11 minute read
The Future of Transit
BY MICHAEL McELROY | PHOTOGRAPHY BY BETH MANN
Nearly a year after the collapse of the light rail project, Orange County conducts a more considered search for Plan B.
Growth has put our region on countless national lists of the best places to live. But the traffic is a different kind of superlative. While Orange County’s population growth is slowing, it still outpaces the state average, and the region adds 80 people a day, threatening to overwhelm roads ill-suited for such high volume. Commutes are maddening. Fender benders can back up traffic for miles. Regional leaders have long known that something needed to be done. In some form over the last 20 years, Durham and Orange County officials settled on a light rail system linking the two areas. It would solve congestion on the 15-501 corridor and be a state-of-theart mass transit system worthy of cities of the future. Voters in Durham and Orange counties passed sales tax increases to fund a transit plan with light rail at its center; the state agreed to pay 25% of the total cost. Officials secured a major Federal Transit Administration grant to pay for another 50%, and Duke, UNC and other key stakeholders signed nonbinding agreements of support.
A model of the Virgin Business Hyperloop One pod came to Frontier RTP in October.
Then in February, after two decades of planning, the Durham-Orange Light Rail plan fell dead at the party, and the guests accused one another of its murder.
The collapse inflamed resentments that may take years to ease, but city leaders say that it also provides an opportunity.
The light rail consumed a huge portion of the sales tax revenue, and now with that money freed up, who knows what could happen? Will the same disputes that doomed the light rail resume? And with the traffic still terrible, can the region afford another 20 years of planning? What can Orange County expect in the process to find what’s next?
Recent interviews with more than 20 government officials, business leaders and residents across the region suggest that, despite their severe disappointment, county leaders are intent to learn from their mistakes and are excited for alternative ideas.
A BITTER DIVORCE
Every suspicious death deserves an autopsy.
For many advocates of the light rail plan, its collapse was not just suspect, but an outright sabotage. The fight over who to blame has been well-covered, however, and all sides can name their villains with little help. Some sources for this article were far more candid off the record, but on the record they repeatedly expressed the genuine need to move on. So we’ll be brief. The spread of light rail systems across the country began in the 1960s, according to a study by Thomas A. Garrett, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. And while the heavy rail systems of New York, Chicago and the like were born out of necessity, Garrett wrote, “The development of modern light-rail systems has been motivated by their potential to not only alleviate traffic congestion but to foster economic development.”
For a region poised to boom, the allure was too bright to ignore.
Light rail’s significance to the region grew profound. It could safely carry en masse the Durham residents who worked at UNC and the Chapel Hill residents who worked at Duke.
The final numbers called for 17.7 miles of electromagnetically powered rail from UNC Hospitals to North Carolina Central University, connecting three major universities and covering 19 stations at 23,900 trips a day.
Then, to put it simply, disagreements occurred.
While feelings remain raw, the region owns the collapse together, and the problems light rail was meant to solve are only getting worse.
“This problem we are having in the Triangle keeps getting pushed out farther and farther, as people [who] try to find a way to afford to participate in this region are increasingly moving out,” said Dwight Bassett, the Town of Chapel Hill’s economic development officer.
WHAT NOW?
In October, a model Virgin Hyperloop One pod came to Frontier RTP in Research Triangle Park. The company has a testing track in Las Vegas and is considering Durham as a site for another. The company says that one day the pods could send passengers about their business at 600 mph through vacuum tubes. Early limited testing proved successful, and if ever deployed, such a system could revolutionize mass transit. But for now, these are just dreams. Citizens will not be hurtling through vacuums anytime soon.
At this point, officials just want to listen.
Though most stakeholders never publicly wavered in their support of the plan, many of them said the engagement process was far from all inclusive. On this, all sides agree. Shelley Blake Curran, GoTriangle’s interim CEO, said that after the board voted to abandon light rail, “the teams almost immediately started working again to revise the plan.”
“The good news is, there are a lot of dedicated people in the Triangle region who want to see some sort of regional solution,” she said. “We all realize that the traffic is not getting better. Anyone who gets stuck in I-40 traffic, I think is saying, ‘Hey, we need to figure out something.’”
A recent report by the American Public Transportation Association, commissioned and paid for by GoTriangle, articulated the lessons learned from the collapse and made recommendations going forward. Much of what the report said should have been done, had been done to varying degrees, but the assessment is a sobering call that Curran, who was not with GoTriangle during the crucial early planning, acknowledged.
“Everyone has to be on board from the beginning,” she said. “We are already doing better.”
ALL THE SMALL THINGS
Mike Charbonneau, GoTriangle’s chief communications officer, said that while they wait for a larger plan, several small improvements can be done now to make a big difference in the existing bus systems.
“Changing a bus route to every 15 minutes in some cases can make the difference between taking two hours to get to work or 45 minutes,” he said. “And for that person who has to walk from work to a bus stop, having a cover over their head when it is pouring rain or 100 degrees, it’s life changing.”
It’s a matter of freedom, Joe Milazzo II, the executive director of Regional Transportation Alliance, said.
“I’ve always felt that mobility can be liberating for a community,” he said. “What you are really doing is connecting people to opportunity and people to all aspects of civic life.”
Durham, Orange and Wake counties each voted to put their own money behind mass transit, which puts the region in a place of strength moving forward, officials said.
