Ninth Street Watch: Future of Transit in the Triangle

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Future of Transit in the Triangle

The Herald Sun has a good article about the visit of the current FTA commissioner to the Triangle, which sums up the current state of the proposed transit plans for the Wake-Durham-Orange Tri-Country Region. The good news is that, as the article describes, all three counties are moving forward in planning for the proposed transit and aligning their wider zoning and long-term development plans to include transit. The bad news is that many of the proposals continue to make the crucial mistake of transit planners elsewhere: in the name of convenience and cost, the transit is routed through an existing major road artery, such as 15/501 corridor. Slate had an excellent article on the folly of this approach - if we want to spur dense development along the transit corridor, we must ensure that transit is easily accessible by pedestrians; plopping it in the middle of a median on 15/501 is not going to accomplish it. Washington, DC provides an excellent study in contrasts of two approaches. The first section of the Orange line through the Roslyn/Ballston corridor has been constructed underground, spurring massive and highly dense development overhead. In contrast, the rest of the Orange line runs along the I-66 corridor through Fairfax County,creating massive parking lots on both sides of the highway and not much else. Given that one of the future stations is going to be built near Ninth Street, it is never too early to start thinking about how proposed design of the entire system will affect our our own neighborhood.