Green Line Extension - Southwest LRT

[Oreos&Milk]

Kenilworth Tunnel structure celebrated completion in April 2025

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C6tvL9VAew

Track, electrical, landscaping, and testing remains.

Also, from the highlights email that arrived this morning…
“The Kenilworth Trail from the Midtown Greenway to Bryn Mawr Station in Minneapolis remains closed and is anticipated to **reopen in 2025**.”

Weird to think that one day this line won't still be under construction and that it will all be built and open for service? ...and one day this extension will actually be in service longer than it has been in it's construction phase. but that won't be for a very very long time but still, feels weird to think of such things.

[UrbanMPLS]

Great news. I’m hopeful this paves the way for a Q1 2027 opening.

[acs]

Kenilworth Tunnel structure celebrated completion in April 2025

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C6tvL9VAew

Track, electrical, landscaping, and testing remains.

Also, from the highlights email that arrived this morning…
“The Kenilworth Trail from the Midtown Greenway to Bryn Mawr Station in Minneapolis remains closed and is anticipated to **reopen in 2025**.”

Weird to think that one day this line won't still be under construction and that it will all be built and open for service? ...and one day this extension will actually be in service longer than it has been in it's construction phase. but that won't be for a very very long time but still, feels weird to think of such things.

I wouldn't count on it. Unless something drastically changes with the suburban transit market this albatross is going to be canned like Northstar within 10 years.

[Bakken2016]

Kenilworth Tunnel structure celebrated completion in April 2025

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C6tvL9VAew

Track, electrical, landscaping, and testing remains.

Also, from the highlights email that arrived this morning…
“The Kenilworth Trail from the Midtown Greenway to Bryn Mawr Station in Minneapolis remains closed and is anticipated to **reopen in 2025**.”

Weird to think that one day this line won't still be under construction and that it will all be built and open for service? ...and one day this extension will actually be in service longer than it has been in it's construction phase. but that won't be for a very very long time but still, feels weird to think of such things.

I wouldn't count on it. Unless something drastically changes with the suburban transit market this albatross is going to be canned like Northstar within 10 years.

Comparing Green Line Extension to Northstar, is like comparing apples to oranges.

This will have all day 10 minute service, Northstar ran a handful of trips a day.


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[thespeedmccool]

I can imagine, in a budget crunch, Metro Transit turning around half of trips at Shady Oak Station, but the idea that Southwest will be totally mothballed barring an actual apocalypse is insane.

[Bakken2016]

I can imagine, in a budget crunch, Metro Transit turning around half of trips at Shady Oak Station, but the idea that Southwest will be totally mothballed barring an actual apocalypse is insane.

Yeah, as long as the regional sales tax for transit funding remains, Metro Transit has more than enough funding.


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[acs]

This will have all day 10 minute service, Northstar ran a handful of trips a day.


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So does the orange line. Want to check how that expansion is doing? barely 2k riders a day. Boy, I sure remember the days when that had projections of 20k riders and we could dream about upgrading it to light rail. Southwest may cost 6x more and be that sexy light rail but it fundamentally serves the same market; shuttling suburban commuters to downtown from park-and-rides all day. You can't seriously look at the station area plans and think otherwise.

Heck, look at the latest blue line extension models if you want a window into metro transit's current thinking on light rail projects. 13k new riders for another $3b project. And that is after the re-route bringing the train much closer to a dense and transit-dependent population. Those numbers would have been laughed at by this forum, transit planners, and politicians 10 years ago. Yet we're going to build it.

Sure Metro transit has more dedicated funding than ever before. I can also remember when this forum absolutely drooled over the thought of getting the transit sales tax increases we've actually gotten under Walz and using that money for truly revolutionary transit expansion. Instead, it's all being spent just to build out the same system we've been planning since the late 90's while barely keeping the lights on everywhere else. At least aBRT has been a huge hit which is funny because it has had by far the most bipartisan support.

