Green Line LRT

[MinnMonkey]

Green Line ridership is running over 40,000 per weekday

https://twitter.com/McLaughlin_P/status ... 0049601536

Anyone know what the ridership on the 50/16 was? Curious how that would compare.

According to Wikipedia 23,776 in 2010.

[VAStationDude]

The author of the Streets.mn Green Line piece had his lies (16 bus was the same speed as the Green Line) published in the most recent Villager.

[talindsay]

It was around 15k if I recall correctly I looked it up recently and was surprised it wasn't higher. I don't have my computer handy and won't try to find the source on my phone, so I could be way off.

[ProspectPete]

The article states 7 more low volume intersections could be added in October. I wonder which ones those are. I can think of 6 (Berry, Hampton, Aldine, Fry, Pascal and Griggs)

[/quote]

Perhaps they consider Fairview and or Prior to be a low volume intersection? Lots of trucks yes, but relatively speaking less cars (on Prior)

[Nick]

The author of the Streets.mn Green Line piece had his lies (16 bus was the same speed as the Green Line) published in the most recent Villager.

I dunno what the abridged version the Villager ran says, but that's not what was in the original post.

I don't really agree with the overall premise (Green Line should have run on I-94) of his original post, but he makes a helluva lot of good individual points throughout the article about the planning process. The immediate dismissal of the whole thing by many people felt, ah, bizarre. "NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG, STOP TALKING ABOUT IT." Especially when the dismissals were from people (not you, obviously) who were/are totally okay throwing rocks at the Southwest or other planning processes. Some of the comments with personal insults had to be scrubbed, which almost never happens on streets.mn. I mean, are we all that invested in proving the worth of mass transit to our conservative father-in-laws?

[VAStationDude]

His premise in the Villager was the Pierce Butler or 94 route originally preferred by Ramsey County was dismissed because of stairs required to access the stations in favor of street level stations on University. (Not because University had tons of ROW, wouldn't have required expensive grade separation and is full of destinations and population). Now with University LRT we have an expensive train that is no faster than the buses it replaced (lie), transit services has been reduced (lie, Green Line runs frequently long into the evening. Past the time when the 16 went down to 15 or 20 minute frequencies) stops at too many stop lights (truth), strangles business (false) and cuts off access across University (I thought there were too many stop lights). A street car would have been just as fast (lie) and had less impact on precious parking. Of course the line has been a smashing success from a ridership standpoint thus far, which, of course, he doesn't mention.

He is really good at bending the facts (overall transit service has been reduced, University street car would be preferred) and neatly dismissing facts (rebuilding freeway bridges and adding elevators is incredibly expensive) that don't favor his pet transit planning gripe, much like the people on this board who criticize the Green and Blue Line extensions. We can't just neatly set aside demolishing hundreds of buildings on the North Side, squeezing LRT on relatively narrow Broadway and putting open cut tunnels on Eat Street. Nor can we wax about mystically cheap tunneling or ignore that better bus service on Hennepin would provide far greater utility than a light rail stop at 29th and Hennepin.

I disagree people dismissed him unfairly. There are plenty of constructive comments to his article. His response was to either ignore them or stick to his distortions. Personally, I think its kind of sad a guy put so much effort into critiquing this line and now that its successful he's resorted to lying in defending a big part of the last ten years of his life.

[MNdible]

...much like the people on this board who criticize the Green and Blue Line extensions. We can't just neatly set aside demolishing hundreds of buildings on the North Side, squeezing LRT on relatively narrow Broadway and putting open cut tunnels on Eat Street. Nor can we wax about mystically cheap tunneling or ignore that better bus service on Hennepin would provide far greater utility than a light rail stop at 29th and Hennepin..

I just got goose bumps.

[ProspectPete]

Just thought of another low volume intersection: MLK/ park street.

[mulad]

I may have to start calling some rants "howling baby theorems" based upon this: http://www.radiolab.org/story/howling-b ... attle_kw1/

[nate]

Just thought of another low volume intersection: MLK/ park street.

That is a strange one. There have been many times my train stopped at the light with zero north/south traffic in sight.

[mulad]

The MLK/Park intersection has bugged me a lot, particularly for westbound trains. It takes roughly 60 seconds for the train to get there from the Robert Street station, which is more than enough time to rearrange the signal timing at that small intersection.

