Re: “Resistance is useless”

That's what happens when you have an animal without a natural predator. I recommend a 0.22.

Re: “Lee Sartain”

RITZ. Been done. It's called RTP.

Unless it's associated with government or law firms, there is almost no reason for anyone to locate a business downtown and plenty of reasons not to.

Re: “After Chapel Hill police detain Charles Brown, a call for oversight”

Will there be an article about the unarmed UNC student who was in obvious trouble, needed help, and used 911 to call the cops on himself, only to be shot four times and killed because he'd reported he was armed and apparently did something to make one of the cops feel threatened?

Re: “At 28, Lee Sartain has an ambitious vision for Raleigh”

Thing is, light rail can't really successfully share a freight corridor. It's all about the collisions. For a passenger train to be on the same tracks with a freight train, the passenger train cars have to be built to a much higher standard to avoid crushing in the event of a collision. Light rail becomes heavy rail.

If you want to run a light rail train track parallel to the existing freight line there is a minimum separation required so that in the event of a derailment the two trains don't get into each other. There is not enough room in the existing corridor to satisfy that requirement.

So you have to acquire new corridor and, as you point out, the existing tracks don't go where you want them to anyway. For example, one of the biggest problems is that there is no rail corridor to the airport. Acquiring new corridor is extremely expensive.

The other thing is scheduling. It's hard to have fast moving and frequent commuter trains sharing tracks with slow moving freights with unpredictable schedules.

Re: “A face of the uninsured, a state of denial”

Barber is about 200 pounds overweight. If he really cared about his health he'd lose it. I'm sure The Rev has got himself set up as tax exempt. I'll be the amount of tax he's paid in his life wouldn't fill a teacup. It's hard to take seriously a man who doesn't pay taxes and has so little regard for his own body demanding that someone else pay for his health care. Regardless of what happens with the legislation, I'm absolutely certain that the taxpayers will somehow end up paying for his quadruple bypass and knee replacements.

Re: “At 28, Lee Sartain has an ambitious vision for Raleigh”

I was living in the DC area in the summer of 1980 when the Metro was under construction. It's all the about the money for the right of way. The Feds used a nearly unlimited budget to pay for tunnels underneath everything. I forget how many gazillon dollars per mile that system cost but there's not that kind of money available here. If you build on the surface you have to deal with at-grade crossings and the surface corridor is not available anyway. Who's neighborhood are you going to tear down? Will you use eminent domain to force people out? How long will the legal challenges from the NIMBYs take?

Re: “At 28, Lee Sartain has an ambitious vision for Raleigh”

I don't know the demographics but I'll bet almost everyone who commutes in the Triangle crosses one of the governmental boundaries. You can't build an effective transit system on an island. Trains to nowhere anyone?