A Failed Commute Reveals a Gap in SouthWest Transit Service

About two and a half years ago, I started a job that requires me to commute from my home near the southeast corner of Lake Harriet to Chanhassen, an outer-ring suburb about 15 miles outside of Minneapolis best known for being the home of Prince’s recording studio, Paisley Park. I drive twice a day down Route 62 and 212, about 30 miles round trip, along with just under 7,000 other Minneapolitans who work in the southwest suburbs of Eden Prairie, Chanhassen and Chaska.

I do not have an innate aversion to driving. Growing up in suburban New Jersey, I learned how to be Zen in stop-and-go traffic. But in the past several years, I have felt a growing sense of urgency to help slow global warming — and, for me, last year’s horrifyingly mild winter manifested the little time we have left to make fixes. In Minnesota, transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, so I’ve resolved to do my part to minimize vehicle miles traveled.

In the last two years I have replaced 30% of my vehicle miles with biking and busing, but my 30-mile daily commute has remained stubbornly irreducible. Periodically, I explore alternatives to get to work. My work affords me significant flexibility to set my hours, so I am not limited by a tight schedule. I eye the status of the Cedar Lake Trail, which would allow me to bike nearly the entire distance off road, but the 17-mile bike ride is intimidating even with an e-bike. The possibility of getting stranded with a flat tire, a dead battery or in hazardous weather eight and a half miles from both work and home is concerning. I check the Metro Transit carpool matching system, but no other profiles with my commute.

Most frustrating of all, the transit agency that is responsible for this region, SouthWest Transit, has a single reverse-commuting trip, the 600, that is unworkable. This bus leaves Minneapolis by 6:42 a.m., nearly a full hour before my son’s daycare opens. According to the Census Bureau’s On The Map data tool, there is a striking balance of 6,750 commuters traveling daily from Minneapolis to Eden Prairie, Chanhassen and Chaska and 6,950 traditional commuters from those municipalities heading into Minneapolis. Yet, despite having 22 eastbound trips into Minneapolis in the morning, not a single one of those buses picks up commuters in Minneapolis on the way back to the southwest suburbs. My frustration with this logistical choice hits a peak when I find myself driving on Route 62 next to an empty SW Transit bus returning from downtown.

Driving along 62 in the morning near the France Avenue exit, next to an empty SW Transit bus. Both of us are headed to the same place.

After seeing one too many empty buses, I needed to try something different for these morning commutes. I decided that using SW Transit’s Prime service would be the most realistic option to get to work without driving alone in a car. SW Prime is a microtransit service provided by SW Transit. In principle, it works like rideshare services such as Uber and Lyft. A user with an app requests a ride from one location to another defined by the user. The difference is that SW Prime uses shuttle buses, can pick up several riders along the way, and the rides cost less than $5 in one direction.

SW Transit provides different versions of this service. Their Prime service covers the limited region of Chanhassen, Chaska, Eden Prairie and Victoria. Trips must start and end in this region to qualify for a Prime ride. More recently, they have added what they call their Edge service, which connects their Prime service area with Shakopee, the I-494 corridor, Edina and the Mall of America. For $5 you can request a ride to or from the Edge region as long as it starts or ends in the Prime region.

SW Prime Edge service regions. The I-494 corridor has the largest amount of overlap with Metro Transit service.

Though the Edge area still does not cover my home, the 494 corridor extends along the South Metro area and overlaps with Metro Transit service that is accessible to me, including Routes 4 and 18, the Orange and D line BRT, and the Blue Line light rail. I figured I could work out the best way to get to the Edge area using Metro Transit and then request a ride to get to work. It is not the most efficient use of transit, but, if I’m sharing the shuttle with others, it’s potentially better than driving by myself.

Planning the Trip

Determined to try this, I started putting together a plan. Because of the seeming flexibility of SW Prime Edge, I had a lot of questions:

Where should I request a pickup along the I-494 corridor?

Which bus line could I take to get into the SW Edge region?

How long would I have to wait to get picked up?

I checked the SW Prime app at 8 a.m. one day and set up the ride I planned to request to see what a typical wait time would be. Before hitting the “confirm” button, I saw that the app estimated a 25-minute wait for pick up. That seemed reasonable.

Ultimately, I worked out that the best option was to get on Route 4 at around 8 a.m. and request the ride from SW Prime once I got on the bus. I can expect to get to Lyndale and 494 around 8:20, and, by the time I get there, it should only be a few minutes’ wait. I could wait in a Starbucks parking lot, which provides easy access to 494 and makes it quick for the drive to get onto the highway.

The plan. Metro Transit would be able to get me to 494, and SW Prime would do the bulk of the work, shuttling me down 494 to Chanhassen.

Following Through

On December 12, after biking my 3-year-old son to daycare that morning and returning home, I walked over to the stop for the 4. The Southbound 4L was a few minutes late that morning. While I waited, I requested a SW Prime pickup at Lyndale and 494 at 8:03. Before confirming the ride request, the app said to expect a 25-minute wait for pickup. “Perfect,” I thought. I’ll get to the stop and wait just a few minutes.

