In July, Justin Laidlaw wrote about a plan to bring bus rapid transit—essentially, “rail-like service on rubber tires”—to central Durham. The story sparked conversation about how the project would be funded, what it would look like, and whether it’s really the way to improve transit in the Bull City.
This sounds like an excellent plan. However there are other areas of transit in this town that deserve tweaking that could make substantial improvements in our current traffic situation here, because we are all suffering from old traffic infrastructure with too many personal cars on our roads. I am going to give just one small example of this. I live on Hillandale Road. Hillandale is one of the shortest roads in Durham, yet in the last two to three years it has become a speeding, dangerous overcrowded road. This could be addressed by making a significant change to the current bus route that comes here. Outside of normal residential use, there is almost no reason to use Hillandale Road unless you are going to Duke, or working at Duke, or going to Duke’s clinics down the road, unless you happen to be going to 85, or 147 or going to Riverside High School. Not that many people live out here. So why is every single street like Horton, Guess, Carver, and small residential streets being used as a connector to get to Duke or Duke entities or elsewhere? The bus route makes a loop here. You cannot go directly to Duke from here. You have to go downtown to the transfer station and take the extra time to transfer to another bus to go 10 minutes down the road, which adds a lot of time to commuting. If you are working at Duke as probably most people living out here now are, it takes you so much longer to get to and from work, going to doctor appointments, or whatever. It takes so much longer that people use their cars much more than they might not otherwise. A publicity campaign letting all the people out here know that they can get to Duke faster and more efficiently and changing this one route might not only make more ridership on the bus, but it would save people money and reduce the traffic jams all over this area, which are getting worse all the time. Transfer stations are economical for the bus service, but if we really want to get everybody as much as possible on our buses to save our environment and keep quality of life here, these kinds of things need to be looked at. Duke is the major employer of Durham, and transit staff need to realize that in order to serve everybody, instead of a particular group of people or a particular area that’s perceived as having a large number of people who need the bus, we need to try to get everyone on the bus by making it convenient. Most urban centers even have school children ride city buses. I did that when I went to school starting in kindergarten. Everyone here also realizes the problems that have been going on for years with our school bus situation, too. I have lived here a long time and I understand a lot about this community and I have absolutely no bias toward anyone in any way. This is a practical suggestion, not a political one. This is what addresses mass transit needs as our population increases and we become a much larger urban area.
From instagram user adampyburn:…