share.triangle.com - Raleigh in 2030 - Comments

raleigh and growth...

plusaf — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 00:13:58 -0500

yeah, me again... happy new year to all....

several things have struck me about Raleigh since we moved here about two and a half years ago.. one of my first opinions was that Raleigh reminded me a lot of what Silicon Valley in California was like when i moved there in 1978... friendly people, smooth roads, lots of trees and nice countryside surrounding the Valley's cities. coming from what used to be a rather rural area of New Jersey, it was strange to live in an area where the only way you could know you've driven from one city into another was the "welcome to ..." and "now leaving..." signs on the streets.

24 years later, housing prices had skyrocketed [i liked that], roads were clogged with rude drivers and the air lost its previously beautiful blue color many days of the year. it was easier to leave than we thought it would be.

Raleigh was a breath of fresh air, literally and figuratively. back to open roads, [and smooth, too!] and friendlier people than i'd ever experienced before... many memories and stories about "Southern Warmth" that we loved and had never experienced before.... we loved it here then, and still do.

but, as with most things, change happens, and it's often disruptive and is anything from annoying to hurtful to people....

growth can be good or bad. inviting and encouraging [subsidizing] companies to move or expand here can create new jobs. more jobs invite more emigrants who want houses, highways and drinking water, to name just a few recent issues we've all been too aware of recently.

silicon valley was a jobs mecca. RTP and Raleigh have attracted tens of thousands of new residents every year. people in silicon valley valued their "green space" and passed lots of laws limiting building heights [so we could see the surrounding mountains and have hiking and biking trails and lots of greenery within a short drive of the urban centers.]

the tradeoff was, that with so many companies starting up and growing and so many people wanting to move into the small buildable region, supply and demand were thrown way out of balance. postage-stamp sized lots and tiny houses in places like Palo Alto fetched million-dollar prices years ago. today, the 0.1-acre, 1692-squares house i left hit about a million dollars on zillow.com before the mortgage "crisis" attacked. even today, it's $1,128,000+ on zillow, and virtually every other home in the 200-house tract we lived in are within a few hundred thousand of that price.

when i'd left New Jersey, i sold a home i'd paid $26,000 for at a $45,000 price. that home i owned in Cupertino went to me in 1979 for about $92,000. it sold in summer of '85 [correction 01.09: '05, not '85] for "only" $845,000. did i make money? you bet. could i buy any other house almost anywhere else in California? No, because i'd end up with a bigger house, no cash, and a possible mortgage payment four times what i'd had before...

it's all tradeoffs.

today, people of Raleigh talk about green-space, limited growth, loss of trees, and everything else Silicon Valley went through back in the 1980s. put strict limits on growth and housing prices, both new and existing structures, will climb rapidly, pricing many middle-class people out of the city altogether, particularly service industry folks from waitresses to police and fire people. most of them won't have salaries that will support housing prices doubling, tripling or more, if they want to buy and own.

tradeoffs.

people complain about jammed highways. maybe fifteen or more years ago, i was "stuck on an interstate" that goes through Atlanta. it was rush hour... about 5pm. i looked around as the sales rep drove us to dinner.... there was one car about a quarter mile ahead of us and the nearest car behind us was about 100 yards away. today, all of the lanes are jammed and crawl for a multi-hour "rush" hour. in portions of Silicon Valley, the HOV lanes for "rush hour" are listed as "3pm to 7pm" or thereabouts.

nobody wanted to build more or wider highways. concrete was bad. trees were good. getting 5 mpg at 5mph for the hour's drive home was the tradeoff against even 20mpg at 45 mph for what should have been a 20 minute drive or less.

highways don't get cheaper, the longer you wait to build them. they get more expensive and even harder to pay for, the longer you wait.

everyone in silicon valley talked about mass transit. buses ran few and far between and required numerous connections to get anyone from where they lived to where they worked. why? simply because, as the area grew, there was no "everyone lives here and everone works there" that could be connected by any kind of efficient mass transit. everyone points to New York City as a model. nowhere else do "enough people all live here and work there" to make mass transit work. but everyone loves mass transit.

to the point that there are essentially NO mass transit systems ANYWHERE in the WORLD which are self-supporting. ie, pay their own way with fares and without government [meaning: public tax] subsidies.

make the choice without kidding yourselves. if you want mass transit, fine, but be up-front about what it will cost in time and taxes. provide some statistics on how often trains or buses would run, what the fares would be and what the taxes and subsidies would need to be to keep 'em afloat. then compare people-miles per hour, not per gallon, for a "normal" commute! no, nobody does that.

