Blue Line LRT

[talindsay]

And, looking more closely at the picture, I wonder how well the signs will distinguish their blue and green boxes?

[Tom H.]

In my experience, LEDs don't always photograph very well. What it looks like in that picture on the previous page may not be a good proxy for what it will look like in person.

[David Greene]

Drove down Hiawatha today and they were doing some major work at the 38th and 46th street stations. Route map kiosks were covered with plastic and it looked like concrete forms were being placed for pouring. There were concrete pumper trucks at both stations, blocking a lane of Hiawatha. Anyone know what's happening?

[Uptown46]

I talked to one of the workers last night. They're removing the pavers on the platforms and pouring concrete. I guess the pavers have been too hard to maintain. Eventually they're going to do all the stations. He also mentioned they'll be testing two 3-car trains on the Central Corridor tracks this weekend.

[commissioner]

I saw them testing the trains today, one was being pulled by a hi-rail vehicle and the other was under it's own power. I saw them go as far as Robert Street. It looked like they were also activating the signals where the Green line splits.

[LRV Op Dude]

Live wire testing downtown St Paul Saturday.

[Tcmetro]

Looks like Metro Council is planning a new platform at Nicollet Mall Station, on the north side, adjacent to the Nic on 5th project:

http://www.metrocouncil.org/getdoc/391d ... umber.aspx

[go4guy]

Does anyone know what the ridership on this line is today, compared to what they projected when the line was built?

[bubzki2]

Does anyone know what the ridership on this line is today, compared to what they projected when the line was built?

http://www.metrotransit.org/facts-about ... ction.aspx

"Ridership: Since opening in June 2004 through 2012, customers have boarded METRO Blue Line light-rail trains 83.4 million times. Ridership in 2012 was 10.5 million and average weekday rides totaled more than 31,300."

And

http://www.metrotransit.org/metro-trans ... 81-million

"Average weekday ridership on the Hiawatha Line exceeds projections for the year 2020 by nearly 30 percent." (Posted 1-15-13)

[transportationist]

Whether it is doing better than forecast depends on which forecast. The Alternatives Analysis predicted ridership of 37,000, the Final EIS lowered this number.

See Table 7 http://www.fta.dot.gov/documents/NSPA2007_Final(1).pdf

[woofner]

The Alternatives Analysis, it should be noted, was completed in 1982. Adding the ridership from the Hiawatha alternatives analysis to that projected for the system of four lines studied by the Met Council in 1981 would have resulted in 186,500 daily rides on LRT. Assuming the sky is in fact blue and everything we know about how land use orients itself around transportation investments would have held true for this system of 5 LRT lines, we certainly would have seen at least 100,000 more daily transit trips than we do today, and probably several hundred thousand more.

In other words, policymakers have had the planning support to make the right decision and consistently have not done so. There should be a public shaming of everyone who was on the TAB, the Met Council, and Mndot from 1982 through at least 2010, if not today.

[go4guy]

It is amazing seeing that just that 1 line makes up 13% of the entire network's ridership.

[Minneapolisite]

Seeing this google maps view of the immediate block off of the West Bank station is quite infuriating (here's the citypages article about the Medusa building for sale). The last pic shows that over 2/3 of 6th St right off the light rail station is surfacing parking lots.Years after this line has been running. Of course, this is not uncommon and even near a major intersection like Lake St you have big box stores with large parking lots where blocks of development could have filled in a new street grid w/o requiring their demlition. So, in short, why doesn't the city want development on these lots? It's not like it would be hard to tax undesirable, wasteful uses for car storage on surface lots within a 1/4 mile of a light rail stations in Mpls proper...or is it? And just think about how many more people would be using the Blue Line if mid-rises had been built on these lots years ago.

[RailBaronYarr]

I've wondered the same thing. The Blue Line has been a major success - reliability, speed, ridership, and even a decent amount of development around some of the southern/downtown stations. It's elevated the view of what transit can be, and it's just a single line. ...With that said, it seems like the city (county? Met Council?) has missed some major opportunities. Of all the places in our urban areas to deserve some development on vastly under-used space, parking lots within a third mile radius of stations should be automatic IMO. It's not like we're in year 3 of operation and developer are timid about building around transit. Minneapolis is pushing a Nicollet streetcar because developers see the potential rail has for desirability in housing.

[Nick]

Minneapolis is pushing a Nicollet streetcar because developers see the potential rail has for desirability in housing.

