vitaviatic

OK. Here we go. The first salvo in a long NIMBY rant emerging from Five Points... N&O~08/31/10 Now give me the reasons again why the Capital Blvd. approach shouldn't be sunk? Yes, it's expensive, but I can almost guarantee you that the tunnel boring and utility relocation required will cost more or less the same as the hordes of NIMBY lawyers and extortionist lawsuits from these whiners. The thing is that you either pay contractors to sink it (who in turn pay some of your neighbors who work on the thing) and delete the basis of the complaints from the Five Point blue hairs, or a pay small army of litigation specialists who will delay, drain, and suck the absolute life out of this project, contributing the money to nothing more than a country club, a Porsche dealer, and/or a hooker or two. My response to these people (continuation of original use, tough tooties to you) will not be not be decided upon in the way way, or to the same outcome. There is a long, sordid history of "coming to a nuisance" litigation in this country to have serious misgivings. So my question is, do you want HSR built in Raleigh, or not? If you do, you'd better think about putting it in a tunnel.

Hey, you guys thought Raleigh was run by dogma, Cary is 5X Raleigh in hidebound thought. The remedy to Cary's intellect+design malaise will come only once an upstart neighbor (um, I'm kinda thinking Apex, possibly Holly Springs) starts to do it better. When that beloved tollway finally gets finished (of course, provided that the tolls aren't too high), watch and see how many people then start driving around the $megaburb known as Cary, to places with fresher concepts. Then you'll see the panicked gentry start to push for things to stitch up Frankenstein, not a minute before. (Apex already seems to be grabbing more than its share of the residences of local "celebrities".) I really couldn't care less what Cary calls itself -- be it "Town of", "Burg of", or even "Hamlet of" would make me fret not. What it boils down to is this. The "Town of Cary" is a "Town" that is run by, and for the nearly exclusive benefit of, realtors and developers. (For that reason alone, it would qualify Cary as a "Town".) Realtors will tell the city mothers to never refer to Cary as a "city", because to all of the emigrant newcomers seeking to buy homes, the realtors will tell them, the word "city" evokes images of gang scrip, and poor people, and all of those undesirable elements of a "city". Your average homebuyer wants "fru fru", not "city", and so it carries on as a marketing ploy by realtors. Is it racial? Why, you betcha! At least partially, whether the intent was to discriminate or not. Minorities are probably more than welcome, provided they sport the "right" kind of clothing, vehicle, and CC&R worshiping attitudes that the other "Town"folk have. In the end though, the joke is on Cary. At some point, Cary will begin to decay. In the instances of Xroads and CTC, it already has. The developers and realtors that perpetrated the whole "Town of Cary" mythology will not dwell and suffer on it -- they will simply move on to Pittsboro or Johnston County, or wherever. And once the decay starts to spread, Cary will have no choice (without its old developer patrons around to bail it out) than to go to the ever-hated Federal till for redevelopment and renewal money to heal the scars. It will, in a fit of irony, then begin acting like a city. Regardless of the State's definition of municipalities, and the lack of import therein, the Federal government, via the Census Bureau, does have explicit definitions for municipalities, under which Cary would be firmly classified as a "city" (although I agree with most of you who doubt that there is any redeeming characteristic to Cary that would qualify it as a real urban area). However, on an application for funding, and through the appropriations process (there are many of you on this blog way better able to delineate the process than I) the "Town of Cary" must use its legal name. To someone at the State level, it makes little difference. But at the Federal level, if an appropriations bill comes across a committee chair, say, Congressman Joe Blow from Spokane, gives the request a once over, reads "Town of" on it, and it gets shuffled to the bottom of the pile. He doesn't know, doesn't care, that Cary now has 300,000 people in the 2015 interim Census. It's a "Town", and therefore it's low priority. Of course, I may be wrong, and the Republicans regain all three branches of government, begin to try and starve cities again, and Cary might become a spoiled nephew for the very same reasons. But I kinda doubt that. And you may give congressmen and women the benefit of a doubt, that they are more astute and studious than this, but even if they are energetic enough to do the research, there is simply too much on their plate to digest. Personally, I am of the opinion that lobbyists do most of the legislating in packaged drops to the Rayburn Building anyhow. Distilled to its essence, Apex, Holly Springs, and Morrisville will turn Cary into a "city", whether Cary likes it or not, despite whatever Cary chooses to call itself. Those of us that have lived in bigger metropoli have seen this played out over and over again. Having said that, I would have to say that, IMHO, nobody gets it right in those parts. Just look at Raleigh and Brier Creek and you see what I mean.

