Hey, longtime lurker here. I've been putting together a concept map for what METRO light rail could look like by 2050 if we really got it together with planning and funding. I've been continually tweaking this in my sparse free time for more than a year right now, but I was hoping to put it out there soon along with an angsty thinkpiece about transit investment pretty soon, and I would love to get feedback from the fine folks of streets.mn. Here it is:
You can click on the map for a larger version and I have a Google Maps overlay with a rough sketch of alignments
here.
From a corridor selection perspective, I've been trying to rein in the appetite for relentless outward expansion. Southwest and Bottineau appear as planned, but most additional investment is focused inwards. The Gold Line is cancelled entirely and replaced with a (relatively) small extension of the Green Line, and the Rush Line is severely curtailed. A rundown of the lines is given here:
Blue: as planned.
Green: as planned, with a five-mile extension eastward replacing the Gold Line.
Red: the Riverview corridor. I put it on the CPR ROW rather than at-grade on West 7th, but I don't have strong feelings about the alignment. The final map shows it crossing the river on Hwy 5, but I think it's better to initially build through Ford to 46th and finish the "airport express" connection later (so Gold south eventually subsumes the initial Ford alignment). The existing Red Line does not appear on the map.
Teal: the Greenway built to LRT spec and extended northeast sometime in the 2040s, subsuming the northern half of the A line.
Orange: the Nicollet-Central streetcar, but as a subway north of Lake. Eventually swings towards 35 and subsumes the real-life Orange Line BRT, with an extension southeast to MoA along American Blvd.
Yellow: a Freemont-ish subway line North, underground or elevated just west of downtown and underground through Hennepin. This interlines with Teal and then Blue at Lake (sounds like flyover hell now that I'm typing this out) before eating the Ford spur and terminating near Montreal. This could eventually be extended through Mendota Heights and toward Purple south.
Purple: a reasonable subset of the Rush corridor north, serving East Saint Paul, heading underground through downtown and the west side, then popping up and running south down Robert.
The Twin Cities express, appearing as part of Green on the map, is an express service between the downtowns and would be realized as either I-94 median rail or some kind of crazy beefing up of the Central corridor (think underpasses, CBTC, and more crossovers) that would permit an express service on two tracks. This is easily the craziest proposal here but I think a frequent way to connect the two downtowns at a speed faster than car travel on I-94 is actually pretty necessary to make taking transit clear across the metro appealing and feasible, and to really knit together economic opportunities across our sprawling Cities.
It seems that the Met Council/CTIB have (understandably) little interest in funding some key pieces of this puzzle, like a Nicollet subway — this would probably require a local ballot initiative and some pretty aggressive (BART/WMATA era level) federal funding to fall into place, though I do think we could do this cheaply compared to places like Seattle. My hope is that by 2030 or so, with SWLRT, Bottineau, Greenway rail, and some kind of N-S spine in place (plus a slew of aBRT and some healthy upzoning) the network effect would kick in, taking the subway would become a "thing" here like it is in other cities and we'd be able to drag the region kicking and screaming towards another subway tunnel apiece for each downtown and some additional expansions. At this point of course self-driving cars will mature as a technology and instantly solve all of our congestion and mobility problems, and we'll all feel dumb for having spent so much money on fixed-route rapid transit.
Overall I think that as crazy fantasy maps go, this one is fairly reasonable and does a decent job of balancing intraurban connectivity with the real need to connect to suburban job centers. I'd love to get feedback on corridors, map design, or whatever. Did I miss a spot? Am I out of my mind? Thanks for reading!