urbanMSP

Is it overly cynical of me to assume that Regional Rail is playing the private equity game of buying up a bunch of smaller companies to package for sale to someone else (in this case, a Class 1 railroad)?

It's genuinely frustrating to see so many pro-transit advocates advocating for such a terribly wasteful transit project.

I don't want to make broad assumptions but I don't know how long you could possibly have been following pro-transit advocacy, especially locally, without realizing that it ...

Must perform an analysis

Must use existing resources

"Would you look at that! We found that one of our existing project resources was a completed alternatives analysis between LRT and BRT that found that LRT was the correct mode for the corridor."

Fascinating, the first article only mentioned Danfoss being upset, not someone who already planned out the site. I take back the correction but not the spirit (that the city owes Danfoss or the developer anything)

More like the company that closed their facility and laid off local workers wants to ensure they can sell their property for the maximum amount they can get and feel entitled to the city’s deference in this matter.

I hope the city recognizes they don’t owe Danfoss anything.

Cool, now you just need to find the parkland that runs from the heart of Uptown to the heart of Northeast that you can leave as an open trench for 2-3 years for digging a shallow tunnel.

What’s that? There’s dense, urban neighborhoods and a river between Uptown and Northeast and you can’t dig a ...

I’m not saying that a theoretical Uptown to NE line would have lower ridership than the BLE.

I’m saying that the ridership of an Uptown to NE line would be unable to meet the cost benefit metrics of a federal grant program, either one that either exists today or a theoretical future one that could ...

House Transportation and Finance Committee is meeting today. Blue Line Extension to BRT is still a part of the proposed transportation bill as of now. Study is expected to come out of existing resources AKA lets delay and increase the cost of this project for no reason.

https://www.house.mn.gov ...

I get that a lot of this is a take it or leave it proposition for cities, but the idea that each major league team needs a specialized, single purpose built, taxpayer funded stadium so that the very rich people who benefit from them don’t have to negotiate with each other seems so wasteful and ...

Arterial BRT would be fine, though. And if we can do that for $50m, I don’t blame Ramsey County for not seeing the point in spending $250m on a slightly fancier bus.

Also to bring this full circle - the transportation omnibus didn't pass before the end of session. I don't imagine it'll be top priority for a special session, so this might be much ado about nothing now.

I mean between the choice of "try to make what's on the table work" and "aim for the moon and undoubtedly miss" I'm going to choose the former every time.

The adjusted ridership projections for the BLE might not be something we would have been excited about if originally proposed, but there isn't ...

Does it make more sense that Target is losing marketshare to Walmart because people aren't sitting in cubes and meeting rooms, or because the average American's paycheck has remained stagnant while the cost of everything has increased substantially? The entire market position of Target has been "pay ...

Disappointing for the workers who demonstrated that companies could be far more efficient focusing on outcomes versus making sure people were sitting in an arbitrary spot for arbitrary reasons, and I will laugh in the face of anyone who thinks this will have any effect towards repairing Target's ...

$150 million going to RiversEdge, which is cool.

Also a sum for transit signal priority implementation. Too much to hope that some of that would be on the Green Line?

I think they correctly realize they have city support to stack the student housing vertically and make way better use of the space than might have been considered acceptable 35 years ago.

Long term, with the Minneapolis extension, I totally agree that the Gold Line will move some trips from the Green Line, if those trips haven't already moved to the 94 bus.

It's just clear that the idea of Saint Paul being a co-equal transit destination to Minneapolis, complete with expensive ...

The first building of the Minneapolis Innovation Exchange is up for Planning Commission review.

59,825 sqft of office space across ten stories, plus ground level commercial.

I think the ridership on the Gold Line is exactly what I would have anticipated. Really good thing we're extending it to Minneapolis because the idea that a commuter in Woodbury was going to get on a bus and then transfer to the Green Line was just fantasy land thinking.

So instead of supporting a project that is all ready to go, has been refocused to serve denser areas of Minneapolis, and would provide a high frequency northwestern spine line to more efficiently deploy our bus routes around, you would rather chase the idea of an as of yet unstudied line that would ...