urbanMSP

Downtown is back, baby.

ETA: Unironically, though, this is extremely good news. The store has been absolutely packed right up to the 6pm closing time any time I've stopped in there after work in the past couple years. Hopefully further extensions to 9 or 10 are also in the cards.

Really good to see some of these regional center downtowns filling back in.

Here's a Strib article on the same project. I doubt they're thinking of this, but they should relocate the Amtrak station to here from downtown Fargo, which doesn't appear to have enough space between the cross streets for the Empire Builder to stop without blocking at least one of them. Not that it...

According to this report on the Wisconsin passenger rail program, Great River service is expected to start in September 2023, though it also mentions further down that Minnesota is still attempting to secure state funding for NLX, so it may not be fully up to date.

The most recent analysis on the MnDOT website leaves it up in the air whether the maintenance facility would be in Sandstone or Duluth. Presumably a layover yard would need to be built in Duluth anyway, so hopefully the maintenance facility ends up there too. Not sure about additional layover facili...

Yep. I'm becoming convinced that the "two-year" closure of Cedar Lake Trail was a fabrication the whole time. It's been nearly four years now, and they're not even remotely close to finishing up the Glenwood/LRT bridge. Admittedly, Glenwood has been completely closed for this whole time, b...

I don't believe the South St Paul Airport is part of the MAC system - I think it's just owned by the city.

Hard to say. There's definitely a lot of transfers on to and from the 32, but I think it's about as good as (non-21) crosstowns get, with Rosedale on one end and North Memorial/Hyvee/Robbinsdale on the other. I think it's more useful to pilot free fares on routes like this than on, say, the D Line o...

Now that Broadway NE has been 4-3'd for a few years, the pain points are just wherever two lanes squeeze down into one. Traffic would flow markedly better if it didn't switch back to two lanes per direction for a block on either side of Central, then again from 35W to Stinson. I'm having trouble fin...

sickos-yes.jpg

The county is rebuilding University and 4th from 35W to Oak next summer. Here's the layout . University is only a state highway north/west of Central, so I guess it's the city's responsibility between Central and 35W? Though, I think bridges over interstates are the state's responsibility no matter ...

This part has the potential to be extremely funny: If the commissioners can’t agree? The bill language that was placed in the lengthy state government omnibus bill repeals authorization and recognition for the current flag and seal. So no action would leave the state with nothing for a flag or seal ...

Seems like we should have learned our lesson about bending over backwards because a couple dozen homeowners do not wish to look at a train, but I guess we'll see.

Wasn't that a previous option that got thrown out because it was going to slow the train down too much to wind through the North Loop?

It's not clear to me that signal priority would fix the 10mph speed limit, or buses stacking up behind a bus that's delayed to let a wheelchair user board because the serpentine curve that looks so nice on an aerial view makes it difficult or impossible to pass. But the next time I spend 10 minutes...

It's not clear to me that signal priority would fix the 10mph speed limit, or buses stacking up behind a bus that's delayed to let a wheelchair user board because the serpentine curve that looks so nice on an aerial view makes it difficult or impossible to pass. But the next time I spend 10 minutes ...

If (big if, between continued hybrid work/WFH and also the LRT extensions) that happens, the locals could go to Hennepin instead, maybe even with bus-only lanes to fill in the gap between the south Hennepin bus lanes and the Hennepin/1st bus lanes across the river.

Man, I hope that proposal gets some momentum before Metro Transit commits to building a third parallel BRT corridor on a third adjacent block of downtown. Even ignoring the superflous capital investment, buses on Nicollet are an operational nightmare. We shouldn't be running three high-frequency ser...

I found an update on this. Basically, the state legislature failed to extend the type of funding they were counting on in the do-nothing 2022 session, and then also didn't get to it this year. So, Phase 1 is now just rehabbing the existing Exodus building, to start next spring, while they keep tryin...