Residents Dig Into North Carolina Triangle Light Rail Planning

"Triangle Transit held a meeting Wednesday night on the Durham-Orange Light Rail project, inviting community members to share their opinions," according to Jim Wise, who notes the opposition of Meadowmont residents who fear the line's impacts on the neighborhood. One of the line's potential routes, known rather prosaically as C1C1A, would run through the neighborhood adjacent to state highway 54.

"The Meadowmont routes, and two alternatives – 'C2' and 'C2A' – that bypass the neighborhood, carry the light-rail line across the Little Creek bottomlands between the Friday Center on N.C. 54 and Leigh Village on Farrington Road," according to Wise. Those routes and several other planning questions are the subject of a recent round of public outreach meetings held by Triangle Transit in Chapel Hill and Durham. Another round of public hearings took place in November.

The outreach is part of the preparation of an environmental impact statement due in February 2016 for the line to receive allotted funding from the Federal Transit Administration—enough to cover half the expected $1.62 billion bill for the UNC Hospitals and Alston Avenue in East Durham.

The article provides a lot more quotes from residents responding to the proposed project, both in support and opposition of specific routes and on general terms.