To make bus rapid transit work, Raleigh wants to improve access to the planned stations
When the bus rapid transit line opens along New Bern Avenue in two years, the city wants to make sure the stations are easy to reach from surrounding neighborhoods.
That effort begins with North Tarboro Street, which runs six blocks between New Bern and Oakwood Avenue at the St. Augustine’s University campus. City planners have begun looking at possible improvements to the street and sidewalks that would make the route between St. Aug’s and the BRT station near the Cook Out restaurant more inviting.
To get started, the city is holding open house meetings at the Tarboro Road Community Center this week to get people’s ideas. The first took place Wednesday afternoon, with others scheduled for 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday and 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday.
“We’re going to the public to find out what’s important to them,” said Brennon Fuqua of the Engineering Services Department.
To get the conversation started, city planners are offering choices and ideas, such as bike lanes, speed humps and better sidewalks, and asking people to endorse their favorites.
Anthony Price, who stopped in after playing pickleball at the community center Wednesday, liked the idea of slowing down traffic on Tarboro to make it friendlier to pedestrians. Price, a pharmaceutical scientist, said he was encouraged “to see that there’s money and opportunity to better the neighborhood. I’m looking forward to that transformation.”
The city is also asking people what they think about turning a traffic island at Tarboro and Oakwood into a public plaza, with seating, planter boxes and perhaps a space for food trucks. The plaza could help attract students and other residents to the businesses that surround the intersection, said Chris Stebbins, an urban designer in the city planning department.
“This would be literally the outdoor living room of the community,” Stebbins said.
Jackie Johnson, who teaches pickleball at the community center, said those kinds of outdoor spaces are rare in African-American communities and she was happy to see one proposed here.
“It’s almost like an open-air market,” Johnson said. “To me, that just brings the community together.”
The 5.1-mile New Bern Avenue BRT line will run from downtown to a new park-and-ride lot east of the Beltline. When it’s completed in the summer of 2025, buses along the route will get priority signals at intersections and 3.3 miles of dedicated lanes to help avoid getting slowed by traffic. Passengers will board from 19 covered, elevated platforms or stations.
The city will evaluate neighborhood access at each station along the line, with an eye toward making improvements by the time the first BRT buses go into service. Construction is expected to begin later this year.
This story was originally published March 8, 2023 at 5:53 PM.
