Raleigh Named 4th Least Stressed City
Earlier this summer a publication said we were a “lazy” area, but what I think they meant was that we are less stressed (it’s not like we aren’t a productive area!). Today Portfolio.com released a survey naming us 47th in stress among a 50-city sample. The survey included factors such as unemployment, income growth, poverty, circulatory-related deaths, sunshine, air quality, robberies, murders, commuting, and housing costs. Minneapolis-St.Paul, Virginia Beach-Norfolk, and Salt Lake City (#1) ranked higher. Note that the city of “-Durham” was not included in the survey.
So I guess we can cross off “commute times” as a good reason to adopt a regional transit system.
We rank 59th
in commute times, yet we have a “sprawl problem” that is killing our way of life. Somehow this way of like seems to be just fine for most of us. Maybe private time in our cars relaxes us.
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September 7th, 2010 at 9:05 pm
It’s hard to believe that raleigh would be one of the least stressed cities. I agree with Dana that we have horrific commute times, really crowded roads, and a serious sprawl problem that is approaching that of Atlanta. I have lived in other cities and never felt as stressed by the traffic as I have here. Try going down Six Forks Road at almost any time of day – doesn’t matter what time.Makes you want to stay in and never go out, whether on weekday or weekend.
September 7th, 2010 at 9:45 pm
Um, no..I was saying that we DON’T have a commute time problem. As long as your commute may be and as much traffic you may see, we only have the 59th-worst commute in the country (yes, that is a 2002 stat, but our commutes certainly haven’t gotten more difficult in the last 8 years). Inside the beltline, where population density is the greatest, we have NO traffic tieups. I-440 puts pressure on the few arteries that can pass it, but still this is a very easy city around which to maneuver.
Atlanta’s problem with traffic is that they did not adequately ZONE and BUILD enough roads in the middle third of the 20th century. Every city has arteries like Six Forks, however Atlanta did not design major arteries through the older and mid-sections. Therefore major amounts of traffic in Atlanta are relying on roads equivalent to Anderson Drive and St. Mary’s street. If high-occupancy heavy rail were the answer for a southern city, people in Atlanta would have shown some propensity in the last 40 years toward desiring high-density developments along MARTA’s rail lines. The reality is that people would rather sit in Atlanta traffic than center their lives around really expensive transit lines.
September 8th, 2010 at 7:47 am
Awesome comment Dana! As someone who has spent time in the DC area and visited Atlanta many times, I agree that Raleigh has no meaningful traffic problems. Looking at Atlanta’s awful traffic and their simultaneously poor usage of the MARTA shows how looney light rail is for the triangle, given our small size and low population densities. Light rail in the Triangle is simply a political device thrown around by politicians pandering to folks who have a desire to be “more European”.
September 9th, 2010 at 11:45 am
I agree that Raleigh’s traffic is nothing compared to DC or Atlanta. Those cities are on a magnitude scale worse than anything I have ever seen here.
I am confused as to why an area that is growing as fast as the Triangle would be somehow caught up in some phoney culture war True Americans vs. Faux Europeans when it comes to planning for future public transit needs. It is not as though the growth is some rumor or falsehood. It is here. We can keep adding lanes for only so long and then other than it being a visual nightmare, it will mean we grow into…oh, let’s see, another DC or Atlanta.
September 9th, 2010 at 11:50 am
DC and Atlanta HAVE HAD rail for 40 years, but still have ever-growing sprawl and massive traffic congestion. The addition of rail here would have extremely little impact on those two factors.
Sprawl is not the result of roads. Roads follow sprawl. Over the past 40 years, people here have chosen to live out in the county in big neighborhoods serviced only by 2-lane roads. Only after their population grows do the roads get expanded and laid to service these areas. Traffic congestion is a road design problem. As I said earlier, Atlanta has 6 radial interstates and a circle. Beyond that they have poorly planned roads that were built too narrow to begin with, and never widened. Raleigh is WAY easier to get around than Atlanta was when it had our population.
September 9th, 2010 at 2:03 pm
Dana, do you think building 540 was a good idea? I’m just wondering.
September 9th, 2010 at 2:49 pm
Yes.
There were 10s of thousands of people who lived in N. Raleigh and worked in the RTP long before 540 opened. They traveled long commutes on winding, dangerous, 2-lane country roads with extremely heavy traffic. The 10s of thousands of people who moved to that area since were coming any way. They sought that type of development, and would have opted for some similar development somewhere else (Apex, Durham, Morrisville) if 540 were not built.
How we allow residential and commercial developments to find themselves along this corridor is a totally different argument.
