Transit

As expected, on Tuesday night the Board of County Commissioners voted unanimously to discontinue the Durham-Orange Light Rail Transit project. After a failure of negotiations, this step formally discontinues the project and begins a process to reallocate the funds that had been allocated to the light rail project through an amended Orange County Transit Plan.

That process will involve lengthy conversations with community members and potential partners. A lot of time and effort, and difficult negotiation lie ahead. For me, it’s time to pause and consider what has been lost.

{Cross Posted from Chapel Hill News}

If you boarded a Chapel Hill Transit bus back in February, you might have been greeted by someone with a clipboard asking you to answer a few questions about your ride. The results of this survey were just released and include relevant and interesting findings as we think about the future of transit in our community.

These survey data tell us quite a bit about who rides Chapel Hill Transit. Most riders (88 percent) were somehow affiliated with UNC, and 93 percent of those surveyed were taking the bus to get to college or work. A majority (68 percent) ride the bus five days a week while another 21 percent use it three or four days a week.

Speaking to a sizeable crowd at Duke last Thursday night, Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá, shared his vision for and thoughts on “Democracy and the Quality of Urban Life.”

As mayor from 1998-2000, Peñalosa radically transformed the physical form of Bogotá. He worked to incorporate the city’s remote, illegally-constructed slums into the city by building new public spaces, parks, and pedestrian and bicycle connections. He implemented aggressive policies to limit car use by eliminating parking and creating dedicated bus lanes to improve public transit. He spoke at length during his talk about how the work he carried out as mayor was designed to make Bogotá a more inclusive, equal, and democratic city.