urbanMSP

Time for a deep bore tunnel under highway 13 between the two!!! This is the way.

If the Uptown Theater does, in fact, get redeveloped into a live performance venue with a capacity of 2500, it's going to take a LOT of buses to get all those people in and out. It would only be like 21 busses if we were talking 60' articulated busses (capacity 120) for 2500 people, and that's if e...

Now what?

Any locations built like this that stay open late will get crazy business. It's crazy how few restaurants and fast food stay open late now after covid19 reduced hours everywhere. Those places that do get completely swamped by cars, and super long lines. Even as early as 11pm lines appear that don't ...

Half a mile is an OK distance for a LRT station.

Something tells me not all of the coalition is on board with "rejecting any further project planning." https://bluelinecoalition.org/coalition-partners/ They mentioned the "Harrison Neighborhood Association['s]" goals in that letter too. Perhaps some activists are trying to laun...

Maybe they should try talking to the Strong Mayor™ about implementing an anti-gentrification plan. Minneapolis theoretically should be making a Rent-stabilization Ordinance, right? Because transit can't be and do everything for everyone.

There have not been negotiations with Canadian Pacific about purchasing the Ford Spur. Apparently the University of St. Thomas has a contract with CP for use of the spur, but there weren't any details about it. What kind of interest would St. Thomas even have with the CP Spur? It's not near them (u...

Amazon is finally building their Woodbury warehouse, it'll be open by late this year. It's being constructed at the SW corner of Manning Ave and Hudson Rd, near 94.

https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-bu ... o-woodbury

Ramsey County and the Met Council haven't explicitly said it, but based on reading the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press articles about WBL passing the resolution, it really seems they might continue with the routing anyways, but I guess we will see. Ramsey County is all-in on the Purple Line, but the...

Oh i don't care if it takes 7th or Smith, like you said people would use either station. Rather, I want it to take whatever route it needs to take for Riverview to get the maximum amount of dedicated guideway. I'd imagine they could run the event-day logistics like they do in Minneapolis. There was ...

Trying to run LRT cars on W7th pre and post events at the X will be a complete & total shits how and will absolutely slow them down significantly. You'd think policy makers would want to use an LRT stop at Xcel to reduce the shit show instead of making it worse. 230 people per LRT car * 2 cars ...

If we built SWLRT a decade ago, it probably would have cost something a lot closer to our first two LRT lines. Construction inflation seems like it's been a huge issue, like our society just doesn't have enough capacity for building stuff to go around any more.

I actually laughed out loud at the "Stakeholder Priorities" slide (bc of Ramsey County). I appreciate them putting those priorities to paper for once. Also thank you City of Saint Paul for pushing for 2 car trains instead of 1 car trains? (you can make that a sarcastic "thank you"...

If the Blue and Green Lines can share tracks through DT Minneapolis, and Blue and Riverview can share tracks through the airport/Bloomington, I don't understand why the tracks through DT St Paul can't be shared. Especially since there's no new OMF planned for this line (right?), they'll need access...

Most of that is the recently (pre-covid) extended route 54. I wonder if that will be removed/shortened when Purple Line is operational. It's in our planning documents as a future aBRT route though, and serves almost entirely different walksheds compared to the Purple Line. This would be a great opp...

I love this new information. Not sure if this is new or a continued study, but they're looking at how to connect Riverview, the Ford Site, the A Line, and the Blue Line together with transit. Modes being considered include "micro-transit", fixed-route bus, and aBRT. Rail is not being consi...

Redistricting maps are out, and found a copy of the state house map (at bottom). Shoutout to Mankato and Rochester for balancing out DFL losses on the Iron Range. Hopefully the new districts will be enough in 2022 to keep a narrow majority. MN House (Metro) 49 Safe DFL > 53 Safe DFL 6 Tilt/Lean DFL ...

I have an unprovable theory that people underrate the value of policy signals, beyond the value of a policy itself.

This is definitely a thing, 100%.

Not finally having high frequency network-quality access to WBL would hurt. But maybe we could see the E 7th St aBRT-ification of route 54 happen sooner?