Can Raleigh have transit-friendly development without gentrification? Find out Tuesday
More than two years ago, the city set out to plan for development along New Bern Avenue that supports the future bus rapid transit system without displacing businesses and bus riders who live along the route.
On Tuesday, city planners will present their ideas online and at a public meeting and begin asking for feedback.
The city hopes bus rapid transit, or BRT, will attract riders with a faster, more comfortable trip. People will board at stations with raised, covered platforms, and buses will travel in their own lanes with green lights at intersections, to keep them from getting bogged down in traffic.
The New Bern Avenue BRT line is the first of four the city hopes to build, radiating from downtown. It will run 5.1 miles from GoRaleigh station east to near New Hope Road, with 10 station stops along the way.
One goal of the plan the city will present Tuesday is to encourage and allow denser development so more people can live and work within walking distance of the stations. The second big goal is to accomplish the first while still providing room for small businesses and affordable places for bus riders to live, said Jason Hardin, a city planner who is managing the project.
One strategy for doing that, Hardin said, is to amend zoning around the stations to allow developers to build taller buildings in exchange for including apartments available for lower rents.
The plan will also include recommendations aimed at making it easier to get to and from the stations on foot.
“We won’t have a great place, and we won’t have a great transit system, unless people can walk there safely and comfortably,” Hardin said. “And in parts of the corridor there’s some work that needs to be done to truly get to that level.”
The plan will also call for the city to spend money to encourage the kind of development it wants to see around the stations, something it has already started to do.
In April, the city paid $3.7 million to buy 24 duplex apartments on nearly four acres in Duplex Village, a complex built in 1949 east of Raleigh Boulevard. The city will seek a developer to build affordable housing on the site, which is adjacent to a former church where two nonprofits, The Presbyterian Homes Inc. and DHIC, hope to build 150 apartments for low-income seniors.
Public feedback will influence final plan
Hardin and other planners will present the development plan in person Tuesday at the Tarboro Road Community Center, starting with an open house at 5 p.m. and a formal presentation and Q&A session at 6 p.m. People can also tune in online from a link at raleighnc.gov/station-area-plan-new-bern.
The planning department will post the plan to the same website on Wednesday, with instructions for how to comment. Hardin said the city will take feedback through the first week in January, with a goal of giving a final version to the Planning Commission and the City Council sometime in February.
GoRaleigh plans to begin building the New Bern BRT line next summer. It has received $40.5 million in federal grants for the project; most of the rest of the $76.5 million cost will come from the Wake County transit tax, a half-cent sales tax approved by voters in 2016.
Construction is expected to take two years, with service starting in the summer of 2024. But if the City Council approves, Hardin said it could begin carrying out the development plan long before then.
“We don’t want to have a plan that doesn’t pretty quickly start to realize those goals of housing choice, housing affordability and pedestrian safety,” he said. “Those are important, and they don’t need to wait.”
For more information about GoRaleigh’s planned BRT system, including the other three lines, go to raleighnc.gov/bus-rapid-transit.
