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I don't think any of these entities are taking a common sense approach to rail transit. Raleigh/Wake County doesn't want to contribute to Durham but isn't the goal to decrease traffic on I-40? It's very puzzling as well that Chapel Hill isn't even mentioned in the conversation, yet they're having monthly meetings on how to ease traffic congestion. A light rail system may cost more upfront but it would be more beneficial in the long run.

In the short term, the focus should be on improving the regional bus service, which is abysmal at best. Triangle Transit shouldn't have anything to do with any rail conversations until it can streamline and use more common sense with bus service. CAT, DATA, and CH transit have far superior operations and handle a greater volume of riders.

Nothing is FREE folks! Google did not get to where it is by offering anything for free!

To the writers and readers of this article…I implore you to do some research on what really happened in Caldwell County when Google moved in. There is a good reason there is a lawsuit.

My Father was living in Lenoir when Google came to Caldwell County. The county wooed Google with loads of money to put the data farm in Lenoir. Where did this Money come from???? Property taxes went up 25% to pay for it. So much for do no evil, Google!!!!!!

Google should be begging / paying us to come here! Please take a look at the bigger picture and not just the faster internet carrot Google is dangling. From Google’s FAQ: "We're --- hoping to identify interested communities that will work with us to achieve this goal.” Now, look at Google’s past M.O. for an apt translation of this: Find a county, city, town to give them all the tax breaks and other services (basically foot the bills for them to get set up). Then once they have the service set up they can charge what they want. It gets better still for Google as they don’t really have an investment in it. Clever Google!

Yes , internet speeds closer to what you can get in other areas of the world would be great and I don’t expect it to be free, but as a Chapel Hill homeowner and tax payer, I don’t want my taxes used to subsidize a filthy rich company like Google either.

Per your article….“The details of the deal remain vague”….hmmm wonder why? Let’s get the details of this “deal” before we start all these pro-Google high speed internet parades.

Google’s "Don't Be Evil" motto is a joke!

I would kill for some cupcakes made from cherry blossom liquor and sakura leaves!

Bliss Cupcakes on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. They are currently closed (mysteriously), but they have amazing cupcakes! I hope they open up soon - supposed to be offering up some crepes or something, but it seems to have taken them 3 months to figure out how to make crepes.

I live in Japan currently and I wish I had the speeds this article is talking about. I don't think anyone outside of major metro areas has particularly speedy internet and most people here don't know how to use the internet to begin with!

Thanks for posting this article and initiating a discussion on food allergies and celiac disease.

There are a number of resources available in the area, GlutenFreeRaleigh being one of my favorites. While it can be a full-time job to do all the research involved with finding allergen-friendly food, blogs and other free resources can help tremendously.

Since breakfast poses a particular challenge for anyone on a gluten-free diet, I recently started Custom Choice Cereal (http://www.customchoicecereal.com). It is our goal to provide great tasting gluten-free cereal that can be customized from a variety of high quality ingredients and is conveniently delivered to your doorstep. Since raising awareness and providing information is a big part of what we do on a daily bases we also have a blog with daily updates on all things gluten-free related. Please feel free to stop by and let us know what you think!

Watch out so you don´t get googleedup.

Google already control the way we find content on the Internet. Do you realy want them to control your access to it also?

Plow down your own fiber and stay independent. Look upon fiber networks, the same way as on public roads. What would you say if you had to pay a fee to leave your own front porch to use the public road?

Excellent, excellent review. Really: great job.

Would those 8000 + souls living in poverty in Chapel Hill happen to be UNC students or are they not counted as residents?

Our schools have been an involuntary organ of the social engineering experiment which began fifty years ago, and have largely failed to please anyone except the academic idealogues since. The politicization of something as important as the education of our children has been little short of a disaster resulting in continuously falling grades and rates of graduation. The real problem we're faced with and refusing to deal with is that we're using our children to perpetuate an unnatural social order that does not satisfy the needs of any of the groups involved. Natural voluntary integration can and does change societies for the better, but the forced integration we've involved ourselves in for three generations now just simply will not work, it cannot work, it has never worked anywhere on earth, it creates an undeniable tension and results in the introduction of a stress factor in an age group that should be protected and carefree. Any family should be free to choose where their children are educated regardless of the racial/ethnic makeup of the institution. To deny the rather obvious differences in cultures is disingenuous and serves only to aid the continuing impasse of two immovable objects. Maybe it's time we let the communities decide for themselves what's best for their own interests. That includes the minority communities as well who should be as equally supported as any other (yes I heard the moans from the separate but equal opponents.) The undeniable fact is that left to their own devices every group will gravitate to it's own comfort zone. That's not racism, it's a natural tendency and the longer we deny it the longer it's going to aggravate us. The school system I spent most of my younger years in was in southern New Jersey, and there was no such thing as forced demographics in the entire system. Most schools were freely integrated, but almost as many were also voluntarily all black or voluntarily all white. They were free to adjust their curricula to suit their own interests, and there was never in my memory any of the divisions and outright oppositions we see in the disorganized system we now have. Racist, hardly, (I'm an old activist) there are considerable numbers of minority thinkers who agree with me. I (and they) tend to think it's perhaps the most honorable position and could help ease many of the problems that have grown so political we're afraid to touch them. Maybe it's time to rethink.

Matt,

Add Gal Costa to Duke's Brazil music legend column. Costa was here, in Reynolds Theater, this fall. Her 1969 albums "Gal" & "Gal Costa" represent, to my taste, the delicious pinnacle of Tropicália.

What we really need is for one of these fine presenting organizations to buck up & book Tom Zé.

