GoTriangle Proposes Carrboro-Durham Bus Service, Additional Fast Trips from Chapel Hill

Triangle Transit BusesCarrboro residents who work at Duke or in Downtown Durham may soon have a new transportation choice: direct regional bus service on GoTriangle Route 405. Chapel Hill residents who work in the same places could see more fast trips this fall as well if GoTriangle implements the service proposal that is now out for public comment.

What Regional Bus Service Is Available Today Between Chapel Hill and Durham?

Currently, there are two regional bus routes operated by GoTriangle that link the Carolina Coffee Shop/Varsity Theater in Chapel Hill to Duke Hospital and Durham Station in Durham:

  • Route 405, which is faster and runs during peak hours only, departures every 30 minutes
  • Route 400, which covers more territory and takes 15 minutes longer than 405 to make the same trip, departures every 30 minutes

In the middle of the day, only Route 400 runs and the buses come once every 60 minutes. But there’s another quirk to the existing service- since the 400 takes an extra 15 minutes to make its trip, often times the 400 and 405 leave Chapel Hill at the exact same time, which means while there are 4 buses departing per hour, travelers only have two departure choices for the fast bus (405) since they often leave the Carolina Coffee Shop stop at the same time as the slower bus 400.

The New 405/400 Proposal: More Fast Buses Throughout the Day

There are several things to like about the proposal on the table for August of 2016:

  • The proposal shortens Route 400 by ten minutes (10 minutes!) by removing service from portions of Old Chapel Hill and Southwest Durham Drive. This makes Durham and Chapel Hill closer by bus, all day long.
  • The adjustment above allows buses to depart on more regular intervals (roughly 15 minutes) from downtown Chapel Hill, providing four departure choices every morning and afternoon during rush hour instead of two departure choices.
  • Service is extended into Carrboro, allowing for direct access to Durham from the Abbey Court/Collins Crossings stop, as well as downtown Carrboro. Durham residents who work in Carrboro can ride it to work, too.
  • Service in the middle of the day, AND on Saturday on Route 400 will now run every 30 minutes instead of every 60 minutes

Here is a map of the new service concept:

Proposed Carrboro-Durham Bus Service

Proposed Carrboro-Durham Bus Service

 

GoTriangle Now Accepting Public Comments

GoTriangle is accepting public comments on this proposal until April 28, 2016.

To find out additional details about the proposal and to share your opinion, please visit GoTriangle’s Service Change Survey for Route 400/405 here.

Carrboro has had one of the highest percentages of residents using public transportation in North Carolina and the southeast for many years. I expect this service to be well-used by many residents and workers alike. If having this service come to Carrboro is important to you, please take the time to share your comments at the link just above.

Dream Up Downtown Walk in Chapel Hill / Carrboro Tomorrow

dream-up-downtownAre you free tomorrow evening, March 31st? If so, and you want to walk and talk city life,  I will be joining Molly DeMarco to lead a walking tour and discussion of Public Spaces in Downtown Chapel Hill and Carrboro as part of the Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership’s “Dream Up Downtown” event series.The walk will begin at Peace and Justice Plaza (179 E Franklin St, Chapel Hill-in front of the downtown post office) at 6:30 pm. and proceed west, finishing in downtown Carrboro around 8:00 pm.

The walk will focus on the theme of Our Public Spaces! We’ll visit several public spaces as we wander through the two downtowns, and talk about what’s working well and what could use improvement. This event is meant to be a Jane’s Walk named after the influential writer and urbanist Jane Jacobs;  it is as much a conversation as a tour. So please bring your own insights, questions, and vision for the future to share.

Come join us, all are welcome!

Filtering, Housing Supply and Changes In Rents: The Evidence

Over the past two weeks, I have highlighted how housing prices and rents increase without new development-  through filtering at large multifamily properties and at smaller rentals as individual landlords decide to upgrade their units one at a time. The flip side of this phenomenon is the question:  Is there is evidence that expanding the supply of housing can put downward pressure on rents, and can prevent mid-market housing from filtering up to become higher-end rental property?

The answer is an overwhelming YES.  But don’t take my word for it, just read a whole bunch of newspaper articles with data below. None of them use the word “filtering” explicitly, but virtually all of them reference filtering in housing markets in one way or another. I’ll make some brief comments after a few articles.

