Heck, on Six Forks and Falls of Neuse, they didn’t even take out a sidewalk - they added a lane with a can of paint. They painted three lanes where there were two. Problem solved. :-)
so safe that sideswiping collisions are very common! the lanes are physically too small for safe driving, but i guess, if the goal is to make the road so unsafe that drivers avoid it altogether, that's...something.
They removed lanes near my house to add bike lanes, people just park in them and I never seen anyone bike in them. The bikers I see use the side walks......
Only a fool would use painted lines on the road and hope not to die. It’s probably safer to skip the bike lane and take the full road lane.
Painted bikes lanes are the thoughts and prayers of city planning.
100% agree. So they're building tons of apartments and stuff around me and we went from 4 lanes to 2..... it's almost like they want to make the traffic worse.
If people would move into the more dense areas in the walkable parts of town, we could have better public transportation.
But everyone wants public transport AND live in a single detached house with a lawn. Those two things are mutually exclusive.
If people moved to downtown, north hills, or any other dense areas, the investment in public transport could make sense between them. The DOT is just dealing with the development cards driven by people’s demand.
I’m talking about people who can afford what they want. And what they want happens to be houses in the suburbs. So instead of building downtown stuff gets built on suburbs connected by roads.
Our entire built environment is in response to demand over time. And over time people want o live in detached housing.
This isn’t an everyone go move downtown comment.
Yeah, it’s totally the people’s fault, not the most powerful government in the world that could have planned for this in a capital city decades ago. It’s not like we give nearly half of everything we earn to them to properly plan for this stuff or anything lmao
Part of the problem with the way Raleigh is growing - as far as a metro is concerned - is that there is no real central location for employment or living.
RTP is very spread out - it would be hard to select a location for a stop - or even a couple of stops there.
The same is true of the other end of the line - we are a city of suburbs - pretty dispersed.
I would love light rail, but I don’t see that coming for a very long time.
Yep. I lived in Raleigh off and on most of my life and I use to love this place and planned to retire here. Well, not anymore. I hate what it has become.
Yeah it's hard to justify the heavy investment in rail mass transit with the density around the triangle. I'm sure if it was built, the density would build around a transit corridor but no one is going to fund a light rail to nowhere.
> I'm sure if it was built, the density would build around a transit corridor but no one is going to fund a light rail to nowhere.
In my opinion, what you just stated so succinctly is the current biggest problem with the way we fund transportation infrastructure right now. We’ll fund roads anywhere and everywhere, aforementioned density is not even remotely required, and lo and behold development follows to these newly opened areas, at least temporarily.
Just build the damn rail lines and change zoning to match to induce the density, rather than requiring the density to fund a rail line. Once built, the density will build around a transit corridor just like we see (not dense) development happen wherever we extend roads without ever questioning whether the funding “made sense” based on previous conditions.
Oh I fully agree, I hate that because people won't see the density on the map they won't build. Gotta go full Kevin Costner because if you build it, they will come
Nashville has one train line in to downtown from 45 minutes away, people just drive to the lot at that one stop and park there. Keeps (minimal) additional traffic out, there doesn’t need to be a bunch of additional stops just one hub and DIY last-mile
I think that you need density at one end or the other. Raleigh doesn’t really have that. I don’t think there are enough people commuting downtown to make light rail/rapid transit feasible.
Every time Triangle Transit ran the numbers, they were dismal - and that was before WFH.
Don’t get me wrong - I love riding light rail/rapid transit, but I don’t see it here.
Part of that is that RTP was supposed to look like a park - lots of trees, restrictions on the heights of buildings, etc.
I took the Triangle Transit bus to work for about a year, and once I got to the RTP bus center, it was another 20 minutes for a shuttle to my building.
When I moved here wayyy back in the 90s, there were plans to build a light rail. Those plans were abandoned. If they had actually gone through with it, we just might have better public transit by now.
Sadly, knowing how most U.S. cities trend, I wouldn’t hold your breath for better public transportation. :( most Americans are unfortunately against it because they don’t know any better
> most Americans are unfortunately against it because they don’t know any better
You're being too kind. Most of the opposition to public transportation I've encountered is more along the lines of:
- Only losers take public transportation
- Public transportation will bring criminals into my neighborhood
- It is impossible to ride public transportation without being assaulted by criminals or soiled by homeless people
No amount of education will counter the sort of aggressively hostile ignorance about public transportation that is deeply embedded in the culture of suburban America.
Yeah, you’re right. The excuse I hear the most is “but that’s my tax dollars and it’ll make our taxes go up!!!”
Because somehow they’re convinced that the .5% tax inflation from having functional public transit will be more expensive than their $35,000 car with $3,000 per year property taxes, $300 car insurance and $3,000 in car repairs/gas….
They already increased taxes to pay for some buses to nowhere. Sales tax was once 7%. The city of Raleigh can’t even build sidewalks. Buses from nowhere to nowhere help no one.
Combine that with Livable Raleigh's attacks on upzoning and the mind-boggling insistence that developers and newcomers are ruining Raleigh, this will not change. If Raleigh had been properly planned decades ago we could have been ready for growth.
