The Collectors Gallery, one of downtown Raleigh’s oldest art galleries, will move from City Market to the more central location in time for the Raleigh Wide Open Festival on Oct. 23.
via Raleigh art gallery moving to City Plaza – Arts & Living – News & Observer.
I just wanted to give everyone a heads up that I’ll be doing some behind the scenes work on the website. Regular visitors to the site should see a couple changes throughout the week. RSS and e-mail subscribers will see business as usual so jump to the main page when you have a chance and explore the new additions.
I thought this was pretty cool. Something fun for your Friday afternoon.
Walking around Glenwood South and other friendly people waiting for the R-Line.
City Manager Russell Allen will ask the City Council today to allocate $59,760 to design a 4,978-seat venue to host summer concerts under the Shimmer Wall. The venue, to be built on the site of the old Sir Walter Chevrolet dealership at McDowell and Lenoir streets, would cost about $1.5 million and could open as early as May of next year.
via Raleigh vote on concert venue set – Local & State – News & Observer.
Corner of Jones and West Street
When you talk about nightlife in downtown, the conversation must include the five or so blocks of Glenwood Avenue that make up Glenwood South. The mistress of downtown really gets lively on the weekends and if anyone has walked down her sidewalks on a nice Saturday night, then you know what I mean by lively. To me, there is a lot of energy in the air when the streets are crowded with cars and people are walking around, enjoying themselves in this entertainment district. Fayetteville Street is real nice and I have fun in that area but the crowds and traffic really do hover around Glenwood; you can’t deny it! With all this traffic, car and foot, it is good that hotel developments are in the works. The convention center helps drive this as I’ve seen many times convention goers riding the R-Line through Glenwood South. A hotel that is right in the middle of so much activity would be very appealing to those visiting the city.
Recently, there have been reports that two hotels are to be built in Glenwood South but no real work has begun yet. We await the start of the 10-story Powerhouse Plaza located on Jones and West Streets. Right now, the lot has been cleared and a sign has been placed out front letting people know what the future will be. The rendering looks promising and plans for ground floor retail are included. This would be a great addition to an already busy pedestrian intersection at Jones and West.
A Hampton Inn hotel is said to be in the works at the corner of Glenwood and Johnson Street. The initial reaction of the online peanut gallery has not been favorable to ‘just a Hampton Inn’. I believe we should wait and see what is proposed rather then speculate off very little information. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the rest of the houses on the 600 block of Glenwood as the area becomes more popular and more traffic moves down it over the years.
Source – News & Observer, Glenwood South Hotel Proposed
Corner of Glenwood and Johnson Street
The view of the Fayetteville Street district from the roof of the West at North tower. View it large on Flickr.
I’m sure everyone will agree with that title. The good news is new buses are being purchased and put into the fleet thanks to some stimulus money. The baby steps are better then nothing or perhaps much better then the cuts in transit that other cities are making around the country. The cost to upgrade a transit system is expensive. If you follow the local and national transit scene like I do then you are quite familiar with seeing prices in the hundreds of millions and even in the billions of dollars to bring big time mass transit to a city and state.
We could go on and on about how the bus services in the triangle do not adequately provide an alternative to driving. But is it possible to take our current system and make it more efficient? Rather then add new routes to serve more customers at a higher cost, should the powers that be explore ways to fill our current routes for much less? Here is a list of suggestions that may motivate more people to leave the car at home and travel by bus around the triangle. Should Raleigh adopt any of these?
The use of transit smart cards in larger cities make it easier to manage paying for any kind of transit. I recently had a chance to experience the first ever such system that was implemented in 1997 in Hong Kong. The Octopus Card is used to pay for all transit and can even be used to make purchases in grocery stores and vending machines. You just swipe the RFID card across the receiver and money is deducted from your account. Money can be added at pay stations without ever replacing your card. It would be cheaper to get in on this system early and expand it over time with our transit network. Currently, the “Acorn Pass” could be used to pay for bus fares and parking meters.
Just like the Transloc System that the NCSU Wolfline already has, a real time GPS tracking system would help people plan their trips if they knew where the bus was at any moment in time. This is especially helpful for those routes that stop only once an hour and would prevent major headaches. The maps could be online and accessed by computer, phone, or monitors at major bus stops.
This one is easy. More shelters and benches at stops would make it much more pleasant for people waiting for their ride. To take it one step further, the shelters could harvest solar power and use it to run lights to keep the area well lit at night. While controversial, I think advertisements on the shelters could be used to counter the cost.
Information goes a long way and we need to make it easy for people to get information about routes and changes to that route. Riders should be able to subscribe, by phone, e-mail, home address, anything, to information updates to any route that they choose. New subscribers should be mailed brochures with bus riding information, route maps, and schedules. They should even be given magnets for people to put up on their fridges so the information is easily accessible. Little things like this could make people more confident and comfortable with leaving their car at home for the day.
Wifi on buses would be a huge incentive for the tech crowd in the area. A lot of work, and internet browsing, is done on laptops or smart phones so that added access is very valuable to those that can work on the go. I’m right here with this one and would love to start doing my work on my laptop when I sit down on the bus rather then when I arrive at work. It is a much more efficient use of my time.
Number 2 may be on the way, as the N&O post mentions that the stimulus money will be used for “a real-time bus arrival system”.