I took the survey. Thanks for sharing it! I was pretty livid at the part with the interactive budget allocation where there’s funding for widening roads to “reduce congestion” 
that you couldn’t claw back. Other than that, though, it was a cool survey.
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Thanks for sharing that – I just completed it too. @daviddonovan I agree, the mandatory money budgeted for road widening was annoying. At least it isn’t the leading priority for other survey-takers (although, it is still second) and is basically tied with how much people allocated for accessibility.
To be honest I found the categories pretty limiting though. I put a lot in “Economic Development” because I was making the case that investment in passenger rail (and denser land-use patterns in general) needs to be presented as a economic issue to get real popular and political support.
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RTA is a broad-umbrella, business-oriented group with an “all of the above” advocacy platform. It seems their main purpose is just to advocate for more transportation spending, not any specific shift in priorities based on any ideology in particular, beyond just sheer economic growth. I have the impression that they were the main driving force behind moving “complete 540” to the top of the regional priority list. But at the same time they are big on transit, too. So they have a lot of influence but kind of represent the status quo, only more of it.
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So what you’re saying is, we need a comparable advocacy group that specifically focuses on convincing NCDOT to shift its focus from highways to transit?
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The Wake Transit transit plan does include Commuter Rail, from Garner to Durham 
Details here: http://goforwardnc.org/county/wake-county/about/
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Agreed, and one that can save some of the small towns around the greater Raleigh area.
We might have another transit bond before that line is actually completed…
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There’s a guy called Joe Milazzo who is the executive director of the RTA. I see him at almost every public meeting, engineering conference I go to around the Triangle and he tries to make sure that RTA has a seat at the table for everything.
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I am not quite sure the best approach for advocacy. There are several important items that would make up a platform and I am not necessarily sure that they fit well under a single organization.
- Promote a significant change in priorities away from cars.
- Recognize that while cars have their place, treating them as the one-size-fits-all solution to mobility in all environments (urban, suburban, and rural) for the past 70 years has been tremendously harmful.
- stop spending so much on building more, wider roads
- stop building so much parking everywhere
- put an end to LOS-first transportation planning
- challenge the notion that vehicular capacity should never be reduced
- implement fully mode-neutral prioritization
- Improving the planning and implementation of non-car infrastructure
- have a service plan first and then come up with a list of projects
- make sure that spending is geared towards generating the most results
- make sure the infrastructure is actually the kind people will use (eg fully protected bike lanes that don’t disappear wherever somebody says a right turn lane is needed)
- avoid wasting money on useless performative infrastructure like “BRT” that consists mostly of over-designed stops with arrival clocks that seldom work, shelters that are pretty when driving by but don’t really protect passengers from the elements and don’t allow them to see an approaching bus from a seates position, plus a few bus lanes where there wasn’t any congestion in the first place, and mixed traffic elsewhere.
- make sure that adequate service is provided. BRT with buses that run every 30 minutes in the mid day period is worthless.
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I feel that the steel wheels on steel rails are turning, albeit slowly. The Calidot car orders now being built by Siemens Mobility for California and Illinois (CALtrans/IDOT) are going to start coming off the production line and begin service soon.
And, since the NCDOT got their F59PHI’s as the tail-end of another order at the time when they were purchased. It’s then very possible that NC could piggy-back on the Siemens order with the $77M being granted from the feds to purchase new Piedmont equipment.
Even with the Pullman-Standard coaches in current service reaching 60 years of life, there still could be some possibility of Wake County getting their hands on them for a short term until it’s time for them to be retired and scrapped. And, let’s not forget the old Ringling Brothers equipment that was acquired at auction this fall:
400017 - Wake County 62-seat coach
conversion pending St. Louis Car-1964
UP 5493, AMTK 4556, AMTK 6061, RBBX 43001
400018 - Durham County 62-seat coach
conversion pending St. Louis Car-1964
UP 5529, AMTK 4569, AMTK 4626, RBBX 43002
400019 - Orange County 62-seat coach
conversion pending St. Louis Car-1964
UP 5533, AMTK 4573, AMTK 4615, RBBX 43004
400020 - Alamance County 62-seat coach
conversion pending St. Louis Car-1964
UP 5535, AMTK 4575, AMTK 4611, RBBX 43005
400021 - Guilford County 62-seat coach
conversion pending St. Louis Car-1964
UP 5536, AMTK 4576, AMTK 4601, RBBX 43006
400022 - Davidson County 62-seat coach
conversion pending St. Louis Car-1964
UP 5542, AMTK 4582, AMTK 4617, RBBX 43008
400023 - Rowan County 62-seat coach
conversion pending St. Louis Car-1964
UP 5499, AMTK 4559, AMTK 4605, RBBX 43010
400024 - Cabarrus County 62-seat coach
conversion pending St. Louis Car-1964
UP 5541, AMTK 4581, AMTK 4616, RBBX 43012
And, not the least, Johnston County, particularly Selma, may not wait for the Wake Transit Plan to get moving while making a play for a short-line commuter service to get kickstarted while a lot of the current highway projects in motion or in the immediate planning horizon start getting moving. There’s going to be a lot of Johnston County residents stuck in traffic who might be open for an alternative.
