urbanMSP

My spouse and I just did a car-free weekend in Denver at the end of July, and definitely didn't run out of stuff to do. The Art Museum and Capitol are right downtown, and the zoo and science museum at City Park are not too bad of a bus ride. We found the RTD transit buses and trains to be reliable, ...

I wonder how much of the transportation use would have to be retained to prevent issues with federal grants. Leaving a little space open for a theoretical streetcar was apparently good enough for the Gateway block to be redeveloped, would a 100ish-stall public parking component of a redevelopment do...

Today is the last day for the Hawthorne Transportation Center. Greyhound, Jefferson Lines, Flixbus, and Land to Air will all be moving to Ramp B starting tomorrow.

Metro Transit is increasing Northstar service starting October 2. They'll be adding a third peak direction trip and a reverse trip every weekday, and adjusting the existing trip times to allow the first peak trip, reverse trip, and third peak trip to use the same trainset. There will also be servic...

If I remember correctly, Route 4 scored the highest (like, even higher than the 10 and 18) on the rubric they were using to select the recent wave of aBRT lines a couple years ago, implying that it would get aBRT'd soon, but they didn't actually confirm it would be next. I'm still holding out hope t...

Mod note: I moved the aBRT posts over to the dedicated thread I created for easier searchability a couple years ago then promptly forgot about.

https://twitter.com/MetroTransitMN/status/1699128290798170582 Route 4 is up next for better busification. It's probably too much to ask to have all trips go up to Silver Lake Village, but it would be cool if the north endpoint of the 4 could be at Central/Hennepin/8thish so that all trips crossed t...

Sounds like they think there'll eventually be Target people downtown again to interact with.

In "lol suburbs" news, Boston Scientific is building a new facility on the old gravel pits east of Arbor Lakes. It will include 1,238 parking stalls for "at least 256 employees". There will be a solar array, though, so don't go calling them eco-unfriendly.

The official detour for that section is unpleasantly circuitious, but cutting through on Park Glen Rd and the parking lot of that long commercial building works well.

It occurs to me that there's a silver lining with construction being delayed: if it was actually opening this fall as planned, we'd be running, what, probably 30 minute frequencies at best? The way it's going it may very well take 3-4 more years to staff up to however many LRV operators they need to...

The fact that there wasn't (as far as I know) a peep of opposition to turning the outer lanes of that section of Lake into bus lanes with the B Line is a good indicator of how overbuilt it is.

Can't wait to sit waiting for lights at the extra eight grade crossings, secure in the knowledge that wasting all the time of all of the thousands of Blue Line riders is saving a couple dozen homeowners from the unthinkable horror of having the speeding traffic on Lyndale be replaced by a quiet elec...

Or, more likely, just let it decay for years like their other riverfront holdings.

LaSalle Plaza has sold for a fire-sale price , which will apparently allow Hempel to make all sorts of improvements, some of which are good, some of which are terminally car-brained. I'm hoping they're motivated and able to fill in the retail spaces (and that the pickleball courts and whatever are ...

It did happen when 35W was closed, though. Park and Portland got their buffered bike lanes turned into overflow lanes, and even so I heard a lot from my south metro coworkers about how bad Lyndale and Blaisdell were for those years.

Psycho Suzi's is closing on August 19th. End of an era, but I've gotta imagine someone else takes a shot at running a restaurant with the only riverfront patio in Northeast.

Hey, that's only 25 more leases. They just need a closer's mindset.

It's nice to see that the Route 17 improvements are happening with this pick. They had previously said that the changes wouldn't go into effect until the 3rd Avenue Bridge was complete.

Yeah, I got the impression that the change was primarily to get Northstar funding stability, and a hedge against the other suburban counties doing the same thing with the Red/Orange/Gold lines. (Unless BRT lines are funded differently?)