By Jason Hibbets
At the beginning of January, the City of Raleigh appointed me to a 70+ person task force to review the Wake County Transit Plan. I’d like to share some important information that will help shape the future of transit in Wake County that warrants your attention.
If you take one action as a result of this post, please take the Transit Choices survey. Want more details about the planning? Continue on…
Last month, the consultants working on the projects released the Transit Choices Report [PDF]. It’s 92 pages. And if you’re a transit geek, it’s all good. If you just want the cliff notes, see my recommendations below.
Read the Transit Choices Report
The highlights
- If you only read one thing in this report, read chapter 5, Our transit choices
- There are some interesting details about population density and employment density in chapter 3 on pages 13-15
- Details about the different spectrum’s we have to choose from are in chapter 3
- Frequency vs coverage page 35
- Takeaways (Density, Walkability, Linearity, Continuity) page 52-54
If you’re looking for details about the different modes of transit available, then appendix A on page 77 is your ticket. Note: this report does not focus on the modes of transit, rather the background, history, and the choices we have to make as a community.
Speaking of those choices, here’s the two major spectrum’s our community must consider
- Ridership–Coverage: Do we want to increase ridership with frequency or go more with a coverage goal that would provide “access to everyone.”
- Infrastructure–Service: Do we want to invest in infrastructure (dedicated lanes) or improved service, more buses, more drivers.
It’s important to understand that these are not either or choices, rather it’s a spectrum. Our community will decide where our limited resources will fall on these spectrum’s.
What’s next?
There are numerous public meetings coming up which I would encourage those of you interested to look into. Next steps include waiting for the different transit options report to be released, which should provide us with information about the ridership–coverage spectrum and the infrastructure–service spectrum. It will also include proposed maps of transit lines.
Feel free to add your comments and any feedback or reactions to the report.
Here’s how to solve the light-rail problem: http://strayvoltage.blogspot.com/2013/07/fixing-raleighs-embarrassing-lack-of.html
I used to think light rail is the solution. I doubt it will happen in my lifetime. Subways in NYC are convenient and cool, Raleigh is not NYC. What we need is better bus coverage. It takes almost two hours to get to RTP from SW Raleigh. It should be 30 min. No one wants to drive on I-40 but there’s no other choice.