It’s Tuesday, March 19.

Thanks to this week’s sponsor: The Nasher Museum is proud to present María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold. The exhibition spans nearly four decades of the artist’s work in photography, installation, video, painting and performance. Her practice embraces the eye of the artist as a tool for witnessing the world with beauty, care and empathy.  

Support the INDY Press Club.

Good morning, readers. 

The wheels on the bus go round and round…as the result of a $138.3 million federal investment to transform Chapel Hill into an accessible and sustainable progressive dreamscape. 

Isn’t that how the song goes?

Last week, we previewed the Biden administration’s recommendation that Congress fund Chapel Hill’s Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project. Today we’re back with a deeper dive into exactly how transformative the project could be.

The NS bus route already provides adequate (and fare-free!) service along the town’s north-south corridor. So why upgrade to BRT? 

  1. There’s demand for more service on that route, but just adding more buses won’t help if they all end up sitting in traffic. The BRT would breeze past the rush-hour traffic by relying on about five miles of exclusive bus lanes and using traffic-signal technology to hold green lights longer for approaching buses.
  1. The project also includes a multiuse path (basically a large bike lane) and improvements to the sidewalks along the corridor. Those additions may help break the deathgrip that cars have had on Americans’ daily lives since the era of the automobile began after World War II. 

And that’s maybe the most important part of this project—experts estimate that the average cost of owning a car is more than $12,000 a year. That may not be much for a tenured professor at UNC, but it’s pretty much an impossibility for someone making the state’s minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.


It could be a pretty impressive victory for affordability if Chapel Hill manages to steer this plan off the page and onto the road. Check out the full story here. 

And have a good Tuesday. 

—Chase

Durham

North Durham coffee shop Perfect Lovers carries on the town’s legacy of scrappy community spaces. 


First lady Jill Biden will be in Durham tomorrow to discuss the Biden administration’s new executive order pushing women’s health research.

Wake

In a wrongful death lawsuit, Darryl Williams’s family alleges Raleigh police shocked Williams with a taser six times, causing his death. In its report, RPD says officers used the taser on Williams three times. 


The financially troubled St. Augustine’s University will send students home at the beginning of April and switch to an online curriculum.

Orange

ICYMI: A runoff will take place in the Orange County Schools Board of Education election in May. 


Chapel Hill officials are hopeful that the Estes Drive connectivity project will be completed by the summer.

Today’s weather

Mostly sunny with a high of 58 degrees.

If you’d like to advertise your business to the Daily’s 30,000-plus subscribers, please contact [email protected]

Love the INDY? Support it by joining the INDY Press Club.

Join now →