Orange Line / 35W@94: Downtown to Crosstown Project

[mattaudio]

That bridge has only existed for about a decade. Before that, there was no bridge between 494 and 82nd St. So, to make it happen without redoing 35W, the bridge had to go up and over all the way.

There's a nice little plaque to some former Bloomington planner up on top of that bridge for the 5 people a year who walk across it (I was one of them, apparently). What a legacy...

[talindsay]

I wonder if it might also be to save money on construction - an arched bridge can bear the same weight with quite a bit less material as compared to a flat bridge.

[mattaudio]

That bridge is not arched. It is built with pre-stressed concrete trusses in sections supported by a series of piers.

[talindsay]

Ah, I haven't seen the bridge and was speculating, thanks for the clarification.

[Mdcastle]

It does looks steep, but considering it's only 10 years old it never would have been built if it weren't wheelchair accessible. Construction got halted because of a government shutdown, and then they built retaining walls rather than a dirt slope to keep if away from an office building that was later demolished, they built the road on basically Styrofoam, which collapsed and had to be dug out and refilled. They finally fixed the lights, but for a while most of them were out, when I called Xcel reporting they were out they claimed they weren't on their database because the city of Bloomington never told them they were installed.

[orangevening]

There isn't any lane expansion. A new deck has to be built for the profile of the transit station.

And it's a terrible idea to take a lane away at a major bottleneck. You're just moving bottlenecks around at that point.

That's not how I understood things.

"Jim Grube, engineer for Hennepin County, which is the lead agency on TAP, said a new southbound lane would have to be added to the freeway to allow bus access to the new station from the inside lanes of the freeway in both directions."

Basically they want a new lane so buses can remain in the center. So rather than taking, say, the existing dynamic shoulder and converting it to a full-on bus/HOT lane, they want to add a lane. That's insane.

Even if somehow they don't need a new lane and only need room for the station as you speculate, you could still use the dynamic shoulder for much of it. There's even an existing bus bumpout on the bridge. There should be plenty of room there.

Is it really so terrible to take an existing lane that's only open a few hours a day? Sure, it's at peak travel time but at some point the city has to say "no" to more and more people driving single-occupant vehicles. We cannot keep expanding freeways in the urban core.

Tearing down those house on 2nd would be tragic (although I'm sure some that are not being kept up well). Wondering if it is too late in the process or even possible to move everything west towards Stevens. Seems like there is a lot more room too, plus if your doing the Greenway connection (aka "The Green Crescent") could just close Stevens. I havn't paid that much attention when I've biked that, but doesn't seem to be that much on that side. If the money is possible maybe elevate the station over Interstate with bus ramps up to the station. It would be a visible attractive (hopefully!) beacon for the neighborhood.

[Tcmetro]

Looks like Metro Transit and MnDot are proceeding with the Knox Ave underpass as the preferred option for the Southtown area, and are going forward with the 98th St stop on the east frontage road for both north and southbound buses:

http://www.metrotransit.org/Data/Sites/ ... avenue.pdf
http://www.metrotransit.org/Data/Sites/ ... mittee.pdf

[mattaudio]

In a way, it's refreshing to look through a meeting deck and see planners/officials justifying the better option. That seems rare these days.

Any chance they will loop in the 494/35W project to create a slip ramp from the HOV lanes up to American Blvd? This would eliminate three stoplights from each direction of travel, making the Knox routing even faster in the future.

[mattaudio]

Secondly, is there ever a chance they will extend the Orange Line past Burnsville TC to HOC? Burnsville's HOC is separated from the TC by quite the car sewer. I thought the original vision was to extend to Burnsville Center at CR 42, but it could go that way via Nicollet and Burnsville Parkway back to 35. And I hope this is also on the radar for county/DOT planners designing final alternatives for a future reconstruct of the Cliff/13/Parkway amalgamation of interchanges on 35W.

[Tcmetro]

The plan for Phase 2 is to extend the line to the existing 167th St/Kenrick Ave station, via a new station at County Road 42. An MVTA plan a few years ago envisioned a BRT station and local bus loop on the SW quadrant of the interchange of 42 and 35W, but I would imagine those would be up for discussion now.

MnDot does expect to reconstruct the Minnesota River bridge for 35W in the post-2020 years. Additionally, Burnsville wants to reconfigure some streets for the Northwest Quadrant (i.e. the quarry) Redevelopment in the new future. A visioning study mentioned a bus only ramp from the Burnsville Transit Station to the center MnPass lanes on 35W. So hopefully that gets implemented.

I would also like to see some kind of option serving Heart of the City as well. The largest problem is peak hour congestion on Nicollet Ave, which can be significant in the AM peak (i.e. 10 minutes to travel from Burnsville Parkway to Highway 13). Some of this will be alleviated when the intersection is expanded as part of the Hwy. 13 project, but I still feel that the congestion will impact reliability. I would like to see a bus line that connects Wal-Mart, BTS, Nicollet Ave, the City Hall, the Hospital, and the Mall. Hopefully it would be on the more frequent side of things.

Also, I think a center ramp from American Bl (or even 82nd) to the HOV lanes would be a great idea, especially once the 98th St Station is rebuilt to the median, and if a Cliff Road HOV ramp opens up.

I don't think that there would be any planning for an extension even further south, but there are two logical options. One serving 35W and 185th St, and the area around County Road 70. There is already a park-and-pool lot down there, and a lot of retail expansion. The other option would be one along County Road 5/50 to the Civic Center, the old downtown, the industrial park, and a connection to the Red Line.

