urbanMSP

Wow. Huge improvement to have 15-minute service on the 11 all the way to Columbia Heights, at least for this guy who works on St. Anthony Parkway and has thus far had to roll the dice about whether the next bus would actually go that far north.

Also really good to see the 94 continuing to be ...

Have they successfully gotten anything built since Latitude 45, which must be ten years old by now?

The ground and skyway levels of The Crossings, at 2nd and Washington, are commercial condos. I've assumed that's what's led to the more interesting business mix (electrical contractor, Oromo TV studio, etc) than the average downtown tower has.

Heartbreaking setback for the Minneapolis Parking and Recreation Board, but it looks like a huge improvement for non-car users of the parkway.

The 2 and 11 were knocked out in the early stage of the last round of BRT planning (that selected the F, G, and H Lines) as being too convoluted to make a legible BRT line out of.

I think this is a good indicator of why the BRT planning process needs to get away from just upgrading routes as-is ...

Not sure how I feel about that. It makes sense for both events (the World Cup and Amtrak's fleet shortage), but I fear they'll end up buying the equipment and then the rest of the Northstar equipment will get sold off.


I mean, they won't sell the equipment unless the service is cancelled, and ...

Yeah, same here. Like, I'll log in to type out a post, and I have to copy the whole thing to my clipboard because three times out of five it'll tell me that I'm not logged in anymore.

Mankato's pretty much the same distance from downtown Minneapolis as St. Cloud is, and Rochester's only about 10 miles futher, so if an extended Northstar was still regional rail, I'd argue that Rochester and Mankato would be too.

Lotta surface parking, but on the other hand, what else are you going to do with that lot?

Also, that Grocery logo in the renderings is an absolute masterwork of being obviously Aldi while maintaining plausible deniablity about it possibly being any grocery store.

Makes sense to me. My particular hobbyhorse is that the HERC property is the ideal spot for a downtown utility hub as we stare down the barrel of electrification generally *and* the existing district energy system having to decarbonize specifically. There's going to need to be at least one new ...

My understanding is that the sticking point with rerouting MN-5 onto Shepard is that Shepard doesn't have a full interchange with 35E, just the southern half of a diamond. I guess a turnback would include just officially truncating it at the Mississippi River Blvd interchange at the east side of the ...

Hopefully Hempl still has $15M or so of free cash floating around their bank account.

That could be a really great addition to downtown. I wonder what this bill would do, unless it's just to allow for a special liquor license.
State Rep. Katie Jones, DFL-Minneapolis, introduced a bill earlier this month that seeks to allow LaSalle Plaza to operate the food hall.


Found the ...

I'm curious how these were selected. It's strange that some of them were carefully pieced together from segments of other lines, like the 2/63 combo, and some are just an existing infrequent suburban (or urban) route plopped onto the map, weird industrial meanders and all.

My votes would be ...

I'm 90% sure that the bi-level doors would line up with single-level Horizon cars like they're using on the Borealis. It's probably not ADA-accessible though, I don't think there's a way for a wheelchair to get up the couple of steps from the bottom level to the mid-level where the doors are.

You ...

Note that it passed the Republican-controlled Transportation Finance and Policy committee on a party-line vote, not the actual (tied) House.

I wonder if the bus overpass and the CP Spur are in there in part to be cut when people understandably raise their eyebrows at the project cost without significantly compromising the line. The overpass especially is an absurd alternative to just, like, installing signal priority to make sure the one ...

Is the diversion onto the CP spur just an excuse to buy it with transit money?

Maybe I'm just missing it, but is there anything in there that defines what the different time periods mean? I'm assuming PM Rush still goes until 6:30, and evening starts then, but where's the transition to Night? 10pm? A few routes mention "late night" service, does that imply service past ...

Very cool! I'm hoping it's a precursor to eventually allowing fare purchases through the app like other cities do. It's so nice when traveling to have a single app that just works pretty much wherever you go.