Public Transit News / Current Events (MN only)

[HuskyGrad]

The Met Council's legislatively-mandated study on high-subsidy routes is out. Shocking no one, the majority of high-subsidy routes are suburban local routes run by MVTA.

I don't know what inspired this study, but I'd bet it was probably Northstar (which had the second-highest subsidy in 2024) and a desire to spank the Met Council, who is apparently everyone's favorite punching bag in St. Paul. Of course, the real enemy of efficiency is the suburban opt-out providers, but that isn't as politically juicy.

The Met Council's weak routes were 25 and 71 (core locals that serve sparse suburbs), 38 and 46 (south Minneapolis crosstowns), 501 (cancelled airport-worker service), and 766 (Champlin express). Overall, 28 of the Met Council's 208 routes are deserving of at least "minor modifications;" 26 of MVTA's 43 routes are considered candidates for modifications.

26% of MVTA's and 35% of Plymouth MetroLink's expenses go to high-subsidy routes. Met Council is at 2.7%.

With this information in hand, it makes one wonder why they even bothered studying the 38 or 46 corridors for upgrading to Arterial BRT. The 46 can barely justify its current hourly service on weekends.

I’d like to see the pre-COVID weekend ridership for the 46. As part of the service cuts at that time, weekend service was eliminated. It often takes a while to recapture those riders from a restored terminated service, especially if there isn’t any significant marketing. I would think it could improve ridership with a connection to the Green Line, potentially at Blake Road.

[Bakken2016]

The Met Council's legislatively-mandated study on high-subsidy routes is out. Shocking no one, the majority of high-subsidy routes are suburban local routes run by MVTA.

I don't know what inspired this study, but I'd bet it was probably Northstar (which had the second-highest subsidy in 2024) and a desire to spank the Met Council, who is apparently everyone's favorite punching bag in St. Paul. Of course, the real enemy of efficiency is the suburban opt-out providers, but that isn't as politically juicy.

The Met Council's weak routes were 25 and 71 (core locals that serve sparse suburbs), 38 and 46 (south Minneapolis crosstowns), 501 (cancelled airport-worker service), and 766 (Champlin express). Overall, 28 of the Met Council's 208 routes are deserving of at least "minor modifications;" 26 of MVTA's 43 routes are considered candidates for modifications.

26% of MVTA's and 35% of Plymouth MetroLink's expenses go to high-subsidy routes. Met Council is at 2.7%.

With this information in hand, it makes one wonder why they even bothered studying the 38 or 46 corridors for upgrading to Arterial BRT. The 46 can barely justify its current hourly service on weekends.

I’d like to see the pre-COVID weekend ridership for the 46. As part of the service cuts at that time, weekend service was eliminated. It often takes a while to recapture those riders from a restored terminated service, especially if there isn’t any significant marketing. I would think it could improve ridership with a connection to the Green Line, potentially at Blake Road.

Network Now has a proposed extension of the 46 to Opus Station.

[billhelm]

The 46 is my "local" (with the D line and 14). My kids ride it daily to and from high school and there's a lot of other kids from Washburn on it. Another need not reflected in the pure numbers.

[DanPatchToget]

Tried Metro Micro for the first time this morning. I would’ve used the 546 since it’s walking distance from my house, but I have a suitcase with me and I’m not brave enough to cross Normandale Boulevard during the morning rush hour. It worked out pretty well getting to 98th Street Station and then the 539 from there. Since it’s not on a schedule though it’s kind of a guessing game timing it right for a transfer, in my case I got to the station a little earlier than expected and had to wait about 15 minutes for the 539. Also apparently payment doesn’t work on the Metro Micro app, so I just used the Metro Transit app to buy a ticket. Overall I like it though, and much better than the last time I used the bus to get to the airport where I had to walk a mile from my house to the closest bus stop.