Austin, TX – 2/2/2015 (Austin American-Statesman)

The boom in apartment supply dropped the area’s occupancy rate to 94 percent in the last half of 2014 — the lowest occupancy level in more than three years, and nearly 4 percent below the recent high of 97.8 percent in June 2012…With all those new units entering the market, supply is catching up to demand. And that means apartment rents are stabilizing after rising rapidly — sometimes as much as 7 percent per year — from 2010 through 2013. The average rent in the metro area was $1,107 a month in December — an all-time high, but an increase of only $8 from the average rent for June, Heimsath said.

Comments: This article notes how the expansion of supply in Austin has increased vacancies, which is another way of saying there are more multifamily properties with idle income-producing units each month, who are now more likely to make deals on rent. Here the supply of new units has cut rent increases from 7% to 0.7%- or $8/month on a unit that rents for $1,107.

Washington, DC – 1/4/2015 (Washington Post)

This new supply forced landlords at some four- and five-star buildings to reduce rents in order to fill their units. As a result, rent growth dipped into the red briefly in 2008, and then again for most of 2009. The Great Recession also had an impact, as some former four- and five-star renters moved to older, cheaper three-star buildings to save money. This increased demand for three-star units, allowing landlords there to continue raising prices.

In recent years, the effective rental growth rates of three-star and four- and five-star buildings have diverged even further. Just as in 2007, this is largely a result of the recent construction boom in the Washington area. An unprecedented number of new apartment units (about 24,000) have arrived in the area in the past two years, increasing the total apartment inventory by roughly 5 percent.

That new supply wave cut rents for four- and five-star apartments even further, even as rents at three-start apartments continued to outperform. But the narrowing may be slowing as the wave of supply takes its toll on three-star rents as well, working in renters’ favor.

Comments: This article identifies some of the submarkets in DC, separating out 3-star properties from 4-star and 5-star properties, and describes how the influx of new high-end units has had rents falling since 2013. (see chart) Also of interest are the descriptions of people moving from one submarket to another because of the Great Recession.

Closer to home, a piece on the Triangle Apartment Market as a whole – 11/19/2014

A total of 7,965 new apartment units have been completed in the Triangle over the 12-month period ending in September, according to MPF Research, which analyzes apartment data in 100 U.S. metro markets. That is easily the largest amount of new supply added over a 12-month period in the 20 years that MPF has been tracking the Triangle.

According to MPF, demand for new units over that same period totaled 6,940 – a hefty number but still below supply.

The new supply has helped slow rent growth in the Triangle. Rents were up 1.7 percent in the third quarter compared to the same period a year ago. That was well below the 3.7 percent average increase across the United States.

Comments: Pretty self-explanatory. More units coming online slowed rent increases compared with national averages.

More local data, in Durham – 2/14/14

The boom in apartment construction in Durham County and across the Triangle has helped to bring down average rental rates, according to a recently released report from the Charlotte-based market research firm Real Data.
However, a real estate company behind one of the new apartment complexes in downtown Durham expects to be able to buck that trend due to the location and type of product it’s offering.
Across Durham County, the average rental price per unit in January was $887. That was down 2.3 percent compared with the average in July of last year. That’s a larger decline than was seen in the three Triangle counties of Wake, Durham and Orange, where the average was down 1.7 percent to an average rate of $868 per month.
Vacancies have risen as some of the units in the new complexes have come online, the firm reported. Real Data had a total of number of 3,045 units under construction in Durham County, which is 30 percent of the number of units – at 10,028 – under construction across the Triangle.
Although averages are coming down, according to the firm’s reporting, it appears that the newer units are being rented out at the expense of older communities. Existing communities saw a net loss of 306 renters across the Triangle, according to Real Data, while there was a positive net unit absorption of 1,436 units.

Comments: The last sentence (emphasis added is mine) is a perfect description of filtering with new units attracting high-end submarket renters to the newest, latest/greatest housing.  This raised vacancies at existing multifamily properties,and rents fell 2.3 percent across the market, making housing more affordable.

And in Chapel Hill on Rosemary Street – 3/31/2014

Students stood in line with keys outside of the LUX apartments leasing office on Franklin Street Thursday hoping to open a treasure chest that would give them free rent for a year. At one point they were approached by two people handing out treats with advertisements for The Warehouse on them.

“I incorrectly thought it was LUX employees trying to pacify people who were waiting in line, but I was wrong,” UNC student Lauren Sutton said. “I got my rice krispie treat and flipped it over and there was a sticker on it saying, ‘Warehouse apartments: Now Leasing,’ and their prices for rent.”