one of the first letters i wrote to the N&O after i got here in late '05, back when Falls Lake was more like a Falls Stream Through Mud and Dirt... was to ask why nobody was digging out the lake... dredging it, so to speak, to increase its capacity. all reservoirs silt up over time and their capacity drops. all of them. but Raleigh was treating Falls Lake like a big tank that would always fill up with rains. sure, it would fill up, but the tank gets smaller every year. two years later, people still ask why the Lake hasn't been dug out to increase its capacity. so do i. well, as other blogs and N&O articles and interviews and letters to Ed's have said, it would take years and cost millions of dollars even to study the ramifications of such a project.

well, five years from now, we'll have more people, more water needs, both for people and industry, and a smaller reservoir. most graphs of growth in population are drawn in a "linear" fashion. but growth is not linear, it's logarithmic. the graphs that we draw are misleading and have little predictive value. a nice "log-linear" graph might be better for planning, but nobody uses them.

i've touted "roundabouts" for decades. we even had them back in Somerville, NJ, my old home town. the state law was "entering traffic has the right-of-way" so once the circle locks up, nobody can get out and traffic backs up for miles in multiple directions. easy fix: put up YIELD signs at all of the entrances to the roundabouts and ticket the heck out of drivers until they smarten up to why that works. it took me several visits to England and their plethora of roundabouts to see how simple the solution works. a properly-sized roundabout can handle any amount of traffic flow up to its design limits, but only if incoming traffic always must yield to drivers already in the circle. i saw the same thing in Truckee, CA, which replaced several lousy intersections with circles, and now it's a breeze to drive those streets.

so everyone here resists traffic circles. and building more roads.

and everyone complains about traffic jams and long lights.

on another point, Raleigh's leaders have made it pretty clear that Raleigh would/should be a great place to visit and do business. the flock of hotels being built and new convention center certainly attest to that.

then ask why, if Raleigh can be a mecca for tourists and convention-goers, why the road system doesn't seem to have any "straight-shots" from the airport to downtown that are wide enough and free-flowing enough to handle rush hour traffic plus conventions plus a few sporting events thrown in.

if a State Fair hits the same time that a Big Game is played, cars back up for miles and many folks give up and go home. the events can be predicted a year or more in advance, yet no Park And Ride services seem to exist, and certainly a tram service from slightly more remote parking venues might work, too.

back to water for a minute... as i've written elsewhere, all we hear on tv, radio and in the paper is about conserve, conserve, conserve.

i call that a testimony to failure. the public utilities which are tasked with the delivery of water to our homes and businesses [or maybe they don't have that charter clearly up on their walls..?] have failed to meet our needs. they've mis-forecast our needs. they haven't worked with city planners on estimates of growth and consumption, so all we can say is "conserve"?

if we add 5% to our population every year, and if we don't start work IMMEDIATELY on drastically increasing our SUPPLY, there is a brick wall coming: EACH AND EVERY year we'll all have to cut back ANOTHER 5% on our consumption, JUST TO STAY EVEN WITH current supply capacity.

Raleigh should be working with all surrounding cities as well as the State to develop increased SUPPLIES of water. import it from Tennessee or Ohio. collect flood waters in tanks and lakes and pump it to reservoirs that are low somewhere else. build desalination plants and pump the water from the coast to here and beyond.

yes, something like putting a man on the moon, or.... Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System.

can you imagine what life would be like today WITHOUT the interstates? just think about that a while.

all of these things will take some "new trains of thought" and it won't be cheap or easy, and lots of old beliefs are going to have to be either given up or shown the light of day to evaluate their real costs in terms of time and money for their users and those taxed to provide them.

and there is no shortage of people who can analyze and predict and graph things, if you'll let them.

but that will be a change, too.

thanks for listening. ah, i feel better now. this is SO cathartic. and i'll be back, too. :)))))))))))

plusaf
Northwest Raleigh
27613

correction and addition to my "Raleigh and Growth" post...

Alan L. Falk — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 23:52:49 -0500

couldn't find an "edit" button.... we sold the Cupertino house in '05, NOT '85... my wife caught that in the N&O excerpt... she's better at math and the second proofreader usually catches stuff the writer was sure they got right.

now, here are some comments on Mass Transit from a friend of mine in Florida... he makes several points in this email which i think are VERY apropos to this topic... [Thanks, Ken!]

" I have two contrasting points for you to consider: a very good friend of mine who lives in Manhattan, and an ex-co-worker who lived in Cambridge MA. The second did not get a driver's license until she started working for Digital (our office was in Bedford MA, about 20 miles outside of Cambridge) when she was 28, and the first has a driver's license but has never owned a car.