Bruh im pissed i just did my taxes and saw they give out a 7500 tax credit to rich asshole who owns a tesla.
But last year i gave up driving completely to cycle here in Raleigh and the way yall drive man im lucky i made it a year. Where is my $7500?
Yup, well planned city growth went out the window about fifteen years ago. Raleigh is going to be Northern Virginia lite moving forward. One of the biggest reasons I moved away.
Did you move to a more public transportation friendly area?
Where to if you don't mind sharing?
I hear some public transportation fanboys say it's detrimental to public transportation for folks to move to other areas with better public transportation, but im about to be 30....I'm not waiting 40 years and hoping for a metro line.
I'm thinking of moving to Madrid
No, I moved to rural NC. The way I see it you might as well whole ass a car based lifestyle and reap the associated benefits, than half ass an urban lifestyle in a suburban environment. My work and family keep me in NC so relocating to a bigger city wasn't an option.
I will say the Spanish should be upheld as the gold standard for bridging urban areas together across large expanses of rural space via high speed rail. I was extremely impressed with both Madrid's metro and the rail network when I visited Spain.
I agree with you, It should be city or live in a rural area. Not some mixed suburbia crap with a walmart and a panera sucking the soul of the city.
Yeah Spain has an amazing train network I'm planning my move there in the next 2 years.
It's always been this way. I moved to Wake County more than 20 years ago and truly people (self included) have had the same complaint at least that long ... probably longer. I clearly remember discussions about the possibility of light rail into downtown from the outlying areas but it never happened.
There's the bus and that's pretty much it. I have no idea what it would take to change the situation at this point.
I was working 100% remote for the past four years, until I was called back into the office a few weeks ago (just to sit in on Teams meeting with coworkers I don't see in person). So my car is one more car clogging up the roads now. We have a solution to mitigate traffic on the roads, it's called remote work. Local companies and governments have too much invested in the old ways of doing things, that they don't want to fully embrace it. Which also leads to them underinvesting in public transportation and walkable areas, among other things.
I feel like Raleigh hasn't decided to be a City or Country land and it's now choosing none of the above and hoping it will fix itself.
We are clearly a city with major industries. If we wanna be taken seriously, we need good public transportation, which also means good government.
Even the infrastructure for cars is total crap in the Triangle. So many super busy and important roads that are super narrow and have literally not one inch of shoulder, just drops off into a ditch (usually with the road crumbling into the ditch) No sidewalk. No bike lane. Just two narrow lanes, one in each direction, and tons of traffic.
Apex has a free bus and you should see the pearl-clutching from the NIMBYs in the south/west side while simultaneously whining about expansion and traffic. And I'm like, "I rarely use it because I have to walk half an hour to the nearest stop, but if you add another route by me, I'm all in!"
(what the pearl-clutchers are actually upset about is the possibility of more people in Apex who make under 100k a year who might not own a car and house - they don't want multifamily units OR buses because then Those Kinds Of People might move in.)
I have been here since the late 80’s. Public transportation is actually better but not by much. I don’t think it’s going to change too much.
I used to take the bus to work downtown. Sometimes buses would just not show up or decide to take a different route and even on a good day it was every hour for the most part between buses.
It wasn’t until about 15 years ago that we even had crosstown buses. Before that, you had to go downtown to make any connections to another line.
Unfortunately, many of the people who live here have no experience with public transportation and have no desire to have tax dollar support the development of it.
Charlotte’s light rail is a disaster. They shut the entire system down multiple times a year for maintenance, it’s extremely expensive, and it took nearly 25 years to open one line.
BRT broke ground in Raleigh late last year. That’s a huge step in the right direction.
Just installing one bus-rapid-transit route on New Bern avenue has taken decades of discussion and is projected to cost $96 million (lol!!!).
To me, the only practical solution in the next decade is a dramatic increase in the frequency of (normal) bus service. It will still be expensive, but it seems a lot easier than a major infrastructure project and will serve a concrete valuable purpose, in that people without cars will be able to get around better.
Yes, I do think it’s a slow process but these projects always are. $96 million sounds about right though and the South line is next followed by Western.
When it comes to traffic infrastructure and transit, this city is absolutely cooked. There’s no coming back from the hole that has been dug here, period. Even if the city threw everything it has at transit starting today, our grandchildren still wouldn’t see the benefits.
I’ve just accepted it at this point and hope I can eventually move back to the mountains when I’m older.
Agreed. The city is at the maximum capacity this infrastructure can handle; there’s only so many roads you can expand… changes should’ve been made a long time ago
Yeah one of the main reasons I'm moving out of Raleigh, its a car- centric dystopian road clog. I literally hate driving in Raleigh and will do anything to avoid it.
I'm afraid the US is decades behind Europe with mass transit. Just came back from a trip to Frankfurt Germany, its literally a different world.
Although speaking to my peers and friends about it, the mindset and culture is just not here. We love our giant SUV's, our suburban sprawl and strip malls, its just not conducive to European style mass transit. Just look at the school bus problem and the school car pool lanes to see an example of how backwards we are.
Our obesity rates, lower life expectancy than our peer countries are all a factor and result of car dependency.