Uh...Perhaps it can be buried underneath Downtown, er, excuse me, Capital Blvd. (Never liked that useless name change, by an even more useless mayor -- Avery Upchurch. But I digress... ) For all of the high-density projects that Raleigh claims to want to put downtown, the Boulevard will have to be upgraded anyhow to up the capacity, especially given that any serious commuter transit is still fifteen years out (more like twenty-five if history is any indication). Rebuild the Boulevard at the same time, with upgrades, and sink the the railroad within the ROW of the highway and you get: 1) more space to build, and; 2) funding from multiple pots (highway and transit). OK, let's get real here for a minute. You can't possibly cram HSR into a skinny little single track corridor (on either side of Capital ). You're gonna need probably three tracks inbound from the north for staging purposes. You wanna talk about wrecking Glenwood South?! Try triple tracking through there. And if you intend to elevate multiple main lines, you might as well bury it, save some money, and get rid of the eyesore. For all intents and purposes, you're gonna have to bury it anyway to get a station with any kind of utility out of it at that puny little Wye. Go ahead. Tell me it's expensive. Why yes, it is! But it's cheaper in the long run to sink it now and avoid all the clutter problems with crossings and train delays later (which might actually, if bad enough, make the enterprise fail!). El Paso tunneled underneath their downtown all the way through. Reno didn't tunnel it, but they co-oped with Union Pacific to build a depressed trainway through downtown to free up Virginia St. and the other I-80 interchanges. The biggest hurdle and expense would be utility relocation, but I suspect that most of the utilities are set off to the side of Capital , and not directly underneath it. Not to mention that this would eliminate multiple condemnations and land acquisition expenses (the State already owns the Capital right-of-way. There are a number of examples of this type of joint highway/transit venture that have done very well, both in the time and expense category (Denver's T-REX notable among them). LA is embarking on the same type thing with the "Subway to the Sea", after they've already been successful with the Alameda Corridor. The little corner of DTR that HSR will graze by is not that big of a deal to traverse (we're not talking about digging under the Legislature here). But so help me, if as usual, Raleigh tries to do it the nineteenth century (read: cheap) way, you will regret it, not just from denegration of the neighborhoods you just made interesting, but from the wasted hours spent pounding your steering wheel, or just as bad, waiting on a train that never moves because it either can't get in or out of the station.

