Transit in the Triangle: Together, or apart?

To touch on a topic I keep trying to get to, it seems that the future of public transportation in the Triangle has come very quietly to a critical turning point.  It appears that most of what's going to be said in public has been said, and the talk made its way from the pages of the newspapers to the back rooms, where I can only speculate that haggling over the process seems to be still going on.  Given the amount of time and effort put into the STAC, I can't imagine that the process has already fallen dead.  At least I certainly hope not.

To recap, following the final collapse of the originally proposed Raleigh-to-Durham high frequency rail service, the state government appointed a Special Transit Advisory Commission (a.k.a, the STAC), to be hosted out of the Triangle J Council of Governments.  The purpose, ultimately, was to revisit every step in the decision-making process, to go back over all the options, and to see if out of the ashes of the original TTA plan, something could be made to work politically and financially.  It consists of all sorts of movers and shakers from across the Triangle, from business folks, former elected officials, university leaders, and activists.  The STAC met monthly for the past year or so, working with staff  members from the various local governments as well as the state.  In February, the STAC unveiled a draft report of its recommendations, which showed an ambitious $2 billion comprehensive plan for transit in the Triangle, to be funded through some sort of local tax, similar to Charlotte's .5% sales tax.  One of the Indy's blogs captured it nicely in a post last month, wherein the stresses in the agreement started to show.  Not surprisingly, the fault lines fell along much the same lines as before.  There's all sorts of ways to describe that rift, but ultimately it boils down to the Durham-Wake county line.

Bob Geary hit exactly this note in the Indy a couple of weeks ago, with Durham, Chapel Hill, and company at one end, Raleigh, Cary, and friends at the other, and a small handful of local business and government leaders trying to straddle the two and bring them together.  Geary cites a gent named Bruce Katz to sum up the argument for joining the region together:

But according to national urban policy expert Bruce Katz, Raleigh needs Durham, and vice versa. And the two cities also need Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Hillsborough and Chatham County, if the Triangle is to be a thriving metropolitan area.

Urban "metros" are the engines of economic prosperity in this century, says Katz, vice president of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. He spoke at Raleigh City Hall last month, armed with statistics: The Raleigh-Cary metro is the nation's 52nd largest, according to the U.S. Census, with a population of 950,000; the Durham metro ranks 85th with 450,000 people. The two are well-positioned to be a powerful, "two-place" region, Katz said, like Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn., or Seattle-Redmond, Wash.

Okay, there's obviously some fair points here, but comparing Raleigh and Durham to the Twin Cities or to Seattle-Redmond is, in both cases, a little foolish.  Take the Twin Cities for starters.  While they both have very unique skylines and their own unique neighborhoods and cultures, they also share a miles-long common boundry.  You can, in fact, walk between the two at several locations and not be sure when you left Minneapolis and entered St. Paul, as you never leave a heavily urbanized area.  In other locations, it's just crossing a bridge over the Minnesota River to move from one to the other.  On the other hand, there's no route between Raleigh and Durham that doesn't involve some very large stretch of unwalkable roads with nothing but trees in between.  The advent of Brier Creek has decreased that area somewhat, but there's still a pretty wide forested corridor between the two. 

The eagerness to envision a nation full of "two-place" regions is even more evident in his second example, though.  Redmond is a suburb gone big -- the comparable city in the Triangle to Redmond is not Durham, but Cary.  Taking the distance between the two as reported by Google Maps, which is roughly driving distance between city centers, Seattle-Tacoma (34 miles) is a much better analog for Raleigh-Durham (25 miles).  The true "two-place" regions which have any analog to the Triangle are more like Baltimore and Washington (40 mi.), or Philadelphia and Wilmington (31 mi.).  Sure these places are widely recognized as being connected, and all share airports, but nobody sane mentions them in the same breath as Minneapolis-St. Paul (10 mi.) 

But to regional pushers like Capital Broadcasting's Jim Goodmon, it's an article of faith that the two regions will grow together.  For business people, particularly broadcasters, with dollar signs in their eyes, it's terribly obvious that it should happen.  For the rest of us, though, it's just not.  The cities are, quite simply, just too damn far apart.  That, ultimately, is one very strong reason why making a unified transit system between the two metropolitan areas is so hard. 

