Purple Line BRT (Rush Line Corridor)

[at40man]

I know it's easy for to blame stagnant suburbs in this region for not wanting the Rush Line to go out there, but the truth is that engagement was pretty terrible on this one. If you look at the video on 3/22 you'll note Ms. Longrie's frustration with met council about lack of engagement. If you watch the previous meetings/worksessions you'd see that the "No Rush Line Coalition" actually did a lot of engagement and had hundreds of surveys filled out by Maplewood residents. Granted, they could have had a more diverse audience (most respondents were retirees or approaching that age and most were women). But, the bottom line is that Maplewood was caught off guard.

As someone who has been living in Maplewood on WBA since 2015, that's bunk. Shortly after I moved in, I was asked about my thoughts on the Purple Line. I've received many mailers since 2015 seeking feedback and providing updates. Numerous pop-up events and other public events were held throughout the years, as detailed in Metro Transit/Met Council's presentation where they even listed the dates and locations and number of people they engaged with. Plus, the trail has had signs up for the past 15+ years stating it would be reserved for future transport use as well as contact information on the signs to provide feedback.

There was absolutely no lack of public engagement. What happened was that when it looked like this was actually possible, the anti-transit folks started dialing up the rhetoric. It was Diane Longrie's ONLY campaign platform. And I don't know if you looked at those "survey" questions, but they were ridiculously worded to lead people to the answers NRLC wanted and were clearly not written by the guidance of a statistician looking to eliminate bias and get a statistically accurate sample. The Met Council surveys, which I believe to be far more accurate (and also seem to reflect the voting patterns in Maplewood) showed a far more even balance of those for and those against.

Inevitably, the people yammering about using the BVT ROW will likely be equally as upset if WBA gets dedicated bus lanes thereby reducing the space for car traffic. Dedicated lanes are the only way to have a true BRT experience that doesn't get delayed by traffic. And as Juenemann said at a previous meeting in her very blunt way (paraphrasing), "The point of this line is to have rapid transit. I don't think anything will be moving down White Bear Avenue rapidly."

[Tcmetro]

Here's the presentation from last week's CMC meeting.

https://www.metrotransit.org/Data/Sites ... 230913.pdf

Page 14 gives a map of the White Bear Ave station areas under consideration. It's unclear if the project will target all of these stops or will proceed with a reduced subset. Nearly all of the stops are currently used by Route 54.

The most promising options for roadway configuration will be presented at the October meeting. There are some other steps along the way, but the current goal is to recommend the preferred alternative next summer.

[thespeedmccool]

Look, I know we don't want to lose all the engineering work that's already been done, but does anyone else feel like an East 7th + Minnehaha Ave + White Bear Ave alignment just makes the most sense? It could use the 5th/6th bus lanes downtown that are being built for Gold/B lines.

I feel like Ramsey County could probably push the "P Line" through development in, like, two years, but insisting on giving it a color and a guideway will take 7-8+ years. Not to mention how much more expensive a color is vs. a letter.

Gold Line kinda made sense for a guideway since the ROW was so easy to put together and there's no arterial street running directly from St. Paul to Woodbury. Purple Line, OTOH, is now talking about dropping $100s of millions establishing a guideway on Phalen and White Bear when it could spend $10s of millions repainting some driving lanes and calling it the P Line.

And not to get distracted, but I think we should be expecting that Riverview will become a BRT project. MNDOT is planning to reconstruct West 7th in 2026-2027, and is giving no indication that they're planning on accommodating light rail tracks. When the time comes for Riverview to become a BRT, it would be nice if it were just an extension of the P Line, creating a one-seat ride between Maplewood and Bloomington through St. Paul.

Purple Line and Riverview have always been, to me, compromise projects. Planners have spent a lot of time and effort justifying their modes and alignments to skeptical NIMBYs who want no transit, and transit supporters who really think these should be no-compromise LRT lines. There ought to be a push for either a. one of these projects to become aBRT so the other can be a full LRT or b. both of these to become aBRT so Ramsey County can invest in a real LRT line elsewhere.

[EOst]

E 7th Street is about to get 4-3'd for pedestrian safety, without any room for bus lanes, which means that any alignment there would likely have significant speed and reliability issues. The East Side doesn't need another mixed-traffic bus on a slow road, it needs reliable, quick transit access.

