Hello, streets.mn readers! My name is John Charles Wilson and I have a history of commenting on this blog. Now I am taking the plunge and writing posts of my own. This post is planned to be the first in a series about public transit in the Twin Cities suburbs, how good or bad it […]
Your author has spent a good deal of time in Lakeville. My wife grew up there, and it’s where my in-laws still live. In fact, our family of four lived there for a summer in between selling and buying a house. My father-in-law runs a small business there, and I’ve even spent a number of […]
As I have shared before, I drive a hybrid hatchback, a 2015 Toyota Prius. To reduce my carbon footprint, I try to walk or scoot for many of my shorter trips, and I also check bus schedules for medium trips, like to a coffee shop in another neighborhood. It can be very frustrating, even living […]
I started writing this piece in my head on December 2nd, a cold, slushy evening on which I attempted to take the bus from downtown Minneapolis to Lyndale and 28th in order to attend a public meeting about street safety. I say “attempted” because—although I did eventually get to where I wanted to go—very little […]
A wave of faster limited stop transit services will arrive in the next few years. The Orange Line BRT (I-35W Minneapolis-Burnsville, replacing Route 535) is fully funded and construction is underway. The B Line (overlaid on Route 21 Selby-Lake), D Line (overlaid on Route 5 Chicago-Fremont), E Line (overlaid on Route 6 Southdale-Hennepin-4th Street SE), […]
Tired of encountering “tagging, vomit and broken glass” at your regular bus shelter? You can “adopt” it, courtesy of a Metro Transit program.
Quite a bit of the dialogue about how to improve transit, density, and general urbanism tends to be binary. Either you are for high density and the corresponding transportation solutions affiliated with that, or you may think that the expansion of park & ride facilities in suburban and exurban areas is the way forward. Like […]
Earlier this year Metro Transit and the City of Minneapolis did a demonstration of rush hour bus lanes on Hennepin Avenue between Franklin Avenue and Uptown Transit Station. Bus service has always been extremely slow due to morning backups from I-94 and afternoon backups from Lagoon Avenue. The demo worked just fine, but relied on […]
I’d like to talk about the most fun part of my morning commute: biking along Pennsylvania Ave between Rice St and Lafayette. And by fun I mean exhilarating. And by exhilarating I mean terrifying. When I moved away from the East Side, I did so knowing that getting to work was going to be quite […]
If you take away anything from the first two of this series of articles, it should be that we need to know more. Only Metro Transit has the data and staff hours needed to do a thorough review of the options for aBRT expansion. But such a review is clearly needed. While my basic analysis […]