This week, we have a not so great photo of the new sign on the Union Station Transit Facility. I thought this would be significant as we are months away from the station opening. The area looks very unfinished and future development is still to come to the area.
Have you ridden any GoRaleigh buses lately? It’s been about six months or so since fares have returned and at the same time, the number of ways to plan your trips and pay for your fare have increased. All those options are meant to help you, not confuse you, and so with lots of options out there, I wanted to take a second and get a list going of all the tech available for connoisseurs to get around Raleigh stress-free and fully informed.
Here’s a nice perspective I captured showing the Raleigh Union Station Bus Facility, or RUS Bus, that’s been under construction for the better part of this year. It’s not that clear from the street but from a higher vantage point, you can see the orientation of the bus station and the future location of high-rise developments. The bus station is planned to be in operation in 2025 but the site is nowhere close to being complete.
A new bus route, the #9 Hillsborough, started service in September of this year, offering 15-minute frequency between downtown and NC State seven days a week. This got me thinking about other bus routes that operate every 15 minutes—our definition of “high frequency” here in Raleigh.
I’m guessing you probably didn’t hear about this new route as you don’t use GoRaleigh. I feel confident with the claim as it’s estimated that only 2% of the Raleigh population uses the GoRaleigh bus system. (I may be off by a few percentage points but the point is, it’s pretty low) However, as Bus Rapid Transit grabs headlines these days, it’s the small details that are going unnoticed and there’s a case to reconsider GoRaleigh as part of your mobility toolkit.
Rezoning case Z-92-22, or better The New Bern Avenue Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) case, is now in the books. Or “on the map” as I prefer to see these things. The final votes took place in July and I wanted to kind of wrap up these changes as the city council has been working it since January of this year. Above is a screen grab from iMaps where you can see the applied TOD zoning in East Raleigh.
Embedded above (direct link here) is the video from the June 4, 2024 Raleigh City Council meeting where the latest updates and discussion took place related to the Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) rezoning case for the New Bern Avenue corridor. We’ve been following this for awhile now and the rezoning case here, which sets to change the zoning for over 700 properties on or near the upcoming Bus Rapid Transit line for New Bern Avenue, is being worked on in phases. I wanted to share my notes and provide a summary of the latest.
Feel free to dive right into the video above, as it opens with a nice summary, and check out these resources on the city’s website:
Remember the R-Line? If not, you can refresh your memory now as we have the fare-free circulator service back up and running. The service was put on hold when the COVID pandemic began in early 2020. Long time residents may remember the old route as being a loop around downtown but it’s worth mentioning that it’s actually a bit different now.
Above is the video for the March 5, 2024 City Council evening session where council revisits the topic of rezoning properties along New Bern Avenue in an attempt to support the now under construction Bus Rapid Transit route. It’s actually a more manageable 40 or so minutes to watch so I encourage anyone to check it out or watch it directly on YouTube here.