Green Line Extension - Southwest LRT

[acs]

http://www.startribune.com/community-le ... 306020881/

Can anyone else make sense of this? How could ending the line at EP town center still be on the table if terminating short of southwest station is not?

[Silophant]

I read it as terminating at SW Station is off the table because it doesn't save enough money. Terminating at Town Center, which saves more money, is an option.

[mattaudio]

Any idea how much it would save to defer 21st St Station?

[FISHMANPET]

It's in the document... http://www.metrocouncil.org/METC/files/ ... 8e25f2.pdf

[David Greene]

Any idea how much it would save to defer 21st St Station?

Hardly anything. And it would impact the connectivity to certain disadvantaged communities.

[mattaudio]

Kenwood?

[EOst]

Presumably the 2 would terminate there instead of Hennepin; that would be a significant improvement in access for a big swath of south Minneapolis.

[Scott Wood]

Any idea how much it would save to defer 21st St Station?

Hardly anything. And it would impact the connectivity to certain disadvantaged communities.

Only if route 2 actually gets extended to 21st station, which is ranked as low priority in the Service Improvement Plan.

[RailBaronYarr]

Hey, the 21st St Station could totally have some TOD:

[min-chi-cbus]

I doubt they'll upzone anything in that neighborhood where single-family homes already exist. I can see the protests now!

[seanrichardryan]

I'd love to see Upton re-extended North. Plenty of room for 18 unit 2.5 story walk-ups.

[FISHMANPET]

According to the document, removing 21st station would save $6-7M, reduce ridership by 1600 (I believe that's against the daily number), lose 3% of the line's transit dependent riders, 1% of the overall population served, and no reduction in jobs served or developable acreage.

Interesting to note, removing Royalston would only reduce ridership by 200, and removing Penn only 750 riders.

So yeah, huge boon to the Northside those stations.

[acs]

Remember the line about burning the furniture... yeah, we're getting there. Not that it matters anyways, if the feds rule against the council in one of the two lawsuits this thing is toast.

[mattaudio]

Shoreland Overlay Districts in urban areas, and the DNR rules about them, are rather ridiculous in many ways. We need to distinguish between urban waterfront, sub-urban waterfront, and undeveloped waterfront.

[RailBaronYarr]

Not if MRRDC has anything to say about it.

But seriously, that img I made was half a joke. And, those station boarding numbers are your daily reminder of how ludicrous the consultant/planners' numbers were, at least on a station-by-station level. Some of them are probably close (and honestly, a couple of us could have settled on the same number in 1 hour of chatting and charged the Met Council $300 for our efforts). If they're deciding which stations in Mpls can/should be cut, taking those figures as justification seriously, I dunno man.

[transportationist]

The numbers are obviously off, everyone knows that, but one of the problems is that you are assuming land use changes, and the forecasting procedure did not/was not allowed to based on federal regs. See this by Eric Roper
http://northloop.org/stay-in-the-loop/2 ... t-planners

[go4guy]

Quick question. What is the cost of the maintenance facility for this extension? And why is it needed? Doesnt the line already have one? Why does there need to be 2?

[RailBaronYarr]

The numbers are obviously off, everyone knows that, but one of the problems is that you are assuming land use changes, and the forecasting procedure did not/was not allowed to based on federal regs. See this by Eric Roper
http://northloop.org/stay-in-the-loop/2 ... t-planners

I wasn't assuming land use changes were baked into the forecast, but rather saying maybe 21st would come close if we actually did end up allowing development. If Royalston was always planned as the major N Mpls transfer point (knowing what buses actually went by there as well as plans for future investments like the aBRT routes), how in the world did it get <300 riders/day?

[acs]

Also these numbers are still assuming a rail bias of over 100%... Wageneous was right on one thing, "there are a lot of people who are extraordinarily invested in justifying the flawed process of how we got here".

[MNdible]

Man, we're getting a lot of mileage out of that quote. If only we'd used the non-flawed process.