But the problems go deeper with transit, wading into politics, funding, and the overall geography of the two cities (you knew I'd get the "g" word in there eventually).  I won't go back over all of the key differences Geary outlines in his piece, but I think there's something more that he doesn't completely address, which comes out loud and clear in the conflict over the STAC.  Durham and Chapel Hill, at the level of developers, city leaders, and the general citizenry, are geared and excited for high quality transit.  Durham grew up around a train station, and Chapel Hill has already drunk a whole pitcher of the transit-centered Kool-aid, with the fare-free bus system it shares with Carrboro.  The universities already sponsor the (wonderfully convenient for me) Robertson Scholars bus, and the TTA routes between the two cities are, if I recall correctly, the most heavily used in the system.  Raleigh citizens generally want transit too, but there's a lot more dickering over what it should look like.  Aside from that, while the tracks certainly go to Raleigh, they don't go through the true core of the city the way they do RTP and Durham, and they don't go anywhere near north Raleigh, and only go through the sleepy downtown of Cary.  Wake County, unlike Durham, is built up on spokes -- roads like Capitol Blvd., Falls of the Neuse, Glenwood Ave., Gorman Rd., and all the rest.  Unlike in Durham, where putting the system on standard gauge rail is the drop-dead no-brainer answer, Raleigh needs a system that aligns with its spokes, and there's no rail lines headed out most of them.

Here's the other problem: links on the west side of the Triangle, where there's transit-friendly development already in abundance around the universities, would seem to be ready to go, and could be pushed much faster.  But if we go with something like a three-county sales tax (which, given Paul Luebke's inexplicable obstinence, seems unlikely at this point -- more on that another day), the lion's share of revenue would be coming from Wake County.  Witness, then, the resistance on the part of Wake leader to elements of the STAC.

I've pinned down Wib Gulley, a strong proponent of the unified solution, after a few church league basketball practices, trying to suss out his take on this.  His argument, and it's a persuasive one, is that the corridor is already there for the Durham-to-Raleigh line, and even if the demand per capita is less than the Durham-to-Chapel Hill link, there's just so many more people along that corridor, that it makes more sense.  That's one reason the D-R line got labeled the "linchpin" corridor in early versions of the STAC report.  But to my mind, it's also one of the reasons that the original TTA proposal stumbled -- the line is just too long, and not enough people really want to ride all the way from downtown Raleigh to downtown Durham.

I was all geared up to do a blog entry about this last year, worried that the STAC was going to turn this "linchpin" connector into a fatal stumbling block yet again.  STAC co-chair, George Cianciolo, was nice enough to take my call and speak with me for a fair bit of time.  He made it clear that this was one reason why the corridor was named the "linchpin," and not the "priority" corridor.  Apparently, there are a fair number of folks on the STAC who felt like Durham-Chapel Hill should be the "priority" connector, in addition to those who still want to push for the region-wide solution.  The current draft of the STAC report reflects every bit of this tension.  Happily, the #1 priority focus is, as it should be, improving bus and local "circulator" service in each of the major municipalities in the area first, and getting to the inter-city lines later.

Still, though, the current politics threatens to pull the whole thing under again.  So what now?  Should the two metros go solo?  Or should the imperatives of being a major metropolitan area, laid out above by Katz, keep us trying to make the "linchpin" line work?

Ultimately, I just see the geographies of the regions as too different for the forces trying to pull Raleigh and Durham together to overcome completely.  Certainly, the two regions have strong interests in common, and this won't change any time soon.  But whereas 35 years ago, the story of urbanization in the piedmont centered around the Triad and the Triangle as different entities, I see a future where the whole chain along the I-85 corridor becomes much more integrated.  Indeed, the new Durham Performing Arts Center has already announced it will be advertising heavily in Greensboro in addition to Raleigh.

So here's an idea -- when it comes to high frequency service, the kind you think of when you think of true, top-notch city bus service, subway service, or elevated rail, let's do this on our own.  Maybe we pass a half-cent sales tax (once Luebke's been hit with the clue stick a couple of times) for the whole region, but we keep the proceeds split, and plan our local circulators locally.  At the same time, though, let's take the connector rail service several leaps beyond just going from Durham to Raleigh.  Let's do some major improvements to the tracks, and take the NC Railroad's local service from 2 Amtrak trains a day and make it 8 trains a day from Charlotte to Rocky Mount, and open stations in Mebane, Hillsborough, RTP, and Morrisville.  Let's grade separate the rail at busy spots so that it can move faster, and double the track the whole way so that one doesn't have to sit behind slow freight cars all the time.

That way, we get the flexibility we need to focus on local needs appropriately, but we don't leave wider regionalism behind -- we expand it even more. [where: 27701]