Fantasy Transit Maps

[angrysuburbanite]

For the rapid transit map:
- The M6 segment to Wayzata and M9 through Northeast Minneapolis are almost verbatim what I have in my in-progress fantasy map, but as one combined line, I think realistically something like this should be the next light rail project to be proposed (outside of Midtown Greenway rail)
- M3 should terminate at SW Station, Chanhassen does not have very much transit demand in my opinion
- I don't quite understand what M5 is.
- Love the inclusion of a Lake Minnetonka ferry
- By the time M2, M6, and M9 are completed there will probably be demand for a continuation of M3 up 494

For the local route map:
- High Frequency routes are pretty much how they should be already...
- Extension of 539 to SW Station should have happened years ago, but should extend up Valley View and Dell road similar to the old 690A branch, and end in Excelsior (via 101 -> 7 -> Water Street). This would connect along Water Street with a reinvigorated route 667 (run as limited stop/all day service rather than express), which would retain the same routing except for its terminus in Excelsior rather than CR 62 in Minnetonka.
- Hopkins & Edina need more service, but I don't really know what... this region is the hardest to plan transit in, isn't it?

Otherwise, great maps, makes what I was working on look like child's play haha!

[Tom H.]

I have read that the St Anthony bridge (35W) was designed to be "LRT-ready", and your map obviously takes advantage of that, but I've always wondered what that actually means. Like one lane in each direction could handle the weight of LRT vehicles and rails?

[Korh]

Rapid transit and regional rail system in the Twin Cities: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit? ... sp=sharing

Regular bus services in the Twin Cities coinciding with the rapid transit and regional rail routes: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit? ... sp=sharing

Rail capacity in the Twin Cities with regional rail system: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit? ... sp=sharing

These are still a work in progress, especially the regular bus services part, but they're close enough to being done that I decided to share them for any questions and feedback.

I also have a longer-distance regional rail and intercity rail system map in the works, but that's still early in development.

Seeing the ferry from excelsior to wayzata make me wonder what happened to the old steamboat that used to make excursions on the lake. Last I heard it was dry docked because it lost access to the dock, but got some kind of grant awhile ago to help restore it/get it running again.

[angrysuburbanite]

I think the public launch they used to use got removed or their contract to use it expired. I think they had plans to construct a new one.

[MNdible]

I have read that the St Anthony bridge (35W) was designed to be "LRT-ready", and your map obviously takes advantage of that, but I've always wondered what that actually means. Like one lane in each direction could handle the weight of LRT vehicles and rails?

I think that's correct -- the dynamic loads of an LRT vehicle are much greater than even the heaviest of rubber tired vehicles, and it's not just "gravity weight" that's a problem, it's the potential racking that the moving vehicles can cause. The structural upgrades that they had to make to the Washington Avenue bridge give you some sense of this.

[mattaudio]

I have read that the St Anthony bridge (35W) was designed to be "LRT-ready", and your map obviously takes advantage of that, but I've always wondered what that actually means. Like one lane in each direction could handle the weight of LRT vehicles and rails?

I always figured this was just a token given to transit advocates to keep a high-criticality project moving forward without opposition, when the Federal government was footing the bill and money was no object.

I can imagine LRT crossing the river to Northeast/Southeast someday, but I can't imagine the 35W bridge is the place to do it given all the alternatives.

[twincitizen]

Minneapolis (led by RT Rybak, who had a pretty strong bully pulpit at the moment) demanded the bridge be 'LRT ready', in part because the final route of the Green Line had not been set. By that time in fall 2007, I'm guessing Washington Ave SE had been chosen as the preferred route, but there were still people pushing for it to hop into the RR corridor through Dinkytown and then cross the river into downtown on the new 35W bridge, before joining the existing Blue Line tracks. The Pawlenty admin pushed back, saying it could lead to delays and cost increases, but I believe they relented and the bridge was ultimately built to FTA spec for carrying LRT.

My own fantasy LRT route addition would use the Blue Line trackage from MOA up to 35W, then hop in the middle of 35W over the bridge with stops at Uni/4th (full city block freeway cap opportunity), Hennepin/Johnson (another cap opportunity), Quarry, and eventually Rosedale. The extension to Dinkytown would only be ~1 mile of new trackage! ~3 miles gets you to the Quarry. I'm normally not fond of LRT running in the center of freeways, but I would make an exception for this line as many of the stations would be integrated into large caps over the freeway.

[DanPatchToget]

Currently working on the regular bus route part of my fantasy maps and I'm stumped on the description for each bus route. Should it be very detailed by listing literally every street each bus route uses, or simplified with only listing key destinations on each route?

