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Does the existing public transit system in Raleigh work well?
Are the buses on time?
Are the stops spaced out conveniently or do you have to walk for miles to get to the nearest stop?
Do the buses arrive at convenient intervals or do you have to wait an hour between each bus?
Does the bus system cover the city well or are the stops mostly concentrated downtown?
I've heard that the bus system is pretty good if you just want to move around downtown Raleigh. But outside of that, I've heard it's a whole other story.
It's honestly not very effective, not so much because buses are late or anything, but stops are not very convenient, the routes can be really difficult to plan with the need to change buses frequently. It's just not a great bus system, although I do know people who use it!
The buses in Raleigh are OK but not great. Most of the city was built from the 1960s on, and was built with the assumption that everyone has a car.
If you are looking to use the bus, you can make it work well enough if you take bus routes, schedules, and stops into consideration when you choose where to live. Obviously, you can't live in a cul-de-sac off Durant Road and expect to have a bus roll by your door every 10 minutes.
Some routes are pretty frequent with buses every 15 minutes for much of the day (#1 Capital and #15 WakeMed come to mind), others are every 30 minutes which is not great, and still others are hourly which sucks.
If you are looking to live without a car, I suggest that you live within 10 minutes walk of a grocery store (Nobody likes carrying huge bags of groceries on the bus.) Other than that, live as close to as many bus lines as you can.
I rode the bus to and from work when I worked downtown. I enjoyed the ride and they were reliable. The bus stop was on my block and dropped be off across the street from my building. I didn't have to ride it anywhere else, but it worked for my needs. You should check out the routes and stops to see if it would logistically work for you. My ride was nice and short.
I actually think it is a pretty decent system given the size of the area. The core of the city is well served. The more car cultured suburbs are less served.
Heck, I lived in Boston for awhile, convenient to a T stop and could take the T most places. But the few times I needed to get somewhere not served by the T, it was a long, bus-changing ordeal that took hours. Not really that different here. If you live along a well served artery and need to get somewhere like downtown, then it can be relatively fast. If you live buried in some suburb and are trying to get somewhere equally obscure, it is going to take awhile.
It might be even more annoying to anyone you might be asking for rides everywhere.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pacman23
Is it possible to live without a car in Raleigh? Or is it going to be very difficult and annoying to get around ?
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