Where would we be in this repulsive religio-thug attack on our way of life if we did nothing? The loss of our young warriors is a tragic consequence of the doomed to failure philosophy of an all inclusive world culture. I'm going to hazard the guess that there are more of us who grow more angry at the violent retrograde brutes who kill our young protectors than there are those who advocate capitulation to the culture of sexually repressed murderers who want and are working ever more intensely toward our destruction. It's terribly painful to lose our young people, and it's acceptable to disagree with the policies that send them in harms way, but how many of us have viable answers to the madness growing all over the world. We have serious problems, probably more serious than most of us care to think about, and the people we have in positions of leadership have access to information and intel that we the public are never going to be privy to. Doesn't it tell us something that when a peacenik like Obama takes office he almost immediately does an about face on these politically explosive issues? Myself and most of my family are also peaceniks, but we know we must defer to those who's business it is to try to preserve world order. God bless our troops and guide our leaders, and our very deepest condolences go to the families who've had to sacrifice their sons and daughters. As much as we wish there were, there are no easy answers.

One hopes Google's entry into the business will result in our crawling out of the bandwidth cave (well behind several other countries,) and help us to begin bringing at least that industry a step closer to world class. We can also hope it may poke some holes in the ripoff cable television boat. You know, those folks who refuse to sell you the channels you actually want so they can devise carefully sparse mediocre "bundles" which satisfy nobody, so that if you want a few meaningful channels you have to buy large mostly useless "premium" bundles for which you'll pay completely inflated fees. On the other hand that may erode the carrion base they insist on referring to as culturally important programming (no names please.) Anyway, we'll be hopeful something good will come of it.

She agreed to those terms when she joined, and has been enjoying the benefits of membership since then. Now, when the organization exercises their rights under the agreement, she's suddenly unhappy with the situation? At what point is she responsible for the consequences of her own decisions? If she's not happy with it, she should change careers, establish a competing MLS, or change the group's policies. (Which she appears to be doing, since she got elected to her local board. Good for her.)

Regardless, slanting this as a flexing of corporate power that will get worse because of Citizens United is pretty preposterous. This is a group of citizens being politically active on a subject they care about. Mr. Geary seems to believe this is a bad thing, but I welcome it. We need more citizen's groups getting involved and making themselves heard.

RaleighRob,

Not that long ago, a decade maybe, I might have agreed with you. But no more. The internet and a growing shift to an information economy, are making physical collocation less and less a necessity. I work on a daily basis with people from as far apart as Western Canada and Brno in the Czech Republic and I do it from my office in the basement of my house. Granted, that's probably a bit extreme, but it's certainly a trend--a lot of the people I work with throughout Europe and North and South America work from their homes too.

As to "cultural wasteland devoid of any identity," that likely reflects your biases more than it does reality--it's sounds a bit like Frank Sinatra lamenting those "little town blues" in an old song. If you like cities, cool. De gustibus non est disputandum. But that doesn't mean the rest of us have to agree. I've spent lots of time in a lot of the world's major cities and, with maybe one exception, seen nothing I'd go out of my way to see again.

And as to "unsustainable suburban sprawl," much of the point of the original article concerned how to "make cities once again a place not just for people to work but for families to live." (My emphasis.) I.e., it's cities that are proving to be unsustainable, and that's been true for decades, and much of what Poticha had to say concerned ways to resuscitate dying cities.

There are city people and there are non-city people. Frankly, I don't like cities. You apparently don't like suburbs. How about this: You live in, and pay the taxes of, the environment you prefer, and I'll do the same in my environment. We really don't need to argue about it--unless you, as the mayor of Raleigh keeps trying to do, decide it's okay to try to raid my wallet (for, for example, the "light rail" he keeps proposing, and keeps proposing the suburbs be taxed to build) to resuscitate your city.

Yeah, "a voluntary, private, non-profit organization with democratically-elected leadership" can extort money from it's members as a condition of doing business. Sounds great! Moveon and the ACLU are political organizations where membership is totally optional not business organizations which you have to join in order to do business. Even if you agree with NCAR's politics and the Supreme Court decision (which I don't but that's beside the point) the organization shouldn't be able to EXTORT money from it's members. I don't think even the wrong-headed (to put it politely) Supreme Court decision condones that, first amendment rights notwithstanding!

So ... the complaint is that a voluntary, private, non-profit organization with democratically-elected leadership was politically active in what it saw as a successful effort to protect its members from a bad law?

That sounds like a terrible ... wait, isn't that exactly how the system should work? Is Mr. Geary suggesting that we should ban groups that are similarly organized, such as the ACLU and Moveon.org, from being politically active?

Fortunately, the Supreme Court recognizes that the First Amendment applies to everyone, not just the people you agree with or groups that are organized in a certain way. That's what Citizens United was all about.

ed, you're absolutely right. thank you. the text has been corrected.

One thing to remember is that folks in other countries get broadband access at speeds much faster AND cheaper than what we pay - I get 5 mbs from Earthlink through Time Warner at $45 a month. In Japan, they get speeds 5 times faster for $9 or $10 a month.

Every year, the cost of offering broadband goes down, but Time-Warner prices stay the same. Sounds like they could offer lower prices but they just don't want to. I guess we know why they were pushing that bill last year - they don't want to kill the cash cow if municipalities come in and offer broadband at the real cost - even factoring in what are probably more generous benefits for municipal employees.

I find it very interesting that Price has just voted nay on a resolution to debate our prolonged war in Afghanistan, whereas Lawson has repeatedly announced that he does not support continued war in the country and would likely vote yea on the resolution. I wonder how much longer Indy progressives will continue to stick their collective fingers in their ears about this country's insistence on being the world cop. Oh well, as they say: "party first, party always"