff and leadership rosters of GoDurham. But they do share a lot of the same resources for bus maintenance, scheduling etc., so I guess the truth is somewhere in the middle of “GoTriangle and GoDurham are independent” and “GoTriangle totally controls GoDurham (or vice versa)”.
My partner and I almost got run over by a GoDurham bus in downtown Durham, just a few nights ago, that was running the same route as the one that ran over someone a few months ago (here’s a news article, as well as a much more helpful Reddit thread). So… there’s that.
Zooming out, though, it definitely has a Durham flavor to it. A lot of what GoDurham does has a focus on low-income and historically Black communities, which tracks with how the agenda of the city government, at large, is often influenced by local activists. This naturally means that riders are the most low-income and non-white out of GoTransit-branded services, so GoDurham has a track record of focusing major decisions on their needs. This includes:
Winning a federal grant for expanding Durham’s equivalent of RUSbus - though it’s unclear if GoDurham can effectively make use of it without over-relying on their older (and smellier…) buses
Upgrading bus stops in the central and eastern parts of Durham - but with a lack of serious clarity about if this (or anywhere else) would be up to BRT standards
So if you ask me personally, the ideas they’re pursuing are wonderful, on paper. But at the same time, just like my critiques for GoTriangle, I do often feel like GoDurham has a pattern of missing the forest for the trees. (Or if you’re that one bus driver, you’re just not looking to begin with, I guess)
Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and UNC-Chapel Hill all pitch in funding for the core of Chapel Hill Transit, so I think it’s a whole different animal. As someone who lives in Durham but commutes to UNC for work, I do find CHT the cleanest and most reliable of the buses - but there’s also a VERY obvious, impenetrable-feeling barrier that separates Chapel Hill from “the beyond world” that this arrangement plays into.
To the credit of GoDurham, they are implementing both realtime stop information on the onboard displays, as well as signal priority. Those are pretty huge. Hope it spreads.
(FWIW I did ride a GoRaleigh bus sometime earlier in the year that had the route visuals up, but haven’t seen it since)
I see this, like, once every couple of months, and every other time I ride it’s just ads. Drives me insane. Like, why did we pay for these screens if we’re just gonna use them for ads?
I did find it really interesting riding Chapel Hill Transit. I rode their shuttles for July 4th. Service was otherwise shut down and the shuttles were operated with like 90% electric buses. I’ve ridden CHT 3 other times, and never otherwise seen an electric bus in service.
I don’t think it’s an accident that they’re the highest ridership agency besides Charlotte in NC, being the furthest big school from the freeway and having been fareless for a while but I’ve kinda felt like it’s not really legible or integrated from a regional perspective. I asked a CHT bus driver if a GoTriangle route served a stop, and they had no idea. They ended up giving me a ride to the hospitals making me miss the CRX. I ended up having take a pretty convoluted route involving biking to make it back at a decent hour.
Why? Hoffman & Associates are still in on that project. Wonky interest rates and stagflated housing markets are valid reasons (albeit annoying) to push back major real estate investments, but it’s not a reason to just give up.
This isn’t the most recent rendering anyway but construction of the tower is supposed to happen sometime within the next 2 years, from what I can remember?
Developer has the top of the RusBus leased in finished condition. Under terms of the agreement the lease payments begin in a couple of years. So they have incentive to stay on schedule. But their “gravel lot” base also needs to be completed as prescribed.
Plus a tight site can accommodate only one active contractor at a time. Residential tower can then use the second tower location as a staging area.
A second tower is certainly a bonus for the developer. So once again incentivized to identify a program and tenant for that later phase. Office now probably out without an anchor tenant. So maybe a hotel. But they can be hard to identify and get to commit before they are ready.
City outlives us all. This just needs a few brief years to play out at the pace required.
