The Quarterly Transit Report–August 2026

Quarterly service changes, Aug. 2026

Route 14

Metro Transit continues to implement the Network Now route plan. This quarter sees a major makeover of Route 14 Robbinsdale-West Broadway-Bloomington Avenue. Basic frequency improves from every 20 minutes to every 15 minutes and the route has been simplified. On the Bloomington Avenue end the hourly 14E branch to the Blue Line 38^thStreet Station has been eliminated except for a couple of school trips serving Roosevelt High School. Also eliminated are a small number of weekend short line trips ending at 56^th and Chicago. Now all trips run all the way to 66^th Street in Richfield, where they connect to Routes 515 and 7, creating a mini-transit center. The very south end of the line has been relocated to Richfield Parkway, significantly reducing the walking distance to Target and Home Depot.

The complicated north end had four different route variations including a branch that circulated through Golden Valley. It was confusing and splitting the 20-minute frequency among the branches created big gaps in the schedule. Now every 15-minute trip follows the traditional West Broadway route to the Robbinsdale Transit Center.

The Golden Valley branch has been spun off as new Route 48, with hourly service to downtown via Golden Valley Road, Penn Avenue and Glenwood Avenue. In the process it increases the number of trips on Glenwood by 50 percent, and returns local service to the stops on Penn not served by the C Line BRT.

Route 74 and Sunray Transit Center
Route 74 connects the Blue Line 46^th Street Station with Highland Village, Randolph Avenue and downtown St. Paul. It continues through the East Side on Minnehaha Avenue and terminates at the Sunray Transit Center. The weekday and Saturday frequency is improving from every 20 minutes to every 15 minutes. Like the Route 14, four branches on the east end have been reduced to a single main line trunk that takes the most direct route to Sunray, where it connects with the Gold Line BRT and six other routes. One of them is new Route 215, which travels to Maplewood Transit Center via McKnight Road. It partially replaces the eliminated Route 74 branches.

On the Randolph portion of Route 74, the hourly diversion to an apartment complex via Lexington, Jefferson and Edgcumbe has been eliminated. It’s also worth noting that the project includes retrofitting all remaining stops with concrete waiting pads, making them ADA accessible. Metro Transit has been plugging away at this for decades and there are still non-accessible stops.

New Metro micro zone
On October 1st and new Metro micro zone will be added in Brooklyn Park, based at the Starlite Transit Center. The zone will be about 2 by 3 miles, connecting at the transit center with Routes 504, 723, 724 and 725, and at Hennepin Technical College with Route 721.

Quarter mile stops
The upgrades to Routes 14 and 74 include eliminating bus stops to achieve quarter mile stop spacing. This is the new standard. Formerly eight stops to the mile, it doubles the distance between stops. Except close to the downtowns where buses tend to stop every block, I believe this policy is misguided. After more than a couple of miles from the downtowns the passenger boardings thin out and the buses stop less frequently. Eliminating stops in the great majority of cases saves no travel time, but does suppress ridership by increasing walk distances. A more nuanced policy would recognize that.

Transit signal priority

For years now I’ve been wondering what the term “transit signal priority” (TSP) really means for buses and light rail trains. How is it accomplished and how much does it actually speed up transit? 

To get answers I recently visited the Minneapolis Traffic Engineering Department, then Metro Transit.

Light rail

Priority for light rail is a different creature than priority for bus. For starters, vehicle detection is different, because light rail is a hard-wired system where the vehicles are detected by tripping relays as they pass. There are four strategies. 

1. The Blue Line along Hiawatha Avenue has full preemption. The approaching LRT overrides the signal cycle and guarantees a green for the train. Because the LRT is directly adjacent to Hiawatha, the signalized intersections for automobiles must respond to the preemption call so that all movements are coordinated and safe.
2. When light rail is on its own right of way that is not in or directly next to a public street, it receives the same preemption that a railroad freight train or passenger train would. The crossing lights flash, the gates come down and the train passes through the grade crossing without slowing. You’ll see a great deal more of this when the Green Line’s Southwest extension opens next year on a former railroad right of way.
3. On University Avenue in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and on 34^th Avenue in Bloomington, LRT has priority, which shortens a red or extends a green.
4. There is no TSP in downtown Minneapolis. That’s because almost all the intersections have significant traffic in both directions, often including crossing transit routes. However, light rail on 5^th Street in downtown benefits from pre-set timing. It allows light rail to make it from one downtown station to the next on a single green, load at the station on the red, then on to the next station on the next green. The same thing happens through the U of M between the East Bank and Stadium Village station,

Bus

Buses do not have preemption, only priority, which can lengthen a green or shorten a red. A radio transponder on the bus sends a call for priority to the next traffic signal, which has a detector card. Once the call is received, several things can prevent bus priority. Priority only happens if the bus is one or more minutes late. On-time status is provided by Metro Transit’s bus GPS. 

