Picture 60-foot orange buses zooming westward toward Research Triangle Park, unimpeded by traffic. If all goes according to plan, by 2035, bus rapid transit (BRT) will connect downtown Raleigh to RTP via downtown Cary, making a couple dozen stops along the way. Dedicated bus-only lanes, traffic signal prioritization, and off-board ticketing will make the trips faster than normal bus service. Western Wake commuters, rejoice.
The only losers in this scenario, arguably, are the residents of Morrisville—a densely-packed town where traffic is becoming a quality of life issue—who won’t have easy access to BRT because the planned route mostly circumvents their town. The Morrisville Town Council grappled with this disappointing reality at its work session last week.
“It’s bringing people from out of Morrisville through to RTP instead of benefiting the Morrisville population,” council member Vicki Scroggins-Johnson lamented.
The total capital cost of the Western Extension is estimated at $62 million. About $18 million of that will come from a special half-cent sales tax levied by Wake County for transit projects. (North Carolina has committed $20 million more, leaving a $24 million funding gap.)
“Our residents are paying for all of this, and yet they are not getting a benefit,” said council member Liz Johnson, referencing the sales tax.
By the end of the meeting, the council had agreed to write a letter to the Triangle’s regional transit planning organization, CAMPO (short for Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization), expressing their qualms with the Western Extension alignment. They don’t expect—or even want—the letter to change CAMPO’s plan to formally approve the alignment at its September 16 board meeting, but they’re making the gesture on their residents’ behalf.
On a map, the Western Extension alignment does look a bit awkward.
Rather than passing directly through Morrisville via Chapel Hill Road or Davis Drive (two routes that were considered), it cuts a jagged arc around town on the northeast side via Evans Road. It’s obvious why Morrisville’s leaders would be frustrated not to be included in Wake County’s most promising regional public transportation effort to date. But as the work session made clear, there are a few solid reasons why this alignment was chosen.
- CAMPO chose this route years ago and avoided Morrisville’s main thoroughfares by design.
The fact that the Western Extension skirts around Morrisville isn’t a new revelation. CAMPO has planned to pit a BRT line between Cary and RTP since 2018, and the agency landed on the Evans Road alignment in 2023 because it struck the best balance between attracting riders and minimizing travel times.
As Morrisville’s representative on the CAMPO executive board, Morrisville Mayor TJ Cawley has been able to watch the planning process unfold.
“This is a point-to-point [route], this is really Raleigh to Cary to RTP,” Cawley said. “This isn’t designed necessarily to be a local [route] for our residents.”
Adding more BRT stops along Morrisville’s busier roads would slow down travel times, defeating the purpose of conveying commuters quickly from point A to point B, Cawley explained.
- Morrisville may not be ready for BRT.
Bret Martin, Morrisville’s Transportation Project Manager, said during the work session that the town hasn’t yet shown enough demand for public transportation to justify a BRT route.
Morrisville has a population of about 30,000 inside a 10-square-mile area. At the moment, its only public transit option is the Smart Shuttle, an app-based, on-demand service that takes riders between 17 stops around town. It’s a small-scale operation; the shuttle only seats 19 passengers.
According to Martin, the natural next step in expanding Morrisville’s public transit offerings would be a fixed-route bus system similar to GoRaleigh and GoCary.
“It’s really, really hard to be like, ‘We’re just going to do BRT,’ and you haven’t done any seeding of the market, you haven’t done any evaluation of where people really want to get on and where they’re going, origins and destinations,” Martin said. “We really need to get that fixed-route service going first, and then we can build up from there to BRT.”
Martin pointed out that a few of the current Smart Shuttle stops—including at Park West Village, Perimeter Park, and Wake Tech’s RTP campus—overlap with planned BRT stops, which could help Morrisville residents access BRT more easily.
- Morrisville residents will get a benefit from the Western Extension, albeit a secondary one.
Cawley noted that the Western Extension will take cars off the roads, which will improve commute times for everyone.
“Even if people aren’t on the buses, they benefit, because some people are on the buses, so we’re taking the cars off the roads,” Cawley said.
- Lodging a more forceful protest against the Evans Road alignment could risk delaying or derailing the Western Extension altogether.
Changing the Western Extension route could delay the project and drive up the cost.
“If you change routes you lose funding, you lose credibility as a planning body,” Cawley said.
Worse still, Martin warned, CAMPO could decide to move its investment elsewhere if there isn’t local consensus around the Western Extension.
“CAMPO does take very seriously when the governing body of a municipality that’s impacted by such an investment is not in favor of it,” Martin said. “The money that’s allocated for this could totally be taken and put somewhere else. … If it was a choice between this [BRT alignment] or nothing at all, what would your choice be?”
After some back-and-forth, the town council seemed to reach an agreement.
“We understand that this is a regional project,” said mayor pro tem Anne Robotti, summing up the thrust of their discussion. “I believe we’re united … that we’d rather have this than nothing. But we have a responsibility to our residents, too.”
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