On Brian Smith’s first day as CEO of GoTriangle, he commuted to work via the 800 bus. Carlos, his driver, dropped him off at the agency’s headquarters in a sleepy office park near RTP.
The otherwise-nondescript building has a triangular protrusion at the front, with windowed walls that converge at an aggressively acute angle above the parking lot. Behind them, up on the second floor, is Smith’s office. On the day of our meeting, only two weeks into his tenure, the room is almost empty save for some standard-issue furniture, papers scattered across his desk, and a plaque engraved “People First” on display atop his still-bare bookcase.
The large common room outside Smith’s door is also noticeably unfurnished and blank, as if GoTriangle itself is new to the building (it isn’t). As he leads me through the space, Smith mentions he’d like to liven it up. The pale grey walls are crying out for his attention—as, perhaps, is the agency itself.
“I like big challenges,” Smith says. “Watching from a distance, it was clear to me that the board and others were very actively working to sort of reposition GoTriangle, given the history.”
GoTriangle’s bus routes are the main arteries of the region’s public transit network, connecting GoRaleigh, GoDurham, GoCary, and Chapel Hill Transit to one another. The agency is also responsible for transit-related construction projects like Raleigh’s RUS Bus facility (which officially opens this week) and the planned Triangle Mobility Hub in RTP, and for managing the Triangle Tax District, a special tax authority for regional public transportation projects.
That jumble of responsibilities produced some internal discord at GoTriangle in the past several years, as its new strategic plan describes. After the agency repeatedly failed to deliver on promises of a regional light rail project, GoTriangle admitted it had lost trust from its regional partners and buy-in from the public. More recently, its former CEO Charles Lattuca resigned in September, and ridership and on-time arrivals dropped at the start of 2025. Now, the agency it’s working to redefine itself and boost ridership as the cities it serves continue to grow.
Enter Smith, the former deputy CEO of Hampton Roads Transit, which operates 60 bus routes and a light rail line across eight cities and towns in eastern Virginia. He has a PhD in Organizational Leadership and 16 years of experience in the field of public transportation.
His vision for the agency’s future—at least, its immediate future—is to improve upon the services it already provides, rather than undertake some grand new project. He wants to increase frequency along key routes, strengthen existing partnerships, and cultivate relationships with current, lapsed, and new riders. INDY asked him what riders and residents can expect from GoTriangle under his leadership.
INDY: What changes are coming to GoTriangle in the near term?
Smith: The RUS Bus project is really a game-changer for GoTriangle and for our ability to serve customers who are trying to get to different places throughout the region, particularly from Raleigh Union Station. And then we’re implementing a 15-minute service frequency on Route 400—that’s connecting really important locations between Durham and Chapel Hill, the healthcare facilities and so forth.
Our plan is to continue to do more of that in the spring. The Route 100 and the Route 700 are the next that we are planning to implement a 15-minute service frequency on. These are services that people are relying on every day already, but as we continue to make them easier to use and more convenient, hopefully we’ll see more people getting on board.
One other really important project that is a little bit more behind the scenes is improving our main bus operations and maintenance facility. That is the location where we service all of our buses and dispatch all our buses from. It’s already reached its useful life in many respects and is sort of at capacity. So we’re going to be doing some important upgrades to that facility that’s going to enable us to support these service improvements in the years ahead.
The other thing is strengthening our partnerships across the region. I see a future where GoTriangle is able to expand the number of partnerships that we have to continue to increase ridership and just really bring more value to the region.
Since getting here you’ve probably heard that people in the Triangle are really hungry for light rail, commuter rail, bus rapid transit, some kind of large scale public transportation project connecting the region. What role would GoTriangle play in that type of endeavor, if it ever comes to be?
What the future holds is still to be determined, based upon our ongoing dialog with our partners about what kind of transit options are going to be the best fit long term, and how we work together to achieve that. I haven’t been here long enough to know—I’m getting to know more people and I’m hearing about the different rail projects.
Communities around the country are looking at the very same questions that the Triangle area is looking at. And more of them have moved away from big rail projects and towards investing in bus service, whether that’s BRT or high frequency bus service. Delivering quality bus service can move a lot of people efficiently at a significantly lower cost than big rail projects. And you still see communities around the country investing in rail, I mean, look at our neighbors in Charlotte as an example. But, it’s just that they are also comparatively a lot more expensive, and more communities have chosen to do bus projects over rail, in part because of the cost.
Back to regular bus service, do you have a goal of where you want ridership to be? And do you have a sense of how close you are to reaching it?
That’s a great question, and I really want to get more dialed in on our operating profile and some of those opportunities to grow. I don’t have enough awareness yet of what exactly those things would look like. But I do know that we’ve got to provide reliable service at the end of the day. That’s in our mission statement, “connecting people and the region with high quality transit.”
I want our customers to be able to know that they can count on GoTriangle to get them where they need to go. We are providing the critical regional connectivity that I think is so important to people being able to enjoy all the wonderful things that the region has to offer. I guess I’ll wax philosophical about this for a moment. When we think about a region, city planners might think about zoning ordinances and land use, and businesses think about customers or employees. There’s lots of different ways to answer the question of, what is the region? But at the end of the day, it all boils down to people. People are trying to get to work, get to medical appointments, get to shopping. So how do we connect people around the region? Effectively, that’s what we’re focused on doing. I think GoTriangle fills a very important role in doing that.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Chloe Courtney Bohl is a Report for America corps member. Follow her on Bluesky or reach her at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].