Interstate 35W

Roads - Rails - Sidewalks - Bikeways
mattaudio
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Re: 35W North - MnPass and BRT

Postby mattaudio » June 24th, 2013, 4:28 pm

Why are they even considering HOT lanes north of Lake Drive?!??! Focus on congestion spots and transit infrastructure within the beltway.

I can't imagine the 2nd St connection downtown would fly either, even if it's just for buses. I'd rather see a connection directly to a two-way east-west transit spine across downtown such as 6th or 7th street.

Also why wouldn't BRT use Hwy 88 with stops at Quarry, St Anthony, and possibly New Brighton? This would result in BRT stations that are much more walkable and lower cost than a 35W alignment.

Tcmetro
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Re: 35W North - MnPass and BRT

Postby Tcmetro » June 24th, 2013, 4:46 pm

I can't imagine any BRT line on 35W North being a good idea. There is a significant lack of anything around the corridor, IMO. Maybe an hourly express bus would be justifiable, but a BRT line?

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woofner
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Re: 35W North - MnPass and BRT

Postby woofner » June 24th, 2013, 5:36 pm

Probably 3/4 of the exits through 85th have significant industrial employment surrounding them. It looks like nothing, but it's something. But let me shift the question. How do you expect to ever get usable coverage in suburban areas without building out the highway BRT network? Is there another way to get all-day coverage in the suburbs? Or should we write off that goal (which of course is not officially shared by any governmental body)?
I can't imagine the 2nd St connection downtown would fly either, even if it's just for buses. I'd rather see a connection directly to a two-way east-west transit spine across downtown such as 6th or 7th street.
The report makes it seem unlikely. The City of Minneapolis seems to have raised a lot of objections.
Also why wouldn't BRT use Hwy 88 with stops at Quarry, St Anthony, and possibly New Brighton? This would result in BRT stations that are much more walkable and lower cost than a 35W alignment.
Not a bad idea, but it seems more important to get to the heart of the Rosedale area. Why do you think it would be less expensive than 35W? No need for vertical circulation?
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Re: 35W North - MnPass and BRT

Postby Tcmetro » June 24th, 2013, 5:56 pm

Any bus service should run along the frontage roads with more frequent stops in order for the people to get to the buses. Simply put, no one is going to walk 20 minutes to an exit ramp to catch a bus, and there is no need for high-frequency service in the middle of the day or late in the evenings.

An express bus running on 35W to Cleveland and CR C, up Cleveland, west on County D, north on Old Hwy 8, then H to 35W and looping around Medtronic and Wells Fargo, and maybe up Lake Drive and Lexington to the Walmart would provide better access to the jobs in the area. Another line along Hennepin, Stinson, Broadway, Industrial, Walnut, B2, Rosedale, Snelling, to the Arden Hills and Shoreview areas would provide direct access to those jobs. Then a peak hour bus to the 95th Ave park and ride, and call it a day.

mattaudio
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Re: 35W North - MnPass and BRT

Postby mattaudio » June 25th, 2013, 8:58 am

How do you expect to ever get usable coverage in suburban areas without building out the highway BRT network? Is there another way to get all-day coverage in the suburbs? Or should we write off that goal (which of course is not officially shared by any governmental body)?
Yes, we should write off that goal. It will never be anywhere close to a financially unproductive investment considering how the land use is so hostile to transit. If people want good transit, they can't build places that are not compatible with good transit.

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Re: 35W North - MnPass and BRT

Postby MNdible » June 25th, 2013, 9:29 am

I don't think anybody is seriously suggesting complete coverage, but on the other hand, I'd argue that it makes a lot of sense to identify strong corridors within the suburbs where we build off existing strengths.

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woofner
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Re: 35W North - MnPass and BRT

Postby woofner » June 25th, 2013, 1:00 pm

Any bus service should run along the frontage roads with more frequent stops in order for the people to get to the buses. Simply put, no one is going to walk 20 minutes to an exit ramp to catch a bus, and there is no need for high-frequency service in the middle of the day or late in the evenings.
It looks to me as though much of the employment is clustered within a half-mile of overpasses. No doubt the conditions for walking are heinous around there, but that should be fixed anyway. People would certainly be willing to walk 20 minutes to/from the station & their job, they do so in heinous industrial areas all around the world, so why not here? The areas where the employment sprawls away from the overpasses could mostly be served by circulators or extensions of existing locals such as the 32 or the 4. I certainly wouldn't oppose your frontage road route (and I think it's significant that MnDot did not suggest it), but I'd guess that a BRT would have route time and legibility advantages that would gain much higher ridership. Probably a combination of one or more frontage road routes with inline BRT stations at the denser, higher employment stations (such as Stinson, C, and maybe 85th or somewhere around New Brighton) would be a good short-term option.

