Battery electric street car! They charge up at stations so no ugly electric overhead wires!
Sevilla, Spain
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Moved here from near Boston last Fall. Having sunsets here no earlier than 5:00 helped my mental health considerably and even as an early riser I don’t miss the nearly 3 months of pre-6:00 AM sunrises.
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Massachusetts transplant here and was surprised what a difference that made…as well as virtually no traffic congestion. I understand it’s relative, but spent three hours at a minimum commuting.
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The one downside is this time of year, where it’s barely light at 6:00 AM while in Boston the sun is fully up by that hour. I then have to remember that Raleigh will still be light at 8:00 PM for the next month or so so it balances out?
Getting around period, regardless of mode, is problematic in the Boston area regardless of how you get there. As half-baked as transit is here, any suburb-to-suburb commute via the MBTA’s skeletal suburban bus operations is arguably on par to if not worse than what we have here.
Photos from the recent trip to Baltimore/DC (right click and open in new tab to see bigger photo).
I did a bad job taking these, but I found some of the house shapes to be quite interesting. The first picture was of 123 West Read St. if you want to do a streetview.
The second photo above was in Fell’s Point. That area had a very active night scene (not pictured).
The bottom two photos are of Federal Hill. I liked the houses between the blocks that typically had retail/restaurants/bars. I believe this is East Hamburg St. (look up 22 East Hamburg St on streetview).
The first one below is of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Georgetown. I like how this shows that you don’t need to have a big river in order to have a cool water feature (wink wink). Granted there is the Potomac, but I don’t see why we can’t have something like this.
The second one was walking between Dupont Circle and Logan’s Circle (on Q St). I love the neighborhood vibe between the two entertainment/shopping areas.
The third below is of CityCenterDC (shopping center).
The final two are of Blagden Alley.
Editing to add that there was a confusing intersection for pedestrians on this road (I think the angle of the intersection may be what messed it up). I almost saw a man walk out in front of a car. I think he was looking at the far pedestrian signal.
I didn’t take this photo, but am uploading it to show how road design should be better taken into account here.
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That intersection in DC (Connecticut Ave, Rhode Island Ave, M/N Sts, and 18th St) is a notorious mess, both for pedestrians and for cars as not far up Connecticut and Rhode Island are complex traffic circles which put anything here to shame. Connecticut further up even has variable direction lanes that change during rush hours, a DC area specialty.
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We took a trip to DC a few weeks back and came across this cool landscaping feature in Old Town Alexandria. It is a creative way to create some shade in a public space that would otherwise be underutilized. The wisteria was not in bloom, but imagine it’s spectacular. It would be a great way to enhance some of our public space, although not a gardener and understand wisteria can be invasive.
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Apartments in the pipeline over in Durham. Super simple design, but it’s really refined and elegant. I like the clean brick detailing, the inset balconies that add texture and warmth, the street-level treatments, and the subtle offsets that break down the scale along the length of the facade. I wish there was retail, and I wish the building was a little more exciting, but posting to show that it doesn’t take a lot to distinguish a proposal from the recycled trash we see getting built in Raleigh. It pays off to work with designers other than Cline and J Davis, and I’m sure the developer will also be able to charge a premium for these units.
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I do dig that Rigsbee vibe over in Durm…
If this were more along the lines for the design of 501 Hillsborough, short height and hell even with no ground floor retail, I’d have so much less gripe with it. Add in some ground floor retail space and this would be amazing just about anywhere.
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Durham has so many projects underway or planned. If Raleigh doesn’t start getting some of the huge pile of stalled projects going, in 3-5 years our downtowns are going to look pretty similar in terms of size (and population).
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Yes and no - they still have yet to build anything tall enough to rival our Big 3
As someone still fairly new here it feels like a case of “the grass is always greener on the other side”. We have a load of stuff going on in downtown Raleigh in the next few years as well as some huge projects that just wrapped up. Unbiasedly I think we’re in better shape.
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As someone living neither in Durham nor Raleigh (but wants the region to succeed and be walkable as a whole), I agree. I tend to see the two cities running opposite experiments on the same issues and competing with each other: Raleigh’s historically been biased towards the real estate market (more economical buildings, market-rate housing, cutthroat restaurant landscape) and is struggling to be a more holistic city through cityscaping, affordable housing, and support for local businesses. Durham, on the other hand, has stronger impulses towards helping underserved communities and promoting local interests and is learning how to be more attractive to developers and investors.
Durham is becoming more like Raleigh, and Raleigh is taking a few pages out of Durham’s playbook on community involvement and downtown business support. Maybe you could argue Raleigh’s “in better shape” since it’s easier for Durham to lose its “soul” than for Raleigh, but I see us more as two parts of a whole.
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This is very cool. There is an American Wisteria but I don’t know/think this is it.
This space is begging for some old men to come play dominoes.
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Yeah but we had a lot of things in the pipeline before the pandemic, and we’ll have to see what actually happens with many of them. There’s just like 4 or so large buildings and several medium sized hotels that would really make a difference connecting downtown.
Every time I go to Durham there’s another bunch of stuff going up, and I was looking at the buildingbullcity message board and see all this other stuff planned that I didn’t even know about. It’s not a competition between Raleigh and Durham, I like and visit both. It’s just kind of crazy to see the disparity at the moment.
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Good points. Something else to remember- there’s downtown Durham but outside of the downtown core Durham doesn’t really have much to offer IMO. Raleigh we have Downtown, North Hills, some decent malls etc
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I think DTR and DTD absolutely complement each other, both have specific “vibes,” for lack of a better term, that work for specific situations, events, groups, etc. When you think about it, DTR and DTD are both on the small-to-medium end for downtowns of cities of 500k and almost 300k respectively, combine them and it’s a major, major downtown, befitting a region of over 2 million people.
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Durham does have RTP though which has some interesting projects coming up
Durham City doesn’t. The Park is in two counties, but it’s its own municipality.
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