Public Transit News / Current Events (MN only)

[thespeedmccool]

Pretty sure the $60 million in busway funding is to fill the gap on F Line and fully fund H Line. Gold and Purple are funded by Ramsey County, Washington County, and the FTA.

The G Line would come before the H Line, right? Or did they find funding for that somewhere else?

I think the DFL secured F and G last year?

[alexschief]

Metro Transit recently put out their Zero Emission Bus (ZEB) plan, and it makes for some interesting light reading.

[Silophant]

Ah, this explains the challenges they've had with the C Line BEBs:

As the C Line was a 60-foot pilot program, much of the program’s infrastructure incorporated new
technology, some of which was being utilized for the very first time including the:
• First eight 60-foot articulated BEBs produced at New Flyer’s St. Cloud facility
• Siemens HPC 1.0 300kW on-route overhead conductive chargers with serial numbers 1
and 2
• First eight Buy America compliant Siemens RAVE 150 150 kW plug-in chargers (Figure
15).

I knew they were new technology, but I didn't realize that all the equipment was literally the first units off the respective assembly lines.

[Tcmetro]

The 2021 Park and Ride survey was released last month. Found here: https://metrocouncil.org/Transportation ... eport.aspx

Highlights include:

• Tripling of usage from 2020 (800 spaces) to 2021 (2,458 spaces), but still well below 2019's levels of 18,653 spaces.
• Six park and rides closed in 2021, five of which are leased church lots and one is MnDot owned (Hwy 7 & Vine Hill).
• Northtown Transit Center being reduced in capacity from 366 to 170 spaces to make room for the new transit center.
• 5,377 spaces at 23 park and rides currently have no bus service due to covid-related suspensions.
• The top 4 most used park and rides are all in opt-out communities (Burnsville, Maple Grove, Apple Valley, SouthWest). The opt-outs have provided a much more robust express schedule during the pandemic, so it isn't surprising that these park and rides are busier.
• Overall utilization is at 9%, with some of the busier park and rides experiencing ~25% usage. The small lot at Como & Eustis has a utilization rate of 95%.

Looking through the details of the park and ride usage, it seems there's an opportunity to remove more of the leased lots and concentrate express bus service to the agency-owned facilities. Metro Transit is supposedly undertaking the Network Next initiative to reimagine the bus system, so it's likely that is a possible scenario under evaluation.

[DanPatchToget]

That's a lot of facilities way underutilized. Would be nice if we could put some of those lots and ramps to different uses besides car storage since who knows when, or even if, the pre-pandemic demand will return.

[Tcmetro]

Agreed. I'm not so sure about how to repurpose some of the ramps given costs and near-interstate locations, but there's a lot of value in redeveloping the lots.

The Maple Plain park and ride lot was made smaller to accommodate a development, so there's already precedent. A few that come to mind for redevelopment are the Plymouth Road/394 and the CR 73/394 North lots that are redundant to nearby ramps and the Como & Eustis lot.

[Bakken2016]

https://www.swnewsmedia.com/prior_lake_ ... 3340c.html

Kevin Burkart was elected MVTA board chair.

Here is a list of things he wants to do:
Continue to emphasize collaboration and streamlining between transportation providers and continue to explore consolidation within our service area to best serve our customers. As density increases, the Suburban Transit Association service area can expand or move farther out.

Move the suburban transit provider network out from under the Met Council to the Minnesota Department of Transportation. MNDOT oversees the other outstate transit providers. Currently the suburban network, being under the thumb of the Met Council, is conflict by design.

In fact, our Metropolitan Planning Organization, i.e., Met Council, should not be a transit provider at all. As the MPO name implies, they should be involved in planning, not operations. That’s poor public policy.

As we continue to operate under the Met Council all funding allocations should be consistent with the 5307 federal funding formula. This is based on population, accounting for growth. The STA area has seen significantly more growth — both population and employment — compared to the rest of the seven county area the past several decades. This trend is projected to continue.

