With the recent news about Green Line training and test trains taking long amounts of time to travel end-to-end from Saint Paul Union Depot to Target Field in Minneapolis, I thought it would be useful to take a look at how long it takes to travel a similar distance on existing buses (according to the […]
In order to combat continuing delays being experienced on congested freight networks along the Empire Builder line, Amtrak has announced the immediate availability of a new transportation service along the corridor from the Pacific Northwest to Chicago, developed under a “skunk works” joint venture with Amazon.com. The new service, Point-to-Point Person-in-Package PrimeAir Program (P2P PiP […]
This winter, through holes in the polar vortices, a few brave souls trekked cross-country along a new electric highway which winds from California to the Northeast. A route put together by Tesla Motors allowed a team of company employees to cut the coast-to-coast driving time for an electric vehicle to just over three days—more than […]
I verge on being a train nut, and if I’m honest, I wish passenger service could be reactivated on most of the remaining rail lines in the U.S. The rail network faces extreme competition from (seemingly) free roads, so it’s always easy to bash the expense of (re)implementing train service, but there are many cases […]
How would you choose a route for a transit line? It’s a difficult task, particularly in a region as big as the Twin Cities. Developed land stretches out for miles and miles before finally tapering off into farmland or patches of wilderness. Some parts of the region have natural geographic constraints due to rivers and […]
A rail crew replaces a switch on October 4th in preparation for reconnecting the Saint Paul Union Depot to allow Amtrak service. Amtrak, the National Passenger Railroad Corporation, could cease to be a “national” network if the federal government shutdown drags on. The company has said that it can ride out a short-term shutdown, on […]
The construction of Interstate 94 through St. Paul is often seen as a black mark on the city’s history, but there was one fairly positive outcome from the planning processes of the time—there is a very regular interval of pedestrian connections across the freeway, with bridges almost every quarter-mile from the city’s downtown to the […]
For Streets.mn’s “Our Fair State” series during the Minnesota State Fair, I don’t really have a good story to tell about an out-state event. I do, however, live less than a mile from the State Fairgrounds and wanted to share a little of what this heavily pedestrian-oriented event is like to be around the other […]
Here are two graphs I made of accelerometer data logged by my smartphone during two different trips I took on Metro Transit lines back in June: One on light rail, and the other on a regular bus. They were just experiments and shouldn’t be relied on too much, but they do show that the two […]
This is what the region’s planned light-rail system looks like if you cut it off at the city limits of Minneapolis. It includes the Hiawatha, Central, Southwest, and Bottineau lines. While the first two largely stick to arterial corridors, Southwest (the planned Central/Green Line extension) and Bottineau (the Hiawatha/Blue Line extension) go as quickly as […]