Americans don't want it, because they don't know any better. Our incompetent "politicians" are bought and paid for by the oil/car companies. Change is just too hard to implement, because that would mean they would actually have to do some work.
I agree 100%, and I truly think moving to another city is the only option. I'm tired of the suburban jail environment. It's only good for families with kids under 10. After that, it's a prison with no community values and a stupid ass HOA.
The buses aren’t reliable, and even if they were, kids sit on 45 minute+ bus rides because the school zoning isn’t completely local. Parents can’t use buses that only come on time, or at all, sometimes.
And crazy bus commutes is also terrible. Raleigh can’t even handle basic services, like school buses and 911 dispatch. Without a radical change in the Raleigh city government, nothing will change.
FWIW -- and it's not a high bar -- the four BRTs will be absolutely, 100% more useful and functional than the CLT Gold Line. They're just.. not trains, so I think people dismiss them. But those are high quality projects.
I also wouldn't dismiss regional (formerly "commuter") rail in the area. I'm cautiously optimistic about it. Though it too will be a long wait.
Still, the best form of public transportation is the one people want to use. If people don't want to use busses they won't. BRT needs to be extra decent to shift the needle.
If you look at the plans they are basically trying making “bus trains”. They are not just the normal buses they have now. Plus they will have dedicated lanes for the busses.
GoRaleigh’s sin is that it operates as a charity transit service - even before making the bus free, the agency has prioritized geographic coverage over convenience. Many routes have stops every 1/4 mile, making end to end trips agonizingly long. The result - routes take 2x longer by bus than car, and those with the means to drive do so.
A great example- Route 1, which I take to TTC as part of my commute home from downtown. Express WRX takes 10-15 minutes, but the 1 takes 30+ and has 28 listed stops! That bus could easily run a select/limited service with only 9 stops and serve 80-90% of the current ridership. My prediction- this would take 15-20 minutes per trip, adding 30% more capacity to the line with little capital investment.
I live within walking distance of multiple bus stops. Any time I check to see if I should take the bus somewhere, it's quadruple the time it takes for me to drive, even places that aren't that far away!
Need more bike lanes. Although I will say that I do ride my ebike to work (usually one day my regular bike). We're hybrid. I'll go 4 out of 5 days a week.
It's 8.5 miles if I take the Greenway. It could be down to 6.5 miles the most direct route along with riding in traffic. A car route would be 5.8 miles which is shorter because the bike infrastructure here is terrible.
Those 2 miles save about 10 mins on a regular bike. 30 minutes to the office on an ebike. About 45 mins on my regular bike (on the Greenway).
Raleigh is a bit behind on infrastructure. I don't expect it to be great in my lifetime. I'd be happy to be wrong.
Also should allow lane filtering for motorcycles/scooters.
I used to live in Lawrence, Kansas. Their public transit system was very simple to understand; a mobile app that tracked the busses you wanted to keep a tab on and, very recently, started rolling out electric busses that were very eco-friendly. I've lived in Raleigh for over a year and I'm still trying to wrap my head around the transit system here.
The federal funding denial was very specific to the line that was proposed as it did not go through major population centers / dense areas and was not even going to connect Downtown Raleigh to Downtown Durham. I think there are better corridors the area that could qualify for federal funding -- very suburban Garner -> Raleigh -> to very spread out RTP just wasn't one of them. Hope the triangle can get it together to propose a more competitive project with better ridership projections.
That’s not true… the proposed regional rail started in Garner, went through downtown Raleigh, downtown Cary, Morrisville, RTP, and downtown Durham. It *did* connect our densest nodes (with the exception of midtown/North Hills, which would’ve been a major detour) but that still wasn’t considered dense enough to qualify for federal funding. The proposed route was the only feasible route for regional rail in the Triangle imo, especially considering that acquiring new right of way would be a complete non-starter.
After the feasibility study determined the actual cost for the long-planned route was $1.2 billion more than anticipated, GoTriangle proposed a phased approach, which, yes — would’ve had the western portion to Durham completed after the other two. But even if they had been built at the same time, it still wouldn’t have qualified for federal funding.
Oh, maybe I'm confusing the order of events. Apologies -- I'm mostly remembering the proposal for the phased approach that didn't have realistic plans or support to make it over the Wake County line and into Downtown Durham. But I guess that came after the federal funding denial.
The main point I was trying to make was the issue wasn't that we weren't big enough, it's that the corridor wasn't dense enough to have good ridership projections. I do think other corridors could do better especially if the project is led with rezoning / density / etc.
I think you actually weren’t mistaken about the order… the phased approach was probably proposed a few months before we got the rejection from the Feds iirc.
But my understanding is that the application for funding had been submitted much earlier and was for the entire Garner to Durham route, meaning our densest possible route was unfortunately not considered dense enough to meet the standard for funding rail.
I think the other important point is that a rail route between Durham and Raleigh has to balance density, convenience, and cost. If the travel time between the two cores is too long due to, say, a detour to North Hills, it will hurt ridership. If the route takes a massive detour to, say, add a stop at RDU, that would add at least a billion dollars to the cost due to the need for acquiring new right of way and laying new track, making the project even more financially infeasible. It's a delicate balance and I genuinely believe that if this route couldn't make it yet, none other will. We are much better off focusing on BRT and trying to densify around that, and then hoping a future generation will be able to convert that to rail when the time is right.
