It is interesting to live at a bus/train station. Not sure if I’d like that with all the operations that would be happening there. Definitely would like working there…
Bummer but at least they didn’t go with Kane and his 20-story proposal. RVA’s new tower is also on shaky grounds and ironically also the same height as this RUSBUS proposal.
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Denver Union station has turned into this. Will try to find article . Hopefully with concentration of apts above, the mere presence of people will mitigate effect .
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It’s gotten really bad the last couple years, including the light-rail. Junkies “train hop” on it constantly, to the point they have an employee waiting near the doors at every stop. Just this year in January someone tried to steal my ski bag but didn’t get far. If the light-rail wasn’t so convenient I would find another way from the Airport to downtown.
Here is an article describing the problem, some people seem realistic to the problem, while others suggesting to allow the open use of drugs like Philadelphia might be the stupidest thing imaginable.
“What we are seeing here is not homelessness. This is about the sale and use of deadly illegal drugs.”
It takes more than 20 paragraphs to finally get to the substance of this:
"The Hancock administration points out that the city has beds available in shelters and programs for people who want them, describing those who don’t use those resources as “service-resistant.”
The available services — which have no-drugs policies — aren’t appropriate for addicts who are physically dependent on a substance, Shelby said. "
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The residual purpose could be a very slightly more direct connection from the parking deck at RUSBUS to the train station. People aren’t even going to use it to get between buses and trains- they’ll doubtless prefer the existing main entrance to the train station along Martin Street.
Not something worth dropping however many million this is going to cost. Not even remotely. It’s a gimmick.
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Let’s just figure that this building will have something like 700 working-age, adult residents. I’d say we could reasonably expect perhaps 25 of them to ride transit to work. This would be well in excess of our city’s transit mode share, but at the same time a rather disappointing result for such a prime piece of real estate.
Put an office building there that houses 700 workers and you’d get more like 100 transit users.
I pulled these specific numbers out of thin air, but patterns elsewhere in the country and world show that employment near transit is a much more powerful driver of transit usage than residential dwellings.
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Drawing blanks. What’s RVA?
Richmond, Virginia
charactersssssss
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…put another way:
The main reason most normal people will ride transit is to avoid having to pay to park.
Not that many folks in our area are willing to go car-free. Can’t blame 'em; I’ve tried it, and it seriously limits your horizons from a job, social, and entertainment perspective. Therefore, any residential building downtown is likely to include parking for basically all of its residents, to the point where the cost of said parking is likely to be bundled into the very cost of rent. So even though you’re living downtown, you’re already paying for the cost of downtown parking. You gain very little by taking transit to work instead of driving.
Contrast that with somebody living in the suburbs where parking is plentiful and “free”. Someone would be much more willing to leave their car behind at home for their commute in order to save the $20/day (or $300/month or whatever) parking fees.
Avoiding traffic is a secondary reason people take transit; again, though, people living downtown are very likely to drive if they work in the suburbs because they will have less traffic to deal with, since they face a reverse commute. In contrast, transit is more attractive in the face of peak-hour, peak-direction driving.
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Hope this hasn’t been posted already, but I’ve always wondered if there will ever be a better pedestrian connection between GWS and the warehouse district. The RUSBUS project just reminded me I guess. It’s always bugged me that Glenwood stops so abruptly at Morgan and there’s no real walkable connection to WHD. (I guess I don’t consider the Morgan St bridge all that inviting as a pedestrian). Has the city ever considered a way to connect these two districts that are sooooo close to each other but feel so separate? I’d love it if they could cap the tracks somehow—maybe they can just use that bridge that was going to connect RUSBUS to US haha.
Plus, isn’t there something planned for the lot highlighted below to the south?
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I agree intellectually with all of your points, so this is more of another angle versus a disagreement.
Office development is still in a fragile place, and most of the exciting urban corporate locations in the region have recently gone to Durham, which is seen as having a more interesting downtown atmosphere (or RTP, which, snoooooze but easy to get to and relatively cheap). The more DTR can make downtown feel dense and lively and desirable, the more likely we’ll get big office movement.
So even if this one ends up being residential because of the pressure to get the federal money, build it now, and make it pencil out, it ultimately is part of making downtown a place people want to be for all three phases of their life - work/play/live - which is good for transit as a whole.
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I don’t think Durham has a more interesting downtown atmosphere (and I live here). Especially post-COVID, it seems like the vibrant evenings are rarer to come by, although there’s a nice buzz around weekday lunches. Every time I visit my parents in DTR it feels much more active. I don’t think companies are picking Durham for the atmosphere.
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I guess to expand on what I meant, it’s not that companies care about atmosphere in and of itself. Durham has more cachet with the young educated workforce they want to hire. They market themselves really well, their historic downtown is where most of their shops and bars are, while most visitors’ first experience with DTR is the void that is Fayetteville Street. It all means we can come across as a bit empty and corporate in comparison.
It also has Duke, which is obviously a huge draw, I don’t want to diminish that.
All this to say, I like Raleigh, I prefer it to Durham, and would prefer we get a nice chunk of that corporate construction and cash 
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could some space along the screening get some bright electronic signage telling about locales and events in the downtown area to break up the blandness?
if i recall i think it was john that had indicated downtown density at roughly 6500 peeps per sqmi? a desire to live downtown might actually have naturally occurring higher transit riders (or walkers and bikers) due to working downtown also.
I think that we are all missing the point that there is a fundamental shift in how we live, work, and play. Research shows stabilization at about 50% of the work week being remote among workers who are able to work from home. Among those who are able to work from home, current work arrangements are as follows for North America:
Hybrid model: 50% and trending up
Full time on site: 30% and slightly trending down
Fully remote: 20% and slightly trending down after having been 30% during the Omicron wave in the Winter.
The top ten metro area that is most like us, Atlanta, has the highest percentage of full days working remotely at 45% among the ten largest cities/metros.
The conversation about who will and who won’t use transit is clearly not just about work. As someone who doesn’t prefer to drive if I can help it, I’d be among the folks who’d train to Durham for fun only, or to a suburb for big box shopping, etc.
This information comes from WFH Research, a joint effort among Stanford, Univ. of Chicago, and ITAM (private research university in Mexico). The link
WFHResearch_updates_July2022(1) (1).pdf (1.4 MB)
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Finally, someone acknowledges the unspoken truth.
If we fail to realize that the homelessness, panhandling and drug use aspects seen at the current bus depot will not be a valid concern for tenets, we’re only fooling our woke selves.
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A downtown without a homeless population, beggars, alcoholics and drug users on the streets is the absolute best one you can have. Arguing against this makes no sense to me.
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No one here is arguing in favor of having homeless people on the streets. What we’re all arguing about is what the facts are on the ground (e.g. shelters and other resources exist, but aren’t being used by the people who need them most), the best way to address that issue, and what the indirect consequences of those are.
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It seems to me that society in general is more interested in not seeing the problems (homelessness, drug abuse and its consequences, etc.) than it is in solving for them. We’ve long been a society that pushes problems elsewhere than one that tries to solve for them.
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