[Nick]

His premise in the Villager was the Pierce Butler or 94 route originally preferred by Ramsey County was dismissed because of stairs required to access the stations in favor of street level stations on University. (Not because University had tons of ROW, wouldn't have required expensive grade separation and is full of destinations and population). Now with University LRT we have an expensive train that is no faster than the buses it replaced (lie), transit services has been reduced (lie, Green Line runs frequently long into the evening. Past the time when the 16 went down to 15 or 20 minute frequencies) stops at too many stop lights (truth), strangles business (false) and cuts off access across University (I thought there were too many stop lights). A street car would have been just as fast (lie) and had less impact on precious parking. Of course the line has been a smashing success from a ridership standpoint thus far, which, of course, he doesn't mention.

[...]

I disagree people dismissed him unfairly. There are plenty of constructive comments to his article. His response was to either ignore them or stick to his distortions. Personally, I think its kind of sad a guy put so much effort into critiquing this line and now that its successful he's resorted to lying in defending a big part of the last ten years of his life.

Well, everything in the world is tea leaves at this point I guess. If the whole article in the Villager was about your first sentence, then that's dumb obviously. The rest of it is largely debatable. Obviously the train is faster than the 16 and probably (and I'm sure in a year) the 50, but, yes, there are people who can claim that they have less mobility because of the Green Line. Which of course doesn't mean that the Green Line is bad and shouldn't have been built, but I still think that getting rid of the 94 off peak is dumb, and I'm not sure why you think that a streetcar would be slower than the Green Line as configured.

It's great that lots of people are riding it, but to that point, it's still ridiculous that our ridership models were (and still are?) crappy enough that we're off by uh, almost 50%. What would the CEI have looked like with the right numbers? What improvements could we have gotten? And more importantly, if we're at the 2030 ridership in 2014, what happens with another 20,000 residents in Downtown Minneapolis, or a fully-fleshed out TOD plan at Snelling, or a re-inhabited Downtown St. Paul, or the planned western extensions? Is an at-grade LRT route on University going to be at its functional capacity during rush hour by 2030? Whoops.

Again, obviously it's a good thing that the line got built, and I'm not trying to only be negative, but someone else brought it up and I spend a lot of time on crushloaded buses crawling down Nicollet Mall with my face three inches from the sweat of clearly-not-recently-showered asses.

[VAStationDude]

I rode the 50 a bunch between the capitol and the east bank back in my day, 4-8 years ago. A 35 minute trip would have been an absolute miracle. 40-45 was pretty typical. The author lamented the loss of parking on university and later wrote a street car would have been preferable. Therefore, it's safe to assume in his ideal world we would have a mixed traffic University streetcar and a 94 lrt. Mixed traffic street cars make the green line look like the 94 bus in clear traffic.

The 94 exists mid day during the week but not on Saturday or Sunday. An argument could be made to bring it back on weekends but it would have to be at the expense of other routes. Let's see what the midday 94 ridership is in a year before we declare 94 service a necessity on Sunday.

I don't disagree with your point about ridership projections and really hope we're not reinstating the 50U in 2025 instead of bumping up lrt frequencies.

[EOst]

I'm not sure why you think that a streetcar would be slower than the Green Line as configured.

Given a streetcar would probably have more stops (both Minneapolis and St. Paul have been talking 1/4 mile stop frequency for their streetcars) and have to deal with traffic in its ROW (and might not even have as much signal priority as the Green will have) I don't see any way it wouldn't be significantly slower.

[mulad]

I think that there's a huge amount of complaining about the line that can really be traced to angst about the amount of money it took, so I think we all need to be reminded that the Green Line had a low cost per rider when matched up against other projects that are/were in the pipeline at the same time. It cost a lot, but is there any doubt that it will bring billions and billions of dollars of value to the corridor during its decades- or hopefully centuries-long existence? There are problems with the line, but some of them can be fixed in the relative blink of an eye. Others may take longer, but I suspect are still pretty trivial in the long term.

There is not One True Mode or One True Alignment. Anyone who wants the Green Line or any other transportation project to be all things to all people is going to be disappointed. Unfortunately, LRT has been marketed as a magic bullet, but it isn't. In a lot of ways, it's frustrating that there isn't just one way to move around -- it obviously gets confusing when we have so many different options.