The Warehouse did not return requests for comment.

But the complex did lower its monthly rent for four-bedroom apartments to $618 for next year, down 21 percent from $785 this year, according to the complex’s website.

Comments: Classic response to visceral competition from brand-new amenity rich building directly across the street- move your rents to a new, lower-rent submarket to compete!

You see that there are all kinds of affordable cities in the United States. There are plenty of low-demand cities, especially in the midwest, where the housing stock has grown slowly and prices are low. But there are also plenty of cheap, fast-growing cities in the sunbelt where the housing stock is growing rapidly and keeping things affordable.

 And then there are the expensive cities. The places where house-sellers are asking for over $200 per square foot. All of them are cities where the housing stock is growing slowly, even though these are the places where it would be most profitable to build. That’s because these cities tend to have geographical constraints that prevent further sprawl, and have adopted zoning codes that make it difficult to add more housing by building more densely.

Here’s the chart, courtesy of Trulia.com:

No Expensive Housing Market Builds Much HousingAs I was working on this post over the last few days, I was trying to put together a good summary paragraph when an excellent blogger in Chicago, Daniel Kay Hertz, took up the same topic and posted this excellent conclusion for affordability:

But the bottom line is that slow, zero, or negative cost-of-housing growth is better than fast cost-of-housing growth. (At least, that is, in high-cost neighborhoods/metropolitan areas.) The vast majority of low- and moderate-income people live, and will continue for the foreseeable future to live, in non-subsidized housing. Even in New York, which has held on to its public housing better than most other large expensive cities, it only makes up something like 7% of all units. That means that it’s exactly these kinds of market trends – consistently large rent hikes, year after year, in mid-ish market housing – that makes a neighborhood, or city, or metropolitan area, eventually unaffordable to working- and middle-class people.

And it turns out that construction booms arrest that sort of pattern, or prevent its continuation, all the time.

Transit Tourism Opportunity on Sunday 9/28: Carrboro Music Festival!

Carrboro Music Festival

Carrboro Music Festival

Well, it’s decorative gourd season, friends, and the weather looks perfect this weekend, AND the Carrboro Music Festival is Sunday.  I expect to be over there by foot/bike/wagon or some combination thereof, but for Durhamites who feel like Carrboro is a long drive to hang out with 10,000 other music lovers taking in 180 local bands for free, then good news!  For the first time ever, you can take Triangle Transit to get you to the festival, as long as you’re willing to do a little walking.

Route 400 leaves Durham Station every hour from 7:00 am to 6:00 pm on Sundays now, and drops you off on Franklin St in Chapel Hill at the Varsity Theater.  Just walk due west down Franklin along maybe the nicest stretch of city street in NC, and you’ll arrive in the middle of all the music in about 15 minutes or so.

Buses head back to Durham from the Carolina Coffee Shop (directly across from the Varsity, where you got off) a little after the hour, with the final bus leaving at 6:12 pm.

Here’s a link to the Route 400 bus schedule.  Download the Transloc App (Iphone or Android) to track buses in real time and locate stops.

Music starts at 1:00 p.m. so you can easily catch 4-4.5 hours of music before needing to walk back to Chapel Hill to bus it home.  Have a great weekend!

Visiting Carrboro and Chapel Hill Without a Car Just Got A Lot Easier

Triangle Transit Buses

New regional bus service on weekends from Triangle Transit is making intercity and interstate travel to and from Chapel Hill/Carrboro without a car easier than it has ever been.

If you try to visit the Research Triangle region of North Carolina without driving your own car here, you will generally arrive by one of three methods:

  • By Plane – To RDU Airport, which is in between Raleigh and Durham, just north of the town of Morrisville
  • By Bus – To Durham Station in downtown Durham via Megabus; or to the Raleigh Greyhound station on Capital Blvd
  • By Train – To the Raleigh, Cary or Durham Amtrak Stations

None of these arrival points are in Chapel Hill or Carrboro, which means if you want to get to our neck of the woods, you need to then either use Triangle Transit’s regional bus service, rent a car, or take an expensive cab/UberX ride.

Before August 2014, Triangle Transit had offered service that stopped serving Chapel Hill around 6:45 pm on Saturdays, and there was no Sunday service at all.