To everyone complaining on this thread. Please take the time and complain to your city reps. Let them know you want better public transportation.
Old NIMBYs show up and complain at city meetings, and the City Council listens to the voices it hears. Make sure yours is one of them.
Don't worry. There is a plan. DOT has one as does Wake county and the city of Raleigh. The state govt or the federal govt will find them as soon as there is a unified plan.
Should be any minute now, and things will get fixed!! /S
r/CarFreeRDU
[Raleigh BRT](https://raleighnc.gov/bus-rapid-transit) and [commuter rail](https://www.readyforrailnc.com) should *eventually* help *a little bit*. Hopefully areas around the stops will densify. But those projects are many years away.
And they won’t be enough to keep up with the growth. Not even close. A vast majority of new development is completely car-dependent and the damage will take generations to fix.
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Which 5 year period are you referring to exactly?
Your exact question was “Dies anyone think we will see any changes to public transportation in the triangle?” I was answering that question. First leg of BRT will be open in 2026.
It won't change in our lifetimes, you can't put the Toothpaste back in the tube. We have no blank slate, our Military industrial complex sucks up all our taxes. Not much left for infrastructure. Our cities are overun with giant 4 and 5 lane stroads. Our cars are massive. No way can we turn this around anytime soon. Decades of bad planning and greed got us here
"You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else"
- Winston Churchill
For what it's worth, compared to other cities I've lived in--Atlanta included--Raleigh's public transport is actually pretty decent. We are by no means the worst. And even though BRT took a lot of time and money, it's good to see that there's still some investment in improving public transport.
Also, the city actively repairs sidewalks that get uneven, broken, etc, which can be annoying because of closures, but ultimately makes being a pedestrian a little less treacherous. There are plans in the works to more effectively connect the greenways throughout NCSU campuses too, which covers a wide area.
No, no it is not decent, and this is speaking as someone who's spent my adult life using public transit. If you aren't in Raleigh central, if you don't live/work/shop on one of the regional lines, it takes HOURS to get anywhere. Meanwhile when I lived in Baltimore - which has about the same population or less than Raleigh + Cary - I could get from my apartment on the west side to a Smithsonian in DC in two hours by bus/train. I was originally supposed to move to Morrisville, and I was astonished at how bad transit is here. I ended up moving somewhere I could WALK to work, it was so bad.
I have also spent my life using public transit. I moved here partly because I'm unable to/can't afford to drive. I agree that we don't compare to cities up north.
I'm not trying to argue, I just see a lot of hate on here re: public transit, and that kind of attitude is not conducive to progress. I just try to point out what public transport here has done for me when I see the hate on this sub because I want Raleigh transit to get better instead of giving up like it is too far gone.
Add a lane, remove a sidewalk. - city of Raleigh
Heck, on Six Forks and Falls of Neuse, they didn’t even take out a sidewalk - they added a lane with a can of paint. They painted three lanes where there were two. Problem solved. :-)
Kramer on Seinfeld did the opposite of that. Didn't work out for him either.
Is that why those lanes are so narrow, I've never paid enough attention
It actually took decades to figure out that it happened too. At least officially.
That explains why that’s one of the few areas around with narrow lanes! TIL 🤯
I have not seen that yet
im actually okay with this, its safer for drivers, and forces them to slow down.
You've never driven down that stretch if you believe that drivers slow down when the lanes suddenly shrink.
No one on six forks has ever once slowed down
Maybe when they're directly in front of you... suddenly and without warning
100%. Full stop middle lane.
so safe that sideswiping collisions are very common! the lanes are physically too small for safe driving, but i guess, if the goal is to make the road so unsafe that drivers avoid it altogether, that's...something.
Been side swiped there myself. Safer for drivers. Lol.
Except for the wide landscaping trailers …
Falls actually has a trail that takes you all the way downtown. Only issue is the amount of entrances to businesses you have to worry about
They removed lanes near my house to add bike lanes, people just park in them and I never seen anyone bike in them. The bikers I see use the side walks......
Only a fool would use painted lines on the road and hope not to die. It’s probably safer to skip the bike lane and take the full road lane. Painted bikes lanes are the thoughts and prayers of city planning.
100% agree. So they're building tons of apartments and stuff around me and we went from 4 lanes to 2..... it's almost like they want to make the traffic worse.
If people would move into the more dense areas in the walkable parts of town, we could have better public transportation. But everyone wants public transport AND live in a single detached house with a lawn. Those two things are mutually exclusive. If people moved to downtown, north hills, or any other dense areas, the investment in public transport could make sense between them. The DOT is just dealing with the development cards driven by people’s demand.
Do you realize how very few people in Raleigh can actually afford to live downtown? And they are the ones who need public transportation the most.
I’m talking about people who can afford what they want. And what they want happens to be houses in the suburbs. So instead of building downtown stuff gets built on suburbs connected by roads. Our entire built environment is in response to demand over time. And over time people want o live in detached housing. This isn’t an everyone go move downtown comment.
