urbanMSP

IMO, pros to tolls: - Reduce congestion - Free up general revenue (ideally for transit improvements) - Better tie funding to usage - Make up some of projected decline in gas tax revenue Cons to tolls: - Complicated to implement - Are a form of regressive tax - Political powder keg in the burbs Wheth...

But is that really rail bias or just good transit bias? If the bus stops here had as clear of information as light rail stops, were big enough for both shelters and enough room to board, were long enough for the bus to pull up to the curb (a big pet peeve of mine), were spaced properly, and weren't...

Good recap TCmetro! I had to go back about 5 years in this thread to find it, but here’s an awesome window into the conversation 25 years ago: Interesting to see how little has changed over 20 years... http://www.mnvideovault.org/mvvPlayer/customPlaylist2.php?id=15794&select_index=3&popup=y...

But the experience of the Red Line being labeled as "Metro" and "BRT" is going to make a lot of riders--and, heck, transit wonks like ourselves--very skeptical of the quality of service on future projects like Gold and Rush and will probably hurt ridership. I've never ridden the...

Wasn't the Red Line originally coined BRT? Even though it would probably get an awful score by the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy especially after going from 15 minute headways to 20 minute headways. https://www.itdp.org/library/standards-and-guides/the-bus-rapid-transit-stan...

Ah, cool, that's what I was looking for. Thanks. I was looking at the LPA report, which is much more ambiguous. I'm pleasantly surprised that they're going to have dedicated lanes for so much of the Woodbury segment. For better or worse, IMO we choose BRT because it allows us to cut corners and make...

Do you know that the Gold Line and Rush Line are both planned to be BRT in mostly dedicated guideways? Yeah, those are definitely a huge improvement compared to a lot of the projects we've considered and do get some of the benefits of rail. I'm curious on the extent of the "mostly" here, ...

In case it isn't obvious, rail bias is real. Its pretty easy to know where a train is and where it stops by finding the rails and the station. Buses on the other hand could be anywhere and just because there is a bus stop sign doesn't guarantee your route stops there or that the driver will see you...

The anti-rail folks always talk about how great buses are because they can go anywhere, but that's also their flaw. Thank you! This is one of my big pet peeves. Flexibility is an asset for planners but a huge drawback for users. Case in point, it's simply too easy to add a detour for a bus because ...

Personally I find that predictability is more important than total time (within reason). Unexpected delays, detours, late buses, and planning my schedule around periods of low traffic all add a ton of stress to my life and make it hard to maintain a schedule or a social life. On the best day my old ...

Sidebar, but does anyone know how this project came to be? I can find documents going back a decade-plus describing planning for the BRT line, but they all act under the assumption that BRT was already chosen. As far as I can tell, the broad strokes of this project were handed down by fiat in a bond...

Sad to see the Blue and Green Line extensions making a cameo in that CityLab article. I feel like "mass transit projects are important but we need to work on containing costs" is a broadly popular sentiment, but one with absolutely no room in the current political climate. The frustrating ...

It's yet another reminder that NIMBYism is a largely nonpartisan phenomenon. In the abstract, Dems usually support transit investments more than GOPers, but that totally breaks down at the hyper-local level. See also: The last four decades in and around San Francisco.

This one?

Something like that would potentially solve the width problem, but taking a lane to bus-only in the middle of that busy interchange would be...controversial. I'm not sure if it would give them enough distance to get back to grade on the 94 side, either.

I really doubt the number of sites was the issue with our proposal. If Amazon were seriously interested in coming to MN they wouldn't mind sifting through a few sites to find the right one, especially if the sites were well-chosen to reflect a broad variety of choices between urban-vs-suburban, gree...

Point taken. I think in a vacuum it would be a valuable stop. From a design perspective, it makes a ton of sense that a METRO line that's (at least in theory) supposed to be the highest-priority, highest-frequency, highest-amenity transit spine for the central neighborhoods of South should stop some...

Yeah, it's a pretty sad missed opportunity there. I guess it's a natural consequence of putting MnDot in the driver's seat.

Yeah, an infill station at 38th, and ideally another infill station somewhere north of Lake St., like Franklin, would go a long way toward convincing me this is an actual Metro service that's serving the community it runs through.

OK, perhaps the sarcasm was unnecessary and obscured my point. More precisely, it's shocking to me how low a priority has been placed on serving riders or destinations between I-94 and MN-62 for this project.

So for the first year-plus it's potentially just going to skip straight from 46th to Downtown? It's like they're actively hostile to anyone using this thing for a purpose other than getting from a Park and Ride in Bloomington to Downtown.