I know that a lot of people here are getting tired of my "Kill Central Prison" campaign. And I'm tired of arguing about it myself. So trust me when I say, like I have before, that I feel like I am "wasting my time" here. I have seen nothing in this particular response that precludes CP getting knocked down and moved. It depends on what you replace it with. $300 million?....Ooooh, that number scares me to death!!!....Seriously. Are you kidding me?! Your own $150 million replacement cost for the building itself is about 3x more than the revenues of a 500,000 sq. ft. shopping center at $100 per square foot...Per month!! (And that's low-balling big time, especially if you have a world-class transit system dumping a million people into that place a year!) Some more math. Assume that half that number is services or untaxable revenues (highly unlikely). So let's run it out: 500,000 x 100 = $50,000,000 / 2 = $25,000,000. So, what? 8% tax revenue from that = $2,000,000 per month. Plus don't forget that train tickets have taxes on them too. So with your $300,000,000 replacement figure -- hell, let's make it $400,000,000 for Pete's sake! -- your tax revenue breakeven point for the State from this facility is around 200 months, or 17 years. Now, as I said in the "Centrium" prop from a while back, throw 4 residential towers on top of that mall (sitting on top of a train station), 32 living floors apiece, 4 flats per floor. 32 residential floors x 4 towers = 128 floors total x 4 units per floor = 512 units total. Now let's say that you believe that the world really has gone to hell in a handbasket and that a condo in downtown Raleigh will never sell for more than $500,000 regardless. So we'll tack an average price on these guys at $250,000 (yeah, a 37th floor overlook with DTR on one side and Dix and Pullen on the other for a half mill...Right!) So here we go again: 512 condo units x $250,000 = $128,000,000. City and county property taxes generated from that, you do the math. I wouldn't ask the General Assembly to give or "allocate" to me a bloody thing. I would buy it from the State if I had the access to the kinds of capital needed. The way it would be done here in Denver (and the way it is being done with Union Station in the FasTracks buildout) is that the property gets encased into a special revenue district (or a "quasi", if you prefer) that captures and collects added fees and taxes to guarantee the loan. You already know the other term for it...TIF. Your local airport already collects up to $8 for you to walk in there with a paid ticket and use the place. And you couldn't do that at this station? Hmmm...$8 x 1,000,000 passengers per year (that's only about 2,800 passengers a day folks, that would actually be a failed system -- but just for argument) = $8,000,000 per year x the aforementioned 17-year breakeven = $136,000,000. We're not even including income from retail rental space, rental car taxes or any of that crap here. And we're already in the comfortable bonding range. Now plug in to those models what I think are realistic numbers: $150+ per square foot/month retail revenues, average condo price of $550,000 (remember you a sitting on top of a bullet train, so don't go comparing this to Soleil or other untassled projects), and in the ballpark of 3,500,000 passengers, or just under 10,000 per day (that's lowball too, if it's a regional and HSR hub). Also remember that a lot of the retail income (I'd say a fifth to a quarter) would probably be coming from Southside Virginia or out of state. That's new money in the State's eye man, and that's money they wouldn't have access to otherwise. You can build a prison anywhere. You can only put this station for high-speed rail in one of maybe three places: Capital Yards (good luck with that one, and almost a nonstarter as far as downtown Raleigh goes), the Boylan Wye (very tightly constrained, and probably obsolete on opening for capacity), or the prison property. It ain't cheap, but it's the best option you've got, friend. This is simplistic, granted. You have construction costs (probably remediation costs as well, considering the site), and other considerations. But the buyout cost for the prison is chump change compared to the economic benefits that this parcel can create. Problem is that everybody just throws up their hands, especially in Raleigh, asayin' "Cain't be done!", and never even tries it on paper! Big numbers aren't so scary when you've got even bigger numbers running 'em down. (BTW -- Let's do the rent, shall we? 500,000 sq. ft. at, oh, $15 per sq. ft. = $7,500,000 per month floor rent. Take half that for expenses, so $7,500,000 / 2 = $3,750,000 per month net x 12 months = $45,000,000 per year net. $400,000,000 (hell, let's make it $500,000,000 for Pete's sake!) / $45,000,000 = < 12 years. Not including the three decks of office space we threw in for "Centrium" as well.)

