Hillsborough Street is in some ways the Main Street of NC State. It has undergone dramatic changes in the last 25 years, accommodating far more student housing. In the last 10-15 years the city of Raleigh has redesigned Hillsborough Street seeking to make it more pedestrian friendly. Is it bike friendly? What could it be?



A term that has recently become widely used by planning professionals is “complete street.” This gets at what Ian Lockwood has written about–the importance of language. The term complete street seeks to counter the idea that streets are only made for automobiles, saying that we should build streets work for diverse users–bikers, transit users, pedestrians, and automobiles. Here is a more in depth discussion of complete streets. For the purposes of this course, we will focus on bikeability, without compromising the needs of transit users or pedestrians.


Audits
Cup-A-Joe to Horne St
Horne St. to Morgan St.

Parking Audit
How much space on Hillsborough Street is taken up by parking spaces? You might want to measure in some way the number of parking spaces used on Hillsborough St.
“On-Street Motor Vehicle Parking and the Bikeway Selection Process,” US Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, February 2021.
Kit Un, “How to Do a Parking Study,” MAPC (blog), February 8, 2010, https://www.mapc.org/resource-library/how-to-do-a-parking-study/.

History/Land Use. (~ 4 people)
Hillsborough Street has been dramatically transformed over the years. How has it changed? How is the land abutting Hillsborough Street used and what does that mean for thinking about transportation? In the last 20 years, large numbers of apartments for student housing have been built on Hillsborough St. (It would be worth getting data on just how many people live on this part of Hillsborough St. now. How many cars are brought in?).  In 2018 a redesign of this section of Hillsborough St was completed. In what ways were the complete streets philosophy and bicycles included? How bicycle friendly was Hillsborough Street before this?
This can be researched two ways:
by looking at issues of the Technician
By getting a card from the State Library of North Carolina and accessing their database of old Raleigh News and Observers.


Envisioning a Different Future
I would like you to envision a two way protected bike lane from Morgan St. to Cup-A-Joe. What would that look like? Is it possible? Would it lead to more people biking?