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Speaking of commuter options for Johnston County, it looks like the ongoing study of a Raleigh-to-Fayetteville rail option is leaning toward operating on the H-Line/A-Line via Selma, and the highlighted peer studies are all commuter rail lines, not intercity state-supported services. A draft conditions assessment was released in November.
I had kind of assumed that they were looking at just extending the state-supported Piedmont line to Fayetteville, but it looks like this is going to be its own line. Curious to see what they come up with. We should know by the end of June.
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you know, it occurs to me that we waste a lot of time and money trying to go to other cities and trying to copy their transit systems. they have no doubt conducted extensive studies, and surveys, and they have come up with systems that work- FOR THEIR CITIES!! but we’re not them! we may all be large cities, and we all have our own transit woes, but the most important thing to consider is, we’re Raleigh, and we should be coming up with a system that is uniquely Raleigh! why do we need to copy what they have? we’re supposed to be a “tech hub”, we’ve got all these “mega-brains” that live here… we should be the transit system that everyone else is copying! talk about tourism…everybody will be coming here to ride on our state of the art transit system!!
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Maybe they’ll be more successful than the last go-around when a local municipality decided to look at the possibilities of a commuter rail project in 2004…
EASTRANS-Final-Commuter-Rail-Feasibility-Study.pdf (1.9 MB)
And, we must not forget the ill-fated Triangle Transit Authority’s Regional Rail proposal…
Oh, and how many around here remember when TTA actually brought a Siemens RegioSprinter DMU for demonstration runs on the S-Line back around 1999 or so?
(We shall not speak of DOLRT. The mere mention is just way too painful.)
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Nashville has a similar struggle to the Triangle in getting a regional mass transit initiative underway. They do have a small rail line going, but they haven’t been able to take the next step since the big spending bill was voted down in 2018.
But there’s some new movement. My hope is that if a somewhat similar southern city can solve this issue, it could give momentum for the Triangle.
A snippit from the Nashville Post:
Governor Lee is continuing to gather ideas for helping metro Nashville’s transportation issues.
“Texas has a model that uses regional authorities that’s interesting to me because it allows local transportation authorities to make decisions about their own communities,” he said. “It’s not a state-mandated program. It’s the state working with a locally driven transportation authority. I like that structure.”
Since a multi-billion-dollar transit initiative failed at the ballot box in Nashville in 2018, local leaders have been trying to regroup. In October, Lee met with Middle Tennessee officials to discuss the issue at an event convened by the Greater Nashville Regional Council. The gathering was the first in a 9 month community engagement process to develop a new plan for transportation and transit in the Nashville area.
Though Lee wants local authorities to lead the way, Franklin Mayor Ken Moore said in October that Lee’s role was vital.
Lee has described the transit issue as an economic one. Traffic congestion costs businesses but addressing it “isn’t easy to do because the city’s growing so fast that it’s very difficult to stay ahead of it.”
“Kicking it down the road is not a good strategy, doing nothing is not a good strategy, hope is not a good strategy, so we’re trying to develop one,” he said.
Shoutout to the Koch Brothers for helping kill said 2018 spending bill. Nashville had a really good shot and let it slip through their fingers. 
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Man it was way more than that. It was doomed to fail they way they launched it. It really looked like a 5 billion dollar boondoggle with some of the haphazard, incongruous phases they had planned.
Money from advocates on both sides of the issue really played a small part in the demise, as problems with the plan were apparent to many, including massive missteps from it’s top sponsor - the Nashville mayor, who resigned her office for some other issues but certainly helped cast more doubt on the project.
Hopefully the new effort will be more organized. Same for the Triangle - ‘mass transit, take 2’ may take off with the new politicians recently voted in.
Nope. Don’t agree. We should do the exact opposite of this. The US is not as unique as people would have you believe, and our region is certainly not even very unique within the US.
The entire US, and even more so our region, is terrible at transit. We have spent basically the past 75 years stagnating and actively regressing in terms of our public transportation here while the rest of the world has continued on with research, refinement, process development, etc. The rest of the world is so much better that we will get much further, much faster, by just copying what they have done.
