Green Line LRT

[MinnMonkey]

Yeah, I don't know. It's a frickin train. It has horns and stuff. And it's a huge 300 foot train. Also it's a giant train. I'm finding it hard to have a lot of sympathy for the collisions that have happened so far, because it's a giant train. It has horns and lights. It's huge. How do you miss it.

Not to mention it's route is pretty predictable. Last time I checked, trains have a tendency to run on tracks.

[David Greene]

To be fair, CCLRT isn't blowing its horn at every intersection and it runs quiet. I can certainly understand people wanting to make turns where they used to make turns. It doesn't excuse their being inattentive but it explains it.

I've seen multiple people make illegal U-turns at 280 and other places. They were lucky there wasn't a train there.

[grant1simons2]

That's like saying "To be fair people on lake aren't blowing their horns at every intersection, so when he didn't look both ways and got his leg run over by the car it isn't his fault, he never heard it coming".

[HiawathaGuy]

This is the quote that made me just shake my head...

http://www.startribune.com/local/stpaul/277153451.html
“Preliminary investigation suggests the pedestrian may not have seen the train moving through the crossing area,” Kerr said in a statement.

[David Greene]

That's like saying "To be fair people on lake aren't blowing their horns at every intersection, so when he didn't look both ways and got his leg run over by the car it isn't his fault, he never heard it coming".

I never said it's not the peds'/bikers'/drivers' fault. But a train is generally quieter than a car and a car can stop much more quickly. Just ignoring that loses quite a bit of context.

A train in the middle of a high-traffic street is very new to people here. It's totally expected that there would be accidents. That doesn't absolve anyone of anything, it's just stating the obvious.

[VAStationDude]

On a westbound train that narrowly the Dale signal and then a fire truck came through. That ten seconds cost the train at least 2.5 minutes. We need soft preemption on major intersections.

Edit: train made up a minute between Dale and Stadium Village

[MinnMonkey]

On a westbound train that narrowly the Dale signal and then a fire truck came through. That ten seconds cost the train at least 2.5 minutes. We need soft preemption on major intersections.

Edit: train made up a minute between Dale and Stadium Village

My hope is after October once they have all the low-traffic intersections pre-empted, they will realize pre-emption isn't the boogeyman it has been made out to be, and start testing it on more heavily used intersections.

Although, I guess I wouldn't be to upset about the train getting behind schedule due to an emergency vehicle.

[holmstar]

Preemption should work fine on the lower traffic intersections as long as it resumes intelligently. For a long time the Hiawatha signals would always resume at the start of the signal pattern, which sometimes resulted in being stopped waiting several minutes for a green if multiple trains came through a few minutes apart.

[Silophant]

Just rode an eastbound train to Stadium Village. Stopped at Church, Union, Walnut, Oak, and Huron. St. Paul's issues get all the media attention, but Minneapolis/the University also desperately need to fix their shit. Stopping at pedestrianized streets should never happen.

[matt91486]

For those interested, the operator of urbanrail.net recently came here and did a blog post on the Green Line.

http://schwandl.blogspot.com/2014/09/mi ... -rail.html

Some parts are complementary. Some are definitely not.

[MinnMonkey]

Just rode an eastbound train to Stadium Village. Stopped at Church, Union, Walnut, Oak, and Huron. St. Paul's issues get all the media attention, but Minneapolis/the University also desperately need to fix their shit. Stopping at pedestrianized streets should never happen.

Up until this week, the trains I were on would almost never get stopped by lights in Minneapolis, but something happened this week and my trips have slowed down between 3 and 8 minutes running through campus.

Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

[mulad]

I went through campus westbound yesterday evening around 6 pm and didn't notice any extra stops. I've seen bad behavior from the lights when they're doing signal maintenance, which might be what was going on. Still weird how the lights seem to either work really well for the trains or really badly, with little in between.

[MinnMonkey]

I went through campus westbound yesterday evening around 6 pm and didn't notice any extra stops. I've seen bad behavior from the lights when they're doing signal maintenance, which might be what was going on. Still weird how the lights seem to either work really well for the trains or really badly, with little in between.

Unlike St. Paul, appears that the lights only give vertical bars when they detect a train. Because of this, I have been on trains that are not detected and may wait 2 light cycles before proceeding, and even then, it is against a horizontal bar. They just blast the horn and proceed slowly though the intersection.

While I personally like the Minneapolis approach better, when the signals get off, it is much worse than St. Paul.

[mulad]

You're right about signals along University Ave, but there are some signals in downtown St. Paul that also need to be tripped in order to work for the trains. But since the time when the signals really started working right there, I've only seen trains get stuck at 4th & Jackson (and the situation there is made more complicated by the crossovers in front of TPT -- I think they may have tweaked some operational rules to try to avoid having trains get stuck there).

[exiled_antipodean]

You all should come and spend some time watching the 29th and University Ave intersection. It's a thing of wonder, since they only have to stop the westbound University Ave traffic, which must be more complicated to programme than a regular intersection.

But the train rarely has to wait to cross University. The length of the green cycle seems to vary significantly depending on trains' presence.

Agreed that when it hits campus it can get slowed.

Does the U control its own traffic lights? That would, in some ways, be crazy.

[mullen]

another review.
http://schwandl.blogspot.com/2014/09/mi ... -rail.html

[mister.shoes]

...but they have in common that they link important centres rather than radiating from one city centre and ending in some low-density neighbourhood.

Come back in a decade!

[Chava]

"please check schedules." Immortalized.

[FISHMANPET]

Are you saying that these places are going to devolve into low density suburbs?

He's claiming that right now both lines have large trip generators on both termini.

[holmstar]

He's referring to SW and Bottineau.