“It is rare to have three sales tax referendums dedicated to transit,” Curran said, and “we are one of the only areas [in the country] to have those referendums passed on the first round of voting.”
NUMBERS SPEAK THEIR TRUTH
The number of Orange County residents who work in Durham and other surrounding counties is climbing, and there is faster growth among the people who work in Orange County but live somewhere else.
More than 48,000 people drive in to Orange County in total; some 37,000 drive out.
The light rail plan would have addressed only a portion of that number.
Some 23,500 people commute between Durham and Orange counties each day, and while many of those doubtlessly take the bus, the far majority drive, often in single occupancy.
Sixty-one percent of Orange County residents have two or more cars.
All this data adds up to an inescapable sum. The lines separating our region are in many cases arbitrary. So the next transit plan needs to be adaptable to the demands of both the specific areas and the region as a whole.
The bus numbers show some signs of progress. Chapel Hill Transit (CHT) buses are nice. They have free Wi-Fi and comfortable seating. The fleet runs green. Partly as a result, ridership is the highest in 10 years, according to the 2019 State of the Community Report from The Chamber for a Greater Chapel Hill-Carrboro. Orange County has fewer people driving alone to work than the surrounding counties and the state in general. And between 2005 and 2012, CHT says, ridership “increased by 20%, and buses operate at near capacity.”
But existing bus service is bound by the same laws of physics as regular traffic. Taking the bus, no matter the amenities, can still take too long for a reasonable commute option.
“Right now the frustration I hear from our residents,” Bassett said, “is that, ‘I can live a five-minute drive from downtown, and it can take me 40 minutes to take the bus there. What’s my motivation [for taking the bus]?’ There isn’t one, I get that.”
For many officials in Orange County and the region overall, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) is emerging as a potential solution to both this increased demand and to the light rail’s collapse.
Bus Rapid Transit, according to the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), is a “high-quality bus-based transit system that delivers fast and efficient service” and that “is often considered more reliable, convenient and faster than regular bus services.” CHT and transit partners, which include the Town of Chapel Hill, the Town of Carrboro and UNC, have conducted a feasibility study for a BRT “North-South corridor,” which would extend 8.2 miles and link, in 33 minutes, park-andride lots from Eubanks Road to Southern Village. The study looked at a plan for 16 stations in which a fleet of 12 BRT vehicles would come every 7½ minutes and serve an average of 8,575 riders a day.
A BRT system offers “the speed of a rail transit system with the comparatively lower cost of a traditional bus system,” CHT says.
BRT can also be implemented according to the needs of the community, Milazzo said. Several cities in the United States have some form of BRT, including Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Los Angeles. Some BRT plans use wide bus-only lanes, and others employ a system that prolongs green traffic lights for oncoming buses. Orange County’s study prioritized both.
Milazzo helped organize a trip for the region’s transit officials to Richmond, Virginia, to see its new Pulse BRT system, which carries some 7,000 daily riders across 7.6 dense miles in 35-37 minutes. It can drive development, too. The total assessed value of the “Pulse Corridor,” Richmond transit officials said, grew from $8.74 billion in 2015 to $10.92 billion in 2019.
“We are clearly pushing BRT as something we think is very reasonable to be part of the solution,” Milazzo said.
BRT seems logical, said Aaron Nelson, the president and CEO of the Chamber, “because you can do it today.”
“These big systems,” he said, require “planning and right-of-way acquisition and compensation, and all that.” The versatility, he said, makes sense for both the time and the place because the thinking has shifted.
“The biggest thing that has changed,” Nelson said, “is the belief that only light rail could drive significant economic development.”
He added: “It was believed that the billion dollars worth of development that was supposed to happen around a station could only happen if we have light rail; the buses couldn’t drive that,” Nelson said. “But we’ve seen in other areas that welldesigned [BRT plans] can be a major driver.”
Though the early feasibility and other studies for the light rail spoke of “exhaustive” public engagement campaigns, these kinds of complicated programs can take so long that whatever is gleaned can soon become outdated. The light rail plan might have been perfect for the market at the time of its origin, Milazzo said, but “the market is different now. There are simply more people.”
“You should never be amazed how long it takes transportation projects to get built,” Milazzo said. “You should be amazed anything gets built to begin with.”
Bassett said the urgency is no longer hypothetical. In many ways the transit issue is like climate change: The dire effects of inaction are not coming – they are here.
“The connectivity point is the interstate system,” Bassett said, “and Orange County’s portion of that interstate system is two lanes in both directions.”
The narrow outlet regularly leads to rush-hour traffic that stalls from 15-501 to the I-85/I-40 split near Hillsborough, a distance of some 15 miles.
“In the 21st century-thinking about jobs and employees, the world shifted a couple of years back: Workforce began to dictate company location,” Bassett said. “It’s more about creating a quality of life that functions and works for individuals.”
It is a big part of why Amazon, Google and other major companies, which have decided against our area as major expansion points, choose their locations.
Time is limited, and these things take time.
Rep. David E. Price might concur. Price represents parts of Orange, Durham and Wake counties and is a ranking member of the House Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Subcommittee. He was a significant advocate for the light rail plan and for the federal funding. When the plan ended, he called it a historic setback.
This time, he said, leaders simply have to do better.
“One doesn’t just submit a new plan to the FTA at the drop of a hat,” he said. “You really need to do considerable regrouping, develop a viable plan and make sure this kind of breakdown in the process won’t occur again.
“We don’t have any time to waste.” CHM