[UrbanMPLS]

Predicting SWLRT will underperform is a reasonable opinion. Saying it won’t last 10 years is trolling.

I don’t think the orange line is a fair comparison. SWLRT is getting a lot more TOD with plenty of opportunities for more. Like the orange line, this will almost certainly underperform pre-pandemic projections, but the floor is much higher.

[angrysuburbanite]

The extension will get ridership. There is lots of all-day travel demand in Hopkins, St. Louis Park, and Minneapolis that will finally be fulfilled with this line. The park and rides will collect from underserved areas of choice riders in places like Minnetonka and Eden Prairie, which both still have some downtown commuter traffic. The light rail is going to become the de facto way to get downtown for lots of suburbanites down here, as, unlike current bus options, it is actually faster than driving. I can say this with confidence because it is true for the suburbs near to the Blue Line. The stations south of Opus are generally terrible, but SouthWest station is a strong terminus with enough park and ride capacity for outstate residents to park to get downtown, and it is directly adjacent to some very good trail connections to the dense-ish Eden Prairie center area. Not to mention TOD potential is still strong on some of the underdeveloped stations.

I think SWLRT will easily hit 10,000 daily riders within a year of opening. It won't be as immediately successful as either existing lines or the Blue extension, but with time and development, it is going to grow into a healthy level of ridership. There's a different culture there, but when I was in Boston I rode the length of the D branch of their Green Line, which has very similar land use along it (generally suburban with pockets of density) and it was very busy even off-peak. I see no reason why our green line won't be like that eventually.

Orange line gets pretty busy despite the low overall ridership number, in my experience.

[BikesOnFilm]

In what world was anyone saying that the highway oriented Orange Line could be converted to LRT? And if someone was saying that, why were you taking them seriously?

I didn't think I'd have to say this here, but as I've explained in comment sections where this is a popular line of thought, it would cost upwards of $2 billion dollars if we decided to mothball Southwest LRT. We'd have to pay back the entirety of the FTA loan, and pay the cost to restore the corridor to the pre-construction condition. $2 billion for the loan, "upwards" for whatever demolition and restoration would cost. We are guaranteed to see decades of SWLRT service no matter what the ridership. Unless we got a statewide conservative trifecta willing to force Hennepin to eat the cost just to make the cities suffer, it's not happening.

Not to say I'm expecting a blockbuster success right out of the gate, but consider the following:

- There have been 9300 housing units developed along the Green Line Extension as of 2023. Some of the as-of-yet unbuilt projects along the line are waking up from the interest rate shock, and developers seem to not be as scared off from building in the suburbs as they are from big Minneapolis developments. The Opus area in particular has developed more housing in the last five years than Downtown St. Paul has in decades. The Blake Road Station development setback is disappointing, but ultimately something will get built there.

- Employers continue to tighten the RTO screws. Eventually I think the pressure on Hennepin County will push them to 2-3 days of hybrid, and Target will reach a similar level, especially by 2027. Add this to the recessionary pressures that are allowing employers to basically tell their current and prospective employees "Do what we want, or we'll find someone who will." I personally find this to be a misguided direction for companies to take, but it's there.

- Flight to quality in office space continues to happen, and thanks to downtown property owners throwing in the towel and letting their properties go to auction, some incredible locations are going to be available at attractive prices. People working in a dumpy 1960s-1980s era office park in the SW suburbs today might be working downtown in 2027.

- Our biggest Fortune 500 company is within a 15 minute walk of one station station, and its sister company is directly adjacent to the next station. Young workers who live downtown and the post-flight exurban workers in Carver County are both situated to take advantage of the train here.

I think UrbanMPLS put it best - "Predicting SWLRT will underperform is a reasonable opinion. Saying it won’t last 10 years is trolling." We really don't know what's going to happen, but it's almost certain that it will be ridden, and it will be around for a lot longer than ten years.

