Triangle Regional Transit

[DanRNC]

I have heard rumblings that Central Prison may be closed but not for the next 15-20 years. There was talk that the facilities are outdated and maxed out in its current location. Potential replacement sites have been identified in Butner and in Nash County.

[monsoon]

^Indeed. While it might be a good idea, any transit plan that sets itself up with having to go to the NC Legislature for this kind of request is inheriting a big handicap before it even gets started. If this is a proposal coming from a paid developer, I would expect them to give a reading on the political likely hood that a majority of the NC legislators would vote to move the Central Prison so RDU could build a train. The only way that I could see them swayed on the matter is of there is a net gain in money to the state.

[tjoad]

Once again I want to thank Vitiaviatic for his input, effort and ideas.

This is the kind of "outside the box" thinking which I think both Raleigh and the TTA have lacked. If ever a project like this were to move forward it would be in the 3-5 years, when the downtown revitalization still has momentum, the convention center is opening, Dix Park is being planned etc.

Of course this all revolves around the relocation of Central Prison, which is all about politics (the BIGGEST obstacle). As monsoon noted, it is going to be very difficult. It comes down to who gets behind this project and how it is marketed (just look at the TTA on how not to do it).

However, I hope state politicians look at the impact a project like this can have on the state as a whole. Raleigh is booming and will continue to boom, it is the state capital for god's sake, the state's second largest city, so you would think relocating CP from prime real estate in the city's core to make way for a grand, innovative development would make sense!

[monsoon]

Just keep in mind this is a state where if you spend a $1 on transit in an urban area, you are going to spend as much in a rural area. This is why we have $100M multilane roads to bugtussle in NC while the cities suffer from inadequate for road building.

[plus2]

If the prison were to move to say...Nash County...you might find 2 or 3 more legislator allies who would love the economic impact of a new large prison in their rural district.

[Damien]

Central Prison is going to have close to $152 million spent on renovations and new buildings in the upcoming years..it isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

[vitaviatic]

I've been reading the various discourses here on transit vs. highway -- as if there were a competition. Yes, projects have to get prioritized for funding, but one does not preclude the other. In fact, the experience in many transit markets has been that the majority of trips are combination trips: Mr. Smith gets into his car and drives to a park-n-ride to catch a bus or a train. Mr. Jones rides a bicycle to the station, takes the train. I know people who live in downtown Denver, hop the train reverse commute, and continue in their car (left at the station PnR) to get to their office park job. The efficiency of transit (speaking of rail here) is to minimize the space required to move x people. More volume through a smaller tube as it were. It is not a panacea for everyone. It never will be.

Transit gadfly Wendell Cox has long perpetrated the myth that rail transit competes with, and actually "robs" money that could be used for highways. It ain't so.

Transit does not compete with highways, except for funding, and only when myopic planners see the two as being conflictory. There is a large part of the workforce, and an even larger lifestyle group for whom transit doesn't work. They need roads. We all get that. Highways are usually built from revenues, or financed based upon the speculative revenues gained from gasoline taxes, tolls, car registration fees, whatever. That's fine. More roads are needed, and we can't escape that. The problem with transit is that it is most often left out to lurch in the funding game, and unless funded separately (which isn't often since people are tricked into thinking they could get a freeway for the same money), it is usually left to beg for money from highway-attached trust funds and other highway-centric mechanisms, in which case the proposal goes against a well-organized highway lobby funded by auto makers, contractors, homebuilders, engineering firms, and anyone else who stands to make a buck off of ongoing highway projects. Support for one-shot projects like transit are hard to come by.

The truth of the matter is that transit is not designed to replace highways. It is designed to replace PARKING!!! That is why the matter of density (whether existing or planned) gets pounded ad naseum into the discussion. In order to be viable, transit has to serve an area where the costs of parking are not only higher than the cost of the transit service provided, but substantially higher.

Example...If the average parking day costs $15 say, in downtown Raleigh, but you could park your car at say Fairgrounds Station for free, and buy a $3 round-trip ticket downtown, you the user take a savings of $12 so far for the use of transit (assuming that your employer didn't pick up the tab for you to park your car downtown). Figure on a 5-mile trip, times 2 trips = 10 miles total and multiply the mileage times a basic .40 per mile for driving the car (we'll use the federal per diem rate for simplicity here) that's another $4 in expense saved by taking transit. Total savings for the day $16 for the rider.