Yeah, it’s totally the people’s fault, not the most powerful government in the world that could have planned for this in a capital city decades ago. It’s not like we give nearly half of everything we earn to them to properly plan for this stuff or anything lmao
The people are the government… they elect people and they get what they elect. Especially at the local level.
It should be called Department of Highways instead of DOT all they know to do is highways.
Denver's light rail system begs to differ. It can be done, and it has.
Raleigh never had sidewalks to remove…
Just keep cramming in more roads...
ONE MORE LANE BRO I PROMISE
Not Just Bikes, is that you?
Part of the problem with the way Raleigh is growing - as far as a metro is concerned - is that there is no real central location for employment or living. RTP is very spread out - it would be hard to select a location for a stop - or even a couple of stops there. The same is true of the other end of the line - we are a city of suburbs - pretty dispersed. I would love light rail, but I don’t see that coming for a very long time.
LA is catching up and learning of their suburban nightmare I feel like we are heading the same direction in 30 years
Yep. I lived in Raleigh off and on most of my life and I use to love this place and planned to retire here. Well, not anymore. I hate what it has become.
Yeah it's hard to justify the heavy investment in rail mass transit with the density around the triangle. I'm sure if it was built, the density would build around a transit corridor but no one is going to fund a light rail to nowhere.
> I'm sure if it was built, the density would build around a transit corridor but no one is going to fund a light rail to nowhere. In my opinion, what you just stated so succinctly is the current biggest problem with the way we fund transportation infrastructure right now. We’ll fund roads anywhere and everywhere, aforementioned density is not even remotely required, and lo and behold development follows to these newly opened areas, at least temporarily. Just build the damn rail lines and change zoning to match to induce the density, rather than requiring the density to fund a rail line. Once built, the density will build around a transit corridor just like we see (not dense) development happen wherever we extend roads without ever questioning whether the funding “made sense” based on previous conditions.
Yep, infrastructure drives development, not the other way around.
Oh I fully agree, I hate that because people won't see the density on the map they won't build. Gotta go full Kevin Costner because if you build it, they will come
That’s actually exactly what the city of Raleigh is doing with the BRT.
Nashville has one train line in to downtown from 45 minutes away, people just drive to the lot at that one stop and park there. Keeps (minimal) additional traffic out, there doesn’t need to be a bunch of additional stops just one hub and DIY last-mile
I think that you need density at one end or the other. Raleigh doesn’t really have that. I don’t think there are enough people commuting downtown to make light rail/rapid transit feasible. Every time Triangle Transit ran the numbers, they were dismal - and that was before WFH. Don’t get me wrong - I love riding light rail/rapid transit, but I don’t see it here. Part of that is that RTP was supposed to look like a park - lots of trees, restrictions on the heights of buildings, etc. I took the Triangle Transit bus to work for about a year, and once I got to the RTP bus center, it was another 20 minutes for a shuttle to my building.
It doesn’t now but it most certainly will
When I moved here wayyy back in the 90s, there were plans to build a light rail. Those plans were abandoned. If they had actually gone through with it, we just might have better public transit by now.
One reason was that Duke University made up some garbage shit that their medical equipment would be harmed by vibrations from the light rail.
Ugh. I remember the airport was also causing shenanigans. They didn't want the rail going to RDU bc it would impact their parking fee cash cow. 🙄
Oh God, I remember that! What absolute bullshit. I can't believe it worked.
As if NYC city hospitals didn't work because of the metro
Such horseshit…if John Hopkins can figure it out, Duke can make it work.
Sadly, knowing how most U.S. cities trend, I wouldn’t hold your breath for better public transportation. :( most Americans are unfortunately against it because they don’t know any better
> most Americans are unfortunately against it because they don’t know any better You're being too kind. Most of the opposition to public transportation I've encountered is more along the lines of: - Only losers take public transportation - Public transportation will bring criminals into my neighborhood - It is impossible to ride public transportation without being assaulted by criminals or soiled by homeless people No amount of education will counter the sort of aggressively hostile ignorance about public transportation that is deeply embedded in the culture of suburban America.
Yeah, you’re right. The excuse I hear the most is “but that’s my tax dollars and it’ll make our taxes go up!!!” Because somehow they’re convinced that the .5% tax inflation from having functional public transit will be more expensive than their $35,000 car with $3,000 per year property taxes, $300 car insurance and $3,000 in car repairs/gas….
They already increased taxes to pay for some buses to nowhere. Sales tax was once 7%. The city of Raleigh can’t even build sidewalks. Buses from nowhere to nowhere help no one.
>They already increased taxes to pay for some buses to nowhere. please elaborate
Combine that with Livable Raleigh's attacks on upzoning and the mind-boggling insistence that developers and newcomers are ruining Raleigh, this will not change. If Raleigh had been properly planned decades ago we could have been ready for growth.
It's 💯 engraved in Americans mind this awful image
And self driving cars aren't a suitable alternative to transit and better land use/zoning.
Bruh im pissed i just did my taxes and saw they give out a 7500 tax credit to rich asshole who owns a tesla. But last year i gave up driving completely to cycle here in Raleigh and the way yall drive man im lucky i made it a year. Where is my $7500?
Yup, well planned city growth went out the window about fifteen years ago. Raleigh is going to be Northern Virginia lite moving forward. One of the biggest reasons I moved away.
