INFRASTRUCTURE, TRANSPORTATION & UTILITIES INTERVIEW
Growing smartly Amid explosive expansion, transportation authorities are unified in providing more options
Charles Lattuca President & CEO – GoTriangle What challenges has GoTriangle experienced in the past year and how are you addressing them? The Raleigh-Durham area is exploding in growth and it’s going to accelerate once we get out of the pandemic. The challenge is figuring out how to best handle the growth that is coming. To ensure that the Triangle stays on all those Top 10 lists about great places to live, we have to continue building a solid transportation system that gives people more options than driving alone in cars on increasingly crowded roadways. At the start of the pandemic, like most transit systems, GoTriangle suffered a significant loss of ridership. A lot of businesses shut down back in March or had their employees start working from home. We experienced a rapid decline in users of the transit system even as we kept transporting frontline workers to their essential jobs. Ridership has been slowly coming back over the past year. We are back up to about 55% to 60% of pre-COVID levels for our ridership during the weekday and 90% to 95% on the weekends. Fortunately, we still see a lot of sales tax being generated and that is part of the transit financing in the Triangle area. The three counties have a half-cent sales tax that is dedicated to transit. The sales tax has bounced back remarkably, and, in some areas, it has actually increased over the previous year. How will the commuter rail and bus rapid transit (BRT) corridors work in the Triangle? In the Triangle, each county has its own local transit provider. GoTriangle is the regional system that runs across municipal lines and connects everybody together. The three counties are working together to create one unified regional transit network and that network includes both commuter rail and BRT projects. Federal funding has been secured for BRT projects that belong to GoRaleigh in Wake County and Chapel Hill Transit in Orange County. These are projects that serve
high-volume, high-capacity corridors where there is a lot of ridership. The BRT corridors are shorter than commuter rail. These BRT projects, for the most part, will operate buses in dedicated lanes for 60% to 70% of their routes. That is what makes bus rapid transit so desirable. In addition to dedicated lanes, BRT buses will have the ability to jump ahead of traffic at signal lights. This is called queue jumping. BRT will suit the needs of people who take shorter trips than commuter rail and even attract new riders because of its ability to bypass a significant portion of the congestion that is already on our roads. The proposed commuter rail service between Clayton and Durham will bypass traffic congestion, too, and provide greater access to opportunity and a speedier commute to work across a wider geographic area. www.capitalanalyticsassociates.com
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