Green Line LRT

[emcee squared]

http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2014/06/1 ... g-success/

The comments on this article are real winners.

[grant1simons2]

They're all from Bill lol

[emcee squared]

Which one of you guys is Bill and are trolling the CBS comment section?

[nBode]

Here's what I think:
1.) It's just more fun to ride the train. This mostly stems from it being a more rare experience, I think (Everyone's ridden a bus, but a train? Cool!), and from it being seen as a more "modern" system.
2.) Trains are so much less confusing, in a number of ways. Firstly, they run a more known route because they are limited by rails. Riding the bus, I am always less sure which route will be taken, especially if I am new to the line. I am constantly worried that I may have read the map wrong and the bus will go somewhere unexpected. Secondly, trains have more permanent stations. This helps again with assurance. I know if I go to this station I will get on the right train and I know where it will take me. There's no guess-work.
3.) I know there are people who are more inclined to ride the train for safety reasons; both because a train on a rail seems less likely to have any sort of accident and because it just feels a slightly more civilized thing which you feel safer riding. I admit most of these safety concerns are opinions/just in people's heads, not supported by fact.
4.) Trains are better for people with physical handicaps (wheelchairs, etc.) because the platform is at the floor height. This also makes it easier for cyclists. Trains can also fit more people and are a bit roomier than busses, meaning you're a bit less likely to feel clustered.

These are mostly just my opinions and reasons for taking the train rather than bus. Most significantly the first two.

[mamundsen]

Here's what I think:
2.) Trains are so much less confusing, in a number of ways. Firstly, they run a more known route because they are limited by rails. Riding the bus, I am always less sure which route will be taken, especially if I am new to the line. I am constantly worried that I may have read the map wrong and the bus will go somewhere unexpected. Secondly, trains have more permanent stations. This helps again with assurance. I know if I go to this station I will get on the right train and I know where it will take me. There's no guess-work.

This used to be my same mindset. Then I got a Metro Go-To Card and figured out how to use transit directions on my Google Maps app on my iPhone. Now I see the bus as simple as the LRT and wished I had figured this out a decade ago!

[ProspectPete]

I posed the question because I work with many LRT haters and they always ask me why a train is so much superior to a bus.
I struggled to give them a satisfactory answer. I did tell them that I think the LRT line will pay big dividends not today or tomorrow, but in another 10-20 years, when the metro area has grown by 800,000+ residents and the corridor will hopefully be repurposed and redeveloped with a TOD theme. Maybe 100,000 of those 800,000 could live in the central corridor and satisfy most of their daily needs by hopping on the LRT. Nevertheless, they don't get the concept of density being anything but negative.

[David Greene]

I posed the question because I work with many LRT haters and they always ask me why a train is so much superior to a bus.

For this corridor in particular, the bus was not going to be adequate going forward. They were already packed to the brim and the projected ridership would have completely overwhelmed the system. We needed rail not just for convenience but for capacity.

Rember to point out to these folks that no one is saying we should run rail everywhere. We put LRT along strategic corridors that either have/will have very high ridership and are strategically located such that we can build connections to the corridors and serve more people with transit than we can now. It is not either/or bus/rail it is both, each in the most appropriate places.

[talindsay]

Rember to point out to these folks that no one is saying we should run rail everywhere. We put LRT along strategic corridors that either have/will have very high ridership and are strategically located such that we can build connections to the corridors and serve more people with transit than we can now. It is not either/or bus/rail it is both, each in the most appropriate places.

I agree with you that this is where we should be building these, and in the case of the Central Corridor portion of the Green Line, this is exactly what we did - this corridor had to be built here for all the reasons you specify. But to generalize this to describe it as the way Met Council actually *is* deciding what to build is simply incorrect - and I'm not trying to make an argument about SWLRT per se. If Met Council were actually putting LRT along strategic corridors that have very high ridership and are strategically located for connections and to serve more people, they would be looking at replacing the 5, 18, 21, and 19 with light rail, in approximately that order, before they considered any of the lines currently being considered for light rail. What's missing in your description is the expediency of choosing "easy" corridors and/or those that will win over on-the-fence suburbanites, which seems to be a major factor. Also, nobody is willing to talk about light rail in extremely expensive places - the 5 and the 21, though obvious places where buses are near capacity and where more transit capacity would dramatically improve regional connections, are being ignored because both would likely require extensive tunneling.

