David D. King's one-year contract gives him until October to get the Triangle Transit Authority back on track. But he takes a long view. The year he worries about is 2030.

By then, an estimated 1.9 million people will live in Durham, Orange and Wake counties. That's 780,000 new residents -- like adding another county the size of Wake today.

"Given the problems that we face in supplying highway capacity, how are those people going to get around?" King asked members of the state Board of Transportation last week. "Where are they going to live?"

King, 60, retired as the state's public transportation chief last summer, just as the TTA was giving up an 11-year bid for federal money to build a 28-mile regional rail line through Durham, Research Triangle Park, Cary and Raleigh. TTA board members persuaded King to put his golf clubs away, and in October he signed on as general manager for 12 months.

The rail project crashed after federal transit officials concluded that it would serve too few riders to justify its soaring costs, estimated in 2005 at $810 million. Now, Triangle mayors, county commissioners and business executives are working up a new approach to tackle traffic problems and transit needs.

Time for new ideas

It's the first rethinking for transit since 1995, when regional leaders settled on a rail route that paralleled Interstate 40 and the Durham Freeway. Now they want to decide quickly where to build the first transit improvements, and -- perhaps a tougher question -- how to pay for them.

By the end of 2007, they hope to produce a new plan for regional rail or bus rapid transit investments, backed with fresh technical studies and bolstered with broad community consensus.

"There's a lot of support to take a fresh look at the overall transit situation," Raleigh Mayor Charles C. Meeker said. "How much support it gets will depend on the ultimate plan that is adopted."

There's no short list yet.

The official map of possibilities shows conceivable commuter routes radiating from RTP to such outlying points as Mebane, Rougemont, Franklinton, Middlesex, Selma, Clayton and Fuquay-Varina. We could end up with buses on toll roads and in carpool lanes, or with trains on freeway medians.

The original TTA proposal is still in the running. Its trains would serve some of the Triangle's biggest university, government and research centers.

Still, the new transit plan could push TTA's ideas aside in favor of light rail or express bus service from booming suburbs such as Wake Forest and Brier Creek -- easing pressures along busy corridors where traffic conditions are far worse now than they looked to planners back in 1995.

"We need to take a look at all our transportation needs outside the rail corridor that TTA had looked in for the last 10 years," said Philip R. Isley, a Raleigh City Council member long scornful of the rail project. "We've got to look at people coming from the southern part of [Wake County], from Garner and Clayton, and how they can get to the Park rapidly."

Mending fences

Tall and sleepy-eyed with thick white hair and a quick, warm wit, King pursues his job with a patient sense of urgency.

He still sees merit in the original rail proposal, but this is a year to hear other ideas, he says. Asked about other possible candidates, he launches a brisk discussion of corridors that deserve consideration.

King says TTA officials lost touch with local leaders in recent years, as they focused on pushing the rail proposal through an arduous federal review. While he keeps the wheels rolling on TTA buses that carry 4,000 riders each day, King is also mending fences with business executives and the governments in Wake, Durham and Orange counties that established the TTA in 1989.

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