Public Transit News / Current Events (MN only)

[FISHMANPET]

I wonder what the Red Line's on time performance was.

[mulad]

Buses down to 27% on-time as of 5:45pm.

Yeah, it's hard to justify this just because of snow, but it amplifies the problems that buses experience every day: When I last examined the Route 16 schedule, I discovered that it only takes 47 minutes to run end-to-end in the middle of the night, but is scheduled at 70 minutes at the peak of the peak (and is always subject to bunching). Meanwhile, the Blue Line has exactly the same end-to-end time all the time.

[FISHMANPET]

Reminds me of what the instructor for my transit class at the U said, who worked on, among other things, the variable toll lanes in 394. They did some timing tests after it opened, and what they found is that it wasn't always faster than the regular lanes, but it always took the same amount of time to go through no matter what.

Consistency in travel time has value.

[UptownSport]

Driver (who people were being mean to because he was late ) told me he was crawling because he had slid for a block and it scared the living daylights out of him.
Buses use summer tires on drives, instead of 'drive' tires. They have straight ribs and offer no traction on slippery roads.

[ECtransplant]

The buses between downtown and uptown seemed to fare worse this morning than this evening

[RailBaronYarr]

Just an update (even though most people here probably follow them on Twitter anyway) - "8:00 a.m. snapshot: buses 51% on time. Avg. delay = 7 min. Light rail on time; some Northstar trips delayed by freight traffic."

A full 12+ hours after the snow has stopped, on a clear/sunny morning the buses are still delayed by a pretty decent amount. I'd be curious to see how much more delayed this is vs a baseline summer morning with no rain (since they don't post those numbers to my knowledge).

[PhilmerPhil]

I don't follow them because every time they post a link, it redirects me to their damn mobile home page...

[mulad]

On my phone, it usually works to visit the link a second time. I do wish they'd fix that, though.

[ECtransplant]

The 12 was over 20 min late getting from uptown to downtown this morning. Would be nice to get some rail to uptown

[woofner]

A full 12+ hours after the snow has stopped, on a clear/sunny morning the buses are still delayed by a pretty decent amount. I'd be curious to see how much more delayed this is vs a baseline summer morning with no rain (since they don't post those numbers to my knowledge).

According to the 2009 Transit System Performance Evaluation, the average on-time performance is 87.3%. This describes the percentage of buses that are "no more than 1 minute early and no more than 5 minutes late", but I'm not sure what is being averaged exactly. Still, it would suggest that a typical AM peak sees significantly less delay than today. The reason is that there was still a lot of delay overall on the roadways today due to people thankfully exercising caution, and general congestion has a cascading impact on transit service that isn't insulated from it. This is why a city that has decided, as Minneapolis has, to prioritize modes of travel other than private car should be creating transit and bicycle and pedestrian advantages through use of bus and bike lanes and bump-outs respectfully. Unfortunately overall city policy mostly hasn't filtered down to the Public Works department.

My question is what impact snow day conditions have on system capacity. That is, how many fewer trips typically occur on days like yesterday (hopefully not today as much) with catastrophic delay? As a result of delay, a bus that is intended to provide, say, 8 full trips a day, may only provide 4. That's why the 18 was standing room only at 9pm yesterday. I kind of doubt Metro Transit is even tracking this sort of thing but I for one would be interested to know.

[widin007]

The 12 was over 20 min late getting from uptown to downtown this morning. Would be nice to get some rail to uptown

I remember 2 years ago after a big snow, the 113, ALL the 113s were an hour+ late, then about 4 or 5 of them struggled up lyndale all at once. Good grief.

[MNdible]

This is why a city that has decided, as Minneapolis has, to prioritize modes of travel other than private car should be creating transit and bicycle and pedestrian advantages through use of bus and bike lanes and bump-outs respectfully.

My gut sense here is that something like bump-outs would make bus service during traffic-inducing events (weather or special event or bad rush hour) worse, not better. Yes, it would be easier for the bus to pull out of the bus stop, but the bus ahead of it at the next stop is obstructing a lane of traffic, generally making the overall traffic that the bus is stuck in along with the rest of the cars worse.

Are you suggesting otherwise?

[woofner]

Yeah, I was saying that the bump-outs should be used pervasively specifically to prioritize pedestrian traffic. I think that bus bulbs would benefit bus traffic in general, but agree that they would only aggravate these extreme delay events. On streets that see severe traffic congestion (e.g. Lyndale & Hennepin, but NOT Nicollet or Minnehaha) I think the best solution is peak hour bus lanes. On extreme delay events, these won't help the buses much because general traffic will congest them, but that would still help overall congestion in these events, and therefore help the buses slightly as well.

[mulad]

I dunno, things were moving so slowly yesterday in downtown St. Paul that I figure bulb-outs could easily help overall flow at congested times rather than hurt it -- some buses would be able to load while they were otherwise stuck in traffic. It doesn't help anyone for a bus to pull out of the travel lane and fill up with passengers only to find that the main travel lane hasn't moved at all -- and that the space formerly occupied by the bus is now filled with cars.

But I certainly think that off-board payment should be used as much as possible at bulb-out stops since that reduces the amount of time that the vehicle is in the way of car traffic (as well as bikes), and there should be a greater effort to implement exclusive bus lanes.

[woofner]

That makes sense - I didn't think of it since the 4 I was in yesterday just picked up and dropped off in the through lane, obviating that problem (although there were so few people parked that I'd think we could have passed on the right and then jammed back into the through lane).

Also, it seems things are still fucked this afternoon. Or just on the north side?

[mulad]

It was pretty bad in downtown St. Paul, though the driver was blaming the Wild game for the traffic.

[UptownSport]

Coming North on 35W totally sucked last night. Not sure if it's always that way.

[woofner]

Just because I can't let this grudge die, I also observed that 35W was still stop-and-go in both directions at about 6:40. I observed this from a 7 bus on the Washington Ave overpass. While my 7 was about 15-20 minutes late coming from Plymouth Ave (delay that I assume it carried over from another phase of its service), the only delay I encountered on Washington Ave was due to cars parked in the right-hand lane. Though I observed that traffic bound for 35W north from Washington Ave was backed up to Chicago, it didn't affect the other traffic on Washington Ave, including the local buses. In other words, there is probably a simpler infrastructure fix to this problem than building an onramp to 35W north from the 4th St Trench, especially given that Washington Ave's 3 lanes in each direction will soon become 1 lane in each direction at Cedar anyway.

[UptownSport]

You have to wonder how much congestion is due to choice riders choosing not to wait (forever) at the frigid bus stop, or deciding to not depend on late buses to get to work on time.

[Tcmetro]

Some preliminary results from the Highway Transitway Corridor Study: http://www.metrocouncil.org/Council-Mee ... niker.aspx

Highway BRT lines would generally have stops on the exit ramps, and the stops would be similar to those on the Red Line (enclosed, bike parking, ticket machines, real time signage). Only two new "on-line" stations are proposed, at I-94 and Lowry and at Shingle Creek Pkwy. I'm actually surprised that there isn't a proposed station at W Broadway.

Two lines stick out as obvious priorities, 394 and Hwy. 36. Hopefully these could be implemented in the very short term (i.e. before 2020).