[mattaudio]

I know Dakota County has studied grade separation at Nicollet and 13 as an option. I think that has since been removed from consideration, which is a shame... grade separation, if done right, could link the job centers and transit station north of 13 with HOC south of 13.

Additionally, the Orange Line could serve HOC via Pillsbury Ave rather than Nicollet, assuming grade separation was happening at Nicollet and a bridge connecting Pillsbury to River Ridge Ln could go in. This would directly connect the existing bus loop and bus-only signals at Nicollet with HOC/future southbound Orange Line service in addition to the existing HOV/bus ramp northbound.

[twincitizen]

I'm wondering for the northbound stop at 66th, if there isn't a better alternative than exiting the highway.

If you go on Google Streetview, there looks to be quite a large shoulder on NB 35W, just south of 66th, adjacent to the current landscaping and retaining walls. It seems like it would be feasible to expand the retaining wall and enlarge the shoulder, creating a bus stop similar to those currently at Lake Street. Obviously you would have to find room for stairs and an elevator in there, but it doesn't look impossible.

The benefit of not exiting the highway is that the bus could immediately merge over the HOV lane after pulling away from 66th Street. It even looks like it could be placed far back (south) enough to not interfere with the exit for EB 62 (maybe, this could be the #1 thing preventing this from happening). The current arrangement of exiting 35W means that buses have to follow that long awkward entrance ramp back onto 35W and they are not able to enter the HOV lane for a considerable distance further.

http://goo.gl/maps/HN5WG

[mattaudio]

I wonder how, within the last 15 years, we ever built...
-A new 66th St interchange without provisions for a future inline transit station
-New roadway surface between 62 and 494 without provisions for future "exit only" lanes between the freeways

[Tcmetro]

If were gonna go about rebuilding the bridge deck, perhaps we could just bite the bullet and put the bus station in the middle.

It would be really nice to see an actual attempt to not half-ass this project.

[talindsay]

If were gonna go about rebuilding the bridge deck, perhaps we could just bite the bullet and put the bus station in the middle.

It would be really nice to see an actual attempt to not half-ass this project.

To be fair, half-assing it is precisely the reason they choose "BRT" for these projects - I'm fairly sure that in some language "BRT" actually stands for government half-assery. While I'll concede that it's possible to build a bus line that possesses all the key characteristics that make people like rail transit, it's really easy for planners to cut here and cut there with bus lines, and pretty soon you have this kind of nonsense. The fact that most of the positive characteristics are *REQUIRED* to make rail transit work at all is the reason why rail projects nearly always contain those characteristics; since bus transit lines don't require those things, they get cut. Rail transit-like bus lines would involve similar infrastructure, and they chose "BRT" in the first place to avoid those investments.

If they were sure they were really committed to making serious infrastructure investments, they would have chosen rail; that's the problem with BRT, it's chosen as the compromise choice: "buses aren't awesome enough for this but we don't want to commit the resources for rail so we'll call it BRT". It's a compromise choice from the start, so the lack of conviction leads to ever more compromises.

Sorry, I'll get off my soapbox. I do think that's the fundamental issue here though.

[Mdcastle]

I know Dakota County has studied grade separation at Nicollet and 13 as an option. I think that has since been removed from consideration, which is a shame... grade separation, if done right, could link the job centers and transit station north of 13 with HOC south of 13.

Additionally, the Orange Line could serve HOC via Pillsbury Ave rather than Nicollet, assuming grade separation was happening at Nicollet and a bridge connecting Pillsbury to River Ridge Ln could go in. This would directly connect the existing bus loop and bus-only signals at Nicollet with HOC/future southbound Orange Line service in addition to the existing HOV/bus ramp northbound.

That was actually my thought too, make the traffic "disappear" so it's easier to get from the transit station to the HOC, like North St. Paul did with MN 36.

I don't think it's been dropped so much as a possible ultimate ideal but rather realistically there's no funding for it. If you look at all the interchanges that have been built in recent years I can't think of any exceptions to the fact that it's because a local agency has championed it (and found funding for it someplace other than Mn/DOT's general budget). My sense is the city of Burnsville is kind of indifferent, and maybe unsure if they want a freeway, a stroad, or a two lane road with cycletracks and whatnot. There were several concepts for an interchange at Nicollet in the concepts for the MN 13/ I-35W rebuilt, it's also possible they don't want to built something at Nicollet that might lock them into a specific concept. For the time being easier to add a turn line to deal with the traffic while postponing hard and potentially expensive decisions...

[Tcmetro]

I sent an email to the project staff requesting that the meeting materials for the past two Orange Line meetings be uploaded to the website (the provided links don't actually work); however, it doesn't seem that it has been done yet. In any case, they did email the materials to me, and there isn't too much to report on. The main things being worked on were related to station placement at 66th and 98th Streets, and how long it would take buses to make a round-trip. It did also seem to indicate that they are shooting for 10 minute peak frequencies and 15 minute off-peak frequencies (hopefully this includes evenings and weekends, unlike the Red Line.)

[mamundsen]

Are there renderings of the Knox Ave option that goes under 494? I am trying to picture it but can't. I've seen the routing options, but never a rendering of the tunnel(?).

[Tcmetro]

When I asked at an open house, it would be an underpass, not really a tunnel.

And here's a news article fresh from the strib about this very issue: http://www.startribune.com/business/248902781.html

[Anondson]

Peeve in the article: dissect/bisect do not mean the same thing.