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Just imagine what will happens when driverless cars become more of an option within 10-20 years. Sprawl will most likely accelerate even more. Interesting to think about
Location: Chapel Hill, NC, formerly NoVA and Phila
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Quote:
Originally Posted by the_bass_player
I have some friends in NYC and they all stated that rush hour traffic in RDU is as bad as in NY, if not worse. The part that doesn't make sense is our metro has like 1/20th the population; so, it really shouldn't be this bad..
People commute from four states to get to NYC for work. Commutes of 1 1/2 to 2 hours one way to NYC are not uncommon, and rush hour lasts about 4 hours in both the morning and afternoon. The city is almost always listed in the top 5 cities in the US with the worst traffic.
Compare that to the Triangle where commute times of 45 minutes are considered to be the upper end, and rush hour lasts an hour (or two?) each morning and each afternoon. I've never even seen the Triangle listed as a bad city for traffic ever.
Rush hour in the Triangles absolutely nothing[/b] like rush hour in NYC. I think your friends were pulling your leg
ETA: not taking away from the point that RedZin made that the traffic here is worse than it used to be, but to compare it to NYC's traffic is laughable.
People commute from four states to get to NYC for work. Commutes of 1 1/2 to 2 hours one way to NYC are not uncommon, and rush hour lasts about 4 hours in both the morning and afternoon. The city is almost always listed in the top 5 cities in the US with the worst traffic.
Compare that to the Triangle where commute times of 45 minutes are considered to be the upper end, and rush hour lasts an hour (or two?) each morning and each afternoon. I've never even seen the Triangle listed as a bad city for traffic ever.
Rush hour in the Triangles absolutely nothing[/b] like rush hour in NYC. I think your friends were pulling your leg
ETA: not taking away from the point that RedZin made that the traffic here is worse than it used to be, but to compare it to NYC's traffic is laughable.
Well, that came from people who work in NY. Whether or not NY is worse than RDU, I think they manage their traffic better.
I think traffic here is absolutely horrible and we need the light rail pretty badly, and we need the suburbs to quit sprawling.
LA to Anaheim is the most dense metro area in the country. That hardly qualifies as sprawl. And I like the way the Triangle tries to keep the industrial and commercial areas separate from the residential and light retail, which did not happen necessarily when older cities were built.
Fifteen yrs ago there was one stoplight between New Hill and RTP (backroads). Now there are over a dozen. 540 has made a trip to RTP or the center of Durham a breeze. As long as there is growth, there will be improvements to our roads. It is harder to do that in the center of Raleigh, but they are trying.
Very interesting. I wonder where the other towns will fall into this 'pattern'.
Raleigh has been increasing its density consistently since 2000 to the tune of several hundred ppl/sm. Of NC's largest cities, it's the first one to break thru the 3000 ppl/sm metric (again) since the advent of the automobile age. Durham too is moving its density metric up but it surprisingly lags Cary's density metric by a few hundred ppl/sm.
I know that the General Assembly has made it much more difficult for cities to annex land in NC and that the population growth rates in established cities now reflect much more infill development rather than just suburban annexation. That said, the city limits can still grow, albeit not at their will like it pretty much was in the past.
I suppose annexation is much more likely when developers on the municipal edges acquire a large chunk of land and petition for annexation as the sole owner of that land. In the Triangle, that is going to likely cause the suburbs of Raleigh more land growth than in Raleigh. Without competition in the county, I'd suspect that Durham might be able to annex more land in the future. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Durham consolidated their city and county for the most part like Nashville and Louisville basically did. However, this might be more easily said than done with the stricter annexation laws that give power to non municipal property owners.
Pretty amazing that Durham is really close to overtaking Greensboro as North Carolina's third biggest city. For reference, Greensboro was a bigger city than Raleigh until the 1990s. It wouldn't surprise me if Durham ends up stealing Burlington from the Triad CSA to the Triangle's.
Pretty amazing that Durham is really close to overtaking Greensboro as North Carolina's third biggest city. For reference, Greensboro was a bigger city than Raleigh until the 1990s. It wouldn't surprise me if Durham ends up stealing Burlington from the Triad CSA to the Triangle's.
In addition to Greensboro over Raleigh, Winston-Salem was larger than Raleigh until some time in the seventies and Durham used to be larger than Raleigh until the fifties.
Durham will pass Greensboro in the early 2020s and Raleigh will be nearly 200,000 larger than Greensboro by that time. If Cary continues to expand into Chatham, I can see it passing Winston-Salem by 2030.
It's completely reasonable to imagine Burlington joining the Triangle the next go-round. It's also reasonable to imagine the core of the Triangle reuniting into a single MSA.
Sure, there are anecdotes of the form "My commute in [insert name of big city] was shorter than my commute in the Triangle", but those anecdotes even if they're true don't mean much in the big picture. Ever tried to drive into Manhattan from Long Island at 7 am on a workday? C'mon. I lived in Atlanta for 12 years before moving to Raleigh 30 years ago. Overall, Raleigh traffic is about where Atlanta was in 1980. It may be that Atlanta is not the outcome that people in the Triangle want, but I will add that Atlanta spent massive sums of money on rail. Traffic didn't get better. The area continued to sprawl. Yes there were political and racial factors for why rail didn't extend into the suburbs, but what people overlook is that the suburbs grew faster than the rail system could possibly have been expanded to cover. Cheap land always wins, and the Triangle faces the same prospect.
Same story for DC/Maryland/Virginia. Triangle traffic is about where those were in 1980. Metro might have mitigated sprawl somewhat, but it happened regardless.
Raleigh's ability to annex is mainly toward the northwest, where it's already crossed the Wake-Durham county line. Otherwise it's hemmed in by other municipalities and the low-density Falls Lake watershed. Changes at the General Assembly haven't helped, but for the most part, Raleigh was near the end of the line on annexation already. Raleigh's population as a percentage of Wake County's population has been trending down slowly for decades, and this will continue unless density in Raleigh begins to rise rapidly.
As late as 1900, the most populous city in the state was Wilmington. Things change.
Relative to what everyone who has lived here more than about 10 years is used to.
Which is really ALL that matters to the people who live here now. For people who want to move here, making comparisons to traffic in other cities is useful, because it allows them to gauge whether or not they'll find the traffic here to be reasonable.
But, comparing the Triangle to Atlanta or LA is about as useful with comparing the Triangle with Cambodia, is it not?
Yes... we might have hungry people here and it may be an increasing problem, but it is not at all as bad as Cambodia and probably never will be.
Doesn't mean people aren't still hungry and that it's not still a problem.
Btw, this really wasn't addressed specifically to you wizard. I just see this come up every time anyone mentions traffic around here.
Amen!
Cringe a little every time I hear "well I moved here from xyz a few years ago and traffic here is basically non-existent!"...
Well....I lived HERE for all of my life and traffic has gotten progressively if not exponentially worse in the past 10 years. It's all relative.
Same concept can be applied to the people moving here because they think it's "affordable".
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