urbanMSP

^yup, that's exactly the point. I live in the neighborhood and just got rid of a car. With a walkable grocery store, amazon.com, car2go, niceride, and the lightrail there's no longer a need if you work locally.

But if you live in the far northwest end of the North Loop transit sucks so you're pretty much stuck having a car.

^yup, that's exactly the point. I live in the neighborhood and just got rid of a car. With a walkable grocery store, amazon.com, car2go, niceride, and the lightrail there's no longer a need if you work locally.

Thats great for those who work locally or on a transit route. But I would bet that is the Minority not the Majority of North Loop residents.

Im as pro-transit as others but we should also be planning for the future residents AND the thousands of Twins fans that are now coming through North Loop before and after games.

Most of the traffic in the North Loop is people driving there from the suburbs, not the other way around. 2 lane streets with turn lanes (i.e. two TOTAL lanes with one in each direction) can handle up to 15,000 cars a day so work fine for nearly all streets in the North Loop.

The only exception is Washington, which handles around 20,000 cars a day. 5th Ave N only sees 5600-8800 cars a day, so four lanes are not at all justified. Unfortunately, the Interchange project will restore the dangerous four-lane configuration that previously existed, as depicted on the site plan on the last page of this bullshit blighting study:

http://www.theinterchange.net/index.php ... Itemid=184

The site plan also shows an access drive, presumably for the planned retail & hotel uses, rather than the bus station depicted in the rendering above. I'm very intrigued by the possibility of a bus station, since it would require a reroute for any route that used it. My pet idea is a bike path that would roughly follow the aerial LRT structure then continue down Olson Hwy to Wirth Park, so I'm definitely interested in any other plans for this space.

I generally agree that four lanes aren't needed through here, but I'd suggest that some sort of special provision needs to be made for the buses turning into Heywood.

Yeah, but a dedicated left turn lane would work better than a general traffic lane, although I would say they could keep the existing signal. The problem is that there are too many lanes on Olson and going from 3 eastbound lanes to 1 violates a traffic engineer's sense of order in the universe.

^yup, that's exactly the point. I live in the neighborhood and just got rid of a car. With a walkable grocery store, amazon.com, car2go, niceride, and the lightrail there's no longer a need if you work locally.

Thats great for those who work locally or on a transit route. But I would bet that is the Minority not the Majority of North Loop residents.

Im as pro-transit as others but we should also be planning for the future residents AND the thousands of Twins fans that are now coming through North Loop before and after games.

That's why I said for those who work locally (or along either rail line). Curious what you and fishmanpet consider an unreasonable distance to walk- the station is in the center of the north loop and I'm not aware of a northwest corner that's more than half a mile from it?

But if you live in the far northwest end of the North Loop transit sucks so you're pretty much stuck having a car.

Is transit so bad that people would rather hop in their car and drive to the CBD to pay for parking, then walk however much further to their end-destination? Seems odd..

Also, I thought I did an analysis somewhere re: workers living downtown work. I don't think I did a North Loop specific analysis, but I thought some 30% of people in downtown worked downtown, and if you stretch the boundaries to include anything north of Lake, St Anthony Main area, and the U, that number was like 50%+? Thanks to the gubmint shutdown, the Census tool is offline so I can't confirm..

Your 30% number doesn't makes sense to me, or perhaps I'm just misunderstanding your claim.

Your 30% number doesn't makes sense to me, or perhaps I'm just misunderstanding your claim.

The tool isn't for total population, it actually represents data of people who work (whether full-time or part-time, and they respond with their primary job). I drew a boundary around downtown (river, 35W, 94) and had it spit out, by census block, where their place of employment was. I can't find my post, but I believe 30% of the workers living downtown had jobs in that same geographical area. Many others worked in DT St Paul, Uptown, the U, EP, Plymouth, etc (those were the top areas outside DT Mpls IIRC). I was curious to see how many people living downtown could commute by bike/transit so I drew a bigger 'work location' bubble to include the U, St Anthony Main, and Uptown and found 50% of downtown population with jobs work in that larger area.