Several conditions have to be met before any priority will be given.

1. If the light happens to be green when the bus approaches the intersection and no priority is needed, the call is ignored.
2. If the bus is on schedule or early, no request is made.
3. If the signal’s TSP settings are not high enough to benefit the bus, signal timing is not modified.
4. A simultaneous call from an emergency vehicle overrides the bus call.
5. If there is not enough time in the signal cycle to give time to the bus, the call is ignored. This may happen if a pedestrian phase has been requested, which a bus can’t interrupt.

Metro Transit’s February 2024 study titled Transit Advantages and Transit Signal Priority found that calls for priority were successful 31-42 percent of the time. These graphs are rom the report.

If the bus call is successful, but traffic is backed up in front of the bus, the extra seconds of green time may be over before the bus reaches the intersection.

There are multiple variables that impact TSP. The bus’s scheduled running time is the first. If it’s too loose the bus is less likely to run late, and priority less likely to happen. If the running time is too tight, priority requests could be constant. That isn’t necessarily a problem: with unconditional TSP, every transit vehicle requests priority.

The other major variable is the percent of signal cycle time that is available for reallocation. If the bus is traveling on a busy street that already receives most of the green time, there is less time to give to priority. 

Before continuing with this explanation, it’s important to point out the technical challenges that confront TSP. It requires Metro Transit’s bus GPS and on-bus transponder to talk successfully to the signal systems of MnDOT, the counties and the cities. Not surprisingly, these are all different, of various vintages, with different levels of capability. 

Currently the amount of priority in Minneapolis is capped at 18.75 percent of the cycle length. With most cycles ranging from 60 to 100 seconds, that’s a max of 11.25 to 18.75 seconds of priority. Unlike preemption, TSP usually does not allow the signal to skip one of its phases. All it can do is steal time from them, and then only up to a certain number of seconds. That places real limits on the amount of priority.  If the signal software is sophisticated enough, it can implement a request to skip a phase of the signal cycle, which opens up the potential for greater priority. It’s currently happening on the Gold Line BRT.

One big obstacle to more priority, especially in Minneapolis, is whether the pedestrian phase always comes up during every cycle, or only when the pedestrian call button (“beg buttons” in Streets.mn parlance) is pressed. During Covid, to avoid transmitting the disease by touching the button, Minneapolis turned on the ped phase all the time. Not surprisingly, that proved popular with pedestrians and most of the ped phases still run full time. That greatly restricts the green time available for diversion to bus priority, so there’s a dilemma for the Traffic Engineering staff. One possibility would be to treat intersections with high ped volume differently from those with low volume. At present there’s no such policy. The only available way to get more bus priority is to reassign some of the walk time to buses when the walk time exceeds the time needed for pedestrians to safely cross that particular street.

How much and where?

Intersections are being equipped on a route by route basis, with these completed so far:

2 Franklin Crosstown
10 Central Avenue
A Line
B Line
C Line
5, D Line
E Line
Orange Line
Red Line

Priority is coming for Routes 14 and 74, plus more A Line intersections.

To date, 275 intersections have been equipped with TSP in these cities.

208 Minneapolis 
20 St. Paul
15 Bloomington
9 Columbia Heights
8 Richfield
6 Apple Valley
4 Brooklyn Center
2 Roseville
2 Falcon Heights
1 Burnsville

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lines are the priority. Several are programmed for the next few years. However, all Metro Transit buses have TSP transponders. Local buses on other routes get priority whenever they happen to approach an equipped intersection. 

I’ve concluded that bus priority, at least in its current form, is not the silver bullet we may have hoped for. Rather it’s just one tool among several that help speed buses. To put it in perspective, February 2024 Metro Transit report cited above looked at all the strategies for speeding up buses. Included were queue jumps at intersections, bus-only lanes, reducing the number of stops, placing stops beyond the intersection, level boarding at stops, off-bus fare collection, all-door boarding and route streamlining (straightening). As Table 1 from the report shows, TSP is a minor contributor to increased speeds. Exclusive bus lanes, stopping less often, level boarding and off-bus fare collection each have a bigger impact and collectively contribute much more than TSP. I think that will continue to be the case until the software permits TSP to skip a phase in a signal cycle, thus opening up considerably more time for bus priority. Even if that becomes technically possible, traffic engineers must still decide if it’s politically acceptable, given that everyone lobbies for a greater share of green time.

 The Transit Advantages and TSL Report

Although signal achieved modest travel time improvements, it was found to be less effective than bus-only lanes, stop consolidation, all-door boarding, level boarding, route streamlining and signal optimization.  

My conclusion is that it takes all the strategies listed above to make a significant reduction in bus travel time. TSP is simply one tool in the toolbox. However, its potential increases if two things happen.

1. More signals are equipped to accept a priority call that skips a signal cycle.

2. Pedestrian calls at intersections are limited to demand (pushing the button) instead of being turned on all the time.