urbanMSP

I'm not sure that you can generalize suburbanites, I looked up the 23 and there's nothing that interests me along it. Some suburbanites for sure like to try to try to get the best of both worlds by hanging out in the lively city for fun and going back home to their quite suburban neighborhood, (and I'm kind of like that in that I patronize the Minneapolis park system- go ahead and institute a user fee if you have a problem with me being there- I'll pay it)- but there's other that if they go in the city at all it's to work and after that they want to get out of dodge as fast as possible and back to drive their daughter to soccer practice. So I'd suggest park and rides would be a lot more interesting to these people than the 23.

Ridership is catching up to projections:

http://www.mvta.com/uploads/ctib_ridership.pdf

So it just took time? I wonder if it will level out or if it will keep going up.

Well, ridership is still well below 1,000 riders/day so it isn't really too impressive. Certainly, the new mall (opening in 10 days) at Cedar Grove will attract some new riders.

I think that the biggest drivers of ridership increases will be the southern extension, better connecting services, and new stops at Cliff Rd and Palomino Dr. When these things will happen is beyond what I know.

I'm curious how many local bus routes we have with higher ridership than the Bus Route With A Color.

You can get a pretty decent idea by toying with this data for a while (use some pivot tables in Excel, for example), though Metro Transit advises against using it for aggregating counts of routes since the data is made up of a bunch of averages.

http://www.datafinder.org/metadata/Tran ... tings.html

Still, there are about 50 bus routes with higher ridership, many of which I couldn't really place. Ridership shouldn't be used as the only measure of a line, since longer routes will tend to carry more people.

Here are the top 25 using a pivot table. :

Every time I see those numbers I look at the 5's ridership and am just amazed (exasperated) that nobody's talking about serious transit in this corridor - I know it would be super expensive but the 5 is where we need rapid transit of the actually-rapid variety (i.e., subway or other dedicated ROW). Sorry, off-topic, I know.

One of the plans I've seen from back in the day actually had a south line east of 35W that curved through Powderhorn, under 12th Ave, and out Cedar to the Airport area.

Anyways I do think Chicago is a natural place for improvement of transit. aBRT as a start. Long term? Tunnel under Park Ave... Convert Portland to two-way before reconstruction, then cut-and-cover under Park before replacing it with a beautiful boulevard at grade. Most buildings are set much further back on Park vs. Chicago, and it's only about 500 feet from Chicago to Park, not much longer than an average platform length. This would probably suck away much of the 11 ridership too. On the north end, it could have split from Bottineau at Broadway/Fremont if we were building an urban alignment for that project.

Considering the 5 runs on both sides of the city, and the distribution of riders is relatively even between the two, it would seem that Nicollet is the dominant corridor south of downtown.

Chicago has really low usage south of 38th St. Buses make very few stops (especially off peak) between 38th and American Bl.

Anyways I do think Chicago is a natural place for improvement of transit. aBRT as a start. Long term? Tunnel under Park Ave... Convert Portland to two-way before reconstruction, then cut-and-cover under Park before replacing it with a beautiful boulevard at grade. Most buildings are set much further back on Park vs. Chicago, and it's only about 500 feet from Chicago to Park, not much longer than an average platform length. This would probably suck away much of the 11 ridership too. On the north end, it could have split from Bottineau at Broadway/Fremont if we were building an urban alignment for that project.

I'd be on board with this. It could diverge from Bottineau at Van White. There's lots of open space there and could run under Emerson north of Plymouth.

It could even run at-grade on Park if we acquired a bit of ROW.

Considering the 5 runs on both sides of the city, and the distribution of riders is relatively even between the two, it would seem that Nicollet is the dominant corridor south of downtown.

Chicago has really low usage south of 38th St. Buses make very few stops (especially off peak) between 38th and American Bl.

Orange Line built as LRT in the middle of 35W on the Southside with station frequencies comparable to the Green Line (Franklin, 26, Lake/Midtown,34,38,12,46,50,Diamond Lake...) could have pulled riders from the 5, 11 and 18. Not to mention, 35W South is already the region's busiest express bus corridor.

Also, 5 ridership is lower relative to the northern portions of the line, but still high compared to much of the system. About 1/2 of the southbound 5s turnaround at 38th because of this disparity. Frequencies are still high enough between 38th and 56th to warrant being part of the high frequency network.

