News

Here is a brief weekly update from the RTA business coalition – the voice of the regional business community on transportation.

RTA annual meeting – a celebration worthy of this region

Thank you to everyone who attended this week’s RTA 20th annual meeting. Kudos to the members of the chairs panel, including our past chairs Bob Ingram, Smedes York, Clymer Cease, and Maeve Gardner; along with our current chair Mike Schoenfeld. We also appreciated the remarks about our organization’s highest priority — sustainable funding for RDU — from Ray Trapp with RTA Omnia Gold member, the Research Triangle Foundation of NC. You can download the slides from the event, including the annual State of Mobility presentation, here.

Thank you for making this event a spectacular showpiece of our members’ successes for the region, and a great way to kickoff the next decade of business leadership for mobility. All we were missing from an attendee experience standpoint was some snow falling next to the reception tent.

Metropolitan Rapid Transit…  let’s get moving, and let’s visit South Florida

At our RTA 20th Annual Meeting, RTA members and partners elevated our focus on the acceleration of a Metropolitan Rapid Transit system for our region.

This week’s blog notes that the advancement of this system is a central component of our overall accelerated metropolitan mobility strategy for the Triangle. Our future metropolitan rapid transit system will have 7 complementary elements, from a regional commuter rail spine, to a regionwide bus rapid transit network, to mulitimodal linkages like the Triangle Bikeway, and more.

In late January, we are going to visit South Florida via our winter 2022 RTA Regional Leadership Tour, where we will learn about multiple forms of passenger rail, as well as bus rapid transit and other complementary elements of multimodal transportation. Part and parcel with our field visits and briefings will be a deeper understanding of the policies and leadership to make them a reality.

RTA members:  we hope you will join many of your colleagues from across the region — including honorary tour co-chairs Mary-Ann Baldwin, Mayor of Raleigh, and Harold Hicks with RTI International and our RTA chair-elect — at the South Florida tour in late January. You can secure your seat for the tour today; you can also sponsor the event via this link.

Please connect with my colleague Iman Fullard via phone (919.664.7011) or email with any questions about registration or sponsorship. Thank you to presenting sponsors the North Carolina Railroad Company and GoTriangle, and current tour sponsors WSP, Kimley-Horn, The Research Triangle Foundation of North Carolina, and HDR.

Let’s get moving,

Joe Milazzo II, PE
RTA Executive Director

Click here for prior RTA Member Briefings and RTA Blogs.