[twincitizen]

Since Route 46 came up in discussion, I'm curious what you all think about my idea to modify the end of the route near 46th St Station. Instead of approaching the LRT station via 34th Ave, it would serve 28th Ave and 46th St. Stops on 34th Ave would be eliminated except for at 46th Street. Stops on 42nd St would be eliminated except for at 28th Ave. The rerouted 46 would use Route 22's stops on 28th Ave and would get two new stops added along 46th St.


https://imgur.com/a/Ih0a8Wb

Why remove service from 34th Ave?
The bus stops on 34th Avenue get little to no use. Also, the stops I propose to eliminate at 45th & 44th are within short walking distance of the LRT Station, which is likely part of why they get such little use.

Why serve 46th St?
Currently 46th has no bus service. This change would actually expand the overall transit walkshed in the area, particularly to the south and west of the current routing. Either way, it's serving a fairly low density area with limited ridership potential, but this reroute is cost-neutral in service hours, and could potentially gain a few new riders without losing any existing ones.

I think this change would mostly be for the better all around, except for the loss of service on 42nd Street as you get further east of 28th Avenue. Anyone relying on the stop at 42nd St & 32nd Ave would have a longer walk to catch the bus at 28th Ave. No biggie if heading westbound anyways, but for those catching the eastbound 46 for a short ride to LRT, they'd be backtracking.

One of the biggest benefits IMO is that westbound buses (actually heading northbound on 34th Ave) would no longer face long delays waiting to make the difficult left turn onto busy 42nd St (top right of map). The new routing would not have any tricky unsignalized left turns like that.

On the subject of that tricky intersection, following the bus route change I would also propose a new median on 42nd St at 34th Avenue, preventing vehicles on westbound 42nd from turning left onto 34th Ave and preventing vehicles on northbound 34th Avenue from turning left onto westbound 42nd St. 2016 Streetview image was the best depiction I could find of the shit show this becomes during busy times.

[angrysuburbanite]

There’s a lot of new stuff in this month’s Metropolitan Council meetings, but there are a couple of transit-related things that stand out.
First of all, the presentation slides for the High Subsidy Route Analysis (https://metrocouncil.org/Council-Meetin ... W-PPT.aspx) gives an interesting stat that confirms a suspicion I had about transit ridership. While daily ridership is relatively low, 160,000 people use transit at least twice a week, and about 26% of Twin Cities residents use transit in a typical year. These are much better numbers than the daily ridership figures will have you believe. Hopefully over time this occasional ridership becomes more regular as service improves.

Speaking of service improvements, the Network Now progress presentation (https://metrocouncil.org/Council-Meetin ... gress.aspx) provides a glimpse into the upcoming changes.

1. 42% of Network Now will be implemented by this March, which is really quite a feat for a system struggling to maintain the absolute bare minimum service levels just a couple years ago. The strategy definitely seems to be aggressive expansion to beat demand that will increase in the near future. However, the 2026 changes seem to be relatively light, likely to prepare for the large expansion year 2027 is shaping up to be.

2. The Key Express Network will be completed in early 2026, with all of the major express corridors featuring all day service.

3. June and August 2026 will see Better Bus Route 14, and restructuring the Anoka-Coon Rapids service, truncating the 827 and replacing the northern half with a restructured 802 and 805 to provide better frequency. Kinda weird this wasn’t done with the Northstar changes?

4. August-December 2026 will see Better Bus Route 74 (including some major East Side restructuring), several new U of M express routes (652, 352, 758), changes to lower-tier express corridors (667, 764, 363), evening service span improvements, and more Metro Micro zones.

5. 2027 will see the Gold Line extension, Green Line extension and associated Network Now changes, G Line phase 1, the remainder of the East Side restructuring, the Route 757 limited stop route on Highway 55, 2 more Metro Micro zones, and improvements to other existing routes. Specifics aren't determined yet and are likely dependent on hiring.

Finally, there’s been an interesting development in regards to the G Line. According to the bus procurement slides (https://metrocouncil.org/Council-Meetin ... pwrpt.aspx), G Line buses will be hybrid electric 40’ buses (visually identical to the ones on the A Line) rather than articulated buses. This makes sense considering the lower ridership profile of the line. Over the next few years, in addition to the 73 new 40’ buses delivered in 2025, 128 biodiesel buses, 79 hybrid electric buses (plus 36 METRO hybrid buses), and 20 fully electric buses are being delivered, likely replacing most of the early 2010s fleet of Gillig BRT buses. Unlike previous iterations, all of the standard 40' buses will look basically the same regardless of their fuel source.