I-540 is NO DIFFERENT than the construction of I-440, yet I hardly find people who say that I-440 should never have been built. The difference is the character of the zoning around the two. Ironically many of the people bemoaning sprawl would love to live in Hayes Barton, the epitome of a sprawl neighborhood off of two major arteries. Somehow Hayes Barton gets a pass these days. It sure didn’t from those who lived on Hillsborough Street when St. Marys was on the edge of town.
One point people forget is that the people attracted here to those outlying neighborhoods are not attracted to riding high-occupancy rail. Period. So rail won’t do anything the change the demand for those types of development. It’s like offering fish food to a dog.
September 9th, 2010 at 4:21 pm
So we end up getting more and more of a mess. Start putting limits on the type of development around 540, and people will say “Folks do not move here to drive 5 miles to a grocery store, etc.”
I think 540 invited more and more development in the mess up north of Falls of Neuse and Six Forks.
I don’t pretend to have the answers, but 10 years ago when I moved here a lot of people said no one would want to live in downtown Raleigh…or Durham…and it is happening.
September 9th, 2010 at 5:50 pm
Where are they moving? It’s probably a bad time to ask that given the entire real estate market, but it worth noting that Bloomsbury Estates hasn’t sold enough to open, Hue and 712 Tucker had to go apts., ?RBC tower and Paramount are something like half full?… and about half of the projects slated to be open by now never got built. I’ve been pretty disappointed with the demand for housing in new downtown projects… but like I said, maybe it is a really bad time to reach any kind of conclusions.
I’m not attacking downtown in any way, and wish that all of this stuff had gotten built. My point really is that even if everything had gotten built, it would have been a tiny fraction compared to what people moving here want.
I just wonder if 440 ruined Hillsborough, Wade, Lake Boone, Glenwood, Ridge, Six Forks, and Wake Forest Rd.
September 10th, 2010 at 10:45 pm
“Ironically many of the people bemoaning sprawl would love to live in Hayes Barton, the epitome of a sprawl neighborhood off of two major arteries. Somehow Hayes Barton gets a pass these days. It sure didn’t from those who lived on Hillsborough Street when St. Marys was on the edge of town.”
Comparing Hayes Barton to the more modern suburban sprawl of North Raleigh is ridiculous. The yard sizes in Hayes Barton are HALF what they are in N. Raleigh. Also, homes are spaced much further apart in N. Raleigh compared to HB. Almost all the streets in HB are narrow and have sidewalks, both of which encourage more walking and biking around the neighborhoods. And, believe it or not, some people in HB actually use public transportation on a somewhat regular basis. I know, I’ve been one of them in the past when I lived there. While HB certainly can’t be considered high density living, it is not anywhere CLOSE to the nightmare of suburban sprawl that is N. Raleigh.
And the reasons why we need more (and better) options for public transit, and improved conditions for walking and biking, go beyond simply addressing sprawl. They also help address concerns of fuel consumption, climate change, and obesity. Further, owning and operating cars is an expensive undertaking, often costing as much as the sticker price over the life of the car. With global economies being what they are, we could all stand to cut back on our spending so that we can save more money. Living in denser developments helps reduce our need for a car.
September 11th, 2010 at 1:31 am
Ashe,
Imagine we are sitting in Oakwood talking about a new, planned neighborhood in some woods on the outskirts of town where the lot sizes are at least twice as big, the setback is WAY farther back on most streets, and there is no retail within walking distance, so a car is a must for 99% percent of all needs. It is 1925 and we’re talking about Hayes Barton.
While the bus travels Glenwood, I’d venture to say that 99.9% of the people within 1/2 mile from Five-points rely on the car for 99% of their transportation. Their lifestyles aren’t any different than the people in North Ridge.
I used just as much gas when I lived in Cameron Village condos as I do living near North Hills.
While public transit theoretically leads to a lower cost of living for people who ride, often-times this argument forgets that somebody has to pay for this incredibly expensive method of transit (usually employers who would otherwise create jobs with that money), and almost always ignores the dramatically reduced efficiency of a person who relies on others for their transit.
You can argue about pollution, but find me the most polluted cities in America and I’ll show you cities that have high-occupancy transit. If air quality is so bad in those areas, then why doesn’t everyone ride the rail? (They don’t WANT to.) Show me underdeveloped roads like North Raleigh had before 540 and I’ll show you densified clouds of pollution with stagnant traffic. So many environmentalists want to outlaw drive-thrus, but they don’t want traffic to FLOW in places where people WANT to live.
If “options” for transit are all that are needed, then buses will do everything people want an inflexible 1+ billion money pit train system to do.
If the City of Raleigh were really serious about transit, they would offer CAT shuttles to the RBC Center for events from areas around Raleigh. The arena is over a decade old, and the city continues to ignore one of the key transit opportunities sitting in front of them.