urbanMSP

There seems to be a lot of talk within the TAC and PAC about the "Y" option, which would serve both the Ford site, 46th Street Station, and the airport. If possible, this seems like the best route to put forward.

I am all for this. It completes the triangle, and preserves a faster connection to the airport/MOA from downtown St. Paul. I hope whoever is picked to develop the Ford site will have the imagination and wherewithal to creatively incorporate station(s) into the ultimate design of the site if this routing goes through. However, my main concerns are as follows:

1. How the politics of proposing the Ford Site/Ford Parkway routing will shake out. Neighbors for a Livable St. Paul and other Highland residents who wanted to stop the Ford Plan on the basis of increased traffic will lash out against anything that goes over the Ford Parkway bridge, shared lanes be damned. I bet they feel pretty burned by the Ford Plan, and the perception (rightly or wrongly) of another large project being 'shoved' down their throats will no doubt inflame even larger resistance than that of the Ford Plan.

2. How will the geometry of the connection to the 46th St. station shake out? That particular intersection seems near inhospitable with rail line coming from the east.

Boston's Green Line Extension is branched and is an FTA project.

Perhaps they were referring to the single-mode requirement, and thus plan on redirecting the 54 Bus to the Ford Site once Riverview is built.

That makes more sense. I'm not aware of any multi-mode projects that have been FTA funded.

I suppose a busway connecting Ford Site to W 7th could be funded locally, but the local streets themselves aren't very busy and could probably handle some bus improvements.

Similar, but somewhat different problem, happened in Austin. They used FTA (Small Starts, I think) funding for the watered-down BRT service on their main street. A few years later they wanted to go and build light rail, but FTA said that because the AA/EIS said that BRT was the best transit mode, they couldn't go back and rebuild.

We could also rely on the New Starts model if the Ford Branch was my dream of Midtown-[Blue Line interline]-46th St-Ford Spur. That would be sufficiently expensive to qualify, but also much simpler than the rail options in crossing Hiawatha presented during the Riverview AA.

The City of Saint Paul is already looking at how rail could run along the CP rail to the Ford Site with the Reimagine the Railway study. Maybe it could just stop at the Ford Site and connect to the A Line.

https://www.stpaul.gov/departments/plan ... udying-new

Build the Riverview corridor as is, with a straight shot to the airport. Build the Midtown LRT Phase 1 from West Lake (Green) to Lake St. (Blue). Build the Midtown LRT Phase 2 from 46th Street to Sibley Plaza, so that Midtown ultimately runs from Hopkins to downtown Saint Paul. Problem solved.

Build the Riverview corridor as is, with a straight shot to the airport. Build the Midtown LRT Phase 1 from West Lake (Green) to Lake St. (Blue). Build the Midtown LRT Phase 2 from 46th Street to Sibley Plaza, so that Midtown ultimately runs from Hopkins to downtown Saint Paul. Problem solved.

^^^THIS, DO THIS!

Build the Riverview corridor as is, with a straight shot to the airport. Build the Midtown LRT Phase 1 from West Lake (Green) to Lake St. (Blue). Build the Midtown LRT Phase 2 from 46th Street to Sibley Plaza, so that Midtown ultimately runs from Hopkins to downtown Saint Paul. Problem solved.

I'll third that, but I also think Met Council isn't taking Midtown LRT seriously because it doesn't involve suburbs.

Wouldn't extending it to St Paul fix that issue? (I kid)

But also, simply running the train out to Hopkins would get SLP and Hopkins on board, doubling the frequency of that rail line between West Lake and Hopkins. It would only cost a little more (1-2 train/sets and <$1m a year in ops) to do it. Given a the eastern extension, it would also double the frequency of transit going from any of those stations to downtown St Paul. Plus, the Midtown-Riverview route might even be faster than SWLRT-CC given Midtown's grade separation (I think I've said this before, but using estimates and actual schedule times for those routes, West Lake to downtown St Paul would be 40 minutes).

But yeah, this has more to do with how *much* Midtown serves Minneapolis than how *little* is serves the suburbs. It's almost 100% Hennepin County not being on board, and the recent change in sales tax funding does little to help that.

Build the Riverview corridor as is, with a straight shot to the airport. Build the Midtown LRT Phase 1 from West Lake (Green) to Lake St. (Blue). Build the Midtown LRT Phase 2 from 46th Street to Sibley Plaza, so that Midtown ultimately runs from Hopkins to downtown Saint Paul. Problem solved.

I'll third that, but I also think Met Council isn't taking Midtown LRT seriously because it doesn't involve suburbs.

