urbanMSP

Pioneer Press: "Is the $485M St. Paul-to-Woodbury Gold Line bus worth it?"

This floored me:

Buses would run every 10 minutes during rush hours and every 20 to 30 minutes in off-peak times. They would operate from 6 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week.

That's even worse than the Red Line!

Pioneer Press: "Is the $485M St. Paul-to-Woodbury Gold Line bus worth it?"

This floored me:

Buses would run every 10 minutes during rush hours and every 20 to 30 minutes in off-peak times. They would operate from 6 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week.

That's even worse than the Red Line!

The only reason I care about this is that it dilutes the Bus "Rapid" Transit brand. This is a commuter line in every way imaginable.

A very expensive commuter line through farm fields and parking lots. The only kind of transit we fund here.

You're right, I really wish we had a train to DT St Paul from DT Mpls.

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The Mall of America is a pretty well developed farm field.

With the aBRT and Orange Line hopefully turning around the impression of BRT that the Red Line has given the region, a lip service transit project for Washington County is the last thing we need. Let this die on the vine, we've got better things to do.

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The Mall of America is a pretty well developed farm field.

In his defense though part of it actually is/was on a farm (Kelly Farm, for ex.).

Gotta wonder how developed the farm fields in Brooklyn Park will be by the time we eventually build Bottineau.

Gotta wonder how developed the farm fields in Brooklyn Park will be by the time we eventually build Bottineau.

Hopefully not developed at all.

Justifying transit out to the metro edge with TOD language, as Metro Transit is doing, strikes me as bizarre. Transit and sprawl are not friends. They work against each other. The envisioned TOD presumably pictures an ADA compliant tree-lined sidewalk to the bus stop from a multifamily building with a Caribou in the ground floor. Maybe a somewhat lower minimum parking requirement if it's extremely progressive. This does not justify a half-billion dollar bus line. You're out in the middle of nowhere and the sidewalk connects to almost nothing else and the adjacent land use pattern is overwhelmingly auto-centric and the bus is only used by a sliver of residents who happen to work in DWTN St. Paul, which itself is not exactly a booming employment center.

Metro Transit should drop the pretense of TOD. This is a largely political project. It makes actual BRT look bad.

This project is being led by Washington and Ramsey counties, not Metro Transit.

Gotta wonder how developed the farm fields in Brooklyn Park will be by the time we eventually build Bottineau.

Hopefully not developed at all.

Justifying transit out to the metro edge with TOD language, as Metro Transit is doing, strikes me as bizarre. Transit and sprawl are not friends. They work against each other. The envisioned TOD presumably pictures an ADA compliant tree-lined sidewalk to the bus stop from a multifamily building with a Caribou in the ground floor. Maybe a somewhat lower minimum parking requirement if it's extremely progressive. This does not justify a half-billion dollar bus line. You're out in the middle of nowhere and the sidewalk connects to almost nothing else and the adjacent land use pattern is overwhelmingly auto-centric and the bus is only used by a sliver of residents who happen to work in DWTN St. Paul, which itself is not exactly a booming employment center.

Metro Transit should drop the pretense of TOD. This is a largely political project. It makes actual BRT look bad.

Hate to break it to you guys, but transportation has pretty much always been motivated by land development. That includes transit and railroads as well as highways. The TCRT company never made a profit on fares alone, Thomas Lowry was a real estate magnate who profited from opening up and connecting streetcar suburbs for development. A streetcar line was built all the way out to lake Minnetonka to serve the new big island amusement park which the company owned.

Gotta wonder how developed the farm fields in Brooklyn Park will be by the time we eventually build Bottineau.

Hopefully not developed at all.

Justifying transit out to the metro edge with TOD language, as Metro Transit is doing, strikes me as bizarre. Transit and sprawl are not friends. They work against each other. The envisioned TOD presumably pictures an ADA compliant tree-lined sidewalk to the bus stop from a multifamily building with a Caribou in the ground floor. Maybe a somewhat lower minimum parking requirement if it's extremely progressive. This does not justify a half-billion dollar bus line. You're out in the middle of nowhere and the sidewalk connects to almost nothing else and the adjacent land use pattern is overwhelmingly auto-centric and the bus is only used by a sliver of residents who happen to work in DWTN St. Paul, which itself is not exactly a booming employment center.