OK, that makes sense. I thought that you were saying that 30% of downtown workers live downtown, which is quite different.

But if you live in the far northwest end of the North Loop transit sucks so you're pretty much stuck having a car.

Is transit so bad that people would rather hop in their car and drive to the CBD to pay for parking, then walk however much further to their end-destination? Seems odd..

I don't think transit is so bad that they'd drive downtown to work, but I think it's bad enough that they wouldn't be able to use it for much else during the day. And once they're driving, they might as well go to someplace that isn't downtown that has easier parking.

I have some friends that just moved into the North Loop and they want me to move there as well and get out of my rat hole apartment. I'd be basically fine to commute to work at the U. Going to work I could use Nextrip to figure out when the next 14 or 7 is coming to take me downtown to catch a 3/16/50/Green Line to get to campus. But on the way back, I could be stuck waiting downtown for a 7 or 14 to get the rest of the way home (especially since there doesn't seem that the three routes share a common stop). My wife travels to various areas around the city via transit, usually by first going downtown on the Blue Line (since we live right by a station). If we were in the North Loop, her frequent fast connection to downtown would be severed, and she'd spend a lot more time waiting for a bus to leave the North Loop and one to get back to the North Loop.

The North Loop is close to downtown, but once you cross the railroad on Washington, you're getting to be a bit far from the core that's well served by transit. I think that the 7 and the 14 should be run on a single street, and be routed to more easily connect with other transit downtown. The city should also work on creating public spaces between Washington and 2nd St, so that people can easily move between the two streets without having to go to either end of the nearly half mile long block bounded by Washington Ave, 10th Ave N, N 2nd St, and 5th Ave N.

A Broadway -- Washington Ave -- Chicago Ave streetcar would pick up this slack nicely. Of course, the Viking's Stadium probably would cause problems with that route.

A Broadway -- Washington Ave -- Chicago Ave streetcar would pick up this slack nicely. Of course, the Viking's Stadium probably would cause problems with that route.

Totally agree. That, or a Fremont-N 7th-10th Ave-Washington-Chicago streetcar. They should just lay tracks in Chicago in front of the stadium as they re-do the thing. They're gonna build streetcars (even if they're a bit spendy) and this Chicago-Washington Ave connection is a perfect outer downtown box to the 5th/6th St E-W spine that run through the center of the city.

This is getting pretty far off-topic. Even discussion of how bad current transit serivce in North Loop is could probably go in the "North Loop neighborhood" thread. I'd be cool with starting up a thread for the Washington-Broadway starter streetcar line, as long as mattaudio promises not to post that map again

The two most important bus-related things that The Interchange project could spur (or should have included in its scope) are:
*A more seamless (branding, arrows, covered, etc.) connection to the 5th St Transit Center (Ramp B) next to Target Field
*Better pedestrian connections and enhancements to the 7th/Olson bus stops, in every direction.

A few pictures of the interchange that I took from target field today:

http://tinypic.com/r/dos7pg/5

http://tinypic.com/r/1zzi77k/5

More information regarding the public art projects for Target Field Station
http://the2020partners.com/wordpress/wp ... 092413.pdf

Nice that the Interchange architect thinks the project will be transformational:

http://www.startribune.com/local/minnea ... 29931.html

But also noticed that in more recent renderings the retail buildings on either side of the 5th ave extension under the new viaduct have disappeared. I know the metro police building is going to be there, but is anything else confirmed? Without the buildings that are part of the development, the new renderings kind of look like we added one more elevated concrete passage through the north loop. It's a nice looking viaduct, but then again it ought to be for 80M.

Original Rendering:
http://theinterchange.net/images/storie ... change.jpg

Feb 2013 Rendering:
http://theinterchange.net/images/storie ... Center.jpg

Looking at the renderings again... I still think it is CRAZY that there are cars involved in this. It should be ped and LRT. It will be a nightmare to get into and out of that ramp on game days.