Feeder lines need to have good frequency to be effective; there's no use having buses come every 3 minutes if the feeder only runs on the hour. Ideally both the Orange Line and the perpendicular lines serving the stations would both have headways of 10 min or less, so that the average wait time for a transfer (either to or from the Orange) would be ≤5 min. (Currently the 46 runs every half hour.)Inconvenience of transferring is another issue, for example 46th St & 35W which never worked as intended because riders preferred the one-seat ride on the 146 instead of transferring.
The comp plan does have it penciled in for up to 6 stories on Nicollet north of 47th, and on the few blocks of 46th around the Orange Line station. I'm not holding my breath, both because living so close to an interstate is not generally desirable (extremely high air and noise pollution), and because I think the Orange Line (which basically only provides trips to Downtown or I guess Best Buy corp) is a much less desirable transit amenity than the LRT stations (which get you more places and definitely still have lots more room to grow).I'll be interested to see if we eventually get some redevelopment around the stations -- the block faces between Nicollet and 35W would seem to be great candidates, and if the redevelopment allowed a slight expansion of the ROW to improve sidewalks, etc. that would be another benefit.