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The State Fair Transit Station
Neighborhood 
(See Plate 22)
Current Conditions
The land around the North Carolina State Fair is
highly used during times of operation, but is other-
wise very underdeveloped. The roads have no curbs,
gutters or sidewalks, and small single-story buildings
are clustered around the intersections of adjacent
main streets. Two of these streets run east-west, paral-
lel to the train tracks on either side, while a major
north-south highway crosses both streets and the rail
line, creating a confused muddle of intersections.
Some highway commercial development has
encroached around these intersections along with a
significant number of ‘flex-warehouse’ buildings. The
NC State School of Veterinary Medicine, with its
large tract of open land, is located to the northeast of
these important intersections.
The intersections required significant improve-
ments. The efficiency of operation, measured by
grades ‘A’–‘F’ by transportation engineers, was
already significantly impaired due to difficult dual
traffic signal requirements. This complex intersection
was expected to receive a grade of ‘F’ in the next few
years due to increased traffic, and when the com-
muter trains begin to run at frequent intervals in
2008, things would only get worse.
In addition, while the State Fairground hosts
various events year-round, the two-week period
devoted to the State Fair itself, attracts as many as
130 000 attendees per day. During this period, traffic
exceeds the capacities of all the streets, and parking
within a mile of the Fairground is at a premium.
The TTA had planned a station to serve the
State Fairground on their commuter rail system. The
proposal called for a standard 400-foot (122 meters)
platform with a pedestrian tunnel under Hillsborough
Street to bring people from the train directly to
a main ticket gate at the Fairground. The freight rail
lines directly south of the commuter tracks would
remain in operation, but there were no plans to
provide pedestrian access across the freight lines
at this location to developable land on the south side
of the tracks.
Plan Recommendations
Our master plan called for the establishment of
Hillsborough Street as a true gateway into down-
town Raleigh (four miles to the east), converting it
to a landscaped boulevard with multi-use paths and
street trees. The intersection of this improved street
with Blue Ridge Road however, caused us consider-
able difficulty. After much consideration and study
of alternatives, including a tunnel, we felt the severe
traffic congestion at this location could best be
solved by the construction of a bridge to facilitate
through traffic, with a new access road for local dri-
vers connecting to adjacent streets on the north side
of the tracks (see Figure 8.3). Connections on the
south side could be made through the new street
network that would be developed as part of the transit-
oriented development on that part of the site. 
This rearrangement would dramatically improve
movement in the entire area. The fall of the land to
the south facilitated this bridge construction by
requiring little in the way of ramping up north of
Hillsborough Street. This would enable satisfactory
pedestrian connections to be made from the
expanded School of Veterinary Medicine campus
to the new commuter rail station and associated
developments.
The current master plan for the School of Veteri-
nary Medicine created approximately 2 000 000 square
feet (185 800 square meters) of high-technology,
research and development space around an expanded
Veterinary Medicine Hospital. We worked very hard
with the campus architect and city and state highway
engineers to facilitate a compromise that changed
the campus plan without destroying its concept
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while configuring the specially designed new access
road on the north side. All parties had to be flexible
to achieve the compromise solution, and final agree-
ment was reached only hours before the final presenta-
tion to the public. The final drawing was nearly
complete, with only this quadrant missing, and in true
charrette tradition, the solution was drawn in and
colored with only minutes to spare! We are certain that
the high-intensity design pressure of the charrette
contributed to this dramatic breakthrough in a dispute
between two parties who had previously adopted some-
what intransigent positions about their own needs.
As part of the Triangle Transit Authority train sta-
tion, we proposed a new pedestrian bridge across
Hillsborough Street and the freight line, connecting
the Dorton Arena to a new signature office building
on a site owned by the city of Raleigh. Around this
focus of the station and major new building, we
designed a medium-rise (4–5 storys) mixed-use
urban village to capitalize on the TOD opportunity,
with direct links to downtown Raleigh and good con-
nections to nearby interstate highways. This TOD
fell somewhere in between the ‘Specialized Urban
Center’ and the ‘Urban Village’ typologies noted ear-
lier, and we interpolated between the appropriate
density figures for a building layout that best suited
the site. We designed our new pedestrian bridge as a
gateway element to the new urban village and the
Fairground, particularly for those who travel to the
Fair by commuter rail. The connection of this new
urban village to the Fairground and its year-round
program of events would also help support the
restaurants and cafés so important to authentic
street life.
Within its hybrid typology, we organized the vil-
lage as an ‘employment-led TOD,’ meaning that we
concentrated on office development as the main eco-
nomic generator, backed by medium to high-density
housing in three- to four-story apartment buildings
with some small-lot single family housing at the
periphery of the site. Along the eastern boundary,
this housing faces onto a wonderful arboretum of
trees and lawns operated by NC State University.