Suburban transit providers should be direct recipients of federal funding allocations.

Our allocation of motor vehicle sales tax dollars needs to account for suburban growth. We are stuck in a 2001 snapshot from the original legislation that pushed transit funding from property taxes to Motor Vehicle Sales Tax.

We’ve done well at public-private partnerships with Amazon, Mystic Lake, the Minnesota State Fair, the Renaissance Festival, and other large employers and entertainment venues. We need to continue these success stories.

[thespeedmccool]

Move the suburban transit provider network out from under the Met Council to the Minnesota Department of Transportation. MNDOT oversees the other outstate transit providers. Currently the suburban network, being under the thumb of the Met Council, is conflict by design.

In fact, our Metropolitan Planning Organization, i.e., Met Council, should not be a transit provider at all. As the MPO name implies, they should be involved in planning, not operations. That’s poor public policy.

These statements are wrong in so many ways.

1. Dakota County is not an "outstate" region. It is plainly metropolitan and there is no argument that MVTA should be overseen by MNDOT as a rural transit agency.
2. The whole purpose of the Met Council is to unify suburban and urban planning into one unit. It's in the name: Metropolitan Council.
3. The Met Council is not a transit provider; Metro Transit is.
4. The Met Council is engaged in regional planning, which does and should include transit planning.

This guy is gonna be fun to deal with. It's long past time to end opt-out services and stop dealing with these anti-urban quacks.

[twincitizen]

What's the latest on restarting service and increasing service on suburban express routes that were eliminated or significantly reduced during the pandemic?

Large downtown employers are bringing employees back (have already or will within a month), and I wonder what that looks like for an employee who formerly took the bus from a park & ride five days a week for their entire career pre-covid. I'm strongly-pro having workers downtown ASAP, but it seems a little unfair to call that person back into the office if their only option is to drive downtown, if that's not something they ever did previously. And I suspect this scenario describes thousands of workers, who like working downtown but not if they have to drive there and pay for parking.

It's kind of another one of many chicken-or-egg situations with downtown workers returning (safety perception, more restaurants being open, skyway links being open, etc.), except not having a bus at all is more black and white than the other topics. Kind of an economic equity issue too, as I'm guessing those who ride the bus, even from suburban park and rides, make far less money than those who drive downtown and have an expensive parking contract (i.e. more likely to be the bosses making decisions for said bus-riding employees)

[Bakken2016]

Metro Transit I know is focusing on directing people to Park and Rides that are open, and suggesting alternative services for routes that are suspended.

My opinion on it is if you are already driving to a Park and Ride, you can drive an additional mile or two to a different one.

[Tcmetro]

I wouldn't count on increased peak service with the next service change. I'd imagine that Metro Transit is still dealing with the labor challenges that lead to the December reductions.

The park and ride system needs some pruning, Metro Transit went overboard with facility construction between 2000 and 2015. There's still a lot of smaller leased lots, which reduces how much service can be provided to the big agency-owned lots and ramps.

[thespeedmccool]

I wouldn't count on increased peak service with the next service change. I'd imagine that Metro Transit is still dealing with the labor challenges that lead to the December reductions.

The park and ride system needs some pruning, Metro Transit went overboard with facility construction between 2000 and 2015. There's still a lot of smaller leased lots, which reduces how much service can be provided to the big agency-owned lots and ramps.

Yeah this was my read too. The December cuts were mostly becuase Metro didn't have enough drivers, and the express buses are easily the least vital in the whole system.

Metro's already cutting lots. I know of at least three cut P&R lots in just Woodbury, and they're no longer planning to add one at Manning & I-94. I imagine all but the most used lots will be getting the ax sometime soon.

