urbanMSP

This is the FRA running a study for recommended long-distance train routes, which theoretically could be operated by any entity, but Amtrak is the only passenger rail organization in the US that can (relatively) easily operate on the various host railroads' tracks, and also the only one that's run a...

This almost reads to me like malicious compliance with the legislative directive. Appendix B clarifies that it's just an update of the pre-pandemic study from 2020, adding more St. Cloud service on top of the six daily Big Lake-Mpls roundtrips, all during peak am and pm hours, with all the rolling s...

Might have been a pandemic change to all of them? I just clicked around the HyVee website, and 6-11pm seems to be the standard hours now in (outstate) MN, SD, and IA. For comparison, there's still a few 24 hour Cub Foods around, but most of them seems to be 5am to midnight.

According to this BIHZ committee item , the modular housing factory is now slated for 1400 Washington Ave N. Seems like a better bet - still pretty central and transit accessible, but isn't a truck-heavy industrial use directly adjacent to an LRT station. On a similar note, Modist Brewing bought 301...

Walked by last night, and there's an excavator and a construction trailer on site. This might actually be breaking ground, very nearly a decade after the first proposal and 4.5 years after the revised version was pitched?

Wild.

Notably, there are not four tracks at Target Field, where this very same system has two services interlining. There's storage space past the last platform, sure, but Union Depot has that too, a whole maintenance facility's worth. I'm perfectly willing to buy the junction at 5th and Cedar being chall...

Remember that, even though it's not moving particularly quickly, the NLX project received a big chunk of state funding last year, and includes a Foley Blvd station. The Met Council isn't going to stand up a separate project to build that for MnDOT on their own.

The 1st Ave N bike lanes were parking protected for fiveish years (~2010-2015). It was an abject failure, there was pretty much always someone parked in them. I've always wondered if compliance would have been better in a part of the city where it was the same group of local residents and/or workers...

If we're building the new highway bridge from scratch with 21st St and ramp reconfigurations, etc, (which I'm still a little flabbergasted that we're apparently doing), I've gotta imagine it can include a station as well. Seems more expensive than the originally pitched idea of elevating the tracks ...

The office building proposal at the corner of Washington and Broadway that popped up back in 2022 has blossomed into a proposal to redevelop all four corners of the Broadway/2nd St N. intersection . According to this (locked) Finance & Commerce article, the ION Corp office/production facility is...

Target is planning to have the HQ workers come in for one week per quarter in 2024.

lol

Since everything (except the 11, I guess) would have to get back to Nicollet at the south end anyway, running down Hennepin would mean using 11th/12th to connect back to Nicollet, or just 12th if the Orange Line contraflow lane was extended to Hennepin (or all the way to Linden/394, if we're thinkin...

Hindsight is 20/20, but the Nicollet BRT stations on 7th and 8th really should have been between Nicollet and Marquette instead of between Nicollet and Hennepin.

Yeah. The social media obsession with a loon flag/seal doesn't seem all that different to me than the (thankfully briefer) obsession with the random dog picture.

On the other hand, if the seal isn't on the flag anymore, how often will I even see it? I just can't get too worked up about it.

I go back and forth on whether it would be preferable to shift the future BRT routes (10/18) to 3rd or to Hennepin. Hennepin would have the advantage of already having BRT stations and thus seamless connections to the E Line, as well as still being within a block of Nicollet so it's not too much of ...

There was a joint presentation from Public Works and Metro Transit to the Council today on the legislative directive to study removing buses from Nicollet Mall. ( Report version ). Notably, there's a (soft?) deadline in play - Metro Transit needs to inform the FTA by April if there's going to be a c...

For south Minneapolis, certainly.

The commission loves it though.

Looking at slide 28 of that presentation, the pink "Riverview Alignment" line continues past Union Depot station and off the edge of the map. I wonder if that's implying that the tracks would just continue down Kellogg and cut over on Lafayette to get into the newly expanded Lowertown OMF?...