B Line Lake St Rapid Bus, Midtown Rail Transit

[Anondson]

No need for a maintenance facility on such a short line, especially with the Southwest facility going in Hopkins.

Should Hopkins get a say? Or at the least a heads up?

[twincitizen]

It's been rumored that Hopkins would be picked over EP for the Southwest facility. The fact that the EP location would cost an extra $500k operationally doesn't help, and the recently-announced cost cutting measure to possibly end the SW line at SW Station instead of Mitchell Road puts a nail in the coffin for the EP facility. It's pretty close to a done deal. Hopkins always made more sense than putting it out at the far end of the line.

Also, I didn't type all of this for it to get stranded at the bottom of the previous page, so I'll repeat:

No need for a maintenance facility on such a short line, especially with the Southwest facility going in Hopkins. Whether this uses a 66' streetcar or a single 90' LRV doesn't really matter.

How long is a round trip from West Lake to Hi-Lake, 40 minutes? Planned service every 10-15 minutes? You can do the math if you want, but the answer is this line will not require enough vehicles or operators to demand its own maintenance facility. We're talking about 4, 5, or 6 single-car trains in service at any given time. Someone should probably make sure the Hopkins SWLRT facility has room though, given the failure to coordinate things in this region.

Methodology:
20 min one-way trip x 2 = 40 min round trip.
+20 minute recovery* / operator break = 60 minutes of service time
60 / 10min headway = 6 operators & vehicles needed
60 / 15min headway = 4 operators & vehicles needed

*In reality, this number is closer to 10 minutes than 20, so it would actually be 50 / 10 = 5 operators & vehicles during peak. I was being generous.

[Anondson]

Hopkins is very aware they are being pegged for the operations and maintenance facility. But should they also be told it will be for the Midtown line also?

I ask because at the Hopkins LRT open house the officials told the gathered residents that the facility couldn't be in Minneapolis because they already had one and insisted the next line be in another city. Few were pleased, but grudgingly understood. I think Hopkins won't be very pleased too find out the facility will also be housing cars for a line that never crosses their border. Or else why not bump Minneapolis back on the list of possible locations for this facility if it will be operations shed to a line exclusively in Minneapolis. Just sayin'.

[papazim]

The Southwest OMF is not being sized to accommodate vehicles from Midtown. This was made clear at the last CMC meeting. But the possibility is being left open for being able to do heavy servicing of Midtown vehicles at the SW OMF if necessary. The assumption is there will be a separate facility built on Midtown to handle regular light servicing.

[talindsay]

I don't understand the planned intentional proliferation of small maintenance facilities all over the metro. I can understand having a mid size facility in Minneapolis and a mud size facility in Saint Paul with a big facility in the inner ring, but why more than that? Separate facilities are planned every time we add track, that just raises the overall cost both for construction and for operations.

[Tom H.]

I'm not sure it's all that uncommon. For instance, the Brown Line in Chicago (a relatively small line that runs from the Loop to the North Park neighborhood) has what appears to be its own OMF at its final stop. Maybe there is some advantage to having distributed OMFs to having large centralized facilities?

(And, yes, I know it's not really fair to compare heavy rail in Chicago to LRT in Mpls.)

[mattaudio]

One more item to the long list of how transit planning in MSP is a disaster.

[David Greene]

Now if it could only share platforms at West Lake and Midtown stations.

I'm not sure we'd want a shared platform at West Lake. These are very different services. With some single-track operation, we don't want the streetcar fouled up by LRT trains running off schedule. It makes the whole operation more complicated if we share platforms.

We of course will want to connect the platforms for easy transfers.

There's no chance of sharing at Midtown because of the elevation differences.

[mattaudio]

Of course there's a chance. I crafted a proposal with cost estimates over two years ago. It has been incorporated into the public record at multiple meetings.

[MNdible]

One more item to the long list of how transit planning in MSP is a disaster.

This gets old in a hurry. Apparently we are uniquely incapable of planning and running a transit system because we're a bunch of backwards hayseeds. Everybody else has it figured out perfectly -- they build their lines just right the first time, and never have any delays or nasty political compromises that need to get made. If only we'd look to [insert name of some other city here] and see how they do it...