This is because, for them, mass transit inside the city works very well. In a sense, though, I am reinforcing your point, in that my second friend was forced to get a license and buy a car when she started commuting outside the city (the opposite of your experience, but comparable). But inside the cities, they simply don't need to drive!

When I go to the HP office in Atlanta (the ABC building), I never rent a car, as MARTA is faster, cheaper and more reliable: I have missed multiple planes getting stuck on 285 or the Georgia 400, but I have never even come close to being late when I take MARTA, even during rush hour. But when I go to the HP office in Alpharetta, I am forced to rent a car.

So it is not that mass transit doesn't work: for these people, it clearly does. It is that mass transit doesn't work *outside the population density of a city*! Picture trying to implement mass transit in a small town, or in the suburbs: my daughter complains bitterly about the lousy buses in Palm Beach County, and it is simply that we have too few people in too large an area to make it economically feasible. Manhattan, Boston/Cambridge, Paris, San Francisco, London, Munich and Washington DC are all cities where I have used mass transit exclusively to get around inside the city limits, and it works. But this is because they have the population density and the limited area to make it effective.

People talk about running out of room in this country. Anyone who has ever been in an airplane and looked down knows this is laughable: we have so much room we literally don't know what to do with it all. We have so much room that we set aside hundreds of thousands of acres for nature and parks and spotted owls..."

ok, once you get over the spotted owl comment, reflect on his comments about "population density and mass transit."

if someone tries to sell you mass transit outside a city center, they're also going to have to get you to buy in to bonds, deficits and subsidies, ad infinitum. no alternatives. city center: fine... but they don't tend to want to limit their "mass transit" to a three-mile radius of the Capitol Building.

if you're willing to pay the price, pay the price. just don't force the rest of us to if we're NOT willing.

Alan Falk
Northwest Raleigh
27613

Let There Be Lights

Visitor — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 10:39:25 -0500

The city could start by adding more lighting along the freeways, such as I-40 and the I-440 beltline. I think this speaks for itself.

Now I'm confused (again)

RickW — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 10:25:59 -0500

That link I gave is the one that made me feel frustratred. This is the one that gave me hope: http://www.ridetta.org/Regional_Rail/Overview/projectOverview.html

I'm not sure now which is current as google can play tricks with history.

Transportation Infrastructure esp. Light Rail

RickW — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 00:32:58 -0500

I am pleased that the TTA is passing the phase of making plans for plans for plans. Their website at: http://www.ridetta.org/Regional_Rail/Overview/3-07LatestTransitNeeds.htm actually has some meat on it now They had been doing environmental studies instead of realizing that adding more lanes to the interstates does more enviromental damage and that the enviromental damage of doing nothing with the rail system is far greater. This system is a must to keep the Triangle from being the largest parking lot in the world. They are trying to adjust it's route to the current world which is good, but wherever it winds up, the future world will adjust to it. Just do it!!!

It would also be nice if the state would find some funds to finish paving the rest of the state roads that are still gravel (or worse). I once was told the state would have this done by the year 2000. Even if you do not live on a gravel road, the vehicle that may get stuck on one may be the one you need (police, EMT, fire-service, delivery trucks, etc.) and this is an easy "weak-link" in the chain to fix.

Just a few off the top of my head...

Java55 — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 21:36:15 -0500

(1) Preserving what Raleigh has/had originally been and not trying to make it into something it is not. I would hazard to guess that most folks who moved to Raleigh came for what it was. Preserving the historical and cultural identity of Raleigh should definitely be on the radar screen as Raleigh continues to evolve.

(2) Setting aside plenty of acreage for green spaces and natural areas off limits to all types of development. Who would want to live in a city where kids (as well as some adults too) would never know what it is like to enjoy nature without having to travel a great distance away in order to experience it? Plus it will be good for the ecosystems in the area too.

(3) Making sure that proper infrastructure is in place and functional first before development occurs. This should include some additional cushioning as well in the event of unforeseen problems such as droughts, etc. too.

Raleigh in 2030

ctmiller — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 10:56:57 -0500

The city of Raleigh is working on a comprehensive plan -- a vision for how North Carolina's capital city will evolve between now and 2030. Community input will help inform this process. So, what's your take? How should Raleigh evolve over the next couple of decades? What issues are key for city officials to address in their written vision for the future?

The city of Raleigh is working on a comprehensive plan -- a vision for how North Carolina's capital city will evolve between now and 2030.…