It will probably be level with the bus when it kneels
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From the renders I have seen, my understanding was that BRT wouldn’t even stop inside the station. West St would be closed to cars and the BRT station would be there. Not sure how accurate that is at this point though.
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That was my understanding too, the BRT station would be on the street.
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BRT buses probably can’t fit in RUS anyway. I imagine that turn would be much more difficult
It doesn’t make sense that West would be closed to cars since that’s how you access both RUS and the parking garage within the Dillon building. I hadn’t heard anywhere that West would be closed.
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No, not closed but most likely remove the parking spaces on the west side (shocker!) and have it be a BRT only lane. The one-way street would remain. At the same time, the northern brt line is so far off, anything could happen.
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That makes more sense.
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I thought the Western BRT was supposed to stop there as well?
Who knows. Planning staff always seems to bring the brt lines into downtown, as marked with a big box on a map, not street level plans. I don’t think they’ve figured it out yet to that level and just have different alternatives.
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A few days ago GoTriangle announced their service changes for when they start operating out of RUS Bus in August.
300, 305, CRX, and DRX will all operate out of RUS Bus. Their routes will still go close to GoRaleigh station at Moore Square, but they will no longer lay over there.
100 was modified this month to go closer to RUS Bus, but no further changes are planned, so it is apparently not going to serve the platform there. It will continue to lay over at GoRaleigh Station.
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For the lazy people who don’t do their own research, that stop is on Wilmington St., north of Morgan St. - a block and a half from GoRaleigh Station.
If you have good or bad vibes about this idea, now is your time to take 3 minutes to tell GoTriangle how you feel:
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August opening date 
https://www.instagram.com/p/DH9IQGrPzW2/?img_index=1&igsh=MXBiOW40aXUxdzRmcA==
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Thank you so much for the excellent photos! 
Now, if some artist would just come along and paint some murals all over the place, especially the ceiling! 
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Indy ran an article on the affordable housing stuff at RUSBUS last week.
I think they reasonably point out that the $1.5 million is a paltry sum of money compared to what some other cities ask from developers for affordable housing:
Florian presented the planning commissioners with a binary choice between accepting the $1.5 million payment-in-lieu or saying goodbye to this downtown development opportunity. He framed the first option as fair and data-driven. But is it?
According to Florian, GoTriangle and Hoffman landed on $40,000 per-unit payment based on “past city guidance on affordability contributions, intended to reflect the cost of replacing a market-rate unit with an affordable unit elsewhere.”
Matthew Klem, a senior planner for the city, told INDY via email that Raleigh “does not have a policy that encourages or specifies a monetary contribution for affordable housing production.” If a developer volunteers to make a contribution, Klem wrote, the money goes into “a discretionary fund that the Council can use to support a wide range of affordable housing programs or projects.”
Like Raleigh, most cities in North Carolina have not created policies for payments in lieu of affordable housing. Even the ones that have policies on paper, like Chapel Hill, have struggled to successfully implement them.
Further afield, in places where mandatory inclusionary zoning is unambiguously legal, cities like Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis would likely require a significantly larger contribution from the developers.
In Portland, developers can choose to build a certain amount of affordable housing onsite or pay a fee of $27 per residential square foot. Constructing 385 market-rate apartments with footprints of, say, 700 square feet (which is below the average for a one-bedroom in Raleigh) would trigger a $7.8 million payment to the city.
In Minneapolis, where the payment-in-lieu fee is $22 per residential square foot, the city could charge the developers about $5.9 million.
This actually prompted me to write a letter to the editor, because the crucial missing context here is that Portland’s inclusionary zoning is publicly funded. So while developers are responsible for building the affordable units (or paying a fee if they opt out), the city is the one paying for them through tax abatements.
It also got me thinking… perhaps this is naive of me, but would Raleigh ever consider contributing money to address the financing gap and keep affordable units at this site? I know it sounds politically untenable, but if you actually think about it, it kinda makes sense.
Option 1: developer gives 1.5 million to an affordable housing fund, which isn’t enough to actually get units like this built, let alone guarantee it will happen any time soon. Raleigh still has to come up with the remainder of the money to fund a stand-alone affordable housing project.
Option 2: Raleigh contributes money toward the affordable component of this project, addressing the developer’s financing gap, and keeping affordable units in an increasingly high-income neighborhood that has immediate access to transit and jobs, and fast-tracks the construction of these units since land, design, and development is already taken care of.
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Meanwhile in Miami… (posted in the show off thread as well)
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Almost feel like them including 20 affordable units instead of 39 would still be better than the $1.5 million.
Or, letting them cap the total at 40 affordable units but allowing the developer add more floors and market rate units to try to make the math work - up to the 40-floor zoning max. (30 units per floor, even just 5 more floors would be 150 units)
Like they shrunk their own proposal by 10-15 floors… could that be why the math doesn’t work?
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To the people who are more wonky on the numbers for AH than I am: is requiring AH contributions for new development not somewhat counterproductive to the goal of lowering cost of housing in general? Per a few different sources, the median home sale price in Portland is ~$320/sqft. Does requiring a $27/sqft AH fund contribution basically just mean all non-AH housing in Portland is 8.5% more expensive than it otherwise would be? With the cost of housing surging as much as it has, should we just be funding AH out of the general budget instead of pushing part of the cost onto new builds?
I just wonder why this practice is so common if it’s seemingly directly contributing to the higher costs that it’s also attempting to mitigate. Is it simply that it’s easier to do politically?
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Yes 1000%. The decision to allow the developer to pay instead of build the units is fine. I would argue the city can do something more impactful. The 10% or 5% of units at 60-80% AMI is a drop in the bucket versus a small fully-affordable project that the city could subsidize with the funds instead. This whole change really isn’t a bad thing IMO. Could they collect more per unit? Sure, I’d support that unless it prevents the developer from building.
And no one mentioned the fact that this project is very much alive, then, because they just successfully changed the reasoning text. I tried to suggest this weeks ago, that things were still in motion.
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This isn’t really new. They’ve been pursuing this zoning text change for awhile now. Maybe a better characterization would be its on life support, the developer basically said they would cancel the whole project if this doesn’t pass. Or possibly shift it to a typical 6-7 story apartment building.
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