So much of transportation hinges on getting the details right, and getting the details right is basically a gradual trial-and-error process, that to pin our hopes on some unicorn, startup, high tech, ground-up, whiz bang idea that we come up with, is the very definition of arrogance and hubris. Let’s try to absorb at least some of the internationally accepted best practices before we say “we can do it better”.
A big part of why China has come so far, so fast, with regards to industry, transportation, space travel, high tech, etc is that they are quite comfortable with finding the worldwide best practice and copying it. Once they have absorbed it, then they proceed with R&D. We need to swallow our pride, admit we suck BADLY at transit, and do the same.
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On the subject of Fayetteville, and the general subject of trains to Eastern NC…
I have had the thought, since we are about to have a bunch of trains terminating in Garner or Clayton or some such spot, this could form the basis for Eastern NC intercity service. Basically, rather than originating and terminating all of these commuter trains in Garner, some (potentially all?) of them could originate and terminate as intercity trains that fan out across four branches throughout the coastal plain.
Durham (552k)
Raleigh (1273k)
Johnston County (Clayton, Selma) (185k)Morehead City Branch (376k total, 133mi, 3 hours, 5 RT/day)
Goldsboro (124k)
Kinston (58k)
New Bern (126k)
Morehead City (68k)Wilmington Branch (787k total, 168mi, 3.5 hours, 9 RT/day)
Fayetteville (376k)
Lumberton (134k)
Wilmington (277k)Wilson (81k)
Roanoke Rapids Branch (266k incl. 1/2 of Wilson, 100mi, 2 hours, 3 RT/Day)
Rocky Mount (148k)
Roanoke Rapids (77k)Greenville Branch (263k incl. 1/2 of Wilson, 100mi, 2 hours, 3 RT/Day)
Greenville (175k)
Washington (47k)
If you take a hypothetical 8-2-8-2 commuter rail schedule, extend every train, and divide the frequency according to population, Fayetteville/Wilmington would get 9 round trips per day, Goldsboro/Morehead would get 5 round trips per day, and Rocky Mount/Greenville would each get 3. Wilson sits on the two northern branches, so it gets 6 per day.
That’s a lot of service…
(Edit… please forgive the formatting. I am working on it.)
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That eastern focus certainly tracks with what the NCDOT Rail Division has been trying to do with no money for quite some time. There is corridor preservation and stabilization (from local funding) going on with New Bern’s Union Station, as is stabilization (from local and state funding) of Goldsboro Union Station.
Efforts in Wilmington to improve freight movement to/from the Port of Wilmington have been more successful largely from federal grant money. One hindrance for Wilmington is going to be the need for rebuilding the bridge at Castle Hayne over the Cape Fear River. That’s also gotten a shot in the arm from the feds.
Plus, one also has to factor in the availability of positive-train-control. At least that’s currently in place on the A-Line and the H-Line which helps Fayetteville and Selma.
Expansion of passenger service to Western North Carolina has been languishing in the planning stages for quite some time due to lack of available funding.
If the Piedmont service gets their new equipment with their $77M grant, then there’s going to be more to spare hand-me-downs available with the current fleet along with the equipment in storage acquired during the Ringling Brothers auction.
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Another option is this, with five branches instead of four.
Benefits relative to above plan:
- More frequent service to Goldsboro (5->8 RT/day
- Goldsboro gains direct service to Wilmington
- Faster trip time to Wilmington (2.5 hours instead of 3.5)
Drawbacks:
- Less frequent service to Fayetteville (9->6 RT/day), Wilmington (9->4 RT/day), and Kinston/New Bern/Morehead (5->4 RT/day)
- Fayetteville loses direct service to Wilmington.
Durham (552k)
Raleigh (1273k)
Johnston County (Clayton, Selma) (185k)Goldsboro (124k)
Morehead City Branch (314k incl. 1/2 of Goldsboro, 133mi, 2.5 hours 4 RT/Day)
Kinston (58k)
New Bern (126k)
Morehead City (68k)Wilmington Branch (339k incl. 1/2 of Goldsboro, 128mi, 2.5 hours, 4 RT/Day)
Wilmington (277k)
Fayetteville Branch (510k, 100mi, 2 hours, 6 RT/Day)
Fayetteville (376k)
Lumberton (134k)Wilson (81k)
Roanoke Rapids Branch (266k incl. 1/2 of Wilson, 100mi, 2 hours 3 RT/Day)
Rocky Mount (148k)
Roanoke Rapids (77k)Greenville Branch (263k incl. 1/2 of Wilson, 100mi, 2 hours 3 RT/Day)
Greenville (175k)
Washington (47k)
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