Triangle Impressions
Further thoughts on the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill metro area
Here we are, back again. I’m in North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area—the Triangle—visiting my wife’s cousin at UNC Chapel Hill. I’ve been to this area before, visiting a friend who used to live in Cary, and from the first time I drove around Cary, or Raleigh or Durham outside of their downtowns, I got this feeling of distance, of things being spread out.
In the first piece I wrote about all this, I quoted a Strong Towns article, and here I’ll quote a different one that also captures this feeling:
The prevailing thing you experience when you drive through Lakewood Ranch is distance. Incredible, alienating distance, with long stretches of nothing at all flanking the major roads in between entrances to gated communities and business parks. It’s a landscape of supersized roads, supersized parking, giant medians, noise walls, and retention ponds. It's impossible to even imagine walking anywhere as a means of transportation in Lakewood Ranch. The distances are so great that the idea is ludicrous.
Now, in that first article, I referred several times to “the Raleigh/Durham suburbs,” by which I meant the large areas of suburban land use outside of the metro area’s downtowns. Every metro area is like this to some extent, of course, but compared to what I’m used to, the land use here felt particularly lacking in order or planning. Much of what lies within the city limits feels nothing like a city, which, in my way of thinking about this stuff, makes it the suburbs.
Some readers thought I was ignoring the real cities, or that I was calling the whole region “Raleigh-Durham,” which nobody who lives there calls it. Well, the Triangle, as it’s usually known, is a funny name for a metro area, and some locals don’t like it either.
I thought this was interesting. Some of it might, I think, has to do with not liking the idea that in reality, the distinct communities in the metro area really are, sort of, one big spread-out place. They weren’t, and they shouldn’t be, but that’s kind of how the place has grown.
If somebody not from my own region referred to the metro area spanning Maryland, D.C., and Virginia as “Baltimore-Washington,” they would be wrong, in a sense, but they’d also be noticing something real about how all these different places fit together as a broader region.
I live in western Fairfax County, in Northern Virginia, near the border with Loudoun County. I am no stranger to places that are growing and transforming rapidly. Some of Fairfax was rural into the ’80s; much of Loudoun still is, but it has been suburbanized heavily in just the last 20 to 30 years.
It is obvious from driving around anywhere in the Triangle that the transformation here has been particularly fast. All over the place there are subdivisions, townhomes, and large apartment buildings going up, and many more that are obviously fairly recent. There does not appear to be much order to where or how things are built. Some residential buildings are adjacent to large car-oriented shopping centers, making them sort of mixed use. Others are just all alone, accessible to nothing without a car. Many are right up against the road, which makes sense in an urban setting, but is strange when they are just large residential islands. Patches of horse farms or nurseries lie in between large agglomerations of car-oriented development.
On the way home from dinner in Cary—a nice Chinese hotpot restaurant next to the region’s only H-Mart (Korean supermarket)—there happened to be a football game letting out of the stadium at Chapel Hill, and the traffic was, as Perry Como sang, terrific. There isn’t really any other way to get around. There’s no light rail or subway-type rail, like the D.C. Metro (which now extends into Loudoun County as well.) Duke University killed a long-planned light rail project that would have linked Chapel Hill with Durham, out of concern that the train would disturb medical research laboratory work. Raleigh and Cary are a little further south, about 25 miles from Durham, but that’s only about half the distance of the stops on either end of the D.C. Metro’s lines.
While many readers agreed with all of the critiques I made, on land use and transit, many still argued the area was exceptional, or at least pretty good. Most places in America are dismal car-oriented landscapes. The natural amenities—arboretums, lakes, large areas of preserved rural or forested land—along with the Triangle’s real downtowns make up for the distance, the traffic, and the suboptimal land use of the more recent development.
That’s at least somewhat true, I think. We had some very good food, both local and international cuisines. We walked around an arboretum, which was full of young families, couples, and groups of friends. Despite the appearance from any of the region’s highways, there is a there there. No doubt, part of my perception of the place was based on the fact that we were moving in a college student and dashing from big-box store to big-box store without knowing the best routes. This recent visit was more fun, and I’d like to see more of Triangle.
I’m going to be writing a little more on this trip, but for an idea of how dramatic the change has been here, we passed this closed up old fashioned hardware/grocery store in or outside Cary, in between all sorts of much newer stuff:
Until next time!
Related Reading:
First Impressions, Raleigh/Durham
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