[angrysuburbanite]

In the last National Transit Database ridership update (for January 2026), Metro Transit's data has been revised for most of 2025. LRT was down -2,360,031 and bus was up 4,462,834 compared to 2024. The numbers for bus are substantially different than previous updates and contradicts the official metrotransit.org/performance page (which hasn't been updated since November 25th, 2025). I'm not sure what caused these numbers to change, but if they are true Metro Transit would have had higher ridership in 2025 (~53 million) than 2024 (~51 million). Bus ridership figures for September and October were close to 80% of 2019 data too.

[Waters]

In the 2/18 Transportation Advisory Board Meeting Council Member Deb Barber said that they were changing how ridership was calculated because they were under counting. https://youtu.be/XwmqxUl0qqg?t=1361 This must be the results of that.

[Tiller]

It would be nice if we could run hourly owl service for our LRT and aBRT lines. Was bringing back the owl network ever part of the network next/network now plans?

[HuskyGrad]

It would be nice if we could run hourly owl service for our LRT and aBRT lines. Was bringing back the owl network ever part of the network next/network now plans?

I agree. Recently, I had a concert go to midnight which was well after the last Blue Line train. I ended up catching another bus home with my friend, who then drove me home. That shouldn’t happen in a corridor that has high-capacity transit investments.

At the minimum, services on the 7, 9, and 22 should increase frequency after the end of Blue Line service.

[Bakken2016]

https://metrocouncil.org/Council-Meetin ... /info.aspx

From today's Transportation Committee meeting, explaining the update to ridership numbers for 2025. It looks like overall all still a 2% ridership decline heavily driven by LRT ridership being down.

[angrysuburbanite]

What happened to route 10 that would warrant such a huge decrease? I thought it had increased frequency?

I do like the new calculations--the low end of the new numbers are the upper end of the old ones, though I wish there was more granular data on metrotransit.org/performance. Having only 3 years of only post covid general daily ridership is disappointing. It's difficult to understand how regular bus ridership moved overall given the transfer of route 21 to the BRT category, but it appears to have weathered the B Line opening fairly well. Regardless knowing the system cleared 160,000 daily riders multiple times in the last few years is reassuring.

(I screwed up with data I posted on reddit yesterday and used the non-recalculated numbers for 2024... oops! I corrected it but that platform seems to only upvote things involving ridership increases. I feel so bad for posting what is essentially misinformation... not entirely my fault given the ambiguity of NTD data!)

[angrysuburbanite]

Ok, Metro Transit performance page has been updated and January data is... not good, to say the least (for obvious reasons). Since I haven't done this in a few months, I'm covering both December and January.

- A Line dropped under 4,000 daily rides again after a very impressive fall surge (likely driven by the frequency increase earlier in the summer). January was quite low at 3,403, but is about on par with 2024 levels, and higher than 2025.

- B Line had a very strong start, posting over 10,000 daily rides from September through November, as well as strong weekend numbers. However, ridership dropped in December and January to around 9,200 on an average day. Given the neighborhoods it runs through, it's surprising that the drops largely reflect regular seasonal trends, but it is difficult to say with less than a year of data. The E Line debuts at 4,616 daily rides in December, and climbs slightly in January to 5,041. These numbers are only slightly higher than what route 6 has gotten in recent years. Sunday ridership is quite weak at about 2,901 daily rides. It's still quite new so there's room to grow, but it definitely isn't as much of a success as the B Line was.

- C Line sees its two of worst months since 2023 with ridership dropping below 5,000 daily rides, and weekend ridership plummeting to only about 2,500. Similarly, the D Line sees the lowest ridership since opening months, at about 10,488 daily rides, and larger declines on weekends. This is substantially lower than previous years.

