Following my post on potential Twin Cities rapid transit routes, which you can find here, next is the topic of regional/commuter rail in the Twin Cities region. Minnesota has one example of regional rail; the Northstar Line between Minneapolis and Big Lake in the northwest region operating on existing BNSF Railway track. The Northstar Line is how […]
In the last post, I discussed which foreign cities are most like Minneapolis in terms of population distribution. In this post, I’m going to present some numbers about the transit systems of those cities, in order to determine how extensive Minneapolis’ transit system could be, given the distribution of its population. Transit share in New […]
Here is Part 1 in the series. We took the first Northstar headed out of town, at the crack of 11 am. We just barely made it to the platform in time: I had to rearrange some of my pack, and it took us a couple tries to find how to get down to the station from […]
May 21, 2016 Lowertown, Downtown 15 miles The grand and solemn Saint Paul Union Depot is a train station. Although this seems patently obvious, Union Depot in fact took a 43 year break – from 1971 until 2014 – as the train station for Saint Paul. Today, Saint Paul Union Depot is a transit hub, […]
Following an extended hiatus to surf the torrent of government news these days, I’m back with another set of maps to explain the current situation with passenger rail in the U.S. and a possible vision for the future. This time, I’m focusing on our neighbor to the southwest, South Dakota. For my previous posts on […]
Please note that this should not be confused with the Dan Patch Corridor, a proposed regional/commuter/intercity rail line between Minneapolis and Northfield, and possibly further south. The original Dan Patch Line, known as the High Line, was built in 1910 between South Minneapolis and Northfield. Before the Dan Patch Line (later Minneapolis Northfield & Southern […]
May 20, 2016 Macalester-Groveland, Desnoyer Park 10 Miles Stonebridge. Today, it’s little more than a two block long street in Macalester-Groveland. From the 1910s into the early ‘30s, however, Stonebridge was the grandest estate in Saint Paul. To this day, the mystique of Stonebridge remains fascinating to local historians because of estate’s size, extravagance and […]
After the success of the streets.mn Red Line trip, I started thinking about other trips that could be done to mix streets.mn with some of the new-ish transit modes that many of us don’t use often. With Metro Transit running a holiday train on December 9, the timing works out comfortably for us to do […]
On October 1st, Metro Transit will increase fares on all buses and trains by 25 cents. While that small dollar amount may seem inconsequential, this decision comes as a culmination to a protracted debate. Transit advocates have argued that the fare increase unfairly and disproportionately affects the poor. Proponents do not necessarily disagree, but argue […]
Amtrak, the country’s intercity passenger rail company, has had its funding stuck in the doldrums ever since it was founded in 1971. There have been sporadic bursts of money to the government-sponsored company, mostly to invest in new locomotives and train cars and the occasional upgrade to the tracks on particular routes. However, there hasn’t […]