Red Line (Cedar Avenue BRT)

[Tcmetro]

A presentation has been posted to the MVTA website about new concepts for Cedar Grove station access.

http://www.mvta.com/uploads/cgts_access ... 25-13.pptx (PPTX file!)

There was also an open house about Cedar Grove and the managed lane project on 77 a few nights ago. Hopefully Mndot will get the presentations up soon.

[mulad]

Eep! Watch out for those results tables -- they're grouped and are not alphabetical: TSP -- A/C/E -- B/D -- F/G.

[mulad]

Wow are those weird proposals and cost numbers. Concept "E" is probably the best bang for the buck according to their numbers. I'm amazed that "G" costs so much -- must have to do with elevators for the pedestrian walkway. "E" still involves a lot of circling around, which I think would be pretty confusing for riders, but I suppose people would get used to it.

"C" is probably the second-best option (again, going by their numbers).

However, my preferred option is a variant of "F". "F" is a lot like "G", but I'm guessing its reduced cost is because they're trying to use existing grades to do away with the need for elevators on the "land-side" part of the pedestrian bridge and only have one or a set of them right at the station. If they shuffle the parking area southward to correspond with the new bridge, they could probably attract just as many riders as the "G" option. Also, "F" would be a great option to extend all the way across the highway in order to provide direct access to the apartments on the west side.

[woofner]

So Alt F is center on/ramps ramps for buses only with an overpass taking them to the station? How can that cost less than an online station?

[mulad]

Hmm. I guess I'm getting ahead of myself -- I'm not sure whether it's better to have stations in the median or along the shoulders here. Obviously the Red Line has gone with shoulder stations to the south. Though by "overpass", I presume you're referring to the pedestrian bridge?

Based on the crude diagrams in the doc, I was figuring it'd be an arrangement similar to 46th Street on I-35W, except without the roadway up above.

[mulad]

Oh, right, that weird driveway(?) thingy that looks like it's going between the existing Cedar Grove station and (what I assume is) the ped bridge. I have no idea what that's really for.

Edit: Or maybe it's an "Offline T" like in page 23 (by Firefox's page count, labeled "Page 15") of this Orange Line doc: http://www.dot.state.mn.us/metro/projec ... tFinal.pdf -- the buses go up and down a big hump in the center of the freeway to a "T" intersection at the top with a bridge to get over to the offline station.

So I guess that provides yet another idea: build ped bridges out to a bus hump in the middle of the freeway and just have people cross at grade in the bus guideway.

[woofner]

The Offline T was what I read it as, but I won't be sure until I see something that wasn't produced in MS Paint by someone who doesn't know how to use the Save As PDF feature in PowerPoint.

[QuietBlue]

In light of the access challenges to the Cedar Grove station, I have to wonder why they built it there to begin with. Is is that they placed a higher priority on the station being next to the redevelopment area than it being on Cedar, was it that BRT wasn't considered at the time, was it that it was where they were able to get the land, or a combination of these?

[Tcmetro]

The original scope of the project was a bit larger. The initial intention was to build a freeway station on the sides of the highway with the local bus station being at the current location. The highway stops were scrapped to reduce the project budget, but the local station was constructed with a federal grant in 2009 (the Urban Partnership Agreement.) The new study is trying to find a more cost effective and efficient solution to integrating BRT with the local station.

BRT in the corridor has been pursued since 2001 when a Dakota County study determined that transit was feasible on Cedar Avenue. The UPA provided the funds that helped jump start BRT in both the Cedar and 35W corridors.

[twincitizen]

Officials look for way to speed up the Red Line stop in Eagan:
http://www.startribune.com/local/south/230348111.html

[mulad]

Dakota County Regional Railroad Authority wants to move forward with a freeway median stop option for the Cedar Grove transit station, expected to cost $14.6 million. It still needs approval from MnDOT and the Met Council. The article also says "Federal Highway Administration", but I suspect that must mean Federal Transit Administration...
http://finance-commerce.com/2014/01/new ... -red-line/

I'm fairly confused, since the PowerPoint file Tcmetro linked to a while back lists a cost of $22.9 million for the "Concept G" median station. The DCRRA meeting agenda shows a "Concept G - Reduced" diagram, so they must have trimmed out something, but I'm at a loss to say what the changes are.

[mattaudio]

Freeway median stop... with crosswalks instead of a skyway. $14.6 million.

[David Greene]

I was just thinking about crap like this today. I am damn tired of building multi-million dollar bus complexes in wealthy suburban areas while regular route service in the cities and less-well-off suburbs keeps getting cut. Yes, there are plenty of less-well-off people in these places who need transit access but they don't need $20-$30 million bus palaces.

I am not going to support another transit sales tax increase as long as this keeps happening. Along with the money I want to see real reform on where and how it gets spent.

[Mdcastle]

So it's bad to do things that make transit attractive to suburbanites?
And it''s bad for suburbanites to drive their cars into the city?
Realistically there are people that would never want to live in the city, but are want to (or are forced) to work there. Maybe people take the attitude "well, too bad for them, they chose to live in the suburbs so lets do things to make it hard for them to drive and make them put up with whatever transit they can get". But then they're more likely to look for jobs at United or General Mills, or whoever buys the Best Buy complex after they go under, and not to go into the city on their free time to spend money. I'm not sure that urbanists would think increasing the isolation of the suburbs is desirable either (or maybe it is, I'm not one so I don't know).

[Nick]

So it's bad to do things that make transit attractive to suburbanites?

When suburbanites have built their cities in a such a way that it costs $72,000 per rider (115,000,000/1,600) in capital costs, plus ongoing operating subsidies, to eliminate one of their daily auto trips, then yes, it's bad.

[Rich]

Is it really THAT expensive to bring transit to the burbs? If 28,000 ride SWLRT daily, ridership will surpass 1 billion in 100 years. Expenses will total $3.6 billion over that same time (SWLRT’s net operating + $1.25 billion construction costs). That’s $3.60 a rider.

[Nick]

The Red Line, which this thread is about, cost $115,000,000 and is projected to have 1,600 riders a day in 2017.

[Rich]

Seems like you're dividing the total cost by the daily ridership. To get cost/rider, isn’t it better to divide the DAILY cost by the daily ridership?

[mulad]

Probably. And worth noting that the average car/light vehicle costs $31,252 and lasts 11.4 years, which works out to $7.51 per day, without including operating expenses, the cost of the road surface, and the cost of the land that the vehicle parks on (assuming there are about 4 parking spaces per car, that probably runs a minimum of $10 to $20 per day by itself).

[Scott Wood]

According to the article, 11.4 years is the average age of all in-service vehicles, not the average age at which vehicles are removed from service, which should be significantly higher.