[UrbanMPLS]

The light rail is going to become the de facto way to get downtown for lots of suburbanites down here

I think this is correct, with one big caveat: it needs to be a pleasant experience, especially during the first year of operation.

I do think a lot of people in the SW metro who never use transit will try it out when attending an event downtown. If it feels clean, safe and reliable, I think they’ll be back. If it’s dirty and feels sketchy, they’ll probably opt to drive in the future.

They’ll also tell their friends and family about their experience, so I really think that first year is important to building the trust and confidence you need to make it the default way to get downtown.

[DanPatchToget]

I won't get my hopes up on lots of choice riders being comfortable riding the Green Line Extension besides to something like a Twins or Vikings game. Sadly this isn't the good old days when the Hiawatha Line was young and issues were few and far between (at least from my experience), and while both of our existing light rail lines have gotten slightly better since the pandemic there's still a long way to go.

With that said I think ridership will be good enough. Definitely not pre-pandemic projections, but also not low enough levels where the idea of short-running trains or suspending service on part of the route is considered.

[angrysuburbanite]

I think this is correct, with one big caveat: it needs to be a pleasant experience, especially during the first year of operation.

This reminds me of another thing I thought was interesting in Boston: outside of the downtown tunnel, the Green Line there is also proof of payment, with fare readers on board like a bus. Probably 10% of the people getting on paid, yet I never experienced any problems or saw any suspicious riders at all. That was pretty eye opening to me as someone whose only transit experience is here and in Chicago. Sure, the MBTA has existed forever, but Metro Transit is better funded, has newer stations and trains, very well-maintained infrastructure, yet very few people want to ride it because of safety issues. How can the T have the exact same fare evasion issues without the rowdy behavior that is omnipresent here? Our system should be spotless compared to the T yet it isn't. I felt safer in a poorly-lit, dingy underground station constructed in the early 1900s than I did in one constructed in 2004--that is above ground! (I'm talking about Nicollet mall station at about 10 PM. When everything smells like weed and the glass on the train looks like someone hit it with a hammer there is no active safety risk but had I been a non-transit enthusiast I would have never wanted to ride again).

I'm sorry for venting here, but this sucks. It's been nearly six years and even with improvements in fare checking people are too scared to ride what should be a quick, environmentally friendly, and seamless mode of transportation. Once everything is up and running the light rail will cover nearly all of the major Twin Cities attractions and hit the four corners of the metro. It will do fine, yet it will probably not surpass the ridership levels seen prior to 2020 (70-80k... current issues persisting the ceiling looks more like 40-50k) for decades simply because of the inaction in regards to perceived safety risks despite doubling in mileage.

Us advocates can say it is better than it is made out to be (which I'd argue it is during a very narrow window of the day), but people deserve to be able to ride our rail system whenever they want and not worry that their children are going to be exposed to crack inside of a train car. It is not acceptable and it needs to end now. And I say this as a very vocal and relatively optimistic urbanist. The general public will not embrace transit en masse until they feel safe to bring their children aboard. I know it is possible: My parents would take me on the Blue line as a child around 2015-2018 and it was perfectly fine. But they definitely wouldn't if the system were in its current state.

(I realize this might be somewhat contradictory to my previous post which was much more optimistic, but I feel like both what I said there and here can be true at the same time. SWLRT is going to do OK but safety issues are a damper on what could be a much higher number)

[BikesOnFilm]

It's a frustrating problem because it has nothing to do with the amount of money invested, the age of the equipment, or any of the things you mentioned.

It's a two pronged problem of:

- Bad things do actually happen sometimes and we need to reduce how often they happen
- Potential riders who want the chance of bad things to be zero before they ride again

Of the two, the only one worth focusing on, in my opinion, is reducing the amount of incidents and bad behavior on the trains. If somebody wants the crime rate to be zero before they ever want to set foot on a train again (or in Minneapolis again), I'm not worried about that person because they're effectively saying "I'm never coming back." If someone's tolerance for risk is "none", we can't help them.