Now let's look at the operational end, and how the (God forbid!) subsidy actually works out.

Using Wendell Cox's own numbers from Demographia (I can't vouch for them because I rarely see substantiation to them) it costs .87 per mile to provide that seat. (Intuitively that sounds right.) .87 x 10 miles is $8.70 that the agency will pay for the round trip. Sounds expensive right? But look at the savings it just created for the citizen/rider. But wait! There's more!

Let's now look at the land value equations at work in the city with transit. In the post-Katrina steel and concrete shortages and price spikes, I don't have reliable figures for construction, but I will assume conservative (low) figures for this argument.

For parking a car, the rule of thumb is that about 400 square feet of space is needed, which includes the space itself, driveways, and other construction-related features. If the parking lot in question is a grade-level surface lot, it'll cost about $5,000 per space to build. Times, say 350 spaces for a city block. Figure on setbacks, traffic islands, lanscaping, etc. That's $1,750,000. Not bad compared to the cost of building that rail (assuming it didn't already exist!); using the Cadillaqued figure of $20,000,000 per mile for double-track new construction for the 5-mile rail segment utilized we come up with $100,000,000. Wow! This is a no-brainer, right? The taxpayer is getting screwed, right?

Not so fast.

By providing a surface lot, you have deprived any other use for the parcel in question so you limit the potential income to around $9,200 per day (I'll use a turnover rate of 1.75 cars per space, but it's a little more complicated than that). Cities rarely impose heavy taxes on parking lot operators, so whatever rate you choose against this income isn't going to be very much for the city.

So we upgrade to an above-level garage. Now we spend about $10,000 per space to build, let's say 6 levels corner to corner above the surface lot. Now we have 2,100 spaces, costing around $21,000,000. Now we're getting up there a bit. Now assume that the parking is all there is. By the same formulas as before, we come up with a daily revenue of $55,125. That's an improvement. But in the big scheme of things it's still settling for an underperforming property if it's in the middle of a major downtown area.

OK. So let's sink the 2,100 lots underground. Call it $35,000 per space (and I may be low on this). The same number of spaces cost $73,500,000 to build. Doesn't really make sense to do that, unless you plan on throwing something on top of it. So let's do that. A 30-story building. Then a retail arcade around the base. I can't begin to calculate the construction costs here, but the focus is on the revenues and the increased property taxes on the property anyway. Office rents @ average $4 per square foot for a say, 800,000 sq. ft. office tower. $38,400,000 rent per year for the building, not including the parking. I don't remember the mil levies right off for Raleigh and Durham, but you can figure the property taxes are based on the value of the property, which is in turn determined by the rent potential of the building. Guess a million per year.

Now toss in 300,000 sq. ft. of retail. Conservative income of $25 per square foot per month. $90,000,000 per year. @7% sales tax = $6,300,000 per year times 20 years (assume as scheduled debt retirement period of the rail capital costs) = $126,000,000. Add that to the 20 years of property taxes @ $20 million. Total = $146,000,000 over 20 years. Almost half again the amount paid to construct the rail system. And don't forget that the rail system will also be paid off with supplementary income from farebox revenues, advertising, etc. that comes in above day-to-day expenses.

Plus, we saved the rider some money and aggravation.

Keeping in mind that it wasn't all transit riders that built and patroned the building. But would 2,100 spaces really be sufficient for an 800,000 sq. ft. building with retail? Maybe not. I've heard estimates that Denver's light rail brings up to 25% of the local workforce into downtown. That's a lot of parking construction costs that just got redlined, folks! In Charlotte, the banks figured this out, and that's how you got normally conservative institutions onboard for CATS' LRT project.

When you get raw numbers for car vs. transit, beware. You usually end up comparing apples with oranges...and bananas and grapefruits. It's not a one-size-fits-all society.

To have a vibrant city center you need some sort of mass transit element to take the sting out of the cost of high-density parking. If you live in a ranch home in Parkwood, and go to work at Southpoint -- both of where the parking is free -- you don't need transit. That's why you don't see too many suburb-to-suburb transit lines.

The transit vs. highway angle is just plain wrong. They are both part of a greater transportation network. Both have their separate, distinctive missions. Turning it into a cockfight between two factions doesn't solve any problems.