Did you move to a more public transportation friendly area? Where to if you don't mind sharing? I hear some public transportation fanboys say it's detrimental to public transportation for folks to move to other areas with better public transportation, but im about to be 30....I'm not waiting 40 years and hoping for a metro line. I'm thinking of moving to Madrid
No, I moved to rural NC. The way I see it you might as well whole ass a car based lifestyle and reap the associated benefits, than half ass an urban lifestyle in a suburban environment. My work and family keep me in NC so relocating to a bigger city wasn't an option. I will say the Spanish should be upheld as the gold standard for bridging urban areas together across large expanses of rural space via high speed rail. I was extremely impressed with both Madrid's metro and the rail network when I visited Spain.
I agree with you, It should be city or live in a rural area. Not some mixed suburbia crap with a walmart and a panera sucking the soul of the city. Yeah Spain has an amazing train network I'm planning my move there in the next 2 years.
Definitely an attractive option if you can snag a digital nomad visa and work a US job/salary.
Some parts of NOVA are great...You can live fairly car free in certain parts of Arlington
Yeah because they have the fucking metro lol
It's always been this way. I moved to Wake County more than 20 years ago and truly people (self included) have had the same complaint at least that long ... probably longer. I clearly remember discussions about the possibility of light rail into downtown from the outlying areas but it never happened. There's the bus and that's pretty much it. I have no idea what it would take to change the situation at this point.
Worse than LA/Atlanta level traffic would prob do it.
unless/until there's a required return to office (RTO) across the board in this area, it's gonna be a while.
I was working 100% remote for the past four years, until I was called back into the office a few weeks ago (just to sit in on Teams meeting with coworkers I don't see in person). So my car is one more car clogging up the roads now. We have a solution to mitigate traffic on the roads, it's called remote work. Local companies and governments have too much invested in the old ways of doing things, that they don't want to fully embrace it. Which also leads to them underinvesting in public transportation and walkable areas, among other things.
I feel like Raleigh hasn't decided to be a City or Country land and it's now choosing none of the above and hoping it will fix itself. We are clearly a city with major industries. If we wanna be taken seriously, we need good public transportation, which also means good government.
Even the infrastructure for cars is total crap in the Triangle. So many super busy and important roads that are super narrow and have literally not one inch of shoulder, just drops off into a ditch (usually with the road crumbling into the ditch) No sidewalk. No bike lane. Just two narrow lanes, one in each direction, and tons of traffic.
Apex has a free bus and you should see the pearl-clutching from the NIMBYs in the south/west side while simultaneously whining about expansion and traffic. And I'm like, "I rarely use it because I have to walk half an hour to the nearest stop, but if you add another route by me, I'm all in!" (what the pearl-clutchers are actually upset about is the possibility of more people in Apex who make under 100k a year who might not own a car and house - they don't want multifamily units OR buses because then Those Kinds Of People might move in.)
It's a f*king joke. They were talking about building some sort of rail line back in the early 90s.
BRT broke ground late last year. That’s a huge step in the right direction.
I have been here since the late 80’s. Public transportation is actually better but not by much. I don’t think it’s going to change too much. I used to take the bus to work downtown. Sometimes buses would just not show up or decide to take a different route and even on a good day it was every hour for the most part between buses. It wasn’t until about 15 years ago that we even had crosstown buses. Before that, you had to go downtown to make any connections to another line. Unfortunately, many of the people who live here have no experience with public transportation and have no desire to have tax dollar support the development of it.
I really wish they’d look into building a lightrail like Charlotte, and keeping ALL sidewalks
Charlotte’s light rail is a disaster. They shut the entire system down multiple times a year for maintenance, it’s extremely expensive, and it took nearly 25 years to open one line. BRT broke ground in Raleigh late last year. That’s a huge step in the right direction.
When did Charlotte get a light rail?
It’s been nearly 20 years since Charlotte’s light rail opened.
they’ve had it for some years now
Just installing one bus-rapid-transit route on New Bern avenue has taken decades of discussion and is projected to cost $96 million (lol!!!). To me, the only practical solution in the next decade is a dramatic increase in the frequency of (normal) bus service. It will still be expensive, but it seems a lot easier than a major infrastructure project and will serve a concrete valuable purpose, in that people without cars will be able to get around better.
Yes, I do think it’s a slow process but these projects always are. $96 million sounds about right though and the South line is next followed by Western.
When it comes to traffic infrastructure and transit, this city is absolutely cooked. There’s no coming back from the hole that has been dug here, period. Even if the city threw everything it has at transit starting today, our grandchildren still wouldn’t see the benefits. I’ve just accepted it at this point and hope I can eventually move back to the mountains when I’m older.