[daveybabymsp]

Pardon my crappy drawing on a screenshot, but I really think the original purple line is the best option when you overlay it on our current system. There is no direct way to get from that part of the east side to downtown besides using the trail corridor. Especially the area East of Lake Phalen near English street. Compare the route that the English street branch of the 64 takes vs the proposed purple line alignment via Bruce Vento. Purple line would bring so much more direct and fast service for people in that area. I think ideal future of transit east of Lake Phalen would be purple line in its original alignment plus aBRT following existing route 64 on white bear.

[Tcmetro]

Phalen is a good corridor to get to the greater East Side faster. The density isn't really there, but hopefully some TOD around the station areas helps. I do like White Bear over the rail corridor north of Maryland. The population is closer to White Bear and redevelopment in the Hillcrest area would be a huge win. Rides to Maplewood Mall are slower, but it would be nice to have a St Paul-Maplewood-WBL express (restore the 265) on an all day basis.

I get the sense that Riverview is going to be a BRT line, so it would make a lot of sense to thru-run buses between Purple Line and Riverview if that is how it turns out.

[VacantLuxuries]

Bruce Vento made sense when the goal was fast service to downtown White Bear Lake. Once that was off the table (even beforehand, when the bus needed to take a major detour from the route to reach a major trip generator like Maplewood Mall), it makes way more sense to serve areas where there is more potential for TOD and neighborhood reinvestment. And it's not like it's guaranteed to be an aBRT downgrade - some of those potential street layouts would be game changing. Getting dedicated center running lanes on White Bear Ave would be a great outcome.

As for Riverview, I'm still not convinced that the major players are interested in switching focus to aBRT. The entire process for that line started when St. Paul leaders got upset at the idea of visitors to the region getting off a plane and seeing a train to Minneapolis and a bus to St. Paul. While some people filling out surveys at public engagement events might be asking about BRT, and the project is doing due diligence to update what a W 7th BRT would look like, the core motivation for going through with the streetcar study - St. Paul's municipal inferiority complex - still remains.

[thespeedmccool]

As for Riverview, I'm still not convinced that the major players are interested in switching focus to aBRT. The entire process for that line started when St. Paul leaders got upset at the idea of visitors to the region getting off a plane and seeing a train to Minneapolis and a bus to St. Paul. While some people filling out surveys at public engagement events might be asking about BRT, and the project is doing due diligence to update what a W 7th BRT would look like, the core motivation for going through with the streetcar study - St. Paul's municipal inferiority complex - still remains.

I'm suggesting that the decision has already been made that Riverview is going to become a BRT route behind the scenes. MNDOT doesn't even mention the Riverview project, and renderings of future improvements could suggest that a dedicated guideway isn't being talked about on the MNDOT side. I really struggle to come up with a reason why MNDOT would be pushing ahead with planning for a project without a streetcar/LRT guideway if it were still in the cards per Ramsey County's thinking. In fact, this advanced repaving would offer a great opportunity to have MNDOT install LRT tracks and avoid the Met Council leading construction, but there's no reference to Riverview anywhere.

I think either Riverview has been pushed way, way back, outside the time horizon of MNDOT's planning, or LRT/streetcar is no longer the plan.

[VacantLuxuries]

(Granted, this is now fully off topic but...)

Hasn't MNDOT done this before? Particularly, work they've done on Bottineau Blvd and reconstructing ramps near Lowry Ave without making any sort of adjustments for the Blue Line Extension project? They don't seem to be very proactive when it comes to transit, even for projects that the Met Council has fully endorsed and is gaining momentum. In this case though, other than the fact that eventually tracks would have to be put into the road they're resurfacing, I don't see anything here that would interfere with the current Riverview streetcar plans. In fact, the scoping document specifically calls out that this project and the Riverview project are in communication and coordination.

Though even in the best case scenario, I can't imagine them going ahead and building tracks for a project that hasn't fully gone through the approvals process. There isn't even going to be a preliminary design for the project until 2024-2026 - how would MNDOT realistically jump ahead and build it? Despite some people arguing for it, the Met Council has yet to be stripped of the ability to build our transit projects, so I don't really know under what conditions we'd see MNDOT just start laying down track. Probably would take a whole different crop of leadership there, for starters.

Anyway, it's not like it would be surprising if Riverview does eventually morph back into a BRT project. I'm just saying that there's been no official movements that would lead me to believe that, and I'm not convinced that MNDOT's activities are the correct tea leaves to read in this case. Ramsey County and St. Paul were the ones who dug their heels in for rail, so that's where I'm going to be looking for indications on any behind the scenes changes.

[Bakken2016]

As someone who sits on the Riverview Station Area Task Force, the county and city both still support it as a rail project.