Over the years, we've seen consultants and industry groups try to clear things up by setting guidelines for different modes, but they're ofter pretty arbitrary. If we put a streetcar on University, would it stop every half-mile like the Green Line does, or would it be every quarter-mile? Would that mean we'd need an express route 50 bus still, but the streetcar would have replaced the 16? How about top speed? Some streetcars are limited to 20 or 25 mph, rather than the 35-50 mph we see on LRT. American streetcars have been limited to single-car operation in nearly all circumstances, even though there's little reason they'd need to be. There is logic behind each of those ideas, but they'd go against the desire for a fast train in the corridor.

A slow streetcar wouldn't have necessarily been a bad idea due to the density of origins and destinations along the corridor, but would have to be coupled with some sort of improved fast service elsewhere, either something along I-94 or something along the national rail network between the downtowns. There still would have been high ridership on a streetcar, and if they went with single-vehicle operation, it would have been necessary to operate them at pretty high frequency, probably once every 5 minutes or less -- could that have worked with sharing tracks in downtown Minneapolis? I'm not really sure. Adding more tracks downtown would have added cost and confusion.

It's often better to look at these different modes a palettes of different options -- follow the guidelines when they make sense, but know when to break the rules and grab an idea from a different but related mode. Unfortunately, that idea can go awry too -- just look at any BRT proposal in the U.S. ever.

There are parts of the Green Line that should be more streetcar-like, but others that should have dialed the other direction and been more like a rapid-transit (subway/elevated) line. The median space along University Avenue is mostly overbuilt, but (rightly or wrongly) many elements are in place because of the speeds the trains achieve along the route. The Washington Avenue Transit Mall as built looks quite pretty, but the implementation shows how the designers/engineers just didn't comprehend the behaviors of pedestrians and cyclists (especially when they're students) -- I'm pretty disappointed that they nixed the tunnel, though I'm not sure if we ever would have seen Washington shut to automotive traffic (probably one of the best ideas ever for the campus).

Regardless, we can basically say that the hard part is done. It may feel that the line is set in stone, but don't confine yourself to thinking that way. The region changed dramatically in the 60 years between streetcar service ending on University Avenue and the startup of the Green Line -- there's no reason to think we can't fix what needs fixing.

[seanrichardryan]

'Green Line already nears 2030 ridership goal'
http://www.mprnews.org/story/2014/09/19 ... -ridership

[a_tribe_called_chris]

I'm not sure why you think that a streetcar would be slower than the Green Line as configured.

Given a streetcar would probably have more stops (both Minneapolis and St. Paul have been talking 1/4 mile stop frequency for their streetcars) and have to deal with traffic in its ROW (and might not even have as much signal priority as the Green will have) I don't see any way it wouldn't be significantly slower.

Given the current design you could have used a streetcar and accomplished the same travel time. Sure, if there were more stops then yes it would be even slower. There are not really any high speed stretches along the green line that proves the benefit of using LRT opposed to a street car for this configuration was the wisest financial choice. I like the line very much and am ecstatic that it is far exceeding ridership goals already. I simply agree with the opinion that the same end result could have been accomplished with a modern streetcar and the general public (along with most riders) would be none the wiser.

[grant1simons2]

If this were steeetcar then they'd have to build some sort of turn around point or cat storage at the target field station. Because the green line extension to Eden prairie would require a lrv because there are high speed stretches on that line

[HuskyGrad]

I'm not sure why you think that a streetcar would be slower than the Green Line as configured.

Given a streetcar would probably have more stops (both Minneapolis and St. Paul have been talking 1/4 mile stop frequency for their streetcars) and have to deal with traffic in its ROW (and might not even have as much signal priority as the Green will have) I don't see any way it wouldn't be significantly slower.

Given the current design you could have used a streetcar and accomplished the same travel time. Sure, if there were more stops then yes it would be even slower. There are not really any high speed stretches along the green line that proves the benefit of using LRT opposed to a street car for this configuration was the wisest financial choice. I like the line very much and am ecstatic that it is far exceeding ridership goals already. I simply agree with the opinion that the same end result could have been accomplished with a modern streetcar and the general public (along with most riders) would be none the wiser.

A streetcar to reach the same ridership would require more operators and higher frequency, because generally streetcars don't have couplers. A few systems such as Atlanta use the S70 with the coupler removed and a different software package.


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[EOst]

Not to mention that it'd either need a new set of stops downtown, or would confusingly use the same stops downtown as the LRT.