not sure how many watch olivia raney at city council. a real complainer? i rode the bus for many years in raleigh…almost 2 decades. me as a youth, my blind parents often stood on the bus holding onto overhead rails as some happened to be crowded. we didn’t spew anger at it…we stood and then got off the bus, if we were close to home we walked or called a cab if not. she may have legitimate claims to past horrors…but as a 1 percent black person and handicapped we never put up that much lip over standing on a bus. i expect big city trams often have standers of all colors. she needs to tame it a bit.
To improve pedestrian safety in the downtown area, city council approved “No Right Turn on Red”. Signs will be installed by end of April.
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I see that they mapped out my daily walking path (green line)…kidding, not kidding.
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Awesome news. How about some photo enforcemement to go with it?
Also can I get a stoplight (complete with No Turn On Red sign) here plz?
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You sunk my battleship!
If you know, you know…
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Don’t you mean SUV? 
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Apologies if someone’s already posted this, but per NCDOT, the Piedmont will add a 4th (5th with Carolinian) daily roundtrip this year (2023)!!
https://twitter.com/NC_By_Train/status/1633862287911186432?t=RIRboJMd3LEnT1bin1obkg&s=19
Great news, though unfortunately looks like CLT Gateway Station has been pushed back slightly to 2026.
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Some less fun news I just saw. NCDOT wants to spend who knows how much money to widen I-40 between the US-64 interchange and Lake Wheeler Rd. (Note: this is not the STIP to fix the I-40/US-64/US-1 interchange, it’ll just widen I-40).
I’ve driven this section many times and never have I thought it would need expansion. Smells like an enormous, absurd waste of money.
There’s a comment form available and a community meeting about the project tomorrow, but maybe we can make some noise about this?
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Weird. That interchange is a complete mess, but the width of the highway has always seemed fine.
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They are also discussing the redo of the interchange. The meeting is for both projects.
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That whole area is a mess. Glad to see them trying to fix it up. This is a vital thoroughfare for tons of people who live here…
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Didn’t they just widen that a few years ago as part of 40fy or was that just the stretch south of downtown?
That was just the south of downtown section.
i know this guy is hated here…im not a transit planner…i rode it for many years due to necessity. does he speak to raleighs path for transit expenditure or is something missing from his analysis? <a phoenix, az example> “For example, over at least the past 30 years, transit has never carried more than 0.8 percent of passenger travel, yet the plan dedicates more than 40 percent of the region’s transportation funds to transit. Planners hope to attract people out of their cars, yet in the decade before 2019, despite spending billions on transit, driving grew while transit was stagnant.” Phoenix’s Irrational Transportation Plan – The Antiplanner
Do you know if this is factual?
Wondering due to NCDOT formula doesn’t allow for that amount to go to non-roads.
His definition of “spending” presents a false economy, as I’ve mentioned above:
Most of the money spent on road transport in any given year is spent by drivers, and by society (in “social costs”). Drivers pay for their own vehicles, their own labor, their own repairs, and society pays for the air pollution, the drainage, the crashes, the thefts, the traffic, etc. By contrast, government pays for transit vehicles, labor, repairs, cleaning, etc. Even within the government, a lot of roads’ costs are paid elsewhere and are on autopilot rather than being subject to the kind of regional review he’s talking about: street sweeping is something the solid waste department does, new roads are paid for by new homebuyers, highways are the state’s responsibility, repaving often doesn’t count as a “transportation expenditure”, etc.
I don’t remember the numbers offhand because it’s been years, but I wrote my undergrad thesis on how much of a municipal budget went to roads, broadly construed; it was something like 20% of all public expenditure.
Because that guy has a huge bias against transit, he focuses only on what’s directly paid for by government – that makes transit look bad and cars look good. But the total cost of providing auto transport is far higher, it’s just divided differently.
An analogy: a train trip from Cary to Durham cost me $6 out of pocket in fare. “The Antiplanner” would have driven there and trumpeted a press release that screamed “a driving trip cost me nothing today, therefore driving costs NOTHING and a train trip for $6 is 
”. Nonsense: a 20-mile drive costs just the driver ~$14, per AAA, it’s just that the costs are not paid per-trip.
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i was kind of asking that question…if antiplanner, randall o’toole, is correct or not. i think john locke has applied some of his analysis in transit articles.
All you’re missing is ‘All the buses I see are empty’ and you’d have Anti-transit/NIMBY Bingo.
Yeesh.
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This isn’t really something that’s up for debate anymore in the science community. It’s just a known fact and has been for quite some time. I’m not really sure why you’d need to be convinced.
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It would seem to me that we are ignoring the investment in roads over time that brought Phoenix to where it is today. How come a new investment as an alternative to driving is compared to the current budget while ignoring decades of just road construction and maintenance spending?
This is like saying “why are we investing in schools when my kids are fully grown?”
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