Metro Transit has been working hard to become greener, with quite a bit of success. The results were recently presented in a staff report to the Met Council, excerpted below. Increasing bus MPG from 4.1 to 4.7 may not seem like much, but it’s a 15% improvement. Buses aren’t the only area of improvement. Metro […]
I took a trip on the Red Line today to check out the new Cedar Grove station, and see out how the Twin Cities’ first BRT is doing. It’s fast and frequent, but it runs through a landscape that is designed to impede transit use. Thanks to the new station, which eliminated a very irritating detour, it’s […]
The GOP majorities in the Minnesota House and Senate have proposed budget cuts to public transit funding by as much as 40 percent, that could have catastrophic consequences for Metro Transit riders. Local advocacy groups Transportation Forward and Transit for Livable Communities are holding a rally tonight at 6pm at the Rice Street / Capitol Green Line Station. Independent from […]
We may live in the city, but nature, though often drowned out, is still there and capable of putting on a show. I live near Lake Calhoun and this is spring migration season. This year the birds are coming through, and in greater numbers than usual. We had an early thaw this year, but normally […]
From the first expression of interest to the actual hauling of passengers, the gestation period for light rail transit in Minneapolis/Saint Paul turned out to be 44 years. When the Twin Cities Metropolitan Transit Commission (MTC) was created in 1967, the prevailing vision for rail transit was what we now call “heavy rail”, completely grade […]
The retrenchment begins With this quarterly schedule change, Metro Transit has begun trimming bus service, and this is probably the first of many cuts. There are two reasons for this: After the longest run of annual ridership increases since before World War I, bus ridership has dipped. This appears to track with much lower gasoline […]
The Ford Plant and the Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant (the Arsenal) offer rare opportunities to design new neighborhoods from the ground up. Both will feature a mix of commercial and residential, will be pedestrian friendly, and will incorporate public transit. In terms of transit potential, however, the two could hardly be more different. Transit to […]
December service changes Once again it’s a pretty quiet service change. There are two suburban route extension stories. Route 722 has always been a short 2-mile shuttle from the Brooklyn Center Transit Center to the apartment concentrations near 65th Avenue N. and Dupont. It runs every half hour. Now hourly service has been extended seven […]
Service Improvements As funding is available, Metro Transit is implementing the Service Improvement Plan (SIP) that was approved last year. Looking beyond the high profile improvements like LRT and Arterial BRT, the plan calls for increasing frequencies on the urban local bus routes that have always been the backbone of the system. This recognizes the reality that regular […]
In order to accommodate riders with disabilities, transit agencies are required to make fixed route vehicles (buses and trains) accessible. They are also required to provide a demand responsive service (dial-a-ride) in the same geographic area and during the same time periods as the fixed route service. In the Twin Cities, that service is largely […]