Buses are required by law to stop at railroad crossings (except where exempted, such as the light rail tracks on University Avenue in the Twin Cities). This is for safety reasons, the law was implemented in Utah for school buses after a terrible accident. The Deseret News reports: DeVon Andrus of Cedar City wrote, “I endorse everything […]
For a few different reasons, I started doing urban walks around Minneapolis/St. Paul areas in early July. It started out with just walking, but it got boring. I then figured why not take pictures of local businesses and areas of interest, learn more about my fine metro during these walks and spread some local love […]
To me, mass transit is all about creating opportunities for connections between people and their communities. Beyond the very literal connection of traveling from one place to another, our transit lines have the potential to help people explore their surroundings in new ways and make unexpected discoveries. I think a lot about this. How do […]
I’ve appreciated the streets.mn blogging about Central Corridor coulda-woulda-shoulda’s. Other than signal-timing, I think it’s fair to say they mainly relate to pedestrian needs. Well, pedestrian needs have gotten short shrift to date for the SWLRT West Lake Station (also future Midtown terminus) – although it may not appear that way at first glance. Unfortunately, until now, […]
Transit projects make for easy political targets because of high construction costs. They have prices in the many millions of dollars, and occasionally tip into the billions, which brings critics out of the woodwork. It’s difficult to know whether certain projects are justifiable or not, particularly because different modes of transportation concentrate and spread out […]
Here on Streets.MN, much has been discussed about pedestrian crossings, signage, and traffic signals on the Green Line. Because of this, it may be useful to look at what our European peers are doing. This urban railway in Slovakia is more of a tramway, but as you can see it has some dedicated right of […]
As the Green Line opened on June 14th, most of us were just excited to finally have a new service plying the busy Central Corridor area, but many were keeping an eye on their clocks and watches, checking its speed against the schedules that had been posted a couple of weeks earlier. On opening weekend, […]
Public officials and planners made a huge mistake when they chose to place the Central Corridor “Green Line” Light Rail Transit (LRT) on University Avenue. Enchanted by federal money and obsessed with dreams of economic development, they forgot the obvious purpose for a light rail train: better mass transit. We must recognize this huge error […]
On Wednesday, Metro Transit provided ridership figures for the Green Line’s second week of operation, including a station-by-station breakdown. They didn’t give specific ridership numbers for each station, but they did give percentages of the total to two decimal places, which is more than enough for us to pretend that they did. The line had […]
The City of Saint Paul produced this brief look at highlights from the Metro Green Line’s opening day which includes a couple shots of my family and a lot of smiling passengers.