The closing point here is that some way should be devised whereby highway funding and mass transit funding (local, that is) are set up to have designated revenue sources, not impinging on the other. My argument would be that, if transit is aiding in the cause of parking (or deletion of it), that a tax be imposed on parking to help with the capital funding of transit. In our example the parking garage would produce around $20,000,000 revenue per year. Pop a 3% tax on that figure and you get $600,000 tax revenues per year from that garage. $12,000,000 over the 20 years. Now multiply that by 15 or more public parking facilities in the city and you're now getting funded to the point that bond-writing for this project is a given. Add several high-density TODs along the ROW with the same tax structure and now you're on your way to a full blown system in need of very little federal funding.

Not only that, you've now implemented a tax that people can actually escape from -- by taking the transit that it was designated to build.

[monsoon]

I don't see where building a 30 story building in downtown with an underground parking garage has anything to do with building a transit system.

However to sum up what you are saying, RDU needs more local taxes to pay for the trains. The question really is there the political will to make that happen and who is going to pay the tax.

BTW, in Charlotte, the Banks had nothing to do with the transit line. I don't recall them putting up one dime to finance it.

[orulz]

vitaviatic,

The idea of a parking tax to fund a transit line is an intriguing one. However, suburbanites seem to have convinced city council to believe that the supposed lack of and "extreme" expense of parking downtown is one of - if not the major factor holding downtown back. It's even a significant complaint among workers who have to pay monthly for their parking spaces when they work downtown.

While I disagree wholeheartedly with the philosophy that "we have a right to park for free", how do we educate these folks who are conditioned to expect free parking that it's both normal and right for parking to cost something?

Aren't most parking decks downtown operated by the city? And isn't the revenue used to finance the operation, maintenence, and construction of the decks? The limited revenue stream generated by parking downtown is probably tapped out as it is, though there probably is some room to raise rates before the elasticity of demand kicks in.

[orulz]

BTW, in Charlotte, the Banks had nothing to do with the transit line. I don't recall them putting up one dime to finance it.

[monsoon]

I don't remember that happening at all. It was the public referendum that pulled together support for transit here. That along with the 10 year volunteer effort to ressurect the Trolley. The banks could have done a lot more to help.

[orulz]

The volunteer effort to bring back the trolley was huge, no doubt.

But didn't Hugh McColl and Bank of America stand up and say "Transit is important to Charlotte" - to the point of building the transit center for the city right about the same time (or slightly before) the transit sales tax became a major topic in the public eye? Or do I have events out of order in my mind? I'd say the banks (or, at least BoA) have been an important catalyst, bringing otherwise conservative or business-focused types on board the transit wagon.

[monsoon]

But didn't Hugh McColl and Bank of America stand up and say "Transit is important to Charlotte" - to the point of building the transit center for the city right about the same time (or slightly before) the transit sales tax became a major topic in the public eye? Or do I have events out of order in my mind? I'd say the banks (or, at least BoA) have been an important catalyst, bringing otherwise conservative or business-focused types on board the transit wagon.

[vitaviatic]

Whether the Charlotte banks put up any money for the transit system or not is irrelevant. If they hadn't recognized the fact that a light rail system would reduce the need for additional parking (which they would end up paying for) should they require it for expansion purposes or whatever, they would have campaigned against it, smeared it, and the thing would have been killed one way or the other by the Chamber of Commerce.

The banks didn't put up any money for transit itself because that's not what they do. The public does that through whatever financing scheme is put into place. (I'm sure they figured into the bond underwriting though.) However, banks do build (especially in headquarters locations, usually in downtown areas) parking decks. They are expensive. Look at those numbers again. If the city builds parking facilites, it's usually just a box that barely recoups the expense of building the thing. Nothing on top. If the bank incorporates parking into a highrise, they too can derive income from it, but depending on how big the building itself is and how much space they occupy, how many employees they locate there, and a whole raft of factors, the income derived from internal sources (employees) is marginal. And in the case of our 30-story example, it is cost prohibitive to supply enough parking spaces for the entire population of the building. You either eat the construction costs in many cases, or you charge rates high enough to deter patrons.

With the LRT coming online, the Charlotte banks can now reduce the target required for employee and customer parking. In addition, they can also pare down leased spaces from other lots for overflow. In the eyes of the banks, it is something of a subsidy to them for the city or transit district to supply customers and employees for them w/o having to incur those extra charges. And the debt isn't carried on their books. Good God, even Phoenix figured this out, and got onboard for LRT, which I never would have imagined happening in a million years! And naivety would tell you that it was grumpy commuters going to the polls to vote themselves a new toy. Fact was, that the majority of major business guns in town got behind the referendum, including the Salt River Project. Forget the city government folks -- SRP runs Phoenix. (They are the quasi-government that runs water and power for central Arizona.) Money flows a lot like water. Sometimes water gets wasted from inefficient piping. If you rely too much on cars and parking, just like too small a pipe feeding your faucet, you get too much backpressure and backflow, which just seeps out elsewhere.

