News

RTA members and partners,

Last week, RTA and NCDOT held an online webinar designed to highlight the promise and opportunities of BRT.

The webinar: Building Roads for Transit — Constructing, Funding, and Benefits of BRT Infrastructure, was primarily aimed for roadway contractors. However, several RTA members joined and we were very pleased with both the attendance and the engagement.

Thank you in particular to Brennon Fuqua, PE, NCDOT Integrated Mobility Division (IMD) — Director, and Wright Archer III, PE, NCDOT Division 7 — Division Engineer for their remarks during the online conversation.

RTA has been championing BRT as a solution for more than a decade. While we have only been using the phrase “buses resembling trains” for a few years, and “building roads for transit” for a few weeks, we have been at this since at least 2010 — and we are looking forward to seeing multiple BRT corridors launch in the next few years or sooner.

How the business community champions transit

For this week’s blog, I thought I would compile a partial list of the ways that RTA has worked to champion an effective regional transit system:

• We have held more than a dozen tours to other cities across the US since 2005 to view and learn about transit options, with BRT on the agenda since 2011.
• We have coordinated the I-40 Regional Partnership with NCDOT since 2009
• We led the push to create the regional Bus On Shoulder System (BOSS) on our freeways through the I-40 Partnership, and spearheaded the development of the state’s BOSS Implementation and Operations Plan.
• We championed BRT among the business community and with elected officials when the conversation was focused on light rail because we wanted more transit for more people more quickly, and we wanted something that we could quickly and effectively scale as our market grows.
• We inadvertently but helpfully renamed “BRT” as “buses resembling trains”, and purposefully added “BRT” to mean “building roads for transit.
• We created, scoped, fundraised, and spearheaded a nearly $1m regional “FAST” transit study – Freeway Arterial Street Tactical transit – which will lay the foundation for a regional BRT network thanks to NCDOT’s leadership through integrated mobility and the highway divisions.
• We made a video of BRT elsewhere during our initial elevation of BRT; and took a leadership position to encourage movement
• We ran the campaign to pass a local option transit sales tax in 2016 in Wake County.
• We coordinated a visit to DC to identify the reality of federal funding for commuter rail (and its recent performance elsewhere) the opportunity of creating a scalable regional BRT network.
• We pushed for zero fare transit to remove barriers for all users, maximize ridership and increase overall support for transit.
• We launched the BRT/FAST/SMART team with NCDOT through the I-40 regional partnership.
• We champion a vision of effective regional transit and put in the organizational, advocacy, and relationship work to make an accelerated reality.
• We encourage the business community to remain engaged, to understand the options, to share those with their associates; and to lead on important conversations about pushing, staying the course, and seeking options.

The bottom line is that your neighborhood RTA remains focused on advancing BRT — a time efficient, cost-effective, high quality, and inherently scalable regional rapid transit solution — and the regional business community is committed to seeing its accelerated completion in our market as part of our broader focus on multimodal solutions.

Let’s get moving,

Joe Milazzo II, PE
RTA executive director

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