I still think building on the Boylan Wye is a bit like building a cupcake for a party with 20 people. You would have to have a layered design with four different levels for the bus functions, commuter rail, HSR, and apparently everybody's favorite -- LIGHT RAIL. Even a modest station would be difficult around a wye configuration (interesting that they seem intent on reviving a turn-of-the-century design that was already problematic in the '40s). Orulz' concepts posted here are good ideas on how to do it, if it absolutely must be done there. But I think it would open (much like I-40 did) to instant congestion and platform jamming. As many of you have pointed out, it's already bad enough now with half a dozen trains. Yes, I am. I am going to wake this dog up, and beat it again!!! Move farther west, knock the *bleep*ing prison down, and stack it with a TOD, and I mean high-density, a la Crystal City or Pentagon City, or if you prefer, since Raleigh politicos seem to brag about emulating it -- Grand Central Station, NYC. High-end and high volume retail will generate enough tax receipts from a self-taxing revenue bond district to pay for the thing within a decade. A high profile retail presence, plus Dix Park (don't get me started on that one!) would ensure a high demand for condominiums stacked on top. It would be a self-sustaining transportation facility, that would not become a money sump as most present-day transport hubs are designed for. The only problem is that every line would have to go underground, but that isn't as big a deal as it would appear with today's tunnel boring technology. In Kansas City, they build warehouses underground, then layer offices on top -- essentially doubling the revenue potential, and getting the less glamorous stuff of out of sight. It's also not a big deal if the expense is split from two separate cost centers -- one as the station structure itself, and two as the pilings for the above-ground development. The CP plot is a quadratic form that will accommodate the linear functions of a high-traffic rail facility far better than that Wye. Someone mentioned connectivity to the rest of downtown? A Memphis-style gondola would lift over the old rail alignment, now a pedestrian walkway/bikepath to carry people to the Convention Center, or wherever. You want other benefits? OK. Try not having to negotiate with multiple common railroads for the very expensive privilege of using "Union Station". Trust me on this one. Railroads are not munificent patrons of the community. They will get their pound of flesh and then some in that kind of a deal. Try the fact that the State already owns the rail property in this location, and doesn't have to negotiate anything with anybody, outside of the context of a lease. Last but certainly not least, try the fact that the State also already owns the CP itself and the land underneath it, thus will not have to acquire property for the station at nosebleed prices. Go ahead. Give me the lame arguments that the beloved Central Prison will never move. Tell me that the State will never move it because it costs too much money, or that the State hates Raleigh so much that it will leave it there as a perennial eyesore and property value depressant. I will tell you in turn that the CP property is one of the crown jewels of North Carolina's entire property inventory, and could be a cash cow of interstate prominence if they play their cards right. And since the state is heavily involved in the building of these stations as correlary assets to its pet project, the HSR, it stands to reason that it would be in the State's own best interests to do this, say nothing of getting rid of Raleigh's wart. In order to maximize the return on (or hell, even make the thing solvent to begin with) an enormous project like HSR, the State is going to be forced to do big ticket, big idea projects like this one in order to produce a revenue stream out of it. Be sure that the trains themselves will run at a loss. It's what you're running the trains to that will make up the difference in revenue. They are going to have to do these kinds of things in Raleigh. They are doing them in Charlotte. They need to do them in Durham, Greensboro, High Point, Salisbury, and anywhere along the alignment they can. This is already high stakes stuff folks. Now is not the time to screw around with stopgap depots that will have to be rebuilt in twenty years anyway. It's time to start acting like a big city, if indeed you want the big city frills.

^^^Re: Previous post... The actual car count is 1 baggage car, 1 dome car (probably too high for NC clearances), and 19 coach/sleeper cars. I believe most of the inventory to be configured as sleepers (as it was in service for charters), but with minimal reconfiguration can be restored for coach service. There are also some old Ski Train cars that apparently did not get shipped off with the demise of Denver's Ski Train last year. Don't know the legal/owner status of those, but I guarantee that those cars are in good shape. Will try to post pics later.

Where I think all of the light rail systems everywhere have missed the boat is in station advertising. I'm sure it's this way in Uptown as well, but some of the LRT stations we have here are in some incredibly high profile, and highly visible locations. Airports make a chunk of change off of merely advertising to its captives -- er, passengers -- and most of the subways do that in the US as well. However, for some strange reason, LRT projects from California to New York have built these sterile facilities that only Stalin could love, and without including any revenue enhancements such as newsstands, coffee kiosks, or static advertising. But there's more! It doesn't have to be just passengers on the platform as the market (which here would be substantial enough). For instance, we have a station in Denver at I-25 & Broadway, just south of downtown, that sits just underneath a freeway with an annual average daily traffic count of just under 200,000, with the section of freeway just north of there reaching for the 220,000 mark (CDOT, 2008). Put an electronic display board on a spindle down there, and you have some massive potential income. So why don't they do it? Don't know. Frustrating, especially when one thinks of the dire straits that transit agencies are in these days. I could see one of these working out of the I-485/South Station and doing very well. Train wraps are all well and good (even if they are tacky), but it's chump change by comparison to some alternatives. Transit agencies pay big bucks for these sites, so they should maximize every advantage they can from them.

Thought you guys may be interested in this... New York Times~04/05/2010 One bit of advice from Denver, where we are now doing a lot of expensive retrofits to correct our own errors. Don't extend for three cars. Extend for a minimum of four. It will cost way less to do it now than trying again to catch up in the future. Maybe not the suped-up substations yet, but at least get the platforms long enough. If possible go for five, since that's the maximum consist length for LRTs (well, of the Siemens variety at least). If the Feds offer enough money to "fix the problem" of Lynx being undersized (which was admittedly their own fault through the funding guidelines in place at the time -- see story), use it wisely.