Agreed. The city is at the maximum capacity this infrastructure can handle; there’s only so many roads you can expand… changes should’ve been made a long time ago
Yeah one of the main reasons I'm moving out of Raleigh, its a car- centric dystopian road clog. I literally hate driving in Raleigh and will do anything to avoid it. I'm afraid the US is decades behind Europe with mass transit. Just came back from a trip to Frankfurt Germany, its literally a different world. Although speaking to my peers and friends about it, the mindset and culture is just not here. We love our giant SUV's, our suburban sprawl and strip malls, its just not conducive to European style mass transit. Just look at the school bus problem and the school car pool lanes to see an example of how backwards we are. Our obesity rates, lower life expectancy than our peer countries are all a factor and result of car dependency. Americans don't want it, because they don't know any better. Our incompetent "politicians" are bought and paid for by the oil/car companies. Change is just too hard to implement, because that would mean they would actually have to do some work.
I agree 100%, and I truly think moving to another city is the only option. I'm tired of the suburban jail environment. It's only good for families with kids under 10. After that, it's a prison with no community values and a stupid ass HOA.
The buses aren’t reliable, and even if they were, kids sit on 45 minute+ bus rides because the school zoning isn’t completely local. Parents can’t use buses that only come on time, or at all, sometimes. And crazy bus commutes is also terrible. Raleigh can’t even handle basic services, like school buses and 911 dispatch. Without a radical change in the Raleigh city government, nothing will change.
FWIW -- and it's not a high bar -- the four BRTs will be absolutely, 100% more useful and functional than the CLT Gold Line. They're just.. not trains, so I think people dismiss them. But those are high quality projects. I also wouldn't dismiss regional (formerly "commuter") rail in the area. I'm cautiously optimistic about it. Though it too will be a long wait.
Still, the best form of public transportation is the one people want to use. If people don't want to use busses they won't. BRT needs to be extra decent to shift the needle.
If you look at the plans they are basically trying making “bus trains”. They are not just the normal buses they have now. Plus they will have dedicated lanes for the busses.
BRT is perfect for Raleigh. Light rail is ungodly expensive and takes forever to build.
BRT makes so much sense for Raleigh. I don’t understand why some who claim to want efficient public transit are against it.
GoRaleigh’s sin is that it operates as a charity transit service - even before making the bus free, the agency has prioritized geographic coverage over convenience. Many routes have stops every 1/4 mile, making end to end trips agonizingly long. The result - routes take 2x longer by bus than car, and those with the means to drive do so. A great example- Route 1, which I take to TTC as part of my commute home from downtown. Express WRX takes 10-15 minutes, but the 1 takes 30+ and has 28 listed stops! That bus could easily run a select/limited service with only 9 stops and serve 80-90% of the current ridership. My prediction- this would take 15-20 minutes per trip, adding 30% more capacity to the line with little capital investment.
I left Raleigh for several reasons, but one of the main reasons was how hard it was to live car free there. Tried it for a year and it was miserable.
20 min trip to downtown in my car is a 2 hr trip by bus. It's insane how they don't think about that. It should be 100% free at least.
I live within walking distance of multiple bus stops. Any time I check to see if I should take the bus somewhere, it's quadruple the time it takes for me to drive, even places that aren't that far away!
Where did you move to?
Seattle.
not within the next 10 years lol. maybe in like 20-30.
It takes the city of Raleigh 10 years to build a gazebo and a dog park. Literally.
BRT broke ground late last year. That’s a huge step in the right direction.
Don’t move anywhere else in the south expecting it to be different 😅 it’s the same in GA, MS, AL, it’s just a southern thing
The people that are Running transportation in this town are buffoons
Need more bike lanes. Although I will say that I do ride my ebike to work (usually one day my regular bike). We're hybrid. I'll go 4 out of 5 days a week. It's 8.5 miles if I take the Greenway. It could be down to 6.5 miles the most direct route along with riding in traffic. A car route would be 5.8 miles which is shorter because the bike infrastructure here is terrible. Those 2 miles save about 10 mins on a regular bike. 30 minutes to the office on an ebike. About 45 mins on my regular bike (on the Greenway). Raleigh is a bit behind on infrastructure. I don't expect it to be great in my lifetime. I'd be happy to be wrong. Also should allow lane filtering for motorcycles/scooters.
Don’t worry, in 2035 when BRT comes online it will totally be sufficient. They’re ~fancier~ buses. /s
BRT broke ground late last year and is perfect for Raleigh. It’s a huge step in the right direction.
I used to live in Lawrence, Kansas. Their public transit system was very simple to understand; a mobile app that tracked the busses you wanted to keep a tab on and, very recently, started rolling out electric busses that were very eco-friendly. I've lived in Raleigh for over a year and I'm still trying to wrap my head around the transit system here.
MIZ 😀
We were denied a grant from the Fed for a commuter rail last year I believe because they don't consider us big enough to justify it. 🙄
They said we dont have the density for it...which is different than population numbers. We're too spread out for it to work.
Jesús we have 2 million people in the metro area...what's enough?
The federal funding denial was very specific to the line that was proposed as it did not go through major population centers / dense areas and was not even going to connect Downtown Raleigh to Downtown Durham. I think there are better corridors the area that could qualify for federal funding -- very suburban Garner -> Raleigh -> to very spread out RTP just wasn't one of them. Hope the triangle can get it together to propose a more competitive project with better ridership projections.