Land is finite. Surface parking is a waste of land, and a tax drain to the city. Deck parking is, IMHO, a waste too, only recouping its costs, but subsidizes neighborhood businesses by bringing car-bound customers to them, thus enhancing the tax base somewhat -- indirectly. The most efficient utilization of a central city parcel is to build to higher density that will generate more sales to the area, and tax income to the city, with less per capita or per sq. ft. costs to provide services. But again, when you do that, you can't provide all of the parking you need within the parcel, or, if you do, you will go broke, have a very ugly building, or both.

Since land is indeed finite, supply and demand will dictate that parking rates will rise. If downtown Raleigh or Durham become as popular as you want them to be, unless a Plan B is incorporated to move people into and out of the city, disaster awaits. Parking rates will get too high (somebody has to pay for the land and construction!) and people will leave again. If the city is required to subsidize parking (as you pointed out orulz, suburbanites do tend to think parking is a gift from the automotive gods, or should be) it will definitely come out on your property tax bill, just like the water and sewer pipes they had to run out to your neighbor's 3.3 acre tract home.

It will take an awful lot of press and public presentations to explain the facts as they are to the citizenry. What kills me though is that there are so many entities which would benefit from the transit equation, but none actively pursue the matter themselves! They leave it all up to an undersized, embattled transit agency to do on its own. NCSU could transform its main campus, as well as reduce its parking requirements with TTA running trains through there. Do you think NCSU makes money on its parking decks? Maybe, but not as much as you think. If they have a 500-space deck with say, 850 regular patrons for the spaces (and I don't know the mechanics of NCSU's parking policies) and they charge an average of $5 per day to each car to park there for the approximately 250 school days of the year, it works out like this:

800 cars x $5 = $4,000 per day revenue X 250 days = $1,000,000 per school year

Now, remember our figures for the construction of an above-ground deck -- at $10,000 per space? Here we go...

500 spaces x $10,000 per space = $5,000,000

OK. Sounds like a good deal, right? You can pay it off in five years, right? Absolutely. But now here come the whole raft of other costs that you have to pay for: salaries, vehicles, maintenance, police services, etc.

Just for the sake of argument let's say 6 attendants per day at $170 per day each (btw, that's not what they get paid, that's what the university has to pay for them, including salaries, FICA share, health care, everything), plus three security guards or campus police (or both) per day at say, $225 each. Now the math:

6 attendants x $170= $1,020 per day + 3 guards x $225 = $675. Total = $1,695 per day x 250 days =

$423,750 per year (but wait, that's just for the school year -- these things have to be guarded 365 days per year)

$675 per day x 115 more days = $77,625 + $423,750 =

$501,375 per year

All this overhead leaves NCSU with only half the parking revenue to pay the deck off. And we haven't even discussed maintenance yet. Oh...and I left out the shared services overhead required for all campus parking -- treasury, etc., and the attributable share to this particular parking deck. True, guards could be shuttled between decks as shared services too. But even with no guards charged to the deck, the hit is still over a quarter million dollars a year. Altogether I would estimate the university is out around $600,000 a year in expenses for the 500-space deck, in addition to capital expenses.

With Tetra delivering students onto campus, they get off the train w/ absolutely no overhead. The transit agency's employees have already done all the work needed to deliver the students (and staff) to campus, and will return at the end of the day to take them home. No money to take, no extra guards required to patrol a deck. And lest it should go unmentioned, the student saves money!!! The parents as well.

Five colleges along the corridor is something transit planners would dream of having. To me, it's a much better font for riders than three or four bank headquarters.

[DanRNC]

Five colleges along the corridor is something transit planners would dream of having. To me, it's a much better font for riders than three or four bank headquarters.

[monsoon]

..... However, banks do build (especially in headquarters locations, usually in downtown areas) parking decks. They are expensive. Look at those numbers again. .....

[ChiefJoJo]

I will point out that most real estate developers are going to build parking decks because they make money on these decks and the property becomes more valuable when there is parking to go with an office or condo.

