B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

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VacantLuxuries
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Re: B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

Postby VacantLuxuries » February 23rd, 2021, 1:32 pm

Whenever I've gone to a business on Lake St., or visited LynLake, or gone to an event at Bryant Lake, I've never once even considered parking directly on Lake. I don't want to get rear ended by someone not paying attention. Or run over by someone not paying attention. Or have my car sideswiped by someone not paying attention.

I'm sure there would be very loud people who would come out in support of parking if someone suggested removing it for bus bumpouts, but the majority of sane people who have never considered halting all of Lake St. traffic to parallel park in front of Bondesque wouldn't even notice.

DanPatchToget
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Re: B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

Postby DanPatchToget » February 23rd, 2021, 3:44 pm

Whenever I drive to Ingebretsen's or any other place on or near Lake Street I park on a side street. You couldn't pay me to park on Lake Street unless I have something the size of a Fiat 500.

However, I'm sure residents and businesses will argue that taking away parking along Lake Street means more people parking and clogging side streets.

SurlyLHT
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Re: B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

Postby SurlyLHT » February 23rd, 2021, 4:12 pm

The only thing I've parked on Lake Street is my bicycle! This is unfortunately true of other main streets throughout the city. You have to find a side street where you can safely park. Some of the cars that sit on the side of these streets I think are honestly being stored there or I don't really know who parks on these streets. I would love to know who they are and why they do. Maybe they have some hidden wisdom?

DanPatchToget
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Re: B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

Postby DanPatchToget » February 23rd, 2021, 5:08 pm

My theory is they have so much stuff in their garage that they can't fit their car in there, so they park it on the street instead. At least that's what I think for neighborhoods like Bronx Park in St. Louis Park where there's tons of cars parked on the street and it basically makes the road 1 lane, and this is despite the houses having garages/carports. Or maybe it's their method of traffic calming.

Mdcastle
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Re: B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

Postby Mdcastle » February 23rd, 2021, 9:22 pm

I don't doubt that there's a lot of truly abandoned cars around. My stepfather used to do "buy here pay here" with his used car dealership and he'd regularly get notices that a car he had a lien on had been towed and impounded. So he'd try to contact the owner and if he could locate them at all, he found they had moved to Detroit or Houston or someplace.

Then someone parked a van in front of my house a couple of winters ago and left it and I never saw anyone around it. After several weeks during the second snow emergency the police knocked on my door asking me to move my car. I said "not mine" and they towed it.

Also probably: people with two or three cars and a single car garage. People too lazy to use the alley, or reluctant to use it after dark. Or as mentioned, people with their garage full of stuff. People want to live close to the city but still keep all their stuff even if their property can't reasonably hold it. See also: the proliferation of all these new self-storage facilities that typically employ one person per shift on a huge area of land. And Bloomington is full of people who feel entitled to park an RV in front of their house. The city finally stopped issuing variances because it was creating neighborhood feuds and consuming an immense amount of city staff time

SurlyLHT
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Re: B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

Postby SurlyLHT » February 24th, 2021, 11:33 am

i also think people collect cars even in the city. My neighbor has 5 cars! He rotates them through his garage, driveway and on-street parking. In residential areas I think there are also older people who have nice cars and don't drive them much and they sit in the streets. We also still have the issue of abandoned stolen cars in Mpls still. I had hoped we'll have better towing during the snow emergencies to clear these since they are planted around the city as getaway cars for crimes.

uptownbro
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Re: B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

Postby uptownbro » February 24th, 2021, 12:54 pm

I know one person in my building that has two cars that are both stored in the buildings garage. He has is everyday car and a collector car.
I think its more common then people think.

twincitizen
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Re: B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

Postby twincitizen » February 24th, 2021, 7:18 pm

I emailed the people working on the B Line about extending the western terminus to Lake & France. They said that wasn’t considered because of their “station spacing guidelines” which requires stops every third- to half-mile (between France and West Lake Station is 0.2 miles). This is despite the fact that B Line buses will layover at that bus turnaround at Lake & France, so even though the buses are there I guess they won’t let people on. Seems silly to be strict on those guidelines when there’s a lot of development going on around there and walking along Lake Street on that particular segment isn’t exactly pleasant.
Now that things are moving forward and they’re taking public comment again, I wanted to bump this. I see no reason why they wouldn’t let people get on/off at the Lake & France turnaround if that’s where every trip is going anyways. While it’s not far from the West Lake station on the bridge, it would dramatically increase the walkshed into a rapidly developing area of St. Louis Park. And again, every bus trip will go there anyways to turn around and/or layover, so it adds no running time whatsoever, and would only require a single station platform/shelter. Please consider including this in your comments to Metro Transit.

If I could change anything else on the line, I’d drop the station at Cretin (Otis & Cleveland would seem to be sufficient for that area). And I’d push metro transit to give another look at adding a station at 12th Ave in Midtown (I’d also push Hennepin County to build a stoplight at 12th, while removing the existing ones at 11th and 13th). 12th is the ideal spacing between Chicago and Bloomington, but lacks a stoplight necessary for crossing. That proposed 1/2 mile gap seems a bit too long for that part of Lake Street.

HKM
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Re: B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

Postby HKM » February 24th, 2021, 7:52 pm

I would add Lake & France while removing one of the two Bde Maka Ska stations (probably East BMS).