Obviously we should do everything we can to attract back people with normal levels of risk tolerance for public life, and we should endeavor to avoid the conditions that create the sorts of people who listen to police scanners all day and drown themselves in the fear of the maybe. But the people who are living in that constant state of fear need to figure out how to dig themselves out of it, because turning the US into Singapore is just not something most of us are okay with.

[mattaudio]

"I want risk to be zero or I'm never coming back" is a red herring.
People are just expecting the personal risk and gross factors to be reasonably similar to the alternatives to transit.

[BikesOnFilm]

I think for the average person weighing the options, yes that's true. I think there are some outsized voices in the public discourse who argue about these things in bad faith, and offer expensive solutions that they say would bring them back but ultimately wouldn't.

Consider, for instance, the voices who think we need to invest millions of hard won transit dollars to build turnstiles and fences around our stations. "Have a patrol officer" on every train is batted around like a reasonable decision, as if uniformed officers are free to procure.

And we also just pretend there is zero personal risk to private cars. 40,000 Americans die on our roads every year and we have internalized that as a cost of motorized freedom, but you bet I'm far more likely to see a headline about the 1-2 drivers who take an illegal left hand turn on University and got hit by the Green Line and the safety discourse that results from those entirely avoidable instances.

I'm not hand waving and saying "there are no problems on the trains." I think we do need to start treating drug use in enclosed public spaces like this as a bigger deal than we might treat someone using under a freeway overpass. Let's do what we can to make them as safe as possible, and give new riders confidence to keep riding.

All I'm saying is there are people we can win back and people who say we can win them back but are ultimately unmovable. Let's have the wisdom to know the difference.

[UrbanMPLS]

Here’s the thing though: Metro Transit is going to get the opportunity to win people back — or, more likely, win them over for the first time.

There will be a good chunk of folks in the western suburbs who will ride transit for the first time when this opens. Not every day, but they’ll try it out for a Twins game or something. And if it’s a good experience, they’ll use it more. They might even tell their friends what they see on the news is overblown. Ideally, this would lead to the train being the default way for those in the SW metro to get downtown for work and events.

But if it’s like the current experience — broken glass at stations, smoking in cars, etc — that will be their last ride and they’ll tell their friends how terrible it was.

It’s an exciting opportunity for Metro Transit. They just need to make sure they get it right.

[Anondson]

I’ll be one who’ll be taking the Green to work downtown from Hopkins no matter what.

My wife could be an odd one taking the line from Hopkins to the Optum area station (in good weather).

[thespeedmccool]

Crime is an issue, but realistically, it's not what's keeping any transit project in the Cities from succeeding. The ultimate problem is that transit doesn't improve most people's commutes.

People from other metros move here and are generally impressed by how little traffic there is. When getting around by private, air conditioned living-room-on-wheels is relatively painless, there's just no way you'll convince someone to wait in sweltering heat for a noisy bus that takes twice as long. Crime is often cited by suburbanites as the reason they don't ride, but the reality is that it's because it's inconvenient, slow, and unnecessary for the trips they take.

The solution, then, isn't to obsessively focus on crime (as many here have pointed out,) but to make expand transit options while making alternatives less convenient. For example, when MNDOT rebuilds 94, they should take away a general traffic lane and give it to busses. Make transit the more convenient option.

The Green Line Extension will be more convenient for some trips, but we're kidding ourselves if we think "all we have to do is tackle crime problems, and then Chaska commuters will suddenly become riders." Southwest will fail if driving remains too attractive an option.

If we want the Green Line Extension to succeed where Northstar failed, we need to stop expanding freeways.

[Korh]

I just want them to open up the trail again, the ceder lake/Kenilworth loop was exactly 12 miles depending where you hopped in and was probably my favorite route in school if I wanted to do a quick ride.