Green Line Hide and Ride Because there are no official park and ride lots along the Green Line, it was expected that impromptu park-riding (dubbed “hide and ride”) would happen, just as it did along the Blue Line in Minneapolis. On December 3, John DeWitt and I drove the line after the morning rush hour to […]
You never hear much about urban land use or transit oriented development in Duluth–or transit itself for that matter. Those topics seems to be restricted to the Twin Cities and sometimes Rochester. I’ve become much more familiar with the Zenith City over the last three years spent writing the new book “Twin Ports by Trolley—The […]
New technology can have a profound impact on an old industry–in this case public transit. No single innovation has improved bus transit service like GPS. It has transformed bus operations and the customer experience. Here’s how. Reassuring the bus rider Taking a bus trip requires some trust on the part of the customer—trust that […]
Amid all the clamor over the Southwest LRT, and the high profile planning for Bottineau LRT and various BRT projects, a big transit system game changer has been quietly progressing under the radar. It’s Metro Transit’s Service Improvement Plan. For decades the funding for bus service improvements has been stagnant, sometimes keeping up with inflation, and sometimes falling […]
In 1970, when Metro Transit purchased the privately-owned Twin City Lines, the route system was essentially the old streetcar system plus some suburban extensions. Except for a handful of urban crosstowns and one suburban crosstown, all routes radiated from the two downtowns. If your origin and destination were in the suburbs or the outer […]
Yesterday Metro Transit put out a press release that Central Corridor ridership has doubled since the Green Line started up. That’s a true statement, but there’s more to it, so here are some additional numbers. Before Green Line construction started, Routes 16, 50, and 94 together were averaging 650,000 riders per month. During the construction period […]
Sidewalks in the suburbs have a long way to go, but many communities are chipping away at the backlog and that is to be commended. Edina, for example, has recently invalidated one of my earlier posted criticisms by building sidewalks along the France Avenue and York Avenue sides of Southdale. Even better, they eliminated one of […]
Although St. Paul’s traffic signals deserve most of the blame for slowing the Green Line, there’s room for improvement in Minneapolis as well. To be fair, Minneapolis deserves praise for its signal timing through the University of Minnesota campus, where trains are seldom delayed. They’ve also established a very good progression for westbound trains from […]
I just returned from a week in Tokyo, which represents the urbanist vision taken to its logical extreme. Imagine density without limit; fast, extremely frequent and flawlessly operated public transit, and narrow streets that preclude big cars so that most neighborhood trips are by bicycle. Also, imagine that there is no litter, even though waste […]
If you want to see the biggest transit show in Minnesota, or anywhere between Chicago and the West Coast for that matter, hop a bus to the new State Fair bus terminal between now and Labor Day. Almost half of fairgoers arrive by bus, and those are now concentrated on the northwest side of the […]