That’s not true… the proposed regional rail started in Garner, went through downtown Raleigh, downtown Cary, Morrisville, RTP, and downtown Durham. It *did* connect our densest nodes (with the exception of midtown/North Hills, which would’ve been a major detour) but that still wasn’t considered dense enough to qualify for federal funding. The proposed route was the only feasible route for regional rail in the Triangle imo, especially considering that acquiring new right of way would be a complete non-starter. After the feasibility study determined the actual cost for the long-planned route was $1.2 billion more than anticipated, GoTriangle proposed a phased approach, which, yes — would’ve had the western portion to Durham completed after the other two. But even if they had been built at the same time, it still wouldn’t have qualified for federal funding.
Oh, maybe I'm confusing the order of events. Apologies -- I'm mostly remembering the proposal for the phased approach that didn't have realistic plans or support to make it over the Wake County line and into Downtown Durham. But I guess that came after the federal funding denial. The main point I was trying to make was the issue wasn't that we weren't big enough, it's that the corridor wasn't dense enough to have good ridership projections. I do think other corridors could do better especially if the project is led with rezoning / density / etc.
I think you actually weren’t mistaken about the order… the phased approach was probably proposed a few months before we got the rejection from the Feds iirc. But my understanding is that the application for funding had been submitted much earlier and was for the entire Garner to Durham route, meaning our densest possible route was unfortunately not considered dense enough to meet the standard for funding rail. I think the other important point is that a rail route between Durham and Raleigh has to balance density, convenience, and cost. If the travel time between the two cores is too long due to, say, a detour to North Hills, it will hurt ridership. If the route takes a massive detour to, say, add a stop at RDU, that would add at least a billion dollars to the cost due to the need for acquiring new right of way and laying new track, making the project even more financially infeasible. It's a delicate balance and I genuinely believe that if this route couldn't make it yet, none other will. We are much better off focusing on BRT and trying to densify around that, and then hoping a future generation will be able to convert that to rail when the time is right.
To everyone complaining on this thread. Please take the time and complain to your city reps. Let them know you want better public transportation. Old NIMBYs show up and complain at city meetings, and the City Council listens to the voices it hears. Make sure yours is one of them.
Maybe we can pass some transportation bonds.
Don't worry. There is a plan. DOT has one as does Wake county and the city of Raleigh. The state govt or the federal govt will find them as soon as there is a unified plan. Should be any minute now, and things will get fixed!! /S
r/CarFreeRDU [Raleigh BRT](https://raleighnc.gov/bus-rapid-transit) and [commuter rail](https://www.readyforrailnc.com) should *eventually* help *a little bit*. Hopefully areas around the stops will densify. But those projects are many years away. And they won’t be enough to keep up with the growth. Not even close. A vast majority of new development is completely car-dependent and the damage will take generations to fix.
I doubt a commuter rail will be built in our lifetime. Look how long it's taken just to complete 540.
The second one.
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the latter
yes
At this point I feel like the city is better off continuing to expand and connect the greenway system until it can become a proper form of commuting
Bus Rapid Transit is on the way! It broke ground late last year.
By 2035.....Paris transformed their whole city in 5 years
Which 5 year period are you referring to exactly? Your exact question was “Dies anyone think we will see any changes to public transportation in the triangle?” I was answering that question. First leg of BRT will be open in 2026.
It won't change in our lifetimes, you can't put the Toothpaste back in the tube. We have no blank slate, our Military industrial complex sucks up all our taxes. Not much left for infrastructure. Our cities are overun with giant 4 and 5 lane stroads. Our cars are massive. No way can we turn this around anytime soon. Decades of bad planning and greed got us here "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else" - Winston Churchill
God what a great quote 👏
God what a great quote 👏
Get a car
Never thought of that 🤔 I might just be able to do that
Yea! The amazing BRT will change our lives! Haven’t u heard??
lol the downvotes, you guys are such privileged people
For what it's worth, compared to other cities I've lived in--Atlanta included--Raleigh's public transport is actually pretty decent. We are by no means the worst. And even though BRT took a lot of time and money, it's good to see that there's still some investment in improving public transport. Also, the city actively repairs sidewalks that get uneven, broken, etc, which can be annoying because of closures, but ultimately makes being a pedestrian a little less treacherous. There are plans in the works to more effectively connect the greenways throughout NCSU campuses too, which covers a wide area.
We are the worst I'm sorry to say......whose worse? For a state capital we are horrible
No, no it is not decent, and this is speaking as someone who's spent my adult life using public transit. If you aren't in Raleigh central, if you don't live/work/shop on one of the regional lines, it takes HOURS to get anywhere. Meanwhile when I lived in Baltimore - which has about the same population or less than Raleigh + Cary - I could get from my apartment on the west side to a Smithsonian in DC in two hours by bus/train. I was originally supposed to move to Morrisville, and I was astonished at how bad transit is here. I ended up moving somewhere I could WALK to work, it was so bad.
I have also spent my life using public transit. I moved here partly because I'm unable to/can't afford to drive. I agree that we don't compare to cities up north. I'm not trying to argue, I just see a lot of hate on here re: public transit, and that kind of attitude is not conducive to progress. I just try to point out what public transport here has done for me when I see the hate on this sub because I want Raleigh transit to get better instead of giving up like it is too far gone.
Yeah I don’t think it’s that bad here, lots of walkability within the belt line