I think (as RBY mentions), that you can partially solve that problem by starting the Midtown LRT route from the Shady Oak operations and maintenance facility. That way, your route hits the most TOD-able of the SWLRT stations and ropes in the County Commission's sixth district in addition to the third and fourth.

The link to Uptown and the dense labor pool in South Minneapolis should be worth a lot to these towns and further down the SWLRT line. Uptown is still growing and the Mosaic development, Graves Hotel, and SoN staying on the same lot suggest that in the future Uptown will to be a destination not just for living, shopping, and eating, but also for business. I'm sure downtown Hopkins in particular would also love to have a direct link to the Uptown market, with its significant population of young people entering into raising family age and potentially looking to settle in a suburb with a ped scale downtown.

I'd probably find more skepticism in the suburbs than on this forums by saying this, but it's absolutely true that projects primarily in Minneapolis can still have benefits to the suburbs. That's part of what the fiscal disparities regime and the Met Council are about, and I'd hope that the benefits to serving the metro's densest neighborhoods with a relatively simple route like the Midtown trench would be obvious to all.

The additional benefit would come by planning the second phase into the Ford Site. I think it's really up in the air as to what goes there, but for many of the same reasons, Ramsey County should be ecstatic about the possibility of a direct route to Uptown and South Minneapolis, and Minneapolis could have good reasons for wanting to be directly connected to the Ford Site.

Given the awesome expansion possibilities on this line, it seems like a real mistake to build it out to operate in mixed traffic and only accommodate 1 car trains.

I can't picture how this gets to DT StP. Can anyone post a map of the suggested route?

This is the LPA, right? Modern streetcar on 7th/ hwy 5.

I can't picture how this gets to DT StP. Can anyone post a map of the suggested route?

What about something like this? The pink link to the Blue Line might make the most sense, but the salmon routing over to St. Paul could be an alignment option https://drive.google.com/open?id=11DK8- ... sp=sharing

Oooh. Was Vagueperson asking how the hypothetical midtown got to DT St Paul? I was confused. I'd love to see the map that took midtown the route that was mentioned up a few. Basically west lake to Sibley Plaza.

Not sure whether this should be moved to the Midtown thread, but here goes.

How many riders on the 21/53 ride from between Uptown and Hiawatha to east of Hiawatha? Back when I used to ride it regularly, the major transfer points seemed to be Chicago, University and to a lesser extent, Hiawatha. Does it make sense to through-route Midtown along East Lake/Marshall or is a transfer acceptable? The latter would allow different modes. I'm not sure how well rail would work east of Hiawatha.

The Midtown AA reported that rail + aBRT was the best option. The aBRT could through-route to Marshall and the rail could through-route to 46th/Ford Site/Riverview. Of course the AA only looked at the segment between SWLRT and Hiawatha.

You'd have to beef up/grade separate more of the planned trackage near downtown. The Midtown Corridor Alone (which would be 1/5 of a Hopkins-St Paul LRT line, at 4 miles in length) would have 10k riders/day (from the Midtown study), half of Riverview. The other 16 miles should easily have an additional 10-20k ridership.

If 20k ridership can justify $1B in investment, then after spending $250M on the Midtown segment and $350M on the 46th St - Ford Site - Sibley Plaza segment, there's be $400M leftover to pay for further grade separation above what Riverview alone could call for.

Ex: If at-grade mixed-traffic rail along W 7th for Riverview costs $100M/mile, and a cut & cover tunnel needed for both lines to interline here costs $300M/mile, then the difference between the two ($200M/mile) would be covered by the second line, and they'd just build the tunnel for both.

The route in gopherfan's post (the 21 bus) should definitely be aBRT along its entire length, even though atm Metro Transit only plans on upgrading it to Snelling, instead of all the way to downtown St Paul.

Wow, reality left this post a while ago. How about midtown fantasies move elsewhere and this thread stick to the actual Riverview project?

There's a fine line between fantasizing about different routings for an unfunded Midtown line (which, should also occur in that thread).. and a relatively germane discussion about the needs for this exact line if something like a Midtown extension were to happen. I think the LPA is drastically short-sighted in running a mixed-use streetcar for the length of W 7th (the overwhelmingly likely scenario, given how the TAC/PAC are responding to neighborhood concerns) given the easy/obvious/cheap win of an extended Midtown. Grade separation may be a drastic conversation (we haven't even grade separated LRT lines through downtown Minneapolis), but a decision about mixing in traffic, station design, etc will be major barriers to using this corridor for anything other than a single tram car/LRV every 10 minutes.