urbanMSP

Don't hold your breath for a deep-bore tunnel - all the metrics used for "cost effectiveness" would point away from that, and there isn't enough broad-based buy-in for the notion that a specific social good is worth making "ineffective" investments for it to actually happen. It'...

Holy cow, they made St-Denis two lanes? Are people complaining about car congestion? Given Montreal's urbanism I think it's a good move, but it's surprising since that's one of the few arterials that actually runs all the way from Vieux Montreal way up north, and it has so many businesses. Haven't ...

Haven't been back home to MN in quite awhile (thanks pandemic!) but I can comment on a similar effort here in Montreal a few years ago, which changed speeds to 30km/h on side streets and 40km/h on arterials, about 18 and 25mph respectively. (In both cases those numbers are based on the same collisio...

I'm probably just out of the loop on this, but anyone know why Nicollet and Central are being considered as separate aBRT projects and not a single corridor like they were back when streetcar was supposed to be happening?

Unfortunately it seems to me like the simplest time to get a ped/bike connection built (in terms of ease of construction, minimizing disruptions, and securing funding) would've been while building the station itself. I hope you're right and the station can generate some political will for better con...

Anyone else find the location of City West Station odd? I biked over there yesterday and the only people I can see benefiting from this are park & riders and workers at Optum who can use the train for their commute (which is probably a small number of the overall workforce). I realize it's too ...

I love how easily people here handwave away the deep public opposition to some of this stuff. It's charming in a way. I don't think anyone's hand-waving it away; anyone who followed SWLRT knows better than that. But I think what the best project is given the constraints and parameters, and what pro...

With that said I do believe it should be dedicated ROW for the whole route, or at the very least built in a way to easily convert the short mixed-traffic segment into dedicated ROW later on. This is where I am as well; I'll support this project if it meets that bar and oppose it otherwise. From now...

As more aBRT lines begin operation, I don’t see why Red, Gold, and Rush(purple?) are colors instead of letters. To me, it seems it will confuse the casual rider. I agree. Especially given that the Orange Line will run in carpool lanes and the Red Line runs in shoulders, the only thing they really c...

The easiest way to extend it south would be to have it Take Cedar Lake Rd/Wayzata Blvd out of Bryn Mawr and then it could take Ewing/France to the W. Lake St SWLRT Station. There's a lot of dead zone in that route without much transit potential to duplicate a route that could be taken with a transf...

I had a fantasy dream of having the C extend across to Kenwood then down Franklin Ave on a bus-only viaduct bridge. That is a fabulous idea. In my head it was unfortunate that there was no way to continue past Bryn Mawr station without switching to LRT, but a short bridge like that would be super p...

Exactly what we need: another freeway to continue our dependence on roads, cars, and gasoline. At least until there's train service with private, individually ventilated compartments from every front to every other front door in the country. Are you suggesting we try to pave our way out of the clim...

With the D Line funded and Bottineau LRT looking more and more like it might get rerouted to actually serve North, I was thinking about how there are gonna be three high-frequency lines that originate in North and all run across Downtown in the same direction. If all those lines run with high freque...

Transportation is the largest sector of carbon emissions in Minnesota and may even have started to trend upwards again in recent years, so the state pretty obviously has an interest in acting to cut them. Based on the powers the state has, I can see a few options: Regulatory approach: adopt CARB reg...

So the idea of a RYG right turn arrows could work, but again there's things to think about 1) You would need to provide right turn lanes, otherwise we're in the same situation we're trying to solve by banning left turns, where a driver is unable to make a turn for a substantial amount of time, so s...

If it did turn out to be a real problem, we could just change the lights to have only straight arrow/right turn arrow, instead of full green, and then it would be completely unambiguous. (As a bonus, this also makes it easy to implement a leading pedestrian signal). Green arrows are only allowed wh...

Eliminating street parking and left turns into businesses will be a sure-fire way to gain local buy-in. That's fine; I still think it's the most efficient and safe design that balances the different uses for the corridor. That doesn't mean it's politically popular or feasible, but it's worth identi...

Do people actually abide by left turn bans? Even if it's 90%, the 10% that ignores it could really grind that street to a halt. I think you would really need a more drastic change (either making the E/W street one-way, or closing the entrance, or building a median to block the turn) to make that vi...

I think banning lefts not only makes the project enormously easier to accommodate all the desired uses, but also probably makes travel times faster for drivers. It's relatively uncommon in the Twin Cities, but banning lefts on major arterials is not a ridiculous or extreme proposition by any means. ...

I think transcontinental HSR is more of a political framework than a transportation framework. It signals to activists that the scale of investment would be large, it signals to non-coastal states that this won't just benefit NY and CA, and it has the big, ambitious, optimistic feel of going to the ...