Public Transit News / Current Events (MN only)

[bubzki2]

Pushing for transit improvements isn't biased. I reject the premise.

[VacantLuxuries]

How would you study something theoretical like that? You could do a poll of current and former transit riders, but I wouldn't consider that non-biased or fact/evidence based. The only evidence we can collect is by moving forward, and putting a moratorium on any sort of new transit spending is a recipe for a death spiral. We stand a better chance to recoup ridership by improving what we had pre-pandemic, not by keeping it static.

The three projects you hold up as examples, a commuter rail line built in a transit hostile region that was never completed to reach an actual population center, a highway reconstruction project wearing a bus costume to get transit money, and the end result of regional planners putting regional planning goals above good transit service, don't really have anything to do with ridership issues post-pandemic. Listing three projects that are flawed for a multitude of reasons isn't a good case for not investing in transit going forward.

Besides, we continue to shovel endless money at freeways and nobody is making future funding contingent on how safe people feel on them, even as a disturbing number of drivers who got used to having them empty in 2020 continue to practice reckless behavior. And forget about any sort of safety enforcement. According to the average citizen, enforcing speed and safety on freeways is as un-American as it gets.

Nobody is going to argue that we always make correct decisions with transit funding. But again, we also do stupid things with freeway money, and nobody is navel gazing about that money pit.

[grant1simons2]

>The average citizen

*the average upper middle class worker with a higher ed degree that doesn't need to work in retail, construction, logistics, general labor, etc.

[Bakken2016]

>The average citizen

*the average upper middle class worker with a higher ed degree that doesn't need to work in retail, construction, logistics, general labor, etc.

THIS! The majority of transit riders can not work from home.

[Nick]

Yes, which is why it’s frustrating to see people with email jobs denying that conditions on the train have deteriorated badly.

[Bakken2016]

Yes, which is why it’s frustrating to see people with email jobs denying that conditions on the train have deteriorated badly.

It has gotten bad, it truly disappoints me that most of what Metro Transit leadership is doing hasn't even made a dent in the issues onboard the trains.

[VacantLuxuries]

I don't think it's a matter of denial, it's a matter of "how (and why) is a transit provider expected to fix systemic societal problems when they are already struggling to keep the service operating?" And "if a transit provider reasonably can't solve these issues, is disinvestment really the only option on the table?"

[Nick]

One possibility is to arrest the people who are smoking crack on the train. Ten years ago, people were not smoking crack on the train in the middle of the day, due to the enforcement of rules regarding smoking crack on the train. Sometime after that, people (?) decided that we should allow people to smoke crack on the train. Consequently, people are now smoking crack on the train. We do not need to hire teams of consultants to do outreach to put together an action plan for coming up with steps to figuring out how to get people to stop smoking crack on the train. We had this figured out ten years ago, and intentionally forgot about it.

[John21]

We don’t have any Metro Transit police anymore. It’s really rare to see them and if you do, they’re sitting in their car.

[Bakken2016]

We don’t have any Metro Transit police anymore. It’s really rare to see them and if you do, they’re sitting in their car.

That is my biggest gripe with MTPD, they sit in there cars waiting for things to happen, they should be riding the LRT. I know it doesn't help that they are down like 60 officers, but focus your resources where the problems are!

[bptenor]

Yes they should be on the train, riding with us. If MTPD was riding with us, maybe my ride home to downtown St Paul wouldn't have included multiple people smoking, one person puking, one person lighting a 12 inch incense stick with a massive open flame, and a used condom thrown on the floor. All within 3 stops. Come on.

[mplsjaromir]

Americans live in segregated neighborhoods, drive alone, and work among the economically likeminded. They are often unaware of problems like drugs, homelessness and poverty. So when they ride transit its one of the only times they see that and think its somehow unique to transit.

[Bob Stinson's Ghost]

Americans live in segregated neighborhoods, drive alone, and work among the economically likeminded. They are often unaware of problems like drugs, homelessness and poverty. So when they ride transit its one of the only times they see that and think its somehow unique to transit.