Metro Transit should drop the pretense of TOD. This is a largely political project. It makes actual BRT look bad.

Hate to break it to you guys, but transportation has pretty much always been motivated by land development. That includes transit and railroads as well as highways. The TCRT company never made a profit on fares alone, Thomas Lowry was a real estate magnate who profited from opening up and connecting streetcar suburbs for development. A streetcar line was built all the way out to lake Minnetonka to serve the new big island amusement park which the company owned.

Sure, historically (to a point - highways historically were financed by redistributed gas tax revenue from the Federal Government, not property development). But is the Gold Line going to raise the value of land so much that the people who build it are going to make a killing? No - that's preposterous. The link between developer and transportation service provider has been severed. That's not to say it doesn't happen elsewhere - in Hong Kong the subway system is funded by the property development arm of the transit agency. But it's not the case here. Arguably, you could say that since the CTIB will partially pay for the line, the counties want new exurban development to increase the tax base. But that's a very tenuous argument (and a genuinely terrible one) in favor of building a BRT line.

Not to mention building a line for the TOD through Lake Elmo is an exercise in futility. Even if it did raise the land values, the city would fight the construction of anything.

Hate to break it to you guys, but transportation has pretty much always been motivated by land development. That includes transit and railroads as well as highways. The TCRT company never made a profit on fares alone, Thomas Lowry was a real estate magnate who profited from opening up and connecting streetcar suburbs for development.

But even so, the resulting development from that transportation was not characterized by unsustainable sprawl and taxation-inefficient land usage patterns. By "streetcar suburb", do you mean something like Willernie; Union Park (east of Prior and south of University in St. Paul); or the area north of Front Ave. near the Half Time Rec? Notwithstanding their function as bedroom communities for people who worked 25min away (at the time) in downtown St. Paul, these were -- and often still are -- fairly dense, human-scaled and walkable places with local service businesses and retail.

I think the concern isn't that "transport / development linkage is bad" so much as it is that times have changed, and not for the better. With decades of sprawl trends, and the associated regulatory and financial structures that have insinuated themselves into our society and thought-space, even the best attempts at "TOD" 15+ miles from the city in an empty farm field will end up lacking the urban-ish features of the neighborhoods that arose from development-transport symbiosis of the past.

(edit: geography)

I'm not sure what to make of this. Lake Elmo has voted to opt out of planning for the Gold Line, despite the current preferred alignment running along the southern edge of the city for 2.5 miles.

http://finance-commerce.com/2016/01/lak ... -line-brt/

There's some claim of the city wanting "smart growth or planned growth", but it's hard to see how the TOD envisioned would be any less than what the city would end up doing on its own, since they are starting some development in this general region anyway. They didn't want the number of housing units being required by the Met Council, which is claimed to be about double what the city had previously agreed to.

In a lot of ways, I'd be perfectly happy with Lake Elmo limiting development, but that would have to translate to redevelopment of parts of Saint Paul and inner suburbs. It's still weird that there's such a lopsided development pattern north and south of I-94 here, with Woodbury practically inviting too much. I've never been able to follow the city-level politics well enough to fully comprehend everything happening in this corridor, though, so I'll stop rambling for now.

While I don't stray much into that area since I live in St Paul, my friends who live closer (N St Paul, Oakdale, WBL, etc.) view the area as generally consisting of rich and snobby conservative transplants from red states.

"That area" generally being Mahtomedi, Dellwood, Lake Elmo, and Grant Township, with the former being more snobby, and the latter being more conservative (with all of the area being both).

That is, of course, a generalization, and there will be some exceptions, though those exceptions don't seem to play much of a part in Lake Elmo city politics.

In response to the recent vote by the City of Lake Elmo, planners are going to reevaluate the route for the east end of the line:

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/East ... 2zJIeVmxXE

This is nothing new. Lake Elmo has basically butted heads with the Met Council for decades...trying to limit development as much as they can. They aspire to be like North Oaks.

In light of the Lake Elmo news, I finally finished off an article that had been languishing in my queue for a while. It's mostly rehashing things I've previously said here, but hopefully you guys find it interesting:

https://streets.mn/2016/01/12/gold-line- ... direction/