urbanMSP

Noticed streetcar rails on girard north of lake- it'd make sense to have rails off hennepin one block so traffic isn't another hwy 55 standstill

The Hennepin County Regional Railroad Authority has scheduled three public hearings in November to formally gather public comments on the Southwest Light Rail Transit (LRT) Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS). The DEIS is scheduled for publication in the Federal Register on Friday, Oct. 12; the comment period will be 60 days, extended from the minimum requirement of 45 days due to the Thanksgiving Holiday.

A Penn station would require vertical circulation. That's not a "little" money.

by seanrichardryan »
From the article:

"Engineers will also have to design tunnels, street crossings and consider existing freight operations on the Kenilworth Corridor in dealing with the 15-mile route between Minneapolis and Eden Prairie."

I don't remember any tunnels?

One billion? At all that, it'd end up costing more than the space shuttle

Well, Snelling was the most viable corridor that wasn't already being considered in other studies.

There are way better ways to better serve uptown with transit than putting light rail through.

Uptown is too dense for light rail to do any good, for such a small distance that's so equally dense, something with more local stops would be better. A dedicated bus lane or streetcar would do a lot more for the area than light rail.

There's a big temptation to put stops close together in dense areas, but that's not a good idea. A dense corridor is more likely to have people wanting to get on or off at almost every single stop. It doesn't matter too much if a lower-density corridor has stops every block, because a typical bus trip will skip past most of them simply due to lack of demand. As a corridor gets busier, you really have to force people to walk a bit farther in order to avoid stopping every block. A bus can't even accelerate up to the speed limit before needing to slow down again under those conditions.

But perhaps your thinking is colored a bit by the ways many light-rail lines have been planned out up until the past few years. The Hiawatha Line has some stops spaced more than a mile apart in south Minneapolis, which doesn't really make sense, and would be totally inappropriate for Uptown. Something more like 1/3 mile spacing would probably be optimal.

I also think light rail would be good in Uptown simply because the capacity of each train can be so high. Buses that run in the Hennepin and Lyndale corridors today are standard 40-footers, but they probably should be running articulated units. I'm sure a lot of people don't ride buses in the corridor today simply because they can get very cramped inside. There's probably a lot of latent transit demand in the area that would appear if the service was faster, more comfortable, and more reliable, and light rail offers all of those things.

A little hyperbole- Don't have to be so 'concrete'

Start video and start adding-Bridges, including a 3000 footer? Tunnels? Even if you call them 'under-crossings' it's still going to be wildly expensive

I think most of us here are hoping that the Green Line isn't built at all.