urbanMSP

So SPUD is too far from the major activity center to be any good for commuter-type operations. It's fine for things like Amtrak. But there really are a lot of places where a west-side commuter rail terminal could be developed in the unlikely event that commuter rail ever actually demanded it. I thin...

Their jobs have absolutely nothing to do with basic parking economics. Why would any team from the Fed waste time away from projects they are assigned as part of their jobs, to look at parking? So that they sound passably intelligent in presenting their request to the city. You're right at a functi...

OR let's just do some more piecemeal extensions, such as extending the Blue Line to Van White and Penn down Olson Hwy. I strongly agree. I wish our region would more seriously consider piecemeal expansions as money becomes available, with simpler planning and without federal money, and then using t...

We went into that location many years ago in an iteration where it was a martini bar, I think. It was unremarkable. It never crossed my mind to try it again. I might give it a try - especially since some strib commenter told them to take foie gras off the menu, sounds like it must be pretty good - b...

Also, the 3-bedroom layouts make me think of Metric's "Satellite Mind".

This is interesting. I like that. Maybe it's because I'm middle aged, but I think about risks of ownership in this building. How well tested are all these interesting elements? It says "Condominium" so I'm assuming these are owner-occupied units, and it's a lot to ask a pool of random some...

As a runner I can tell you there's more than enough of them lying around to block the running paths.

Understand my bias: I live in Cooper. The Greenway is so far from the activity centers, and my understanding has been that they couldn't use the train bridge both for ROW reasons and for the condition of the bridge. Building a new river crossing, or rebuilding the existing bridge to handle both frei...

Car traffic east of Hiawatha drops significantly enough that I'm sure they could take the middle of the roadway for rail without trouble. I've always rather hoped that they'd do something along the lines of what they currently plan for Riverview - use dedicated ROW from West Lake station to East Lak...

Also, a hospital should be super easy to sanitize. Cinder block walls, metal counters, etc. are really easy to sanitize. Granite isn't bad, but wood is terrible.

Of course, the medical side of the U has more money and more clout with the legislature than other parts, but "slated for demo in the next 3-5 years" describes about 10% of the campus, and has done so for decades. The University wish list places any obsolete building, in any state of use, ...

I suspect these events are far more for the people throwing the sand than the people having sand thrown at them. Ha, nice. I mean, if they were *actually* breaking ground in any meaningful way whatsoever, it wouldn't be so absurd. Given the tremendous amount of digging any project requires, it seem...

Well, they're buying 28 new ones for the new extension through Cambridge - their current Green Line fleet is 488 cars per Wikipedia. And the 28 are being built by a Chinese company that's setting up a facility just for that order so they may be very custom. But regardless, that's a good sign.

I only read half of that article but unless it gets a whole lot smarter in the second half, I'd say it's kind of idiotic. Where exactly do they think all those autonomous cars will go when they're not in use? Or do they expect them to be continually circulating, and see no problem with traffic in th...

I think everybody agrees in principle that the Green Line should be completely replaced. The challenges to that are legion, but the two big ones are cost and disruption. The Green Line would be insanely expensive to rebuild, at least in part because it can't easily be phased or segmented, and the se...

Height in itself is neither good nor bad. The fight is over density, and density is what a city needs, not height.

This is a giant stretch, but in theory you could ride LA Metrolink Los Angeles-Oceanside, transfer to the Coaster and go Oceanside-San Diego. Two commuter rail lines, but they make an intercity route. No idea if this would ever be useful considering there is Amtrak's Pacific Surfliner that runs thr...

The equipment will be owned by the funder, if they follow the normal model, and the funder will be setting the operational parameters, with Amtrak as the contracted operator. Regarding equipment, I don't know what they'll decide but new operations like these try to choose something a little more con...

Why would anybody expect differently? That's absolutely the norm for intercity services everywhere in the US - there are exceptions, but those are just that - exceptions. I've been on Amtrak-contracted services before, and the funders have the ability to make it more or less like normal Amtrak servi...

Of course, if we had trains that through-routed Minneapolis via the CBD to St. Paul (on a double level tunnel shared with LRT under 5th or 6th Streets) then back across the river on the NP #9 bridge to St. Paul Union Depot... more people would be encouraged to take the train. Haha, that's some pre-...