By the way... If NCDOT is shopping for rolling stock, I've got a line on some good condition cars in storage here in Denver. They are Budds, similar to what is on the rails there now. They were in the fleet of Grand Luxe Tours (formerly known as American Orient Express), which was a charter train operation that was owned by the late Colorado Railcar (which by the way was essentially the designer of the DMUs that TTA was supposed to use). The cars are, as far as I know, still in transportable (rolling) road shape. They've been sitting in UP's Burnham Yards in Denver for a little over a year now. There are a number of coaches in the pile, along with a dining car, a porter car (I think), and baggage cars. I'm sure they would need some interior restoration at this point, but minimal I would think. I'm just hoping someone gets them out of here before they become condos for rattlesnakes. I can find the details of the receivership if anybody is interested, and I can do some minor, uncompensated legwork if desired (taking photos, for example). You know where to find me.

That is annoying, isn't it? The engineer should only be blowing for those xings, and in this specific format: --.-, or two long blows (a couple of seconds should do), one short blow (about a second or half second), and one more long blow. That is the only acceptable or even legal way to announce his crossing approach. Anything else, including blowing hard all the way through, is illegal. If it's the case of a malfunctioning horn (which does happen when flapper valves get stuck) they need to fix it. If the train is operating in a congested corridor with lots of, say, foot traffic to the side, then use of the bell would be a lot less aggravating, and just as effective. If it's just a grumpy old "hoghead" that enjoys irritating the hell out of people, s/he needs to be stopped. I would suggest calling the Charlotte Amtrak office, and getting a phone number for the "Road Foreman of Engines" that covers that area. The RFE is that engineer's direct supervisor and that may be the fastest way to deal with it. If that doesn't work, you can log a complaint with the police of course, but be warned, local constabularies are rather inclined to run away from those complaints -- one, because of the difficulty of proof; and two, because the local DA's are usually outgunned by attorneys on the railroad's retainer (and for a small fine it becomes a wash under the "low hanging fruit theory"). Now since both the Carolinian and Piedmonts are state-sponsored trains, a complaint to the NCDOT might work. However, if all else fails, you can contact the Federal Railroad Administration here: FRA Atlanta Regional Office 61 Forsyth Street, SW - Suite 16T20 Atlanta, GA 30303-3104 Phone - (404)562-3800 Fax - (404)562-3830 Hot Line - 1-800-724-5993 Good luck, and I hope things get quieter for you.

O...I get what you're saying. I do. And it's not a question of whether the "West Line" merits light rail. That's a subject for a very silly argument. It's about the appropriateness of the transit form for a corridor that would run 35 some odd miles, Raleigh to Durham, whether or not the market segment was 65% or 15% of that corridor between those two points, as well as the inherent safety of it. LRT is not appropriate for that length of travel. And we could argue ad nauseum about whether LRT can be placed alongside a freight corridor or not (although the FRA told Lynx in Orlando that it cannot, and that's good enough for me). I think the more fruitful argument would be whether it should be placed there. To wit: UP Littleton Derailment~12/07 BNSF Littleton Derailment~01/09 These are two different wrecks folks, occuring within a year and a half of each other, and with RTD fortunate in the extreme that they did not involve fatalities, and that they did occur on the off-hours, where one could easily imagine the carnage had they during AM or PM rush. I go back to an old point that I made in the old blog. Would you rather ride a CAT bus with hard bench seating for 45 minutes to an hour for a trek to Durham, or would you rather ride a "motorcoach" with cushioned airline seating (and probably a restroom)? That is the exact analogy for LRT (city bus) versus commuter rail (the motorcoach). It is wholly a question of passenger comfort. It has absolutely nothing to do with the technology. EMU, LRT? Who cares? You may in fact be correct in that perhaps half to even three-quarters of the pax boarding in DTR will only go to Cary or RTP. So, with LRT, you are basically telling the other quarter going to Durham County to go screw themselves. If commuters swig their gallon of coffee and run into trouble halfway, they will (and do) piss the seat. They have no choice. Long-term, that quarter won't ride. Plus, you have basically limited the viability of the system with LRT, making it impossible to extend service to say, Burlington or Goldsboro. If MARC ran from DC to Baltimore with LRT, or VRE to Fredricksburg, I would guarantee their failure. Same basic range, O. Do what you want with North Raleigh. It's only a fifteen to twenty minute route, and much of that will be supergrade as I understand, therefore less subject to delays at gate crossings, etc., and faster. If you mandate LRT from Raleigh to Durham, you are in essence, also mandating a hub operation out of the RTP somewhere, thus mandating transfers which drops the efficacy of the system, and decreases the willing market or demand between Wake and Durham county destinations, for no reason at all other than perceived style. You are also mixing grapes and watermelons out there on the alignment. And if you drop a watermelon on a grape, well...Grab your roll of Brawny and get busy.

