RTA members,
Thank you to everyone who attended our RTA Brunch this past Thursday, August 7.
It was wonderful to join nearly 300 regional colleagues from business, transportation, and government for our annual gathering.
One of the highlights was our keynote address from Andrew Miller, Ph.D., who offered his perspectives on transportation innovation and on our polycentric market. You can view the slides from his presentation here, and peruse several of his prior articles in a recent RTA blog post.
Andrew’s presentation was an excellent followup to the remarks from several members of our RTA Steering Committee, including RTA chair Sarah Gaskill with FUJIFILM Biotechnologies, Travis Crayton with the Research Triangle Foundation of North Carolina, and past chair Harold Hicks with RTI International. You can view their companion slides here.
After enjoying the presentations from our keynote speaker and Steering Committee leaders, and connecting with several members and partners after the event, here are around 10 example takeaways and reflections that can help inform the execution of our RTA business plan in concert with our partners.
RTA 2026 Brunch – 10 takeaways
- Our market is foundationally polycentric, which requires a commitment to effective, reliable cross-regional connections for continued economic success. A polycentric market experiences comparatively less congestion, albeit with more vehicle miles traveled, and an enhanced, multiple corridor bus-based network is our natural rapid transit framework versus a rail-based system.
- Automated driving, in the form of “robotaxis” and privately-owned autonomous vehicles, is not “coming” to North America; rather our automated driving future is already here, although it is not equally distributed.
- Driving will increase (est. 30%), and congestion will increase, because automation will make driving more attractive, for more trips, and for more people.
- We will need to add more freeway lanes and highway capacity to address the added congestion, particularly in growing markets like the Research Triangle.
- Transit can still work, even with the inevitable expansion of automation driving. Transit might even work better as congestion increases due to increased driving, so long as rapid transit is indeed reliable and rapid. To that point, we will need dedicated or priority lanes for transit. That can include managed lanes on our freeways to provide priority for regional transit.
- Unreliable transit that is stuck in traffic with everyone else, will become less attractive, less utilized, and less supported as automated driving progresses.
- The exchange station over the freeway makes sense and is an essential aspect of our future enhanced multimodal network. If we think about links and nodes, an exchange station — a quick, comfortable, attractive, and reliable transit connection point — is the nodal counterpart of a dedicated lane for a transit link.
- While our region has established a willingness or desire to invest in transit, and has indeed set aside significant dollars for upcoming capital needs, our region needs to deliver – quickly – on our mobility infrastructure investments. The longer projects take, the more uncertain and risky their completion becomes, in addition to the delay to the community in the receipt of benefits.
- Physical infrastructure – anything we create that involves pouring concrete – can be expected to have a lifespan of 80 to 100 years, but it is hard for us to know what technology advances in the next 20 years are going to impact mobility. We need to think about what we invest in through that lens.
- The Research Triangle region needs to present and offer itself as a testbed of automated technology. The industry will benefit, and so will we. And we need to ensure that all of our infrastructure is automation ready; the proposed exchange station already is.
Click here for media coverage from the event: ABC-11, WRAL.
Click here for photos from the event: letsgetmoving.org/RTA2026BrunchPhotos
The regional business community remains fully committed to rapidly advancing the region’s mobility future for the prosperity of all.
Let’s get moving,
Joe
Joe Milazzo II, PE
RTA executive director
[Note: the following is a draft post, which may be updated during the second week of August 2026]
RTA members,
Thank you to everyone who attended our RTA Brunch this past Thursday, August 7.
It was wonderful to join nearly 300 regional colleagues from business, transportation, and government for our annual gathering.
One of the highlights was our keynote address from Andrew Miller, Ph.D., who offered his perspectives on transportation innovation and on our polycentric market. You can view the slides from his presentation here, and peruse several of his prior articles in a recent RTA blog post.
Andrew’s presentation was an excellent followup to the remarks from several members of our RTA Steering Committee, including RTA chair Sarah Gaskill with FUJIFILM Biotechnologies, Travis Crayton with the Research Triangle Foundation of North Carolina, and past chair Harold Hicks with RTI International. You can view their companion slides here.
After enjoying the presentations from our keynote speaker and Steering Committee leaders, and connecting with several members and partners after the event, here are around 10 example takeaways and reflections that can help inform the execution of our RTA business plan in concert with our partners.
RTA 2026 Brunch – 10 takeaways
- Our polycentric region – the foundation of our market – requires a commitment to effective, reliable cross-regional connections for continued economic success. For a polycentric market, driving experiences comparatively less congestion, although more vehicle miles traveled, with a enhanced bus-based network being the primary regional transit framework.
- Automated driving, in the form of “robotaxis” and privately-owned autonomous vehicles, is not “coming” to North America; rather our automated driving future is already here, although it is not equally distributed.
- Driving will increase (est. 30%) and congestion will increase, because automation will make driving more attractive, for both more trips and for more people.
- We will need to add more freeway lanes and highway capacity to address the added congestion, particularly in growing markets like the Research Triangle.
- Transit can still work, even with the inevitable expansion of automation driving. Transit might even work better as congestion increases due to increased driving, so long as rapid transit is indeed reliable and rapid. To that point, we will need dedicated or priority lanes for transit. That can include managed lanes on our freeways to provide priority for regional transit.
- Unreliable transit that is stuck in traffic with everyone else, will become less attractive, less utilized, and less supported as automated driving progresses.
- The exchange station over the freeway makes sense and is an essential aspect of our future enhanced multimodal network. If we think about links and nodes, an exchange station — a quick, comfortable, attractive, and reliable transit connection point — is the nodal counterpart of a dedicated lane for a transit link.
- While our region has clearly established a willingness or desire to invest in transit, and has indeed set aside significant dollars for upcoming capital needs, our region needs to deliver – quickly – on our regional mobility infrastructure investments. The longer projects take, the more uncertain and risky their completion becomes, in addition to the delay to the community in the receipt of benefits.
- Physical infrastructure – anything we create that involves pouring concrete – can be expected to have a lifespan of 80 to 100 years, but it is hard for us to know what technology advances in the next 20 years are going to impact mobility. We need to think about what we invest in through that lens.
- The Research Triangle region needs to present and offer itself as a testbed of automated technology. The industry will benefit, and so will we. To that point, we need to ensure that our mobility infrastructure is automation ready; the proposed exchange station already is.
Click here for media coverage from the event: ABC-11, WRAL.
Click here for photos from the event: letsgetmoving.org/RTA2026BrunchPhotos
The regional business community remains fully committed to rapidly advancing the region’s mobility future for the prosperity of all.
Let’s get moving,
Joe
Joe Milazzo II, PE
RTA executive director
