In Chapel Hill, buses painted Carolina blue shepherd students, residents, visitors, nurses, and workers up and down the town’s roughly eight-mile-long north-south corridor. It’s the college town’s spine, comprising NC Highway 86 and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Like all Chapel Hill bus routes, it’s also fare-free for riders thanks to a partnership between Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and UNC-Chapel Hill. It’s a perfectly fine service, and the town wants to make it even better for commuters with an upgrade to a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system.
The BRT, in a town nearly as old as the nation itself, is more than another tentative line on a map. It’s an opportunity to showcase a progressive vision for the future—one based on busing, biking, walking, and affordability. A successful BRT could prove that it’s possible to realize the dreams of greenways and sustainability that policy makers have promised for years, most recently in the Complete Communities framework.
“Public transportation connects people to jobs, school, family, and more—and when transit reaches more people and communities, its impact is even greater,” said U.S. transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg in a press release announcing the recommendation of a $138.3 million investment in Chapel Hill’s BRT earlier this month. If Congress approves that money, the town’s transit department has an ambitious plan to transform the way people move along the north-south axis.
“It’s one of our highest-ridership routes,” says Brian Litchfield, Chapel Hill’s transit director. But that route is facing challenges: there’s demand for more service, says Litchfield, but just adding more buses won’t help if they all end up sitting in traffic. It also won’t help to just add more lanes, the common instinct of planners from across the country since the post–World War II era of the automobile began.
BRT is designed to solve those problems by operating like a subway system—efficient and predictable, regardless of road congestion—without ever digging a single tunnel. The system would rely on about five miles of exclusive bus lanes, allowing bus commuters to roll past auto traffic at any time of day. It would also deploy traffic-signal technology, holding green lights longer for approaching buses in order to minimize time waiting at red lights.
The bus itself is the headliner, but the project also includes a multiuse path (basically a large bike lane) and improvements to the sidewalks along the corridor.
“It’s going to improve bus service, but it’s also going to substantially improve the ability for the community to be able to bike, walk, or move throughout that corridor in something besides a personal vehicle,” says Litchfield.
By more effectively linking the park-and-rides at Eubanks Road and Southern Village, the town hopes to make the BRT so good that residents don’t need to rely on a car, which policy makers see as an important step toward affordability in Chapel Hill. Even as residents and town leaders have split over methods for responsibly managing the town’s growth, factions have generally agreed on an affordable housing plan and the need to make sure that the people who work in the town can afford to live there. The American Automobile Association (AAA) estimates that the cost of owning a car is more than $12,000 a year. That may not be much for the average tenured professor at UNC, but it’s a hell of a hit to the wallet for someone making the state’s minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
The BRT has been in the works since as early as 2012, when Orange County voters approved a 1/2¢ sales tax to raise money for public transportation. With projected population growth and demand for transit services on the rise, a package of plans that also included the Durham-Orange Light Rail got Triangle residents dreaming about options for a future of connectivity.
But the light rail plan had too many stakeholders and too high a price tag. It imploded before a single inch of track was laid. To this day, residents who are asked about light rail are apt to shake their heads and mutter in annoyance about Duke Hospital. The BRT plan—smaller and simpler—meanwhile, kept quietly rolling along. Now, it’s gaining momentum where light rail failed.
Litchfield doesn’t find the comparison particularly helpful.
“Light rail … was a whole different project on a whole different level related to funding and challenges related to stakeholders,” Litchfield says.
Chapel Hill isn’t the first place in the Triangle to consider BRT. Raleigh’s BRT, currently under construction, has come under fire because it was paired with a set of zoning changes to encourage denser development along the route. That issue is specific to Raleigh, given the placement of the route, but the tug-of-war between needed infrastructure improvements and their contribution to gentrification may play out in different ways in Chapel Hill as the project proceeds.
And there will be plenty of time for those conversations, as it’ll be at least five years before the wheels on the Bus Rapid Transit hit MLK Jr. Blvd.
President Biden’s department of transportation has recommended that Congress approve funding, along with 13 other similar projects, in the 2025 fiscal year budget. If approved on schedule, the town hopes to move through design and begin construction in 2026 or 2027, with operation beginning in 2029. But Litchfield is hesitant to put his faith in Congress’s timeline.
“Never place a bet on what Congress will do,” he says. “There’s no guarantee until we receive notification from the Federal Transit Administration.”
Still, he says that most projects that get this far ultimately do receive funding. And after a long process—one recent step required a 1,300-page application from the transit department—the town is optimistic about the future.
“We have all the … good vibes on making sure that gets fully funded by Congress,” said Chapel Hill mayor Jess Anderson, to light applause, at the council’s work session following the announcement.
More information about Chapel Hill’s BRT plan can be found at NSBRT.org.
Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at chase@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
