Pic of the Week

The 400H building is now complete. Maybe not technically but as far as I’m concerned as a downtown regular it is. The sidewalks are open and recently the Downtown Raleigh Alliance posted that residents are moving in. Now we wait for some ground-floor shops.

We’ve been following this development for quite some time now and I really like it for a variety of reasons but the main one being it’s mixed-use nature.

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17 Years Ago, A Connoisseur Was Born

Wasn’t 2007 a fantastic year? We saw the iPhone. Netflix starting streaming. The Raleigh Connoisseur starts publishing blog posts. All of these things are changing the world and today is a day to celebrate one of them in particular. With 1,527 posts logged, I’m happy to report that I’m still here.

We have our community, our meetup, and this space here of course for various topics around urban planning, transit, developments, and a little food and drink. There’s so much to talk about if you follow what’s going on in Raleigh and I’m happy to keep putting these thoughts out there where I hope it fosters good discussion and makes all readers stop and think.

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2024 Will Be a Pivotal Year For Raleigh’s Transit Future. We Must Support Transit-Oriented Development.

In November 2023, the first of four bus-rapid transit (BRT) routes, years in the making, broke ground. The first route out the gate will be the eastern route. This one services the New Bern Avenue corridor between downtown, WakeMed, and parts around New Hope Road. We just might be riding around in articulated buses some time in 2025.

The increase in bus service is finally happening, kickstarted back in 2016, after Wake County voters decided to increase the sales tax in order to fund expanded transit. The second half of the transit journey comes with the accompanying land use and I think 2024 will be the year Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) becomes a household phrase. (or at least to all you readers out there)

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Coloring Outside the Lines: Imagining Fayetteville Street’s Future

Above is a video recording (watch it directly on YouTube) of a virtual meeting hosted by the Downtown Raleigh Alliance and Interface Studio where they take attendees through some of the things coming out of the Downtown Raleigh Economic Development Strategy project currently in progress. We’ve mentioned this project earlier in the year and this video is worth watching as it focuses mainly on Fayetteville Street. The team shares ideas that may lead us to new ways to reinvigorate the street.

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The Downtown North-South Greenway Connector Overview

I spent some time this week with a survey from the city about possible plans to reconfigure North West Street between Peace Street and Wade Avenue that could accommodate bike lanes, walking paths, and a different parking layout. If that excites you, jump right on over to that survey here to let them know what you think. If I still got you, I wanted to revisit the plans for more bicycle infrastructure along West Street, how it’s going, and what we might expect in the future.

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Put a Plaza On It: North West Street

Raleigh Magazine had a great event earlier this month in downtown Raleigh. While this post is not about the event exactly, you can’t help but spot the urbanism that took place during it. A parking lot was taken over for one night to bring people together to celebrate Raleigh’s hospitality industry. Easily, over 100 people were in this space, covered by a tent, where about a dozen or so cars typically park. I attended the event and couldn’t help but notice that this space works much better for people rather than for cars.

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