[tjoad]

Raleigh may ease parking spot rule

[vitaviatic]

One clarification on parking, then I will leave it alone. The standard suburban FAR (floor-to-area ratio) of .4 does not work in a traditional downtown area. You absolutely must go much higher in order to achieve any positives in cost-benefit. As stated before, you cannot supply all of the parking needed for such a high-density facility within the actual project itself. If you can reduce the parking requirements, even by 25%, that's a lot!

By the numbers RTD-Denver's light rail produces a ridership of 34,273 per day. Let's assume half of that number actually goes downtown (which I think might be a tad bit low - if the downtown Auraria campus were included it would more likely be in the 25,000 range, but let's go conservative here). So that leaves us with 17,136 passengers per day delivered by light rail. For deck parking (using our $10,000 per space construction figure) that would create an additional demand for about $175m in parking space financing spread over the downtown business community and the city. Now, an apportioned share of the cost of commuter rail (or even light rail) is much lower on a yearly basis. Meanwhile, these 17+k people are being delivered daily downtown without parking inventory needed for them, thus much less subsidy required to get them there.

The annual figures published for 2004-05 were:

( http://www.rtd-denver.com/Projects/Fact_Sheets/RTD_Facts.pdf )

10,396,623 light rail riders /2 = 5,918,312 for downtown's share. Now let's assume that the average expenditure of each of those riders was $5 (forget retail, this would be a low figure even for lunch!). That's nearly $26 million dollars pumped into the downtown economy without the economic drag of providing a parking deck, paying parking attendants, more security to patrol the decks needed, etc.. IOW, the profit margins from transit customers is quite a bit higher and purer than those bringing the jalopy downtown. Even ultra-conservative businesses that are often loathe to support any kind of civic taxes are recognizing here that it adds back into their bottomline at the end.

Even more astonishing I found, were the numbers for the 16th Street Mall Shuttle (which is a free electric bus traversing the length of the street). 18,369,537 riders per year! I personally think that a similar approach to Fayetteville St. would have been popular as well, by simply adding a transportation component, as well as major aesthetic improvements. A suspended gondola, operated above the street would have added a second operative "storefront level" to the existing buildings, creating a de facto shopping mall design out of it, and leaving the ground level intact as a ped plaza, without the sometimes dangerous bus v. pedestrian scenarios encountered here with the buses. Adding a "cross-mall", such as Martin or Davie St., would have created a node that spread into four directions (instead of two) at the middle of the business district, diluting somewhat the inefficient linear design that you find now on Fayetteville, where folks have to walk much farther to get to anything. Maybe when they figure out that the "Mayberry redoux" doesn't work so well when the 200 or so cars that they can now park on the street do not bring in enough income to justify businesses setting up in a relatively high-rent district (where the visitors still have to pay to park, and could do better at Crabtree) we'll get a modification of this sort.

The politics of this kind of mess drive me absolutely bananas! Politicians and voters always seem to be driven to the most simple solution to things, which often (in the lack of thoughtful, detailed consideration) ends up being the more expensive option in the end.

'Nuff said.

[ChiefJoJo]

From my bike tour... would you believe this is the future TTA Govt Center station site? Probably a vantage point most will never get from the bridge over Peace St:

[vitaviatic]

That's an interesting site, Chief JoJo. It looks as if it has enough lateral empty space that the ITC can be built over, and at the periphery.

What San Diego and Denver have done, not to mention the older, bigger transit cities, is to sell air rights over transit stations. This would bring in an income sufficient to offset the maintenance costs for those stations (and possibly a whole group of them). I know that there was an RFP issued for the Raleigh ITC which closed the beginning of the month. Unfortunately, by the time I found out about it in mid-December, it was too late to organize a consortium to put up a proposal. In the RFP it looked as if everything east of the site was zoned high-density mixed-use, and everything west medium-density mixed-use. What I did not see however, was any kind of allowance for development over the transit center itself. This in and of itself could be a waste of land, and possible lost income for the transit agency.

One of San Diego's tallest buildings, America Plaza, was located in the block just south of the Santa Fe Station (Amtrak/Coaster). With one of San Diego Trolley's major downtown stops planned for that block, the MTDB pitched it out to incorporate the platform within an overlying structure for which the air rights would be sold, and would bring in a specified income. Today, the Trolley runs right through the building, with a bit of a commercial arcade to the side.