Apparently the CTIB approved $9.7 million tonight for the inline Cedar Grove station. Largely acknowledged in the article as a play to keep Dakota county in the CTIB. Does anyone else know what other items were approved for funding tonight?

http://www.startribune.com/local/south/ ... page=1&c=y

Yes:

http://www.mnrides.org/transit-projects ... sit-grants

You mean it wasn't enough for Dakota County that we "upgraded" Cedar to six travel lanes, double left turn lanes, and fewer pesky stoplights for people to get from one side of AV to the other? All with transit dollars?

More reason to convince me that we'd be better off with a referendum for transit sales tax in Hennepin/Ramsey, and give CWADS a graceful exit.

In fairness, this is a pretty cheap bone to throw.

I'm 100% for what mattaudio is saying - CTIB is kind of a mess, and we'd be better off with a tightly focused organization of Hennepin & Ramsey Counties.

However, I can't see how anyone could be against fixing this horribly planned station. It's eventually going to pay for itself in saved operational costs, which could be used to increase the frequency in the future to approach something actually useful. This is simply correcting a mistake that never should have happened. It was a poor judgement call by Eagan to not do it right the first time around.

And again, the suburban counties leaving CTIB would be a godsend. The Red Line could just become an MVTA route (they already operate it) and honestly, I'd be ok with the remaining smaller CTIB fully paying for Orange Line operations out to Burnsville Center. That's a useful enough line for Hennepin County residents that the 2 stops in Burnsville don't really bother me much. Anoka County likely cannot leave CTIB, and most (all?) of their funds are tied to Northstar operations anyways. Washington County should have left a few years back or never joined in the first place.

I'm 100% for what mattaudio is saying - CTIB is kind of a mess, and we'd be better off with a tightly focused organization of Hennepin & Ramsey Counties.

However, I can't see how anyone could be against fixing this horribly planned station. It's eventually going to pay for itself in saved operational costs, which could be used to increase the frequency in the future to approach something actually useful. This is simply correcting a mistake that never should have happened. It was a poor judgement call by Eagan to not do it right the first time around.

And again, the suburban counties leaving CTIB would be a godsend. The Red Line could just become an MVTA route (they already operate it) and honestly, I'd be ok with the remaining smaller CTIB fully paying for Orange Line operations out to Burnsville Center. That's a useful enough line for Hennepin County residents that the 2 stops in Burnsville don't really bother me much. Anoka County likely cannot leave CTIB, and most (all?) of their funds are tied to Northstar operations anyways. Washington County should have left a few years back or never joined in the first place.

Do you think Hennepin and Ramsey could get a transit tax in those two counties alone without the support of the exurban counties? I doubt it.

I agree, it could actually make it harder to expand the sales tax in the near term, if ever.

But assuming no sales tax increase is on the horizon, dumping the suburban counties would take some of the politics out of the existing arrangement and make things much easier for Hennepin & Ramsey Counties to plan how to spend their .25% tax proceeds. I think this is what a lot of people in transit planning/advocacy circles are now realizing.

For the most part*, the suburban counties don't need frequent, all-day transit running in dedicated ROWs. They need better express AND local bus service, and there are existing pots of money for that which don't rely on being part of CTIB.

The exception to this would basically be adding aBRT (or better) into Columbia Heights and West St. Paul, which we are doing anyways and is not reliant on their participation in CTIB.

The .25% sales tax isn't enough to rapidly build out the dream system today, but it is enough to build a decent system of LRT and highway BRT. The proceeds will only continue to grow as Hennepin County and Ramsey County grow their population and revitalize more and more urban commercial districts.

The exception to this would basically be adding aBRT (or better) into Columbia Heights and West St. Paul, which we are doing anyways and is not reliant on their participation in CTIB.

Exactly. For the portion of real transit needs that do extend into CWADS, I can't see lack of CTIB money as being a real barrier to those investments. The counties could make their own investment, especially considering how relatively cheap aBRT is on traditional urban corridors that extend into CWADS.

I'm 100% for what mattaudio is saying - CTIB is kind of a mess, and we'd be better off with a tightly focused organization of Hennepin & Ramsey Counties.

The last time I read the statute, it seemed to say that two counties is all you need to form a joint-powers board. However, my memory tells me that at the time of the legislation, people were really worried about attracting suburban counties because the board could not exist with just Ramsey and Hennepin. Does anyone know whether CTIB could exist with just two counties?