Triangle Transit Expands Weekend Service August 2014

But as of August 18th, 2014 – these gaps in the regional bus schedule have been filled in!

Regional Saturday service now runs as late as the weekday service on routes 400 and 800, and Sunday service runs from 7 am to 7 pm.  What this means is that trips that were either impossible or forced a car rental for a weekend visit, can now, in most cases- be accomplished using Triangle Transit regional services, local buses, and walking in the urban core of Chapel Hill and Carrboro.  This will give travelers more options, and save them money.

Here’s a quick rundown of your options.

Downtown Durham and Bus 400 or 405 = best Ground Transport Access to Chapel Hill / Carrboro

Piedmont Arrives at Durham Amtrak Station

Piedmont Arrives at Durham Amtrak Station

Arriving by Amtrak in Durham, every train arrival of the entire week except for the last train from Charlotte (#76) on Sunday nights – allows for a successful connection on to Chapel Hill via Triangle Transit bus 400 or 405. Unfortunately, the earliest southbound train out of Durham leaves before the first bus from Chapel Hill each morning reaches Durham. Hopefully this connection will be added in the future.

However, the rest of the daily outbound train schedule in Durham is well served. Amtrak has direct connections from Durham to everywhere Amtrak’s Carolinian and Piedmont travel, including Charlotte, Greensboro, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC.

Also arriving in Durham, directly across Chapel Hill Street from the Amtrak Station at the corner of Willard and Chapel Hill, is the one stop for Megabus in the Triangle.  Megabus has direct service from Durham to Charlotte, Fayetteville, Richmond, and Washington, DC.

To get from either the Amtrak station or Megabus stop to Chapel Hill / Carrboro, walk to the bus center and connect via routes 400 and 405.  400 runs all day long, and 405, which is slightly faster, runs on the weekdays during rush hour.  You can find schedules for bus 400 and 405 here.

To be sure, you could also reach the Triangle by train in Raleigh or Cary, and by Greyhound bus in Raleigh as well.  That said, if you’re trying to get to Chapel Hill or Carrboro, your connection will be shorter and more convenient from Durham.  The only time this might not be true is if you arrive at the Raleigh Amtrak station by one of the trains that do not stop at Durham, such as the Silver Star, Silver Meteor, and the Palmetto.  If this is how you reach the Triangle, use the Trip Planner at www.gotriangle.org for the best way to continue on to Chapel Hill / Carrboro on Triangle Transit.

RDU Airport, Bus 100 and Connect to Bus 800 = best Air Transport Access to Chapel Hill / Carrboro

If you fly into RDU Airport, the bus that will pick you up, no matter whether you land at Terminal 1 or Terminal 2, is Triangle Transit bus 100.  Note that this bus follows the same traffic pattern through the airport whether it is going to Raleigh or to the Regional Transit Center (RTC).  When 100 arrives, assuming you’re headed for Chapel Hill or Carrboro, just confirm with the driver that you are boarding a 100 bus headed towards the RTC, and you’ll be on your way.  The RTC is quite close to the airport, and after departing Terminal 2, you’ll reach the RTC in just under 15 minutes.

Once at the RTC, you will find that every time bus 100 arrives, so do bus 700 (goes to Durham) and bus 800 (goes to Chapel Hill).  Board 800, and about 30 to 35 minutes later, you’ll be in Chapel Hill at the UNC Student Union.  If you’re headed to downtown Chapel Hill or Carrboro, it’s best to stay on to the first stop past the Morehead Bell Tower (can’t miss it), and then either walk up Columbia Street to Franklin, or if you’ve got heavy luggage, catch any Chapel Hill Transit bus with a name that doesn’t end in “X” at Sitterson Hall heading north to get to downtown, which is only 2 stops away.

Franklin and Columbia Streets – the Heart of Chapel Hill Transit

Now that you’re in downtown Chapel Hill, if you’re at the corner of Franklin and Columbia, you have easy access via Chapel Hill Transit to pretty much everywhere the bus system goes in either Chapel Hill or Carrboro.  The F, J, or CW bus will take you to downtown Carrboro in about 7-8 minutes.  The NS will take you to Southern Village or the north end of Chapel Hill.  The D or F can take you to eastern Chapel Hill.

