[Durham INC] Our transit future -- Third round public workshops -- Wednesday

[Pat Carstensen]

I went to the open house last night.  If you want to see the big maps, you have another chance today at the Chapel Hill Library or out at RTP next week.  They are trying to get the maps, etc. into a size that is reasonable to download from the website.
A couple observations:What is new is breaking regional transit into 3 pieces: a commuter segment between Durham Central Station and Raleigh (which would go faster, have fewer stations, concentrate service in "commute-time" period, and might be faster to put in) and local segments in Wake County and in Durham/Orange Counties (which would have about twice as many stations as the 1990's plan did).  The Alston Avenue station will be the eastern-most station in the Durham/Orange local.  It will have a significant amount of bus service (from Durham Tech, NCCU, and neighborhoods).  I am really concerned about how this interacts with the proposed Alston Ave. widening, since you want to have lots of opportunity for dense, walkable development within about 1/2 mile of the station, and it looks to me like 1/2 the space you could do development in will be street.  This station may take 20 years to realize, but then the traffic justifying the widening may also take 20 years. There isn't much in the plan for South Durham -- you would have to drive or take a bus to RTP to get on the train to Wake County, or get to the I40-NC54 area to catch transit into Durham.  Which means there won't be much incentive to develop smarter there.The stations (at South Square, Duke, and along the railroad through Durham) would all be opportunities for new centers of activity.I worry that we may have missed our opportunity to do regional transit.  When the schools have "What If" committees (I assume they are doing worst case planning for how bad their budgets could be), it's not clear we will have the will to invest in transit -- and I don't think we can be a successful region (given growth and rising cost of gas) without region.  
Regards, pat
From: pats1717 at hotmail.com
To: inc-list at durhaminc.org
Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:26:00 -0400
Subject: [Durham INC] Our transit future -- Third round public workshops --	Wednesday








Open house, drop-in style:
Wed, Mar 23, 4 - 7 PM | Durham Station Transportation Ctr, 515 W. Pettigrew St., DURHAM.
http://www.ourtransitfuture.com/
 		 	   		  

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