Er, wouldn't our experience with Hiawatha sort of suggest otherwise, as per the rest of your post?

[RailBaronYarr]

Yes, I was being a little ironic. They did a survey of developers to garner a lukewarm idea of how responsive they'll be, and of course devs responded with interest (so yay, streetcars!), when we already have a rail line with tons of untapped potential. Why the mismatch?

[David Greene]

Why the mismatch?

Hiawatha was not designed with development in mind. If it were, the Cedar-Riverside station wouldn't be hidden, the area around the Frankling station wouldn't be a car sewer and Hiawatha Ave. wouldn't be a speedway.

[talindsay]

Why the mismatch?

Hiawatha was not designed with development in mind. If it were, the Cedar-Riverside station wouldn't be hidden, the area around the Frankling station wouldn't be a car sewer and Hiawatha Ave. wouldn't be a speedway.

I don't think that's true; I just think that they were thinking of development at certain places rather than all places. Remember that they didn't even bother to develop a small-area plan for some of the stations farther from downtown (50th, I believe, didn't have a small-area plan) because they just assumed there wouldn't be development in those areas. Hiawatha was (correctly) designed as a transportation link first, and only secondarily as a driver of development.

That said, to me the interesting thing about Hiawatha is that there *has been* a lot of development along the line - they just did a very poor job of predicting where it would be and what shape it would take, despite the long, drawn-out small-area planning that was meant to do just those things. There has been a lot of development between 50th and the VA, despite no effort to really address development there; while Lake Street, clearly expected to see intensive development, has thus far only had moderate results. One could certainly say there has been success around the 38th Street station; despite the massive gulf that Hiawatha produces, there has been a great deal of development on the east side of the Avenue there. By contrast, 46th Street has seen modest development on the station side but there's been almost no carryover to the east side.

Of course, the "Great Recession" that started four years after the line opened is certainly part of the reason that development in general has been more muted than they expected; but that would not explain at all the odd pattern of development, which seems to scoff at the efforts to plan and control new projects.

[mulad]

The grade separation at Cedar and Franklin was initially done in 1950: http://tcsidewalks.blogspot.com/2011/03 ... watha.html

According to historicaerials.com, the northern interchange with I-94/I-35W had been completed sometime between 1966 and 1979, which widened the Hiawatha Avenue bridges over both Franklin and Cedar. According to Google Earth's historical imagery, the divided highway section of Hiawatha Ave still had a gap (a normal surface street configuration) from Cedar Avenue to just south of Lake Street in 1991. So aside from that roughly 1-mile gap, the road configuration was mostly locked in already and the LRT line had to deal with whatever space was left over.

When the bulk of Hiawatha Avenue was proposed in the 1970s, residents pushed back against a full-fledged freeway design and got it designated as a "multi-modal corridor" instead, even though nobody really knew what that meant at the time -- and I'm still not sure we know what that is today. We know the result is a "parkway" with a rail line and a bike path, but many people would make different decisions if they had the choice to do it over again. It's all clouded by the fact that the original proposal was for a freeway, so we've ended up with something that was an alternative to going whole-hog on that idea.

Still, we've somehow ended up with a popular line which isn't heavily reliant on park-and-ride traffic (there are about 2,800 official spaces along the line, so the amount of daily ridership from people who drive is probably somewhere between 10 and 20 percent).

I do think that the zoning along much of the Blue Line is relatively weak. For instance, there is a Pedestrian-Oriented overlay district extending east and west along 38th Street near Hiawatha, but it only goes north and south a short distance -- about 1 block north, and only about 1/4 block south (though it does include the Longfellow Station development on the other side of the highway). Denser development is generally allowed in the immediate vicinity of Blue Line stations, but they barely scratch the 1/4- to 1-2-mile walk sheds that we tend to talk about with transit services. Large areas are just zoned R1, R1A, or C1, which simply wouldn't allow bigger stuff like what's been happening in Uptown (R3, R5, R6, C3, C4, etc.).

Zoning can be changed, but the process can end up moving very slowly. While I think the Blue Line corridor has been lagging in development a bit, I'm not overly concerned. It will be around for a long time. Development/redevelopment plans often take 30 years to be fully realized, so we're probably only 1/3 of the way along.

[David Greene]

^^^^ I agree with everything you've said here. That Franklin redesign was about the worst outcome possible.