[DanPatchToget]

I remember Brian Lamb (former GM of Metro Transit) talking in my transport planning class back in 2015 about Metro Transit moving away from small parking lots that they leased and consolidating with big lots and ramps dedicated entirely for park & riders. Back then, and especially now, I prefer they just leased under-utilized lots for small park & rides and link them together with express bus routes, but since we're stuck with gigantic park & ride facilities it would be nice if we had more use for them than just storage for downtown commuters' cars. By that I mean surround them with mixed-use development so they're used by residents, visitors, park & riders, etc. There's a couple newer developments by the Blue Line's American Boulevard Station (specifically the southbound platform) where there's parking ramps in the middle of apartment buildings. The parking ramps aren't for park & riders, but I think they're still good examples of how we can make the best of existing park & ride structures, especially those with existing or potential BRT/LRT/regional rail (28th Avenue, SouthWest Station, Hopkins Crossroad P&R, 63rd Avenue P&R, Anoka Station, etc.).

[Tcmetro]

The 22 is the next in the Better Bus Routes program. Metro Transit is cutting roughly every other stop for quarter-mile spacing, and eliminating the A and D branches in the north and the G branch in the south. Comments accepted until March 13.

https://www.metrotransit.org/route-22

[Trademark]

The 22 is the next in the Better Bus Routes program. Metro Transit is cutting roughly every other stop for quarter-mile spacing, and eliminating the A and D branches in the north and the G branch in the south. Comments accepted until March 13.

https://www.metrotransit.org/route-22

The biggest thing that would make the 22 a better bus by far would be grade separating the railroad crossing in Camden. North of 42nd Ave. Those trains come pretty often and it's easy to spend 10 minutes there at a time destroying the reliability.

[twincitizen]

I would like to see the stops eliminated on 34th Ave at 57th Street, as there's no stop sign at 57th and the bus makes stops at 56th and 58th. Oddly, there's a brand new bus shelter for the northbound stop at 57th, but not 56th. Due to the high density Bossen Terrace area down there, I wouldn't be surprised if 57th actually has the highest boardings of the stops around it, or is on par with 58th.

In a vacuum, it's simply bad transit planning to have buses make stops at intersections without 4-way stop signs/signals. In this example, without anyone boarding/alighting at 57th, the bus would be able to continue moving at full speed and make a stop at the next block (56th), where there's a 4-way stop requiring the bus to come to a stop anyways.

[Silophant]

I don't understand why there aren't some stops being removed downtown (except for moving the Nicollet stop across Nicollet to the aBRT station). There's no way boardings/alightings on 5th Ave S are high enough to justify stops at 7th, 6th, 5th, and 4th.

[DanPatchToget]

I did some math based on APTA's ridership figures for Q4 2019 vs Q3 2021 (latest ridership data available) and seeing how much pre-pandemic ridership we've recovered.

The light rail system has 32,100 average weekday riders, which is 42.6% of the pre-pandemic ridership of 72,300.

Northstar has 200 average weekday riders, which is 8% of the pre-pandemic ridership of 2,500.

Metro Transit's bus system has 73,800 average weekday riders, which is 43% of the pre-pandemic ridership of 171,600.

MVTA's average weekday ridership is 2,300, which is 23.4% of their pre-pandemic ridership of 9,800.

SW Transit's average weekday ridership is 1,300, which is 32.5% of their pre-pandemic ridership of 4,000.

Plymouth Metrolink's ridership data for Q3 2021 isn't right since it shows 383,900 average weekday riders (I wish that were true, suddenly it would make sense to talk about a subway system in Plymouth). Their average weekday ridership in Q4 2019 was 1,900.

[DanPatchToget]

Metro Transit's service changes beginning March 26th:
https://www.metrotransit.org/quarterly- ... y-march-26

Unfortunately a lot of service reductions.

[mamundsen]

Metro Transit's service changes beginning March 26th:
https://www.metrotransit.org/quarterly- ... y-march-26

Unfortunately a lot of service reductions.

The phrase “to better match current ridership” is used a lot in that summary of changes. I saw in the connect newsletter that they stated “Systemwide, we are providing about 20% less service than we did before the pandemic began. Our ridership is growing but remains about half of what it was before the pandemic.” It’s a bit of a chicken or the egg problem between ridership and route/frequency.