Which brings me to my point, that MnDot is willing to support a marginal managed lanes plan by building it gradually but is unwilling to do the same for a less marginal BRT plan. That suggests to me anti-transit bias (again, a $350m BRT line with 10k daily riders is nationally competitive) and that the BRT is just token transit inclusion in a freeway expansion plan.
It will never be anywhere close to a financially unproductive investment considering how the land use is so hostile to transit. If people want good transit, they can't build places that are not compatible with good transit.
But they already did. In the short term, that will mean that transit will need more subsidy and that land use policies should change so that the subsidy decreases over the long term. What alternative is there besides firebombing the suburbs or allowing them to trammel the areas where transit could be 'financially productive', thereby reducing that productivity? Why would any suburbanite support your plan for a bilevel transit tunnel under 6th St if they have no chance of ever using it? The majority of metro residents live in areas like New Brighton, and we can't just wish them away or force them to move to the city. If our economy as a whole is to remain 'financially productive' and not succumb to a climate-induced permanent depression, we have to find a way to mitigate the transportation impacts of the residents of these areas, and I can't think of another way besides transit and land use policies that encourage densification.

To be clear, I would never argue for 35W north to be a priority for transit investment, but it will have a role to plan in a holistic system. So like the managed lanes plan would be implemented gradually and in a complementary manner with maintenance needs, so should the BRT plan.
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mattaudio
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Re: 35W North - MnPass and BRT

Postby mattaudio » June 25th, 2013, 1:29 pm

You assume people are stuck making the same choice that they're currently making. I give people more credit than that. They can move or find a different job, bearing the cost/reward of their decisions, so long as we don't keep insulating people from the true costs of poor decisions.

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Re: 35W North - MnPass and BRT

Postby woofner » June 25th, 2013, 1:59 pm

How exactly do you envision the process by which one million people decide to move to the central cities? What would motivate them to do that and where would they live? If people were required to pay the external cost of operating an SOV and living in a single-family home in a northern continental climate, probably the cost of living in the suburbs would increase dramatically. But frankly it wouldn't necessarily increase dramatically *more* than the cost of living in Minneapolis or St Paul. Yes, the neighborhoods in Minneapolis & St Paul would likely more easily adapt to the new costs, but many suburban areas would as well, and it would be a very slow process in either case. Maybe you can think of a process that I can't, but I think it would take methods of government that have been out of favor for 60-70 years to quickly effect change on the necessary scale, and we won't have the type of emergency that would motivate that until it's too late.
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Re: 35W North - MnPass and BRT

Postby mattaudio » June 25th, 2013, 2:04 pm

The obvious answer to me was quite the opposite of the obvious answer to you. The market would easily take care of this over a generation or so, just as the market was happy to build a few generations of the suburban experiment when government subsidies and policies tipped the scales in that direction and led us towards a giant mistake.

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Re: 35W North - MnPass and BRT

Postby woofner » June 25th, 2013, 2:35 pm

How would the market take care of it? It seems like even if the delta between urban and surburban increases in cost of living due to incorporation of externalities were much greater than seems likely to me, all that would do would be create a huge class of people (suburbanites) with no resources to reduce their cost of living. That is, if the difference in cost of living were large enough to encourage most suburbanites to move to the city, who would buy those suburbanites' houses so they could then afford to move to the city?
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Re: 35W North - MnPass and BRT

Postby mattaudio » June 25th, 2013, 2:56 pm


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Re: 35W North - MnPass and BRT

Postby MNdible » June 25th, 2013, 3:08 pm

Perhaps you should run that article by my friends who were definitely not going to move to the suburbs until they did move to the suburbs.

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woofner
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Re: 35W North - MnPass and BRT

Postby woofner » June 25th, 2013, 3:20 pm

Right, but even if the millennials all stuck to their guns and everyone wanted to move to the city, there would still be a million people who live in the suburbs and need to sell their house before they can move to the city. How are they going to do that if no one wants to move to the suburbs? If we just wait for those million people to die, it will take longer than one generation since human adulthood is much longer than childhood.

