The long wait for construction to begin on the New Bern Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) corridor may finally be over. The “groundbreaking” ceremony happened back in November 2023, and now, almost two years later, transit fans like you and me are still waiting for something to happen. There’s plenty written about the challenges of finding contractors who could do the work within budget, but the city has finally found a path forward. This fall, construction should kick off on the first package of project deliverables. Let’s go through what we might expect over the next few years.

If you need a quick refresher on the New Bern BRT, we can expect to see dedicated bus lanes for 3.3 miles between downtown Raleigh and WakeMed. The route will continue until New Hope Road before terminating and coming back towards town. The route will also have enhanced stations with level boarding, ticket kiosks, and 60-foot articulated buses. (bendy buses!) The corridor is also getting an overhaul with numerous pedestrian improvements such as new crosswalks and sidewalks that didn’t exist before, signalized intersection upgrades, and much more.

Since contractors did not bid on the entire project at all, city staff have broken up the project into the following pieces, best visualized with this slide.

What’s the executive summary of all this as of today? Here’s what you can tell all your friends:

1. The road work between Downtown and Poole Road is planned to start construction this Fall.
2. The road work between Pool Road and I-440 is open for bids today and could be awarded before the end of the year.
3. The road work between I-440 and New Hope Road plus building out all the stations will open for bids most likely in January.

So it’ll be awhile and hopefully the service is up and running before the end of the decade. If you do some quick math on those anticipated schedule estimates, this could go long but everyone needs to recognize that lots of aspects of these packages can occur in parallel.

Zooming in on Downtown itself, I’ll be real interested to see how Wilmington Street looks like once they build out the station on the 200 block. I hope the whole thing gets a new coat of pavement and refreshed street markings. This street is busy already and I’m already starting to think that this block could use less cars and on-street parking but I’m going to save that for a future blog post. More to come once shovels are actually in the ground.

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