Transit Information is Text and Smartphone-Ready in the Research Triangle

If you’re reading this for the first time, I can understand how this may all sound a little complicated.  That said, if you’re a visitor, there are lots of ways to get customer information about these and other bus services.  Perhaps the most useful are the Transloc and Transloc Rider apps in the usual smartphone stores.  They are free and integrate real-time arrival information for every bus and every bus stop in the Triangle.  You can see the system in action on the web as well at triangle.transloc.com  You can also call 919-485-RIDE to speak to customer service representatives who can provide trip planning assistance.

Fares

The base fare for Triangle Transit for a one-way trip is $2.25.  Chapel Hill Transit routes within Chapel Hill and Carrboro are free to everyone, so unless you’re planning to ride Triangle Transit multiple times in one day, paying for regional buses by trip with cash is the best, most cost-efficient way to pay.  More information on fares, including youth and senior discounts, can be found here.

Morgan Creek Greenway Sets a New Standard for Local Bike Facilities

While Chapel Hill and Carrboro have some of the highest rates of walking and cycling for transportation in North Carolina and the Southeast, there is still a lot of work to be done to build a continuous network of bike/ped infrastructure that both IS safe and FEELS safe.  The recently published final Chapel Hill Bike Plan notes that one of the primary reasons identified by residents for why they do not ride their bike for transportation is safety.  (see pages 25-27 for the excellent Level of Traffic Stress Assessment)

With that in mind, it is critical to recognize the outstanding leap forward that the Morgan Creek Greenway project in southern Chapel Hill represents, and the standard it sets for other future off-road and on-road facilities in the area.

Recently we’ve begun taking family bike rides on the Morgan Creek Greenway, and the reasons are numerous:

  1. It’s safe from cars. The greenway is 10 feet wide and from where we usually begin at a parking lot off of NC 54 to Southern Village, there is not a single roadway to cross thanks to the new Culbreth Rd. underpass.  Within Southern Village, the crossings of the streets are on low-speed, 2-lane only roads with limited traffic, 3-way or 4-way stop signs, and pedestrian bulb-outs at the crossing points.
  2. The scenery is terrific – creeks, bridges, honeysuckle bushes, wildlife.
  3. It takes you somewhere- we usually integrate dinner in Southern Village into the roundtrip; the picnic tables outside Pazzo are in the shade late in the day.

 

Here’s a map of the Morgan Creek Greenway, connected to the Fan Branch Trail, via the Culbreth Rd underpass.  While the graphic says “trail segment planned for 2014,” I’m sure that will be updated soon – the trail and underpass are completed and open.

Morgan Creek Greenway

Morgan Creek Greenway (map by Town of Chapel Hill)

While at present, the trail seems to end at a parking lot along NC 54, this project is part of a larger effort to bring the trail all the way to University Lake.  Another great benefit of this trail’s current and future alignment is that in addition to the already-served Scroggs Elementary school, there is the potential to also link Culbreth Middle School, Frank Porter Graham Elementary, and Carrboro High School to the same trail.  You can take a look at the future potential of this greenway by viewing page 13 of this PDF on the Town of Carrboro website.

By the time the greenway reaches Smith Level Rd, the current project to add bike lanes and sidewalks to Smith Level Rd should be complete to the Morgan Creek Bridge near the Carrboro Public Works facility.  This will allow the growing network of on-road bicycle lanes to connect with the off-road network that includes the greenway system.

Everybody who had a hand in making this happen in Chapel Hill should be very proud- it’s a terrific community asset!

Here are a few more photos from various locations along this map.

Bridge Over Morgan Creek

Bridge Over Morgan Creek

 

Culbreth Rd Underpass Approach from the South

Culbreth Rd Underpass Approach from the South

 

Fan Branch Trail Section

Fan Branch Trail Section

Looking Through Culbreth Rd Underpass

Looking Through Culbreth Rd Underpass

Thanks for reading!

Orange County Wants Your Ideas For The Southern Orange Library Branch

The Magic of BooksI was thrilled a few days ago to get a message from Orange County Library Director Lucinda Munger, announcing two upcoming public input sessions for the Southern Orange County Library Branch, now planned to be built in downtown Carrboro.

It’s great to hear that this project is moving forward and that the staff is thinking about how to make it a public resource that reflects the community.  I asked Lucinda if she could expand a bit more on what type of input they’re seeking, and here was her response:

This is really the community’s chance to tell us about what they want this to be like: – what it feels like when you first walk in, what should it look like and what types of activities does the community want to see at this library that will service the not just Carrboro, but the Southern portion of the County.  Also, they will be asked what do they think about the proposed site – pros and cons. Plus, the library will be starting an continual online conversation thru the Friends of the Carrboro Library Facebook page, www.facebook.com/OCSouthernBranchLibrary, and an online survey – with the same questions as at the meeting – beginning March 25.

