This floored me:
That's even worse than the Red Line!Buses would run every 10 minutes during rush hours and every 20 to 30 minutes in off-peak times. They would operate from 6 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week.
That's even worse than the Red Line!Buses would run every 10 minutes during rush hours and every 20 to 30 minutes in off-peak times. They would operate from 6 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week.
The only reason I care about this is that it dilutes the Bus "Rapid" Transit brand. This is a commuter line in every way imaginable.Pioneer Press: "Is the $485M St. Paul-to-Woodbury Gold Line bus worth it?"
This floored me:That's even worse than the Red Line!Buses would run every 10 minutes during rush hours and every 20 to 30 minutes in off-peak times. They would operate from 6 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week.
In his defense though part of it actually is/was on a farm (Kelly Farm, for ex.).+2
The Mall of America is a pretty well developed farm field.
Hopefully not developed at all.Gotta wonder how developed the farm fields in Brooklyn Park will be by the time we eventually build Bottineau.
Hate to break it to you guys, but transportation has pretty much always been motivated by land development. That includes transit and railroads as well as highways. The TCRT company never made a profit on fares alone, Thomas Lowry was a real estate magnate who profited from opening up and connecting streetcar suburbs for development. A streetcar line was built all the way out to lake Minnetonka to serve the new big island amusement park which the company owned.Hopefully not developed at all.Gotta wonder how developed the farm fields in Brooklyn Park will be by the time we eventually build Bottineau.
Justifying transit out to the metro edge with TOD language, as Metro Transit is doing, strikes me as bizarre. Transit and sprawl are not friends. They work against each other. The envisioned TOD presumably pictures an ADA compliant tree-lined sidewalk to the bus stop from a multifamily building with a Caribou in the ground floor. Maybe a somewhat lower minimum parking requirement if it's extremely progressive. This does not justify a half-billion dollar bus line. You're out in the middle of nowhere and the sidewalk connects to almost nothing else and the adjacent land use pattern is overwhelmingly auto-centric and the bus is only used by a sliver of residents who happen to work in DWTN St. Paul, which itself is not exactly a booming employment center.
Metro Transit should drop the pretense of TOD. This is a largely political project. It makes actual BRT look bad.
Sure, historically (to a point - highways historically were financed by redistributed gas tax revenue from the Federal Government, not property development). But is the Gold Line going to raise the value of land so much that the people who build it are going to make a killing? No - that's preposterous. The link between developer and transportation service provider has been severed. That's not to say it doesn't happen elsewhere - in Hong Kong the subway system is funded by the property development arm of the transit agency. But it's not the case here. Arguably, you could say that since the CTIB will partially pay for the line, the counties want new exurban development to increase the tax base. But that's a very tenuous argument (and a genuinely terrible one) in favor of building a BRT line.Hate to break it to you guys, but transportation has pretty much always been motivated by land development. That includes transit and railroads as well as highways. The TCRT company never made a profit on fares alone, Thomas Lowry was a real estate magnate who profited from opening up and connecting streetcar suburbs for development. A streetcar line was built all the way out to lake Minnetonka to serve the new big island amusement park which the company owned.Hopefully not developed at all.Gotta wonder how developed the farm fields in Brooklyn Park will be by the time we eventually build Bottineau.
Justifying transit out to the metro edge with TOD language, as Metro Transit is doing, strikes me as bizarre. Transit and sprawl are not friends. They work against each other. The envisioned TOD presumably pictures an ADA compliant tree-lined sidewalk to the bus stop from a multifamily building with a Caribou in the ground floor. Maybe a somewhat lower minimum parking requirement if it's extremely progressive. This does not justify a half-billion dollar bus line. You're out in the middle of nowhere and the sidewalk connects to almost nothing else and the adjacent land use pattern is overwhelmingly auto-centric and the bus is only used by a sliver of residents who happen to work in DWTN St. Paul, which itself is not exactly a booming employment center.
Metro Transit should drop the pretense of TOD. This is a largely political project. It makes actual BRT look bad.
But even so, the resulting development from that transportation was not characterized by unsustainable sprawl and taxation-inefficient land usage patterns. By "streetcar suburb", do you mean something like Willernie; Union Park (east of Prior and south of University in St. Paul); or the area north of Front Ave. near the Half Time Rec? Notwithstanding their function as bedroom communities for people who worked 25min away (at the time) in downtown St. Paul, these were -- and often still are -- fairly dense, human-scaled and walkable places with local service businesses and retail.Hate to break it to you guys, but transportation has pretty much always been motivated by land development. That includes transit and railroads as well as highways. The TCRT company never made a profit on fares alone, Thomas Lowry was a real estate magnate who profited from opening up and connecting streetcar suburbs for development.
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