I confirmed the request and the ride was accepted. Perhaps as an omen of what was to come, the wait time immediately increased to 42 minutes. I paused and weighed my options to abort quickly or continue on with the additional delay. Ultimately, I figured that the bus would probably take a little longer than scheduled to get to 494, and the wait for the SW Prime shuttle would still be tolerable. And according to the SW Prime app, I would still get dropped off at work between 9:03 and 9:15 a.m. Not ideal, but workable with my flexible schedule.

I got on the bus at 8:07 and headed south on Lyndale. A little nervous with this new commute, I periodically checked SW Prime’s ETA at the pickup location. By the time we drove under Route 62, the ETA had dropped to about 22 minutes. When I checked a few minutes later, the time started going back up. I got off the bus at 77th and Lyndale and headed to the parking lot next to a Starbucks on 494. By 8:30, in the 27 minutes after the initial request, the estimated wait for pick up had only dropped about 15 minutes. From the initial estimate of 25 minutes, the wait had grown to close to an hour. I decided to wait for the ride. What else could I do?

Contributing to the disappearing sense of reliability, the SW Prime app showed a picture of the driver who had accepted my ride and was supposed to drive me to work. After about 20 minutes, that picture changed to a different person, and then about 20 minutes later the picture swapped back to the original driver. It felt like my ride was being tossed around like a game of hot potato.

While I stood outside in 12 degree weather, the wait time continued to drift randomly. At some point, it dropped to 12 minutes, providing a brief hope that I would ultimately get picked up, but then headed back up to 18 minutes.

Finally at 9:05, over an hour after my ride request was accepted and still indicating a cumulative wait time of over an hour and 15 minutes — three times longer than the initial 25-minute estimate — and with no expectation it would ever drop below 10 minutes, I conceded defeat. I canceled my ride and ordered a $27 Lyft ride, including tip, to work.

Sitting in the Lyft to work, I kept asking myself, “Why is SW Transit so resistant to bringing people into their service area?” Despite having buses that could pick up riders on the return from downtown Minneapolis, they don’t provide reverse commute express buses, and their Edge service obviously is unreliable. Can people without cars only get to and from the SW suburbs in a private rideshare for over $50 a day? As someone with a rather cushy job and flexible schedule, this was not a major expense, but, for someone else with less disposable income, who may be required to clock in, sudden car trouble can quickly make this region inaccessible. It’s frustrating to see the agency neglect basic daily transit services while they tout a pilot program for driverless vehicles.

Reflections

In the days since this failed trip, I drive to work mulling these questions, but I also wonder “Could I be asking too much of a suburban transit agency?” Ten years ago, SW Transit provided the 684, a reverse-commuting route. This route had five westbound morning trips with 25- to 40-minute headways. It had issues maintaining ridership, and perhaps SW Transit made the correct choice to discontinue the route rather than rework it to be more useful for commuters.

I have found that an illustrative comparison can be made between SW Transit and another suburban transportation agency serving west metro suburbs, Plymouth Metrolink. The regions of these two transit agencies are similar. Both are comparable distances from Downtown Minneapolis, sitting on the 494 loop. Both regions have employers that rely on significant numbers of reverse commuters from Minneapolis. Businesses in Plymouth employ 3,800 people who live in Minneapolis, compared with Chaska, Chanhassen and Eden Prairie’s 6,750. Despite the shared characteristics between these two regions, SW Transit’s single reverse-commuting trip stands in contrast to Plymouth Metrolink’s seven reverse-commute trips with half-hour headways between 5.30 a.m. and 8.30 a.m. If Plymouth is capable of supporting this service with fewer potential customers, what is holding SW Transit back?

The timetables for two reverse commuter bus lines. On the top, the 747 operated by Plymouth Metrolink offers seven trips in the morning for 3,800 potential reverse commuters. In contrast, at the bottom is SW Transit’s single trip for the 600 for 6,750 potential reverse commuters.

I attended a SW Transit Commissioners’ meeting in September 2024 to raise these issues during their public comment period. After my brief comments, Commissioner McKayla Hatfiield of Chaska directed a basic question to the executive leadership of SW Transit: “Why don’t buses pick people up on the way back from downtown?” There must be a good reason why SW Transit neglects to collect any fare from riders traveling westbound in the morning despite having buses returning in that direction. Surprisingly, the answer was, “I don’t know.”

I have been told that SW Transit is going to be doing a full review of all routes this year. My hope is that this review will reveal that neglecting riders attempting to travel to the southwest suburbs from Minneapolis is a mistake. Providing transit into their region would be useful not only for reverse commuters and their employers, but also for local amenities and attractions. Paisley Park, Chanhassen Dinner Theatres, the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum and Eden Prairie Center, among others, could all benefit from transit service that brings Minneapolitans into their region.

Until then, I have few options for my commute. I will have to continue to drive down Route 62 staring at empty buses.