Seriously, folks. It's taken me about 30 minutes to stop laughing long enough to type this. OK. So let me get this straight. The original TTA plan was shot down by the Feds because the TTA could not produce enough local funding for a $140m system and wanted a 60% handout without any substantive proof of ability or progress on said project. So now the TTA wants to gouge out a 1/2 percent sales tax for funding a system, then proceeds to upspend the system to $2B??? (Ostensibly "because Charlotte did it")And to revert to LRT, a system that CAN NOT BE BUILT NEAR AN EXISTING FREIGHT CORRIDOR? Well, since you've blown the only positive that you had going in the first place in the Triangle -- the pre-existing, state-owned rail corridor running between three of your four "urban centers" with already existing passenger rail service -- why stop at $2 billion? Why not 4, or 5, or 10? Because you're going to need it given the virgin rights-of-way that you're going to need to install light rail. Before any utilities are relocated, before any super- or subgrading is done to separate the corridor from the street level, and long before you can even think of laying ties, rails, and catenary, all so you can run light rail. Ya know, if all you want to do is change the propulsion systems from diesel to electric, that's fine. They've got an EMU for that. Bigger, more comfortable cars, that actually run on heavy rail tracks. But hey! If you absolutely need to carry on a pathetic sibling tirade for getting your own light rail, just because Charlotte has one, then by all means have at it. I will say this once more, and I swear to God, I will never open this subject again. If for no other reason than it's dangerous to my health. Light rail is an inappropriate conveyance for a regional system. If you want to run up and down the old Seaboard with it to North Raleigh, that's fine. No problem there. But for a 45-minute trek to Durham via the universities, Cary, the airport, RTP. and all these other places you want served, this is an uneconomical and verrrry uncomfortable choice. My trip to downtown Denver takes about thirty minutes by LRT. That's about all I can stand of the bench seating and the overcrowded aisles. Any longer than that, and I wouldn't ride the thing. And if you build your own light rail to DTD from DTR, I won't ride that one. Ever. It really isn't all this hard to do transit, folks. Getting past the mind-numbing politics is by far the hardest thing. But the Triangle (and I mostly blame Raleigh for it) can't seem to get out of its own way. When I go to Santa Fe, and ride the RailRunner some 70 miles to Albuquerque (and over a mountain range at that), I just have to scratch my head and wonder why the place listed on my birth certificate can't get a single train set rolling on an existing, and flat, rail. But perhaps the answer lies in an anecdote that I will share with you now. (If you're a Raleigh booster, and have that characteristic lack of a sense of humor, and a hot temper to boot, you need not read on.) My grandfather was a Virginian by birth, but as he loved his golf, he settled in the environs of the Raleigh Country Club to whet his appetite for a game that I can barely stand to watch. But I used to ride with him on the cart as he played with groups of men, some of which he obviously didn't have a lot of fun with. After hearing a disparaging remark made about an unlucky Charlottean chap that happened to be stuck in the capital city for a week or so by some disgruntled locals, I asked my grandfather about why these dudes seemed to enjoy dissing their guest so much. My grandfather, astute as ever in these matters, deferred the explanation to a later time. And ever conscious of the social discrepancies, he let rip once we were in the relative isolation of the practice green. "The guy from Raleigh", he explained, "will spend four hours arguing and screaming about how you can't hit a hole-in-one on a par three hole. The guy from Charlotte will proceed to hit 240 balls in the same time, and hole it four times." When I related this story to my other grandfather (who was a Raleigh native), he just guffawed, and said, "Yep! Yep, yep, yep." My two grandfathers rather liked each other, and I rather enjoyed their company as well. Cheers to them both.

