I hate this project except for the section in Minneapolis. The Met Council should be promoting T.O.D. rather than constructing more surface parking spaces in Robinsdale.
Do you think anyone on the bus tour actually got out of the vehicle and stood in the middle of that 6-lane highway? What an awful place to have to cross and then wait for a train!!!
This stupid line is still planning to send trains up to a corn field just so it can get a mile away from a mostly empty Target office complex- all for $2 billion. Yet, it took me 40 minutes to go down Lake St. on the Route 21 bus, from Uptown to Midtown, last night. The Met Council and Hennepin County seem incapable of making decent transit and are wasting billions on LRT to car-dominated and transit hostile places.
Sometimes it is just faster to walk than take the 21. I find it frustrating that if I want to take the bus home from work it will take me an hour and fifteen minutes to travel 6 miles while my coworker who lives in Savage claims it takes him an hour by bus/rail. Maybe Metro Transit's goal is to have every trip an hour?
The project connects many important destinations in Brooklyn Park to Minneapolis, without having to take 2 buses that take an hour or more. You have North Hennepin Community College, Starlite Shopping Center, Amazon Warehouse, and plenty of residential areas. Yes, it ends in in a cornfield next to Target North, but that area is prime for TOD redevelopment. This project is 100x better than SWLRT, and if it fails due to municipal consent, I'm going to be extremely disappointed.
To your point on the 21, the METRO B Line is coming with dedicated bus lanes. It's not like they are ignoring the city, but we definitely don't have the political will to tunnel in Minneapolis, so we aren't going to get large lrt projects in most of the city.
Sure the 21 is due to be upgraded to the B line. But if Metro Transit was serious about building up the urban core why are they spending 65 million on the B line and 532 million on the Gold line? The A, B, C, D and E lines don't even cost as much combined.