The precedent of Hiawatha has propelled transitways such as Southwest, Bottineau, Gateway, Robert Street ahead - expanding the reach of transit in places that are (relatively) easy to lay tracks. Central is so incredibly obvious that it got onto the list anyway, but it isn't currently setting any precedents - nobody is studying real high-capacity rapid transit on similar dense urban lines that are at capacity. There are potentially a lot of reasons why this is true and why Central somehow got through despite this, but I like to think the simplest explanations are usually the best - University is wide enough to accommodate a relatively cheap alternative, while Lake, Chicago, Nicollet and Broadway are not.

[Silophant]

Two Green Line trains in a row just left Nicollet Mall station with destination signs properly displaying Downtown St. Paul. Progress!

[Andrew_F]

Yep, the one I'm on is displaying it properly as well. Unfortunately I think we may have sat through multiple light cycles at 280 (over 4 minutes stopped)?

[MinnMonkey]

Yep, the one I'm on is displaying it properly as well. Unfortunately I think we may have sat through multiple light cycles at 280 (over 4 minutes stopped)?

There was an announcement today around 2pm that the train will be delayed to get back on schedule. It does appear that they are getting bunched up like what used to happen on the 16.

[ECtransplant]

We put LRT along strategic corridors that either have/will have very high ridership and are strategically located such that we can build connections to the corridors and serve more people with transit than we can now

If we were doing that, then we would be running Southwest through uptown, Bottineau down Broadway and building Midtown before Gateway

[ProspectPete]

Amen.

[FISHMANPET]

Somebody behind me is doing a train vs car and race and recording the experience. Not a TV camera, just a little go-pro, but sounds newsy.

Also, I got on at East Bank going West, and the train is pretty full, even at 6 pm. I'd love to see ridership numbers for today.

[nate]

My train from DT St Paul this afternoon was gratifyingly crowded.

[FISHMANPET]

I got off at downtown East to transfer to the blue line, and about 3 minutes after I got off my west bound green train, another westbound green pulled into the station, almost empty. So hooray for train bunching.

[talindsay]

Yeah when i left the west bank eastbound at 5:30 the train was crowded enough that i chose to stand - there were some seats but no sets of seats. I was thinking how great to open a new line that doesn't have to "win over" enough riders to be crowded.

[mulad]

I'll agree with pretty much everything that talindsay said in his earlier post -- We should be upgrading busy existing corridors, but they've often been filtered out because there isn't much space on most of them. The extra expense of tunneling or elevating has caused them to be ignored. There's definitely a place for new corridors -- I've argued before that they're probably better off being built as what I'll call "express rail" -- more commuter-oriented with fewer stops, on existing freight corridors (ideally double-tracking or adding sidings on a bunch of our existing freight corridors). Let's do light rail or maybe even true "heavy rail" rapid transit on the denser corridors.

The Green Line will give us a good result in the experiment of putting a high-quality service down a busy existing corridor, so we can see how good or bad ridership and benefit/cost projections have been for all these decades.

Anyway, I took the train from Union Depot to Lexington, where I didn't quite make a connection to the 83 (I hadn't checked whether that was supposed to work, though). I had supper nearby and the tracks were pretty quiet in the westbound direction, but I saw a number of eastbounds go by. There were two westbounds only seconds apart just as the 83 arrived.

There were eight passengers handled on the 83 in the distance from University to Como/Hamline, so it's at least working as a feeder for now. One person was on before arriving at University, and another guy got on at Energy Park/Front. I hope it can manage to build up a ridership of its own too.

They were using track 2 (south side) at Union Depot, and people there were being told that it will be the primary track like 99% of the time. Unfortunately, the station was built with bigger shelters on track 1 (north side). They probably should have flipped that around.

[aeisenberg]

I rode the train this afternoon-- it took 24 minutes to get from Target Field to TCF Bank Stadium in the middle of the day, with good weather and no traffic. The transit schedule says it should take 16 minutes.

[grant1simons2]

Holy cow it's the 3rd day of operation, 8 minutes off ain't bad