Agreed. I was hoping for a shorter bus 
maybe adding another if needed in time?
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New RLine route approved by council today. It moved through so quickly that if you went to the restroom while it was streaming on YouTube, you would have missed it.
Key things:
- Will remain free
- Will no longer be branded as RLine, rather as Go-Raleigh, allowing it to use the shorter buses
- Is a linear route with both ways on West St. and a narrower loop along the Salisbury/Wilmington couplet, and connected on the north end by Peace St.
- Councilman Martin asked about a future change to extend further down West after it’s connected under the train tracks.
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GoRaleigh has posted the new routing with stops on Twitter. Goes live on Sunday.
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Also, looks like they extended to Union Station. IIRC, it was originally only supposed to go to Hargett.
Edit: Hargett, not Morgan. Thanks @dtraleigh.
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Maybe this is selfish, but this looks like an improvement. That said, only going one direction just seems short sighted.
I liked this new route cause the end result was speedier (less time to go around) compared to the previous route. I thought looping around on Hargett would be fine but now one more block? I hope the route isn’t slower cause of that.
At the same time, I think all that matters is catching the bus in the right direction and people will be fine.
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In the case of West and Peace, one only has to make sure that they are standing on the correct side of the street.
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How many buses will be plying this route at any given time? 2?
I said this in the other thread - but I think they’d do better by having one bus go clockwise and the other go ccw. On the east side, go north up Wilmington and south down Blount, like the BRT.
A trip from Union Station to Memorial Auditorium would be annoyingly long and out-of-the-way with this horseshoe shaped route.
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To the first point, this route makes having opposite routes tricky because there’s already a stretch where the busses are going clockwise and county clockwise during the same route (partial West and Peace). To the second point, the Union>Memorial route length in time is well taken, but the distance is short enough for many to actually walk. If one has luggage in tow, and wants a free ride somewhere, I would guess that they’ll put up with a little time taken out of their day.
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In a world where people are out freely flowing between venues and enjoying nightlife in multiple small businesses while popping in and out of this option, I say kudos.
Now, feels weird and again, another instance of tax dollars at work in a suspect algorithm…
You might make the argument that one could take a bus down to an area where one might grab the RLine - but, you’d be ignoring the real world scenario where that is not a functional option in a real world, real time scenario. Or you might make the argument to drive in and then use then R Line, which…OK BUT…when I visit DTR and drop coin, I’ll try to park and ride - but this route doesn’t seem faster than walking and typically that’d be my preference so…???
So, ride the hell outta the thing and I’ll try to do so. Enjoy.
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My guess is they’ll make it a bi-directional loop after the West St. extension. Hopefully they’ll have more funding by then.
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For all intents and purposes, its new route is already a bi-directional circuit, albeit a U shaped one.
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this may be a stupid question…But. I’m going to put it out there, can the R-Line be used as a trolly line to North Hills/Midtown from DTR ?
We already have something like that. It’s route 8. 
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We tried the R-Line Monday but waiting for 30 minutes off West and never saw a bus. The various apps hadn’t been updated yet and due to the holiday nobody was answering the main line when I called to see if the new route was active yet. We had seen a R-Line bus off Wilmington earlier in the day so we assumed we could give it a go.
So today we have it a go again!
We got picked up at the Peace St stop SmoHo I. The trip to the RCC was rather quick and I expected a long wait at that stop based on the previous route. We were only stopped for 2 minutes and picked up 2 additional passengers (4 of us now).
Getting back to SmoHo headed to Davie and was about 14 minutes.
At RUS at about 20 minutes from start and we’re at another break/stop which lasted about 2 minutes as well.
Now back headed north!
Got off at Clouds for a total trip time of just under 30 minutes.
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Thanks for the report!
Sheesh I feel like that’s a long damn time for such a short trip. Of course, in the summer months it’d beat walking and soaking your clothes.
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The R-Line may be cut soon. From someone at the city,
Our regular system ridership is currently averaging about 60% of normal while the R-Line is averaging about 14% of normal. This equates to approximately 2 passengers per hour overall. We are currently already operating limited service from 7 AM through 6 PM.
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If they paused it until Summer, I can live with that decision…as long as they don’t use the pandemic as a reason to scrap it altogether.
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Totally agree. I don’t see the need to make a permanent decision given the circumstances. Perhaps there’s more to the decision than we know making temp more permanent, but I don’t want it to go away without a replacement.
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