This is a comparison perspective of the argument I was making about the hospital and park at Dix not being mutually exclusive. Here is the precedent. This is San Diego's Balboa Park as seen in Google Earth. The red ringed area (yes, that is a building, and a massive one at that) is the Naval Hospital, which as I and others have alluded to earlier, is wedged into the south central part of the original Balboa Park. Should it be there? Probably not, but it goes to show that the land uses are not terrible affronts to one another. Now take a look at the bird's eye of Dix Hill from GE. From every possible continuing use scenario that I have yet heard from the State, these hospital buildings are more than enough to handle all those. Percentage-wise, the footprints are not much different. The offset location is also similar, insomuch as I would assume that the park would be centered more to the Western Blvd. and Centennial Pkwy. side of things. And maybe the State wants to use the rest of that property for other state facilities? I doubt it. If anybody has the huevos (and the unmitigated gall) to even suggest that, give me his or her name, and it will be lock and load time for him or her from all fronts, from the Libertarians, to real Republican conservatives, to Blue Dog Democrats (not that liberals would approve of that kind of largesse, either). He or she had better have an updated resume for the aftermath of making such a statement of mission creep from state government. That's a lot of land, folks. And "campus" designs, especially for civic buildings are way out of vogue now. The Art Museum might be able to get away with sprawling over several cow pastures, but only in the context of being a garden for sculpture and creative landscape. And perhaps the Vet School, because, well, that's what they do. Pastures and the creatures in them. Anything else is asking for ridicule, and ostracizing of the first magnitude from the press, local and national. Other points that didn't make it into my last rant. Having a park surrounded by highrises is not the antithema to a pleasant park that militant garden clubbers would have one believe. Those intensely populated residences provide the park with three things. One, a heavy-use population that will report problems, and also insist that they get solved, as well as that improvements be made. After all, they are the ones pumping lots of tax money into the neighborhood with their pricey condos, and adding value to it. Second, those residents all supplement security in that, there is always somebody there, watching, and in the age of cell phones, that type of vigilance has saved major parks from ruin and abandonment from shear fright. Third, and by no means insignificant, those same residents, with their self-interested tendencies to protect their park, will watch over the park from the height of their pricey perches, like guards in so many watchtowers. They may not be able to stop petty violations and such, nor the occasional George Michael going on in a parking lot, but the major stuff they will. And that is a major crime deterrent. These highly concerned residents, if for no other reason than to protect their investments, would be zealous caretakers of the park they bought next to. But more often than not, they are good people anyway, these city dwellers in their highrises, who don't mind sharing space with other people. A field of pansies and roses, surrounded by flatscape, no matter how nice, will be very labor intensive to protect from vandals and miscreants, unless (and I would say, even if) surrounded by eight-foot high fences -- which sort of eliminates the rationale for the "park" in the first place. This is an aspect of urban life that few Raleigh denizens would understand, unless they had been reared in or spent plenty of time in larger cities. Why urban features work and behave like they do, since most of us raised in Raleigh are used to suburbia on steroids. Like why large urban parks work is because they have lots of people in them. And to guarantee that lots of people stay in them, you need lots of people to live nearby. Add plenty of stability, safety, and unique features, then you end up with a tourist base. Maybe you want that, maybe you don't. But if you want Dix as a park, I believe this is the best way. Here in Denver, we have several large parks that are framed by highrise condos and apartments. If you wish, angle down in Google Earth to such parks as Cheesman (all around it), City Park (especially to the south, where new condo towers are still sprouting along 17th Ave.), and Washington (they do have height and McMansion controls in place for the Wash Park area now, but the four towers north of the park are well-blended into the area since the 60's. My exemplar, Balboa Park is also ringed by mid- and highrises on Bankers Hill and Hillcrest, with the same kind of panorama of downtown San Diego that you could have from a Dix Hill Park of downtown Raleigh.

