urbanMSP

When my daughter was little and we were still trying hard to be a one-car family I used to ride the 21 with her frequently. We encountered a fair number of drunks, gang arguments, and drug dealers, but I only witnessed a couple drug transactions, one belligerent drunk harassing us, and one actual fi...

Unless you're a 20 year old girl or traveling for more than a month a carry on and personal item should be more than sufficient. I like trains. I rode Amtrak all the time when I lived on the east coast and take various line when I go back out there. But the train needs to be competitive on price an...

Consider that monorail *has to* go up high - meaning that it's less flexible and harder to adapt to varying conditions. Also consider how massive - heavy, unsightly, and expensive - monorail switches are. Factor in the very high cost of station construction and the bigger weight issues, and you can ...

It's incredibly tiring the way Minnescraper / UrbanMSP discussions of Southwest always have to go back to "Only 3C made sense". 3C wasn't chosen. Get over it, and move on. I don't care if you liked it better. Personally, I happen to prefer transit projects that are politically feasible to ...

Hey wait, isn't this thread titled, "Intercity Rail to Chicago"?

TGV would be practical and relatively cheap to build, but it requires dedicated ROW in current US regulatory climate - once it has any junctions with conventional rail, it falls under the insane FRA rules about being able to survive a head-on with a freight train, which obviously no legitimately hig...

With 119 views so far, it will need to reach a broader audience to convert any skeptics. I also think this kind of promotional piece generally serves more steel the resolve of those who are already "converted" rather than convert anybody - it's not exactly flashy, and Peter is given about ...

The UM Transitway to SLP West End idea is a great one, but there's a small wrinkle: the trackage on 5th downtown couldn't handle that much traffic. Assuming the Green Line runs every 7.5 minutes and the Blue Line runs every 7.5 minutes, even a 15-minute interval on this line would mean twenty trains...

Not a bad idea at all, but our region seems to be completely uninterested in light rail projects that aren't full-blown independent corridors by themselves. Also, I do wonder how the would choose to run it operationally - having half of the trains go south and the other half follow this spur might w...

^ This. People are acting like they're going to be building a busy highway through here. It's going to be one train every two hours or so. That makes the $123 million price tag to relocate even more ludacris when you could have rail and freight coexist in a corridor which already exists and one way...

As long as the developments in this area front the existing sidewalk on street level, leaving the trench area available for a future concourse of train platforms!

Motion seconded.

^^ For both of you above, the history of Minneapolis did not begin in the 1990's ! lol! All you need to do is take a look at Philip Johnson's IDS tower to see the huge influence one building can have. It clearly paved the way for Wells Fargo, Capella, and other projects to happen and changed the wh...

The breathtaking and visionary IDS 2 proposal was hands down the best skyscraper design ever proposed in Minneapolis. It would have completely transformed downtown and set off a remarkable urban renaissance unprecedented in the history of our city. Necessary repost . Elf, you might be my hero for t...

Mndible and fotoapparatic both raise very good points. I want to raise another: for many trips, these intermediate stations will be the inner end of the trip, not the outer, and for those trips cutting a station would be horribly inconvenient. I work on the West Bank and, despite the University's cl...

Okay, so I took a few minutes to find the information. Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be too much documentation for the public about where they're at, but it's a joint project between CTIB and Met Council; it looks like CTIB is taking the lead. The GEARS committee got an update on the current...

Dayton has instructed his administration to study a "program of projects" approach to these projects, to determine if it would make more sense to approach the federal government with a master plan and staged construction in a centrally-organized way. That effort is well underway and I beli...

I'd be really surprised, frankly. I think they'd rather not talk about it, and at this point it would be politically very risky to suggest spending a couple hundred mil more on a project that's so incredibly underperformed expectations. We all understand here why that's not fair and why it might be ...

Certainly not a given, but I would expect the election outcome should be a pretty positive thing for this project as well - Cravack was adamantly against this project, and while Nolan is no Jim Oberstar I expect he'll be more likely to embrace something that can bring jobs and tourists to Duluth. It...

The problem is funding on *our* end, *MEANING* the state government. The funding breakdown is standard MSP formula since CTIB came into existence: 50% federal, 30% CTIB, 10% local (in this case Henn County) and 10% state. The CTIB has committed their funds, Henn County has committed their funds, and...

Yes, my thought exactly. We should see this go forward without issues now, as long as the federal New Starts program isn't completely eliminated (which seems unlikely). I think as long as New Starts gets any funds, this will get funded since Obama called it out as a priority, and its only missing fu...