Durham Without a Car: The Long-Stay Guide to Getting Around

Durham’s Amtrak station (601 W Main St) is housed in the historic Walker Warehouse of the old Liggett & Myers tobacco complex — the same redeveloped complex, West Village, where our Durham lofts are. This is not “near the station.” You step off the train, roll your suitcase across the complex, and you’re at your front door. No transfer, no rideshare, no parking.

We didn’t engineer this for marketing; guests discovered it for us. One pre-arrival message we’ve received, verbatim: “Do you have instructions for check-in for someone arriving on foot from the train station?” We do. They’re short.

Service is genuinely useful, not token: the Piedmont runs three times daily in each direction along the Raleigh–Durham–Greensboro–Charlotte corridor, and the Carolinian adds a fourth daily train each way, continuing north to Washington, DC and New York. Raleigh is one short hop down the line; Charlotte is a few hours without touching I-85. The station building is staffed and open daily from early morning until 9 p.m.

For three guest groups this is a quiet superpower: international scholars arriving without a US license, patients and families coming for treatment at Duke who’d rather not manage a car, and anyone connecting from the Northeast Corridor who can make it from a New York platform to a Durham loft with zero driving.

First, the honest part: there is no train or rail link from RDU airport to Durham. The Amtrak trick above works if you arrive by rail from another city; if you fly in, you have exactly two realistic options, and they trade money for time.

Durham has no light rail or subway — the in-town network is GoDurham, the city bus system, and it’s better than most newcomers expect. Every route radiates from Durham Station (515 W Pettigrew St), the downtown transit hub a few minutes’ walk from our lofts. Regional GoTriangle buses to the rest of the Triangle leave from the same building, as do Greyhound intercity coaches.

The route that matters most to our guests: getting to Duke. Routes 6 and 11 run from Durham Station to the Duke and VA hospital area, and Route 11 is part of GoDurham’s frequent-service network — 15-minute daytime frequency, so you don’t plan your morning around a timetable. Route 6 also continues to Duke Regional Hospital. For a hospital stay, that turns “we don’t have a car” from a crisis into a non-issue: it’s a direct bus, an 8-minute drive, or a cheap rideshare, roughly two miles each way.

And the fares: GoDurham has been fare-free since 2020. The city has renewed free fares budget year by budget year — the current approved budget runs through June 2026, and the city’s proposed budget would keep buses free for another year beyond that. Even in the years when GoDurham charged, a local ride was historically $1. Either way, bus transportation in Durham rounds to free on an extended-stay budget.

Grocery logistics are one of the most common pre-arrival questions we get from car-free guests, so here is the actual map from the West Village lofts:

• Durham Co-op Market (1111 W Chapel Hill St) — a full-service grocery store and café, open daily, about a 15-minute walk. Produce, meat counter, pantry staples, beer and wine, prepared food. This is the everyday store for a car-free stay.
• Whole Foods Market (621 Broad St) — about two miles away near the Ninth Street district. A short rideshare or bus ride; pair it with a Ninth Street lunch.
• Food Lion (2930 W Main St) — the budget supermarket, about two miles west, a straight shot along the same street the lofts sit on.

Delivery works here, and guests lean on it. Instacart, DoorDash, and the grocers’ own delivery services all cover downtown Durham — ask us and we’ll send building-specific delivery instructions before you arrive so drivers find the right door on day one. Every loft has a full kitchen — full-size fridge, oven, dishwasher, cookware — so a weekly delivery plus the walkable co-op genuinely covers a month of real cooking. (Here’s everything else the apartments include.)

Beyond groceries: the Brightleaf district’s restaurants are essentially across the street, and downtown’s core — DPAC, the Durham Bulls ballpark, the bar and restaurant blocks — is a 10–15 minute walk east.

If you do bring or rent a car, it costs you nothing extra to park it: parking on premises is free at every one of our buildings, West Village included. Plenty of guests land on a hybrid plan — car-free for the daily routine, a one-day rental for an outlet-mall run or a Blue Ridge weekend. That beats paying for an airport rental that sits idle for 28 of 30 days.

Commuting to RTP after all? Start from our corporate housing near Research Triangle Park page instead — the math changes when the commute is daily.