[Silophant]

Probably just key destinations, or routes like the 11 (Central-40th Ave-University-37th Ave-2 1/2 St-35th Ave-Main St-St. Anthony Parkway-Columbia-31st Ave... and that's just the half-hourly northernmost portion) will get pretty unwieldy.

[DanPatchToget]

Rapid transit and regional rail system in the Twin Cities: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit? ... sp=sharing

Regular bus services in the Twin Cities coinciding with the rapid transit and regional rail routes: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit? ... sp=sharing

Rail capacity in the Twin Cities with regional rail system: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit? ... sp=sharing

These are still a work in progress, especially the regular bus services part, but they're close enough to being done that I decided to share them for any questions and feedback.

I also have a longer-distance regional rail and intercity rail system map in the works, but that's still early in development.

I combined the rapid transit, regional rail, and regular bus service maps into one map:
https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit? ... sp=sharing

One of the biggest changes from the map back in April is Riverview. Since there was pushback towards a streetcar and the physical changes needed to West 7th for it, plus the desire for a service that's faster than the existing Route 54, I figured skipping Fort Snelling and using part of the Ford Spur and I-35E would be the best way to do that while still having good local bus service on West 7th that could also improve connections between the Highland Park area and the M1 (formerly Blue Line) to Minneapolis. I also made all the LRT routes into downtown St. Paul use one alignment, which would be elevated. The downtown Minneapolis portion of the LRT routes would also be elevated.

I also removed the LRT route that utilized the Progressive Rail spur in Bloomington and Richfield and replaced it with an extension of the F Line ABRT to I-35W & 98th Street Station and a local route on Lyndale Avenue.

The M6 BRT was rerouted to I-94 with service to downtown St. Paul and Union Depot.

There's also some smaller changes including station names, tweaks to bus routes, micro-transit hubs, etc.

As always share any comments or questions you have on it!

[COLSLAW5]

Just looking at some of this and you should really try to add some of these as comments on the Network Now that Metro Transit is working on. I really like the idea of extending the 2 over to the new light rail station

[Bakken2016]

Just looking at some of this and you should really try to add some of these as comments on the Network Now that Metro Transit is working on. I really like the idea of extending the 2 over to the new light rail station

I've been saying that as well, in my Network Now comments I included a route 2 extension.

[nils]

This isn’t a done deal yet. Tell your state senators you don’t want the study and that the only point to it is to make sure the project misses the window for federal funding.

What’s the elevator pitch for this line being successful at this point? There’s less commuter demand than when originally designed and there very few high-interest destinations along the line, and it’s not particularly densely populated.

While I understand that it feels like “well, it’s our only option,” I don’t think it makes sense to commit all of our eggs to a basket that is likely to underperform what are already fairly modest expectations.

As someone mentioned previously, this would probably be the last big transit investment for a very long time. The only way that that wouldn’t be the case is if it were a smashing success. After how poorly the SWLRT has gone, we simply can’t afford to be flippantly supporting projects the Met Council thought were a good idea 40 years ago just because we like trains.

I think time and efforts are better spent on drumming up some support for the most high probability opportunity for success we have—Uptown to Northeast. Lay some groundwork and then be ready to seek federal funding in a few years when Mayor Pete takes office a few years from now.

[BikesOnFilm]

So instead of supporting a project that is all ready to go, has been refocused to serve denser areas of Minneapolis, and would provide a high frequency northwestern spine line to more efficiently deploy our bus routes around, you would rather chase the idea of an as of yet unstudied line that would require subway tunneling and cost exponentially more both because of mode choice and inflation. All based on the idea that we might have a transit friendly President in the future?

The only way federal transit projects exist post 2026 is if we have a transit friendly US Senate. And because of the way the US Senate is configured, it's a massive uphill climb for Democrats to take meaningful control of that body. With the filibuster, 51 senators is not control. 60 is. We will likely never see Democratic supermajority control of the Senate in our lifetimes.

And again, an Uptown to Northeast train does not exist in any conceptual or planned form. If the idea is to wait until Mayor Pete shows up and restarts grant programs, you're already too late because the federal planning process would take so long that it wouldn't be ready for the FTA to sign the loan for a decade. I've said we can move faster if we abandon the federal grant process and bootstrap the cost of projects locally, but ultimately we don't have the vision for something like that here, and even pro transit Democratic legislators would be more likely to point to the BRT projects on this corridor (that replaced the plan to build a streetcar from Uptown to Northeast, mind you) as reason not to build the multi-billion dollar subway version.