- Gold Line loses most of the growth trajectory it was on in the fall, dropping about 300 daily rides in December to around 1,300. Saturday ridership also dropped below 1,000 again for the first time since last May. The Orange Line drops by about 400 daily rides, losing most of the growth in 2025 as well. However, both December and January were still ahead of 2025 and 2024. Weekend ridership declined similarly, falling below 1,000 for the first time since 2024. Both the Orange and Gold Lines appear to have extremely similar seasonal patterns.

- Regular bus saw the largest declines after a fairly stable year. Despite the B Line opening, regular bus ridership recovered quickly back to around 80,000 daily rides. Daily ridership declined by almost 20,000 between November and January.

- Blue Line remains basically flat at an embarrassingly low 14,112 daily rides in January. This is less than half of pre-covid, and about the same as what the D Line was getting earlier in the fall. Saturday ridership is only 11,929, the lowest recorded in several years. The Green Line continues its poor performance from 2025, returning below 20,000 rides again. Weekend ridership is now roughly the same as the Blue Line after being much higher for the last few years. The lack of a fall ridership surge (as is typical for the Green Line) is interesting. Given these ridership numbers I doubt increasing LRT frequency is a very high priority because even at every 12 minutes there's a lot of extra capacity going underutilized.

The overall system saw 136,900 daily rides in December and 130,558 daily rides in January. Both months are typically lower than others, but the system was seeing 165,363 daily rides in September so that's a large decline. Luckily much of this decline is seasonal and influenced by recent events so it is likely not reflective of long term ridership trends. I expect 2026 to be better for transit ridership than 2025 as new service matures, though the Blue Line closure this summer will make that less obvious.

[Bakken2016]

Ok, Metro Transit performance page has been updated and January data is... not good, to say the least (for obvious reasons). Since I haven't done this in a few months, I'm covering both December and January.

- A Line dropped under 4,000 daily rides again after a very impressive fall surge (likely driven by the frequency increase earlier in the summer). January was quite low at 3,403, but is about on par with 2024 levels, and higher than 2025.

- B Line had a very strong start, posting over 10,000 daily rides from September through November, as well as strong weekend numbers. However, ridership dropped in December and January to around 9,200 on an average day. Given the neighborhoods it runs through, it's surprising that the drops largely reflect regular seasonal trends, but it is difficult to say with less than a year of data. The E Line debuts at 4,616 daily rides in December, and climbs slightly in January to 5,041. These numbers are only slightly higher than what route 6 has gotten in recent years. Sunday ridership is quite weak at about 2,901 daily rides. It's still quite new so there's room to grow, but it definitely isn't as much of a success as the B Line was.

- C Line sees its two of worst months since 2023 with ridership dropping below 5,000 daily rides, and weekend ridership plummeting to only about 2,500. Similarly, the D Line sees the lowest ridership since opening months, at about 10,488 daily rides, and larger declines on weekends. This is substantially lower than previous years.

- Gold Line loses most of the growth trajectory it was on in the fall, dropping about 300 daily rides in December to around 1,300. Saturday ridership also dropped below 1,000 again for the first time since last May. The Orange Line drops by about 400 daily rides, losing most of the growth in 2025 as well. However, both December and January were still ahead of 2025 and 2024. Weekend ridership declined similarly, falling below 1,000 for the first time since 2024. Both the Orange and Gold Lines appear to have extremely similar seasonal patterns.

- Regular bus saw the largest declines after a fairly stable year. Despite the B Line opening, regular bus ridership recovered quickly back to around 80,000 daily rides. Daily ridership declined by almost 20,000 between November and January.

- Blue Line remains basically flat at an embarrassingly low 14,112 daily rides in January. This is less than half of pre-covid, and about the same as what the D Line was getting earlier in the fall. Saturday ridership is only 11,929, the lowest recorded in several years. The Green Line continues its poor performance from 2025, returning below 20,000 rides again. Weekend ridership is now roughly the same as the Blue Line after being much higher for the last few years. The lack of a fall ridership surge (as is typical for the Green Line) is interesting. Given these ridership numbers I doubt increasing LRT frequency is a very high priority because even at every 12 minutes there's a lot of extra capacity going underutilized.

