The Twin Cities is welcoming a new transit service on Saturday: The METRO Red Line bus service along Cedar Avenue from the Mall of America in Bloomington to the eponymous Apple Valley Transit Station. The 10-mile route will have five stops: Aside from the endpoints, it also hits Cedar Grove Transit Station at Nicols Road […]
The Zip Rail project to connect the Twin Cities to Rochester with a fast train service has finally entered into a Tier I Environmental Impact Statement process, more than two decades after the concept of connecting Rochester was first dangled in front of the public. The EIS team held their first open houses this past […]
Real-time arrival information for buses in the Twin Cities area has been publicly available since 2008, when Metro Transit added NexTrip functionality to their website. It was updated a year later to include a mobile web version. Eventually the communication protocol used under the covers for both the mobile and desktop websites was simplified and […]
Something remarkable happened last year: The country’s mix of alternative-fueling infrastructure for cars suddenly flipped from being dominated by biofuels and lighter fossil-fuel byproducts to being primarily composed of electric charging stations—at least if you go by the pure numbers.There is an asterisk by “Electric” in the legend of the chart above, and the footnote […]
This is the headquarters of the Metropolitan Council, the Twin Cities regional planning agency. It’s located in downtown Saint Paul. Notice anything about how it’s laid out? If you ever walk past, it may take a moment, but you’ll soon realize that the building doesn’t have any entrances onto the street. There are doors […]
The proposed Northern Lights Express train from Minneapolis to Duluth (“NLX”) took another step forward on Monday last week when the long-awaited Tier 1 Service Level Environmental Assessment was finally released. Initially expected to be completed by October 2011, the environmental review was delayed as the scale of the project was reassessed after early cost […]
The idea of induced demand is a strange one. You would think that building a highway or widening a road would alleviate congestion by spreading out the existing traffic across more space, and that would be the end of it. Toss in a little extra width in anticipation of population growth, and it should be […]
I love the University of Minnesota. With 50,000 students plus large contingents and staff, it is a city within a city, and one remarkably distinct from the rest of the Twin Cities. There’s a tremendous degree of pedestrian activity each day, particularly between class periods. The better parts of campus are highly permeable, with small […]
The Minneapolis Department of Community Planning & Economic Development (CPED) has put up a document describing the development planned at the former Totino’s site in Northeast Minneapolis, the namesake of General Mills’ Totino’s pizza brand. The pizza joint had been a landmark of the city, but the building has fallen into disrepair. There are efforts […]
As I first started exploring Metro Transit’s bus network in college, I was struck by how much freeway mileage in the Twin Cities doesn’t carry any transit service. Having grown up near Rochester and typically only visiting or driving through the metro area a few times per year, my mental map was mostly built up […]