Here are the days and times for the meetings:

Tuesday, March 25: 6 to 8 p.m., Hickory Tavern, 370-110 E. Main Street, Carrboro
Saturday, April 12: 12 to 2 p.m., Town Hall, 301 W. Main Street, Carrboro

I’m definitely hoping to attend one of the meetings, and will be sure to post the link to the online survey when it is available.  Come out and support your community library, and share your vision for the future!

North Carolina Carfree Commute Map 2012!

Recently I started following @shanedphillips on Twitter after reading a terrific guest column he wrote at Planetizen. Shane lives carfree in Los Angeles and blogs at www.betterinstitutions.com. I’ve added him to my blogroll today- please check out his writing.

He is also hashtagging this month as #marchmapness on Twitter as he is creating carfree commute maps for various states.  I asked him about NC, and he whipped this map up in less than a few hours. Thanks, Shane!

For Carrboro, three of the four primary Census Tracts that make up most of town have non-car commute rates of over 20%.  If you zoom in you will see that there is a big change in non-car commuters from Census Tract 107.05 to Census Tract 107.06, where non-car travel drops from 24.9% to 6.4%.  My first read on this was “well, the F bus goes up North Greensboro St and Hillsborough Rd, but then turns back south on Old Fayetteville Rd- that should explain it.”

But look again- while transit commuting falls from 7.6% to 4.8%, the real drop in non-car commuting comes from the loss of Bike and Pedestrian commuting.  In 107.05, over 17% of commuters walk or bike to work..  But in 107.06, only 1.6% of commuters bike, and nobody walks. Also interesting is that if you go one Census Tract *further* away from the employment center of Chapel Hill / Carrboro, bike commuting actually *increases* to 2.6%.

To me, this is an indicator of how powerful proximity to a significant mixed-use destination can be on transportation choices.  The Census Tracts closest to downtown Carrboro and Chapel Hill have very significant numbers of people commuting without cars.

What do you see of interest in this great tool that Shane created?

Rare Opportunity Today: Carrboro and Chapel Hill #Sneckdown Photography!

It’s near midnight on January 28th as I write this.  As everyone wakes up on the 29th, we will have a rare opportunity in the Triangle to see how the snow reveals which parts of our intersections are not needed to allow cars to move freely.  Clarence Eckerson of Streetfilms (see 3-minute video below) has pioneered the art of taking film of leftover snow and plowed roadways to show where intersection treatments for pedestrians could be improved, while keeping traffic moving at lower and friendler-to-pedestrians speeds.

 

This type of photography has gotten its own Twitter hashtag this winter, combining “snow” and “neckdown”- the term for narrowing a roadway at an intersection, into “#SNECKDOWN.”  Here’s a screen capture of a great example from a few days ago in Massachusetts:

sneckdownSo keep your camera handy on Wednesday and document our local #sneckdowns!  Who knows when we’ll have this chance again…

The Distribution of Population in Orange County and the Site of the Southern Orange County Library

Back in the spring, at an Orange Board of County Commissioners meeting where I and other citizens spoke in favor of building an urban library in Southern Orange County, one of the most common themes from county staff in the discussion was that a significant number of rural residents would be served by this library, and that they would come to the library by car and need a place to park, implying that this criterion should play a primary, and perhaps even decisive role in the siting decision of the library.

For the remainder of this post, let’s put aside the question of whether or not parking is easier for rural residents in an urban or suburban location, and just look at where the population of Southern Orange County is located.

Orange County 2010 Census Population Data

Orange County, in addition to containing all or part of four municipalities (Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Hillsborough, and Mebane) is split into seven townships. These townships are more or less remnants of a briefly operating system of local governance in the post-civil war period that lasted less than 15 years. Nevertheless, the county still gathers data based on these geographical boundaries which can help us examine the present-day distribution of population.  In the 2010 Census, the total population of Orange County was estimated to be 133,801. Below is a map of Orange County townships and their 2010 Census population:

 

Orange County Population by Township, 2010

Orange County Population by Township, 2010

As you can see, over 75% of county residents live either in the Chapel Hill or Hillsborough townships, with almost 68% of the county population in Chapel Hill township alone. The Chapel Hill township contains both the town of Chapel Hill and the town of Carrboro, as well as just under 14,000 residents living slightly outside the Chapel Hill /  Carrboro town limits.

