urbanMSP

This is so good. My only qualm with the preferred alternative map is that it doesn't show a future connection with the C Line at Cedar. I had the same thought that the C Line was missing, and in my head there was a C Line extension planned that would run south of Downtown, but looking around now I ...

I feel like the mismatch in ridership is going to be a long term problem for the line. The core of the old 21, from Hiawatha west, has very heavy ridership, and it drops off a ton after that point. Their solution, to maintain the legacy 21 on the core route, means that the aBRT buses will just end ...

This thing is going to have phenomenal ridership. Super legible and direct, tons of destinations and density--and so many transfers! It links the Green Line, E Line, Orange Line, D Line, Blue Line, A Line, the downtown St. Paul bus corridor, and SPUD. I'm pretty confident that by 2025 (assuming thin...

True intercity rail benefits people going both ways, at various points along the corridor. Rochester specifically, being a medical destination in its own right, is probably the strongest case for this, but it's still not self evident - it needs to be developed. Couldn't you achieve some of this by ...

Given our state's famously flexible definition of "BRT", I'm very curious to see what this ends up actually being. It would be quite the feat if Rochester managed to get, say, dedicated, physically-separated, center-running bus lanes before Minneapolis or St. Paul got them.

I honestly think connecting Northstar to St. Cloud as a commuter line would be a better example to show, but looks like NLE is closer to actually happening. My gut says that, if either happens, they probably both will, and probably within a few years of each other. Maybe there's a virtuous cycle wh...

I guess I'm preaching to the choir here but I totally agree that the reconstruction should have been an opportunity to rethink the placement of the station, and that Lindau is a much more natural location for a variety of reasons. The most compelling, IMO, is that just escaping Bloomington can be ~7...

Map of options for realigned regional rail routes through Minneapolis and stations. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1TMfRWxkwixEs94KNU5YbfKjvpam32zKP&usp=sharing Interesting! Re: the max build option, I think if we were gonna open up the tunneling options I'd prefer to use the time and money o...

I wouldn't be surprised if there'd been some Koch brothers influence with this, especially considering there's a Koch (Flint Hills) refinery right on Hwy 52. I was briefly on a Community Advisory Committee for Zip Rail, but it got heavily loaded with people from the Cannon Falls area rather than pe...

It's a bit of a complex route, but the rationale does make sense and it hopefully will still be fairly straightforward to navigate with the exception of the segment between France and Hennepin. Hopefully they have a concrete plan to keep the buses moving through that section smoothly, because that's...

Here in Montreal, the STM bus routes are named for the principal streets they serve, rather than for their destinations. For example, the 80 bus will always say "80 Av. du Parc" and the 55 bus will always "55 Boul. Saint-Laurent". In a sense this is less sophisticated, but I find...

My 2¢ is that the project was never really designed around providing service to Northsiders, and the fact that some of the stops will sorta serve them is largely a side-effect. If I wanted to design a line to shuttle suburban commuters from the northwest to downtown while minimizing their contact wi...

I'd like to see us be a bit more forward-thinking in our designs than we have historically been, and leave the door open to eventually extending down Lake and into St. Paul, even if it doesn't seem super politically feasible in the immediate future. I think the strongest corridors are East Lake and ...

Continued evidence of bad faith concern trolling by the “bus instead of LRT” GOP leadership. They only want regular fixed route service, anything more than that they could care less. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk I don't see any evidence they want even that. Given the events of the past few ye...

Here's the transportation funding bill that came out of the special session. AFAICT there's no funding for transit expansions except Northstar. Not terribly surprising, but deeply embarrassing and disappointing nonetheless.

You're right. Still, you could design the street section in such a way that this wasn't the case. And I suspect that it's a detail that even those who've been paying attention may not have fully understood, and one that might make a lot of people (present company of course excluded) upset when they...

In theory BRT like the Orange Line and LRT are supposed to be "rapid transit" and are meant for traveling greater distances, while aBRT is meant to be an improved alternative to local buses. In practice it's a distinction without a difference. You could call the A Line the Mauve Line or ca...

The ABRT stop labeling is also pretty absurd. It's probably important to know that the A Line is on Snelling, or the D Line on Chicago, but "Chicago & 34th St" next to "Chicago and 38th St" next to "Chicago & 42nd St" etc. is way too much. It's as though Blue L...

Given a finite pot of transit funds, I just don't think I'd prioritize spending on these outlying crosstown routes. I'm sure there's some degree of chicken and egg thing happening here, and I know people love the idea of building out a non-centralized transit system, but... most people still want t...

As a general aBRT thought, opening a new line every 3 years isn't that slow of a pace, as much as we like to whine around here. That's actually pretty good, in the abstract. The real problem is that we didn't open the first one until 2016, after studying aBRT in 2011. Getting a new aBRT line every ...