[MNdible]

Or if only they'd read the comments that UrbanMSPers file in the public record!

[VAStationDude]

As someone who uses the Blue Line daily, I don't want a shared Midtown platform. Construction would be an absolute nightmare. Dwelling Midtown Corridor trains have the potential to seriously mess up Blue Line operations unless there are tailing tracks south of Lake which would require shut downs of the line between 38th and Franklin during construction. If we want to be a Strong Region let's utilize the already built vertical circulation infrastructure rather than mess with the Blue Line.

[Anondson]

Maybe there is some advantage to having distributed OMFs to having large centralized facilities?

I can think of one operational advantage. Imagine a train-auto collision on the track between the OMF and the distant line. Not only would the affected line where the crash stops service, but every line the OMF feeds cars out to is shut down. But if each line has its own OMF, service on each line remains intact except for transfers to the out of service line.

[ProspectPete]

Does anyone have an idea of the timeline for this project? The met council website was vague as to when they would start moving forward.

[Tcmetro]

The final open houses will be held soon, the AA report should be published soon afterwards. Wonder if/when this line will advance into the DEIS stage...

Public Open Houses

Wednesday, Nov. 20
Intermedia Arts
2822 Lyndale Avenue South

Thursday, Nov. 21
Colin Powell Center
2924 4th Avenue South

Open houses are from 6 - 8 p.m. Presentation begins at 6:30 p.m.

[talindsay]

If they do it right I wonder if they might just have to do an EA for this one instead of the full-blown EIS process. I don't recall the details but I think it has to do with cost (scale) and potential impact; since this is already grade-separated and the cost should be relatively low, I wonder if it might fall into the much shorter EA process.

EDIT: digging around on the FHWA and FTA websites I found this document [pdf] that describes the process. It sounds like while it's still technically possible for a rail project to get away with just an EA, the expectation has shifted such that rail projects are expected to do a full EIS. That's not surprising but it is disappointing.

[Tcmetro]

http://www.metrotransit.org/project-library

Some more detailed maps, and cross-sections. Looks like the biggest detriment to the trails is at Hennepin Ave. Otherwise the trails are basically the same as existing.

Weird that there are stations at both Nicollet and 35W. Definitely should be combined.

[mulad]

Yeah, Hennepin has always seemed to be the tight spot to me. The drawings seem to imply that the structural supports inside the bridge abutments are spaced pretty far apart, so I wonder if a hole could be poked in the northern one to allow the bike path through, though that'd probably be a messy operation.

Looks like a lot of bridge piers would end up with the wing-like deflector barriers like for the pedestrian bridges on Washington Avenue due to the Green Line.

[RailBaronYarr]

Yeah the Nicollet and Stevens/35W combo was discussed. Definitely seems like an opportunity although with the very strong likelihood of a streetcar (and at the least an enhanced bus) along Nicollet that seems like a must to have closely co-located stations for transfers. The same could then be said about the Stevens with access to the Orange Line/Lake St station area. As proposed, the 2 stops are a whopping 870' (0.16 miles) apart from each other, in stark contrast to the line's fairly typical half mile spacings. However, if the 35W station was cut, someone would need to walk a full 0.3 miles to the actual Orange/Lake St station, a bit far for a typical transfer IMO (just over 6 minutes).

This could be mitigated if the stop for Nicollet was on the east side of the street in the trench, but perhaps still not enough. To this point, I'd prefer that side anyway if there's a chance whatsoever of having LRT share the Midtown tracks and exit the trench on the south side just before Nicollet to curve northbound in a tunnel under 1st to eventually run under Nicollet in downtown. Fantasy, obviously, but I wonder why the west-side station alignment is proposed..

[MNdible]

I'm no expert here, but it seems to me that the clearances that they're providing are excessive.

For example, at the Hennepin Avenue bridge portal, they're showing 8' from the centerline of the track to the face of the bridge abutment. If the train is 10' wide (and it's probably less), they're leaving 3' of play. Trains are on tracks, so they shouldn't need that much wiggle, seems to me. If the thing derails, a couple of extra feet won't make much difference anyway, but it would help at some of these tight portals.