I'm really not sure what your point is here. You see all of that in a 15 minute walk through downtown. Lots of white middle class people walk around downtown. Tens of thousands every day.

[Trademark]

Yes they should be on the train, riding with us. If MTPD was riding with us, maybe my ride home to downtown St Paul wouldn't have included multiple people smoking, one person puking, one person lighting a 12 inch incense stick with a massive open flame, and a used condom thrown on the floor. All within 3 stops. Come on.

Of all the things people burn on the train an incense stick is by far the best thing. Honestly I would love to have an incense being burnt on my train. The other stuff not good tho.

[Korh]

Wasn't it the whole viral clip of MTPD officers overstepping there bounds that kinda changed there attitude/stance completely or can someone else point to some better examples of when they started spending more time in their cars rather than on busses or trains.

[alexschief]

I was in Phoenix this past weekend, and I rode the LRT there four times. My fare was checked twice by uniformed but unarmed staff. These folks worked in pairs and had a walkie talkie and a fare scanner. One would check the fares while the other would chat up riders and just generally be there as back-up. Obviously the issue isn't really fares, but fares are a pretext for agencies to regularly put these types of staff on trains to enforce better behavior. The issues with smoking were significantly less on the rains that I rode. I think that's the main issue for Metro Transit.

The key point from Phoenix is that the people checking the fares were not Valley Metro employees, but contractors from Allied Universal. My understanding is that Metro Transit cannot currently copy this approach because fare skipping is a misdemeanor, not an administrative citation, and so enforcement is can only be conducted by licensed peace officers. That means it's not worth it for Metro Transit's to hire ambassadors (Of course they could and probably should do this anyway, but they'd have no responsibilities other than to ride the train) but it also means that Metro Transit cannot hire quickly hire outside contractors to patch over gaps in MTPD staffing.

Whatever issues there are with MTPD staffing and deployment (I can't understand why they don't have a permanent presence in some places) the root of these issues is inflexible state law. There is reportedly bi-partisan support at the legislature to fix this issue and give Metro Transit the flexibility it needs to hire appropriately, but in the past years, key Republican senate committee leaders didn't support it. Now with the DFL in control in both houses, hopefully it will be made a priority. The sooner, the better.

[Tcmetro]

I was poking around on the Metro Transit website and noticed a few updates about planning efforts and the Better Bus Routes program.

Metro Transit will start engagement in 2023 on the "Network Now" plan which will look at how to restore and reconfigure the bus network over the next five years. The longer-term "Network Next" effort is on hold still.

Better Bus Routes will review Route 17 in 2023 and Route 4 in 2024. Routes 61 and 11 will be reviewed after those.

https://www.metrotransit.org/Data/Sites ... bility.pdf

[Silophant]

Ooh, good find. With the operator shortage, it would sure be nice if they could get more than one route per year through the Better Bus Routes program. And I'm not just saying that because the 11 is my route and I want it to be improved before 2026.

Planned bus lanes include 10th St N, the Hennepin/Lyndale Commons, 1st Ave NE/Hennepin Ave NE, and portions of Lake St. and Marshall Ave. These projects will be implemented in the next 2-3 years.

Have we heard about bus lanes on 10th St N or Hennepin/Lyndale yet?

[Tcmetro]

There's a page on the city's website for the 10th St N bus lane. It looks like it's converting the third lane that starts at Twins Way to a bus lane until Currie Ave, where the buses turn left into the 7th St Transit Center. It feels like more of a "bus lane visibility" project than one that will have a significant effect on operations. I don't recall that 10th St is particularly congested for buses.

https://www.minneapolismn.gov/governmen ... nsit-lane/

The E Hennepin/1st Ave NE and Hennepin/Lyndale Commons bus lanes don't seem to have any info on the web yet, but are probably related to the E Line project.

EDIT: I must have missed this - bus lanes have already been included in the layouts for the E Hennepin/1st reconstruction.

https://www.hennepin.us/hennepin-and-first

[Silophant]

Yeah, I pass through that portion of 10th pretty regularly and it doesn't seem congested. Can't hurt, though. A little depressing that even that two-block bus lane couldn't get implemented in time for the D Line launch in December.