An illuminating part of redesigning the Blue Line Extension has been the avoidance of tunnels at all costs. Even though a tunnel under North Minneapolis would have been the cleanest way to proceed from an equity and land use perspective, it was not pursued in order to keep the grant proposal cost competitive. I don't think the cost of a subway tunnel connecting Uptown to Northeast would be competitive based on this knowledge. And we wouldn't know for sure until we sunk millions into the study to find out if it would be!

The elevator pitch is "We've already studied this thing to death and another study is just a bad faith attempt to ensure the project dies" and I think that's compelling enough for me. Having four lines that fan out from Downtown Minneapolis and connect as many of the big suburban employment centers as possible and drag those suburbs kicking and screaming towards walkability and density is a good enough reason to stay the course.

[uptownbro]

Im sorry but with the current Admin we likely wont have any future lines even if we scrap this line for a "better" line.
Is the line perfect, no.
Is it far better then the SWLR, yes.

[Mdcastle]

Why? I genuinely don't understand why we would care to "drag" suburbanites towards walkability and density when even our urban centers are still struggling with this in many ways.

Would you rather they drive all their cars downtown and then park?

[nils]

Why? I genuinely don't understand why we would care to "drag" suburbanites towards walkability and density when even our urban centers are still struggling with this in many ways.

Would you rather they drive all their cars downtown and then park?

Over 50% of the expected ridership comes from a household that does not have a vehicle, so there will be no drop in traffic from these riders.

Those that do have a car (i.e., the average suburbanite) will have to choose between:

• Taking the train, traveling at an average speed of 16mph, making a dozen stops in some of the areas of downtown with the highest crime rates; or,

• Driving at 60mph on hwy 100 (in a car that they're already spending $10k a year to own / lease / insure / etc.).

These are people who have consciously chosen to live outside of an urban center. They've already made the choice to be a car-first household. No amount of investment in slow suburban public transit will change that.

[nils]

The adjusted ridership projections for the BLE might not be something we would have been excited about if originally proposed, but there isn't a chance in hell that an Uptown to Northeast subway would have the ridership to justify the deep bore subway that would be necessary to build it. Not unless the biotech sector here takes off like a second Silicon Valley and we're talking about building 30 story towers in Uptown.

What's the argument for it having less ridership than the Blue Line Extension? I would've expected at least the same ridership, given:

• More people live within a 10 minute walk of a 3.5 mile line that would run from LynLake - Loring Park - Marcy Holmes (64k per my unscientific smappen drawing) than live within a 10 minute walk of the entire 14 mile blue line extension (56k per Met Council).

• You'd have destinations all along the corridor that weren't just suburban office buildings and parking lots. From the Uptown District, to MIA, to the convention center, to connecting to green/blue lines, to Stone Arch bridge and Saint Anthony Main, etc.

• Instead of being at grade, limited to an average of 16mph, a subway could move at almost 2x the speed.

I will not pretend to understand what the federal funding criteria specifically look at, however, my point is that for a similar cost figure you could make an elite tier subway line that would have (at the very least) similar ridership to BLE estimates that connects multiple of our urban cores.

This hypothetical isn't to say that Uptown-NE is the only answer. Rather, my point is that any new ideas for rail transit investment over the past 40yrs have been met with a dismissive "..maybe after we finish the blue line and green line." Instead of burying our heads in the sand and blindly advocating for a line that no longer does what it was designed to do, we should be reorienting towards the actual current and future needs of the city -- and suburban commuter rail is very obviously not it.

[BikesOnFilm]

I’m not saying that a theoretical Uptown to NE line would have lower ridership than the BLE.

I’m saying that the ridership of an Uptown to NE line would be unable to meet the cost benefit metrics of a federal grant program, either one that either exists today or a theoretical future one that could reasonably pass in the US Senate.

Understanding how those federal grant programs work is crucial to understanding why what you’re proposing will not happen. Even if more people live in those areas than in the BLE corridor, they are not dense enough to justify the cost of a deep bore subway.

my point is that for a similar cost figure you could make an elite tier subway line

That’s hilarious. It cost us $500m to dig a shallow half mile tunnel in a park.

[thespeedmccool]

I will not pretend to understand what the federal funding criteria specifically look at, however, my point is that for a similar cost figure you could make an elite tier subway line that would have (at the very least) similar ridership to BLE estimates that connects multiple of our urban cores.

I beg to differ. We would probably spend well, well over $3 billion to tunnel a light rail between Uptown and Northeast. Probably more in the range of $20 billion with the way things are costing right now.