The overall system saw 136,900 daily rides in December and 130,558 daily rides in January. Both months are typically lower than others, but the system was seeing 165,363 daily rides in September so that's a large decline. Luckily much of this decline is seasonal and influenced by recent events so it is likely not reflective of long term ridership trends. I expect 2026 to be better for transit ridership than 2025 as new service matures, though the Blue Line closure this summer will make that less obvious.

Remember people were choosing not to leave their homes in January due to ICE.


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[angrysuburbanite]

...Luckily much of this decline is seasonal and influenced by recent events so it is likely not reflective of long term ridership trends...

Yes, I am aware.

[Bakken2016]

...Luckily much of this decline is seasonal and influenced by recent events so it is likely not reflective of long term ridership trends...

Yes, I am aware.

My bad, totally missed that part.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Korh]

It was one mans decision that indirectly caused ridership to drop and depending on how recent events play out it ridership might spike because of a different decision by the same man.

[DanPatchToget]

Would love to see the ridership stats from today, especially for the routes that serve the State Capitol Building, if Metro Transit kept track of that. The 54 was almost already packed leaving the MoA a little after 11, and the Green Line was at crush loads when I left around 3:30.

[angrysuburbanite]

2026 Light Rail closures due to the Blue Line reconstruction (https://metrocouncil.org/Council-Meetin ... pdate.aspx) will be as follows:
Blue Line
- May 9-10th and 30th-31st between Target Field and Fort Snelling (2 days each, weekends)
- June 29th-August 19th between Target Field and Mall of America (52 days)
Green Line
- April 25th-26th and May 2nd-3rd (marked on calendar but not mentioned in the table?)
- June 29th-26th and August 16-19th between Target Field and West Bank (32 days)

Beyond 2026, the Blue Line will be completely closed between April and June 2027 and partially closed between June and August 2027. Lake Street Station is expected to be closed from early 2027 through 2028, and Franklin Station will be closed from April to July.

Most station rehabilitation was completed in 2025; platform barriers and platform door tiles will be added during the closures. Older dot-matrix displays will also be replaced with new Variable Message Signs. The airport tunnel will get a boiler replacement and Intrusion Detection System upgrades.

Both Cedar Ave and Franklin Ave bridges are being redecked, likely the cause of full closures as tracks will be completely removed. Crossovers, signals, and rails that weren't upgraded during the 2025 closure will be replaced this year.

The MSP Terminal 1 Station is being renovated with upgraded escalators and elevators and new wayfinding.

Replacement bus service will see some travel improvements, though Terminal 1 to Downtown will take 51 minutes compared to 48 from previous bus replacements. Rail travel time takes about 24 minutes for the same trip. You can see a table of transit time examples on slide 16. ADA pads are being installed at several locations, allowing for time savings around Lake Street. Bus headsigns will also use signage consistent with BRT services such as the Gold and Orange Lines.

February ridership was higher than that of 2025, mostly due to the E Line which jumped over 1,000 daily riders from January. The E Line is now about double route 6's ridership and will continue to climb as winter concludes. Both LRT lines are still well below their 2024 peak and continue to shrink year over year, though the Green Line appears to be stabilizing. Both the C and D lines are posting some of their worst numbers since COVID-19, but other BRT lines rebounded to where they were in November. Local bus is much, much lower than previous months but this service category is still difficult to compare due to the aBRT openings. Overall the system saw 150,276 daily rides, up about 20,000 from January and 4,000 from 2025, but down 13,000 from 2024.

[twincitizen]

I wonder if the April-June 2027 Blue Line closure more or less confirms that the Green Line extension will not open before June. Metro Transit has never given more specificity than "2027" but that hasn't stopped us from wondering if it could open in March (or earlier) given that testing started last fall and that typically takes a year. Probably bad optics to open a long-awaited $3 Billion line without a rail connection to the airport.