Denver did something similar with their express bus terminal at Civic Center. The station was countersunk, and a 22-story building was erected above it, occupied by the Denver Post and state govt. offices, bringing in several million dollars in air rights per year. Now the plan for Union Station itself, which was just finalized a few weeks ago, has the platforms being sunk underground, and a pedestrian plaza raised above, lined with various condo and office buildings, all of which will bring in air rights income. The problem with this scenario is that the cost of relocating an already existing rail system completely beneath itself, is pretty daunting cost-wise, and the formidable capital raising required to get it off the ground. But with a blank slate such as the Raleigh MMTC, this shouldn't be too difficult at all. I hope whoever wins this RFP bid takes this into consideration, and doesn't settle for a cheap "scrape and hammer" job.

Chief JoJo alluded to the insanely popular San Francisco Centre, a six-story shopping mall located right on Market St. This mall is probably 70% transit-fed. Of course, San Francisco's Market St. is almost in a category by itself. You have a double-stacked tube with BART on the bottom, running people in and out from the East Bay and San Mateo Peninsula (and recently added, the SFO airport). On the next level, the Muni streetcars which empty out toward Twin Peaks and Ocean Beach. At the street level, electrified buses ply their way up and down between Civic Center and the Embarcadero. Shuttles and streetcars also bring in people from the Ferry Building and the other ferries at Pier 43 1/2 (near Fisherman's Wharf). What they have accomplished in San Francisco (over the course of a hundred plus years) is to create a space which you can get to, without a car (in fact, you'd be either stupid or completely transit-phobic to use a car there and pay the parking rates!), with regular transit service from a 50-mile radius. Within the next several years, that radius will expand to 100 miles, with new technology coming online.

Long-term, the Triangle should be thinking in such terms. One axis of activity will often beget another. In addition, a high-speed, high volume corridor also creates the opportunity to streamline inefficient bus services. Instead of everything having to go downtown, the west Raleigh bus routes (Lake Boone, Blue Ridge, Cary for example) could now orbit around the transit stations, providing more frequent and thorough neighborhood service for less (or the same amount of) money.

Sometimes forgotten is the fact that what gets spent on one thing in the transit world often gets reduced or eliminated on something else.

[vitaviatic]

We posted a graphic representation of what the Centrium complex would look like at our website: Thin Air Group, LLC ~Tetra. (Go ahead and laugh. It's an hour and a half job on MS Paint. No CAD program, and not enough time to hand draft it. Sorry.) This will at least give you an idea of the general layout. But keep in mind that nothing is quite to scale. We are shopping this project around to some architects that we know for an authentic rendering in the meantime.

[tjoad]

Transit story in the N&O. Nothing too new in this story but worth a read. I did find this quote quite interesting:

One TTA critic is skeptical of the deal.

David Hartgen, a professor of transportation at UNC-Charlotte, said TTA should sell the land it bought for the rail project and stay focused on providing other forms of transportation.

"It's not called the Triangle Land Authority," Hartgen said. "If we really want to be improving mobility in Raleigh, we wouldn't be piddling with this. We would be getting cars into the hands of people who don't have them."

[monsoon]

.....

Are you kidding me? Is that what they're teaching in Charlotte? Just give everybody a car and that'll solve all our transit needs! Good grief.

[ChiefJoJo]

Some good news for TTA Phase I fans in that article...

Tom Darden, president of Cherokee Investment Partners, says he's ready to invest around the station sites even though the TTA rail project is in limbo. He said he is confident that the Triangle will eventually build a transit line, and that will make nearby property more valuable.

Board member Nancy W. Dunn of Winston-Salem, who heads the transit committee, predicted the [state] board would approve an agreement to insure that the proposed venture does not jeopardize the state's investment in the TTA, freeing the TTA to sign the deal with Cherokee.

This is good news for Cherokee and for TTA so that they may move forward on their development proposals. If the FTA will ever allow transit agencies to use private funding to supplement federal, state, and local funding such that it comes "off the top" of the project rating system, or allows agencies to account for that future growth as additional ridership, then perhaps TTA can still make Phase I happen.

My own plan would be to find a way to add one station on either end of the line, Highwoods in Raleigh and Duke Medical Center (largest single employer in the Triangle) in Durham, and leverage the Cherokee proposal against the bottom line to increase ridership and reduce costs... oh and add a local funding option (sales tax or real estate transfer tax) to pay for it.

Possible transit corridors under study: