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The city will soon close a pedestrian tunnel the connects GoRaleigh’s Moore Square bus station with Wilmington Street and the heart of downtown as part of a broader effort to try to make people feel safer.
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City officials say they will block off both ends of the short tunnel with chain-link fencing next week. They say closing the passageway through a two-story building will eliminate a place where people hang out and sometimes get into trouble.
“These are typically people that are not riding the buses,” said Capt. W.M. Chestnut, who leads the police district that includes the station. “So the police department is having to split resources and be right there on Wilmington Street and in the tunnel and on the platforms in Moore Square. So by limiting that, it just cuts out the loitering that’s going on on Wilmington Street.”
Closing the tunnel is the latest step the city has taken to try to improve “real and perceived public safety” in and around the bus station, said Evan Raleigh, the assistant city manager. The city has brought in a private security company, improved lighting and cut back vegetation, Raleigh said.
“What we want is people to feel safer,” he said. “Because we know right now crime is down in downtown. The hard numbers suggest we’re trending in the right direction. And yet the perception that downtown is an unsafe place persists.”
Some people who use the passageway say shutting it down will mostly just make it harder to get in and out of GoRaleigh Station, by forcing people to use Martin and Hargett streets. Abdul Boyd said closing the tunnel won’t solve the problems of homelessness and mental illness that lead people to hang out around the bus station.
“People wandering around with nowhere to go,” said Boyd, who identified himself as homeless. “Homelessness is the biggest issue right now. It’s not going to change that.”
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Nabil Algahmie owns the Downtown Smoke Shop next to the tunnel and says he isn’t worried the change in foot traffic will hurt his business, which has a back door accessible from the station. But Algahmie said closing the tunnel will only push people to Hargett and Martin streets, and with them any problems the city is hoping to prevent.
“It’ll look like it solved it on this part of the street,” he said. “But you’ll just push them away from the middle to the corners.”
Algahmie said the city should have a gate in the chain-link fence that it can open on weekdays when people are riding the bus downtown.
“Then they could shut it down for the evenings and weekends,” he said. “That’s really when the problems are, the weekends and evenings.”
The fence will have gates, said Raleigh, the assistant city manager, but those will be reserved for law enforcement and occasional use by businesses that flank the tunnel. For now, the city intends to keep the tunnel closed to the public indefinitely, he said, though that could change.
“It’s a fence, if left untouched, could be there forever,” Raleigh said. “But much like anything you build, it can be reversed, if we find there’s a real pressing need to do that.”
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This story was originally published August 19, 2026 at 4:41 PM.