urbanMSP

Without annotation of those road widths, it's a bit hard to understand how they can do sidewalks and bikeways on Segment 4 and not on Segment 2, despite both having the same effective width (and Segment 4 even having a narrower legal width). I am guessing they are planning on taking more of the lega...

Right, but the reason they are giving the "East of 94" option a hard look, despite the increased time and significantly increased cost, is because of opposition to the train on Lyndale N.

The Met Council's unwillingness to use grade separation to improve operations is definitely a source of ongoing frustration, especially when contrasted with their seeming eagerness to use grade separation to placate small localized opposition. But also, these are complex projects, the Bottineau LRT ...

I sort of have a romantic idyll of trains to St. Cloud, Duluth, Winona, etc. (Rochester someday?) having more locally focused branding. I've always liked the livery of the Northstar trains and hoped the Northern Lights Express trains would have a design with a similar motif, but perhaps different co...

We happen to live just a block away from an Evie charger, and it has been very very helpful to get to some destinations (the X for a Wild game for example, where it also saved us the need to fight for parking). But our circumstance is obviously quite ideal for Evie use. It is frustrating that the pr...

Yeah, I do sometimes think that the talk about this project misses how localized the biggest problems are. The three things that caused the price to increase were: adding Eden Prairie Town Center back in (after it was removed to cut costs), adding the crash wall (irritating), and the revisions to th...

There are going to be three really low ridership stops on the Mpls portion of the SWLRT, but the Bassett Creek Valley Station and Bryn Mawr Station bug me more than the 21st Street Station for two reasons. First, the 21st Street Station should allow for a useful connection with the #2 bus. Second, I...

I've believed for a while that the 38th St corridor is one of the most underrated in the Twin Cities. A while back I did an analysis of boardings for each stop along various corridors , and 38th Street leapt out as the second most efficient corridors per stop, per bus. It should be a route with 10 m...

I guess my point is, I don't think Dan Patch is a particularly good route. It's winding, indirect, and has a lot of bad station locations relative to the activity centers you've listed above. It's a weird modal fit, the length of the Blue or Green Line LRT when fully extended, but serving nowhere ne...

I get that people have been pining over the Dan Patch line forever, but at this point I'm not sure why it would be prioritized over a route running through Rosemount and Farmington before hitting Northfield (and then onward to Faribault, Owatonna, and Rochester, although either line could hit these ...

So... anybody know why window makers are concentrating in this area? What's the competitive advantage for this region?

Tracks have to be at-grade.

I mentioned this recently on Twitter, but this month the FTA made some substantial revisions to the entry requirements of the Core Capacity CIG program, which (to avoid getting too technical) significantly eased the crowding metrics needed to qualify. It continues to bug me that there hasn't been a ...

I had some time to kill last evening, so I hopped on a bunch of trains and rode in each of the cars around downtown Minneapolis, and it was... a lot better? Maybe I just got lucky a bunch of times in a row, and certainly riding around rush hour probably lowered my chances, but there was not a single...

Since this looks increasingly realistic, I have some basic questions for people more in the know: - Would this be double tracked the entire way? Or would there be timed passes? Or would there be just a single trainset operating each day, going back and forth? - Assuming it would use diesel locomotiv...

Yeah, it's going to be an improvement. But I've been a bit disappointed that nobody thought to dream a little bigger. What about returning one of the streets to two-way traffic and remaking the other as a greenway and linear park? Instead, the I-35W reconstruction status quo has just gotten baked in...

I've always felt that the Twin Cities to Rochester boosters have suffered from a bit of tunnel vision. This city pair makes sense a lot more sense as part of a longer route. That could mean a locally focused route serving Rosemount (26.6k), Farmington (23.5k), Northfield (20.7k), Faribault (24.4k), ...

I guess my question is; what has prevented these people from stepping to the plate earlier? What advantage or opportunity have they lacked so far that this working group will provide? I'm not saying that this working group will fail; I think they will come up with many suggestions and act on a few o...

I have no doubt that many of these people are smart and care deeply about the success of downtown, but you've got to wonder about the purpose of a working group made up of the same people who have held power and influence downtown for decades. Surely most of these people already know each other and ...

I was in Phoenix this past weekend, and I rode the LRT there four times. My fare was checked twice by uniformed but unarmed staff. These folks worked in pairs and had a walkie talkie and a fare scanner. One would check the fares while the other would chat up riders and just generally be there as bac...