Triangle Transit moves bus station to Imperial Center

Hundreds of daily commuter trips will change — some will grow longer, some shorter — when Triangle Transit moves its regional bus transfer center out of Research Triangle Park on Dec. 1.

The new transfer point is at the Imperial Center on Slater Road, just east of RTP. It’s two miles southeast of the current location off Davis Drive in RTP, used by Triangle commuters since the 1990s.

“Because the transfer center has shifted east, travel times for people coming in from Raleigh and Cary will drop by about eight minutes,” said John Tallmadge, Triangle Transit’s commuter resources director.

It will be a longer trip for RTP commuters from Chapel Hill, but travel times from Durham won’t change much, he said.

The Imperial Center is more densely developed than RTP, so the new transfer stop should be conveniently close to a few thousand jobs in the nearby hotels and office parks.

The Davis Drive transfer hub most of Triangle Transit’s bus riders until a couple of years ago, when the three-county agency gave commuters the option to bypass RTP on inter-city express buses. Now about 20 percent of Triangle Transit’s 4,600 daily riders stop at the transfer center each day.

Triangle Transit was forced to find a new home for the transfer point after its landlord, Park Center FA LLC, declined to renew the lease. The agency moved its administrative offices to the Imperial Center in July.

The transfer center will serve riders on TTA’s eight regional, non-express routes and five shuttle routes. New bus route maps and schedules will be posted online at www.triangletransit.org by the end of October, Tallmadge said, with the changes taking effect Dec. 1.

Triangle Transit hopes to become part of a proposed regional rail-and-bus network that will be considered this winter by Wake, Durham and Orange leaders. If a rail line is built, Tallmadge said, the bus transfer center will move to an RTP rail station.