I think I've made the point before that, even if the State wanted to keep Dix open for a time, it would not necessarily be an incongruous land use to have the land around it become a park. There is, after all, a precedent for this -- and in one of America's great urban parks at that -- at San Diego's Balboa Park. The Naval Hospital sits at the southeastern corner of the park. Excess parking at the Naval is often used as overflow parking for events and weekend/holiday crowds to the Park and the San Diego Zoo. The only difference between Dix and Balboa would be the location of the facilities, as Dix would be somewhat more central to the parcel. But the same dynamics would work there. Shared parking, and grounds maintenance, which could actually benefit the State if the parks authority would take responsibility for that. It also seems to me that Dix is a little on the large side to be kept open for a mere (but not insignificant) 100 patients. Unless the State is so loose in the front end on cost management that it doesn't mind maintaining an entire campus open for a relatively small health care operation, doing it this way is hardly a good option. I'm not in health care mind you, but this is what I am thinking. 100 patients, about 15 or more professional staffers between doctors and RNs, to cover all the shifts, then some 20 to 30 more as NAs, orderlies, etc. That's a given, perhaps. But now you still need food service workers, security, and maintenance staff for a 24/7 operation. Contract it? Sure. But they are still costs, and not small ones. Whatever -- you are now at the tipping point of having nearly as many staffers as patients in this facility! Now if you have a cafeteria doing double duty as a park-supported commissary or eatery, and actually selling food as well, then you have an incremental cost reduction. (And it shouldn't be lost on anyone here that the food would have to be a couple of steps above your garden variety institutional food service to fare well in the marketplace -- thus better for the patients.) If security is shared, or perhaps the park supports a contingency of Raleigh's own police department, that too becomes a shared, thus mitigated cost. And we already talked about maintenance. Whatever the State's intentions with Dix, problems at Butner will still need to be fixed. There is no sweeping it all under the rug. If they let the unused parts of the facility go, the entire building will atrophy in short order, and then they are really in a jam. However, if the State continues to want Dix intact, they are going to have to pay for it. And I expect that the fire under their collective feet is getting a bit toasty right about now. The hotel and residential belt around the edges of the park, as I and others have previously suggested, could also be tagged with a special use tax that could feed money into the State's mental health program to help out. In short, this could actually be a great scenario for a compromise. Having Dix as a civic park, with the right design, will directly and indirectly infuse money into a State program that no one is left to doubt is in very big trouble.

^^^ O makes a verrrrrrry good point here. While this action does show that there is recognition at the state level that transit is a big part of future planning considerations, it's almost suicidal by a Democratic legislature to tap two or three separate tax increases in at the same time during a sluggish economy -- no matter the benevolent intent of it. Right-wing radio is just waiting for this kind of thing so that they can spew their venom; "See! Tax and spend! Tax and spend!" Well, yeah...Seeing that we haven't spent nearly enough in infrastructure in the past 40 years. I think I stated before that I don't like sales taxes as engines for transit. They are sloppy politically, extremely volatile during 7- to 10-year peaks and valleys in the economy, and not the least of my gripes is that they take money out of the pockets that transit is ostensibly supposed to help -- the working poor. I still think that there are better ways to come by the funds for what you need, provided two things: 1) that you can accept a shoestring starter operation while you build cred with the Feds, and 2) that someone is willing to put the elbow grease into getting it done. vvv (Insert old argument here) vvv My previous suggestion was to implement a Transit Influence Zone in a half- to quarter-mile radius around stations to support the commuter rail operation, along the entire alignment, within which a property tax surcharge would be implemented -- very similar to downtown business districts and other similar entities. Considering the values of these properties, a couple of mils should do the trick. Then get the State to enact a rebate to those entities paying such taxes. Two things are different with this strategy: 1) the taxes paid are recovered through value enhancement to the taxpayer's property, probably many times over; and 2) with the property tax surcharge being targeted specifically to transit, which vastly increases the transportation inventory into the taxpayers' own neighborhoods (increasing the value), it becomes a self-investment that not only is a no-brainer with a rebate, but also takes the onus off of the State to try to do everything for everybody. A guy in North Raleigh, who isn't likely to see a train in his neighborhood for the next thirty years is not very likely to bite on this. Better to cut him out before it starts. And when North Raleigh wants theirs, they can organize theirs too. And again realizing that it's not just about trains, but about expanded bus service and other options too, I reassert that the city-managed bus systems need to be consolidated under one autonomous authority for this to work. In this way, bus routes can be streamlined and optimized, and drawn to incorporate all the other options with way more efficiency than they have now. In short, this battle for regions to self-tax may be won, but I tend to fret with O that it may end up being a Pyrrhic victory in the end.