Silophant
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Re: B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

Postby Silophant » February 24th, 2021, 8:13 pm

Definitely agree about the Lake and France station. As for Cretin, one thing Metro Transit's been very intentional about with the BRT line design is having a direct transfer to every intersecting route - hence the three stops in a quarter mile at Nicollet, 35W, and 4th Ave to connect to the 18, Orange Line, and 11. Seems like the better solution would be to move the 63 to Cleveland and increase frequency on that street rather than run parallel service to either side of the UST campus, but as long as it's on Cretin I think MT will insist on having a stop there.
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alexschief
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Re: B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

Postby alexschief » February 25th, 2021, 10:01 am

Double endorse both of these ideas.

I'm still really unclear why they are not building floating bus stops on Marshall. If it's a cost issue, perhaps eliminating one set of stations could provide the needed slack in the budget so that the Marshall stations are safe for bicyclists.

talindsay
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Re: B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

Postby talindsay » February 25th, 2021, 10:49 am

I'll be interested to see how well this works on Marshall, it's a tight corridor for everything they're trying to do on it. I do think that's probably part of the issue with floating bus stops there, it would make things even tighter. Another consideration might be snow clearing in the winter, as Saint Paul has a lot of trouble clearing Marshall as it is, and that would make it that much more fiddly. In my lived experience it seems like Minneapolis has more willingness to undertake difficult snow removal than Saint Paul.

blo442
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Re: B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

Postby blo442 » February 25th, 2021, 11:33 am

My guess based on what I was told during D Line engagement: Metro Transit is not pushing for/will not pay for floating bus stops as they add cost & complexity that does not directly serve their goal of improving transit service. So it would be the City's responsibility to advocate for and agree to pay the added cost of floating bus stops, early in the project's engineering phase. Basically, write to your city council member.

EOst
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Re: B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

Postby EOst » February 25th, 2021, 11:45 am

I'll be interested to see how well this works on Marshall, it's a tight corridor for everything they're trying to do on it. I do think that's probably part of the issue with floating bus stops there, it would make things even tighter. Another consideration might be snow clearing in the winter, as Saint Paul has a lot of trouble clearing Marshall as it is, and that would make it that much more fiddly. In my lived experience it seems like Minneapolis has more willingness to undertake difficult snow removal than Saint Paul.
Saint Paul doesn't have the equipment to plow anything less than 10' on a wide scale. They have a small fleet of smaller snow removal vehicles but they're needed for clearing bridge sidewalks and pedestrian bridges after storms.

Didier
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Re: B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

Postby Didier » February 27th, 2021, 9:23 am

Sorry to sidetrack here but in a nutshell was there a reason to keep this on Marshall as opposed to turning at Cretin and running through St. Paul on Grand? Is there a different plan for Grand? Or just trying to keep the route as simple as possible?

Trademark
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Re: B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

Postby Trademark » February 27th, 2021, 11:02 am

Sorry to sidetrack here but in a nutshell was there a reason to keep this on Marshall as opposed to turning at Cretin and running through St. Paul on Grand? Is there a different plan for Grand? Or just trying to keep the route as simple as possible?
That's where I think Greenway rail should extend to. Grand as a street has such potential and decent right of way for tracks.

seanrichardryan
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Re: B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

Postby seanrichardryan » February 27th, 2021, 11:17 am

The B line replaces route 21 in STP, higher frequency, better routing. Grand & the 63 is a whole separate corridor for discussion but planned for BRT I do believe.
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seanrichardryan
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Re: B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

Postby seanrichardryan » February 27th, 2021, 11:20 am

'Longer Term' for the 63. The 21 was prioritized I think because it is so damned sluggish but has high ridership numbers.
https://www.metrotransit.org/evaluating-brt-corridors
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tmart
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Re: B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

Postby tmart » February 27th, 2021, 2:05 pm

Sorry to sidetrack here but in a nutshell was there a reason to keep this on Marshall as opposed to turning at Cretin and running through St. Paul on Grand? Is there a different plan for Grand? Or just trying to keep the route as simple as possible?
That's where I think Greenway rail should extend to. Grand as a street has such potential and decent right of way for tracks.
Agreed--I always found it odd that the LRT segment was so short. In one sense I get it--the Greenway is dedicated, grade-separated ROW, and as soon as you switch to Lake St. you lose that--but the value of the line would seem to be so much higher if it got an extension to destinations like St. Thomas, Macalester, Summit Hill, and Downtown STP. It's one of the reasons I've always been skeptical of the "dual alternative." I feel like rail is a great mode choice for the corridor, but what's proposed is only ~4 miles, and with no clear plans for extending it or otherwise integrating it into the network, it always felt kinda like the deck was stacked in favor of building the B Line and then putting the rest of the plan way on the backburner.

Also in my head it always ran down Summit instead of Grand, because Summit has an enormous ROW where a turfed track could be quite charming. But I think proposing a line affecting both the Greenway and Summit would create some kind of singularity for local opposition that would swallow us all alive :lol:

But that's rail--in the current reality where we're mostly only building buses in the core urban neighborhoods, I do think the more direct route down Marshall/Selby makes sense--it's more legible, faster, and wouldn't seem to preclude an additional route down Grand.

DanPatchToget
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Re: B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

Postby DanPatchToget » February 27th, 2021, 3:05 pm

I might've said this already on here, but in my (potentially unpopular) opinion the Greenway should be BRT. There is no way to interline a Greenway LRT with the Green Line Extension at West Lake due to the tunnel, and on the east end the only alignment being considered (that I know of) are trains going up and interlining with the Blue Line at Lake Street-Midtown. With BRT it's much more easy to extend the route beyond West Lake and/or Lake Street-Midtown.


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