You see Carolina’s blue bus turn onto Franklin Street. The bright orange letters say “U” – University Shuttle. You sprint towards the Carolina Coffee Shop, hoping to stop before the doors close. They know it will be another 45 minutes before the next bus arrives. In desperation, you yell at the bus like it can hear you.
“Wait! Stop!”
It withdraws.
The all-too-common feeling of missing the bus is part of a bigger problem: not having enough buses. If we devoted more funding to transit development projects, we could make Chapel Hill greener and more accessible.
However, improving access to Chapel Hill begins with improving local public transport infrastructure. That means more buses, more often.
It also means less parking, dreaded what it sounds like.
“But it’s so hard to park in Chapel Hill. We cannot afford to reduce it any further! “
I get it. I also struggle to find parking spaces in this city consistently. It’s either too expensive or too rare. No matter how you cut it Parking at Chapel Hill sucks for everyone.
But making Chapel Hill a more transit-oriented city means creating more space. Parking and transit are inextricably linked. When you create more parking space, there is induced demand – when you build it, individuals will come. So if we build more parking spaces, we will give more cars space on the streets, which will further increase our dependency on our cars to get us from point A to B.
But what if we didn’t have to rely on our cars so much to get around?
To make this a reality, you need to rely more on buses.
Of course there are problems with that too. It’s hard to get the bus just right. Weekend duty is limited and when it is absent you will have to wait with the time that you may not necessarily have. All of this has been exacerbated by the pandemic.
Chapel Hill Transit does what is necessary to ensure the safety of bus drivers by limiting the capacity and frequency of buses. At the same time, it has kept people from using its services, especially when they have other options.
The way to revitalize public transportation in a post-pandemic world and make Chapel Hill a less driver-dependent city is through funding bus projects. The consistency of transit is a top priority for drivers. Imagine not having to control the time of the bus perfectly, but knowing reliably that it would come every 10 minutes. This comes from funding more buses and more routes.
Transit consistency also means ensuring that the journeys themselves are short and fast once there are people on the bus. The speed of bus journeys can be improved by creating separate designated bus lanes made possible by Bus Rapid Transit projects.
Fortunately, Chapel Hill has already received funding for such a project at the end of last year. The North-South Bus Rapid Transit Project (NS BRT) received a federal grant to continue with his design plans. However, this money only covers a fraction of the total cost of the project.
The jump from Chapel Hill to BRT is a big step, but it is a slow and bureaucratic process to get such massive projects up and running. The current timeline does not assume the service will begin until 2026.
However long it takes, the truth remains that implementing these transitory projects is the best way to make our city more accessible. More projects like BRT and increasing bus frequency mean reducing our carbon footprint, boosting the local economy and ultimately making Chapel Hill a more desirable place to be.
And maybe next time the absence of the bus will not be a moment of panic and despair.
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