[thespeedmccool]

I guess we'll see what happens. I was under the impression that Riverview was going through a reevaluation, and that therefore MNDOT's pushing ahead with a project would suggest that signals are pointing to BRT. Maybe I'm misremembering something, or maybe I'm not reading the tea leaves right.

[DanPatchToget]

I received an email from the Met Council about Purple Line stations advanced for further evaluation on the modified route. The locations are:
Maryland & Clarence Street
Maryland & Hazelwood Street
White Bear & Maryland
White Bear & Arlington Avenue
White Bear & Larpenteur Avenue
White Bear & Frost Avenue
White Bear & County Road B
White Bear & Gervais Avenue
White Bear & County Road C
Beam & White Bear
Maplewood Mall Transit Center
St. John's Boulevard

[Vagueperson]

Clarence and Hazelwood seem very close.
If it goes this route would they bother going on the berm between Cub and Johnson Pkwy?

[DanPatchToget]

Based on the map that was attached with the email it looks like that's the plan. Doesn't seem worth it to rebuild the Phalen & Johnson intersection just for a one-block stretch of dedicated busway. I'm sure this would rile people up, but it would be a lot cheaper to just remove the on-street parking along Phalen and put in bus lanes.

[Vagueperson]

The original plan I think wasn't to rebuild that intersection but instead build a bridge over Johnson Parkway from the berm to Phalen Blvd north of that intersection. Maybe that's still the easiest way to go, it just seems like a lot of construction for a short stretch. Avoiding a couple intersections might be worth it?

[EOst]

Both options are being evaluated.

[Tcmetro]

Some work has been completed at better defining the concepts for the Maryland/White Bear alignment.

Here's the slide deck that was presented at today's meeting: https://www.metrotransit.org/Data/Sites ... 231011.pdf

There are two options being considered for Maryland and "South" White Bear (likely the portion south of Larpenteur): converting one lane in each direction to a bus lane, or converting one direction to a bus lane, with the other direction having one lane turned into a center turn lane. St. Paul requested consideration of a 3-lane design that wouldn't have bus lanes (but looks like it would have room for bike lanes) and the County basically said that they won't support that. Too many sections without bus lanes may reduce the project to a level that is under the threshold for federal funding.

For the "North" White Bear area, both options will have bus lanes in both directions. One option is side running, while the other is center running. This is the wider section that already has space for left turns.

In the meeting it was stated that most of the future Corridor Management Committee meetings will be canceled until March 2024, when it is expected that a best option will be picked for the lane configuration on the new route. April 2024 will provide the results of the comparison of the Maryland/White Bear and Bruce Vento corridors, and sometime in the Spring the endpoint analysis will be completed. The locally preferred alternative will be chosen in Summer 2024.

In my opinion, the bus lane in one direction only would work best for Maryland and South White Bear to provide a dedicated left turn space. In the north end of the corridor, the side running option also seems to make a lot of sense, so that the Purple Line can share bus stops with local routes in the corridor.

[twincitizen]

At this point I would vote for officially "downgrading" this project to aBRT. I'd rather see White Bear Ave retain the ability to do a 4:3 road diet, with strategically-placed queue jumps for buses at congested stoplights. Nothing about this corridor makes sense for being actual guideway BRT over aBRT. This Purple Line nonsense is nothing more than a political vanity project of the Ramsey County board and inertia by project staff. Arterial BRT is more than sufficient level of service for this route.

[Tcmetro]

I more or less agree, but the big challenge then becomes getting local funding together to build out the line. Might not be so difficult as the Purple Line will be piggybacking quite a bit on the G & H line construction, and of course the Maplewood Mall Transit Center already exists.

The dedicated ROW from Arcade to Maryland is only 1.6 miles and the traffic issue really only exists around the Johnson Pkwy and Maryland Ave intersections.

[mamundsen]

I agree that a downgrade to aBRT makes sense (even if it was extended north if the future moods change in Vadnais Heights or White Bear). The speed will not attract ridership over driving, so it should be an enhanced bus service for those in the corridor that rely on transit. BRT is 5x+ the cost of aBRT right? No way that investment makes sense with the shifting plan.

Side note... I think Metro Transit's slow to increase frequency to the northeast area of the metro is another sign that transit doesn't work out this far. Look at the full Metro Transit network map and you see that route density is focused to the west and south. Disclaimer, I used to ride 270, but have been unable to utilize it for years because of frequency and schedule. I'd prefer to utilize Purple Line downgrade "savings" on additional route or frequency options. Maybe a better option for Hwy 36 BRT into Minneapolis.