Implications for Library Siting

One of the criteria that County staff discussed in their prepared memo on March 19, 2013 was:

“Able to provide comprehensive library services to all the residents of southern Orange County.”

Given this criteria, I believe it is reasonable to say that “Southern Orange County” could be reasonably defined as the two southernmost townships, Bingham and Chapel Hill. These two townships had a combined population of 94,498 in the 2010 Census.  Of those 94,498 people, 93% of them lived in Chapel Hill township, and 7% of them lived in Bingham township. This means that if you’re trying to maximize your ability to serve “all the residents of Southern Orange County,” you should probably focus heavily on how you’re going to serve the people in Chapel Hill township most effectively.

In the past few months, a new visualization tool has appeared that gives us an even closer look at population distributions, the Census Dotmap website, which maps every single person in the USA using one dot per person in their Census Block, the smallest level we can look at the data without actually placing people in their homes, which the Census will not do for privacy reasons.  Here’s a look at the entire county using that tool:

Census 2010 Dotmap with Orange County Township Boundaries

Census 2010 Dotmap with Orange County Township Boundaries

The simple take-away is that the darker the section of the map, the more people live there.  I drew in the county boundary using a graphics tool so if you go to the Census Dotmap website, don’t expect to see the townships there.  Still, even without the townships drawn in, you’ll find that you can pick out the county border pretty well along the Alamance and Durham county lines. It’s harder with the Chatham and Person/Caswell borders, but the effects of the Orange County Joint Planning Agreement and rural buffer are still evident.

You’ll see that Southern Orange County’s population core is in the sections of Chapel Hill and Carrboro roughly bounded by Estes Drive on the north, MLK/Hillsborough/Country Club on the east, Fordham Blvd/Clubreth/Smith Level Rd (including Southern Village) on the south, and Old Fayetteville Rd on the west. Scroll down for a closer look at that population core, traced in dark red. For orientation, the primary commercial section of Franklin Street is highlighted in Carolina Blue. The sunburst graphics are as close an approximation as I can make at this scale of the following locations that have been mentioned as potential Southern Orange County library sites:

  • 1128 Hillsborough Rd (Orange)
  • 401 Fidelity St (Blue)
  • 301 W Main St – Town Hall (Purple)
  • 201 S Greensboro St – Roberson St Lot (Red)
  • 300 E Main St (Green)
Southern Orange County Population and Various Potential Library Sites

Southern Orange County Population and Various Potential Library Sites

The county staff’s preferred site, 1128 Hillsborough Rd (shown in Orange) from March 2013 is outside the “core of the core” section of Chapel Hill Township, while the other four sites are within that critical center of population.

Recap: Southern Orange County Population

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be discussing more benefits of building the library in the population heart of Southern Orange County. But for now, I’ll close by reviewing the following facts about Orange County population.

  1. Unless there is a sudden, drastic change of plans to put the Southern Orange County library somewhere north of Eubanks Rd, the existing Orange County library on West Margaret Ln in Hillsborough will be the closest library to pretty much everyone in the five northernmost townships: Cheeks, Hillsborough, Eno, Little River, and Caldwell.
  2. Of the combined population of the two southern townships, the population split is 93% Chapel Hill township, 7% Bingham township.
  3. Of the combined population of the two southern townships, 78%, or almost 4 out of every 5 residents, live in the Chapel Hill or Carrboro town limits.
  4. If the county staff’s linear projections are correct, Bingham Township will add 2,686 residents by the year 2050; while Chapel Hill township will add 51,996 residents by 2050.
  5. If the county staff’s exponential projections are correct, Bingham Township will add 3,854 residents by the year 2050; while Chapel Hill township will add 90,825 residents by 2050.

 

With the exception of the graphics, I got all of this population and projection information from the County website’s demographics page. This data acknowledges that nearly 80% of the people most likely to use the library are in-town residents of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and the county’s own projections looking forward indicate significantly higher projected growth in Chapel Hill and Carrboro town limits than in unincorporated Chapel Hill Township or Bingham Township.

Future analysis of any potential library sites should acknowledge this baseline data about where population is located.