Also, we don't really have a generation for this to happen. We need it to happen now, basically, or 20 years ago if that is possible. This is both due to the existential threat posed by climate change, and also because there is demand right now that is sitting there unmet. As I mentioned in the red line thread, there is actually enough density in the suburbs to support all-day local service in many places, the infrastructure is all that's missing.
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Nick
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Re: 35W North - MnPass and BRT

Postby Nick » June 25th, 2013, 3:34 pm

http://www.theonion.com/articles/scient ... -to,27166/
Scientists: 'Look, One-Third Of The Human Race Has To Die For Civilization To Be Sustainable, So How Do We Want To Do This?'

WASHINGTON—Saying there's no way around it at this point, a coalition of scientists announced Thursday that one-third of the world population must die to prevent wide-scale depletion of the planet's resources—and that humankind needs to figure out immediately how it wants to go about killing off more than 2 billion members of its species.
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Re: 35W North - MnPass and BRT

Postby FISHMANPET » June 25th, 2013, 4:09 pm

I think suburban homes are going to lose value, and there's nothing we can do to stop that. In some places it will get to the point where subdivisions are worthless because nobody wants to live there. About the only thing we can do is have the government come and buy them up at some discount but not insulting rate and knock them over.

I have to agree that much of suburbia is unservable by transit, and we can either force those areas to be transit amenable (reconnect/create the grid and upzone) or we can abandon them and say "the municipality can't afford to keep up this subdivision here's the assessment for maintenance of your road and water, or you can let it go to travel and dig wells."

Not everybody can win in this future, but because politicians have to make it happen and politicians have to be elected, the government isn't going to strong arm anyone and everything will be terrible forever.

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Re: 35W North - MnPass and BRT

Postby MNdible » June 25th, 2013, 4:25 pm

I'll agree that outer-ring suburban homes are going to lose value relative to core-city/inner-ring suburban homes, but what exactly is the market force that will cause these areas to be abandoned? If you believe in the market at all, then you ought to accept that as demand for a product falls, it's price will follow, and then somebody will see it as a good value and snap it up at a discount. In many ways, this is a continuation of exactly what has been happening recently. Most of the people who were pushed out to the outermost suburbs weren't choosing those areas because they wanted to live that far out; it was because that was the place they could afford to live, and they accepted what to me would be unacceptable trade-offs (e.g., long commute, limited access to services, etc.).

If you'd asked me 5 years ago, I might have accepted that gas prices were going to spiral out of control, and that that might really be the death knell for these areas. But now, I'm inclined to believe that hyper-efficient gas and electric cars are likely to forestall this event.

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Re: 35W North - MnPass and BRT

Postby FISHMANPET » June 25th, 2013, 4:35 pm

I think transportation will become more and more expensive (both in time and money), and this will push people out because it's just not worth the time and hassle to live that far out. And if we properly meet demand closer to the core, these places will empty out. If I have a choice between a house in a first ring suburb in a place I want to live that I can afford, and some home a half hour away from the core that costs half is much, I'm probably not going to make a purely financial decision, and I'm going to buy the home that meets my needs. And if there's enough homes closer to the core that people will want and most can afford, then it doesn't matter how cheap homes are out there.

People drove until they qualified, but if we build more closer in they won't have to drive as far. Some people will want those homes, but a lot of people won't. You're right that more efficient cars are going to slow this trend, but I also think we're nearing a tipping point where these placeless places aren't growing anymore and just can't afford to keep up. It's a very Strong Towns view, but I don't know of another way to frame it. The costs to maintain sprawling infrastructure exceed the tax revenue that people in those areas are willing to pay. Full stop. Something has to change.

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Re: 35W North - MnPass and BRT

Postby David Greene » June 25th, 2013, 7:28 pm

We should also consider LGA and tax base sharing. If these houses do fall in value, the tax base is going to take a hit and suddenly previously net contributing suburbs will be subsidized. This has already happened to some extent but is another drag (like efficient cars) on change.

Frankly, we could not afford a rapid change. The shock to the financial system would put us in a world of hurt. Look at what subprime mortgages did. What we're talking about here would be much bigger.

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Re: 35W North - MnPass and BRT

Postby Rich » June 26th, 2013, 9:50 am

I'm going to buy the home that meets my needs.
This is true. And living close to work is one of those needs. But the reality is that the great majority of jobs are located in the suburbs or exurbs (I think only about 10% of metro area jobs are downtown). So most people need to live in the burbs because for most people that's the closest place to their job. As long as businesses continue to open up shop in the suburbs, people will need homes nearby.


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