A billion dollars of clarity

Hey, guess what? The Green Line isn't doing so great. Bob Collins of Minnesota Public Radio has noticed:

Since the end-to-end speed of the light-rail line from St. Paul to Minneapolis was announced a few weeks ago, supporters and opponents have lobbed grenades over the time it takes, roughly the same as the Route 16 bus. If you’re lucky.

During construction, I’d intended to take the line to Target Field for the July 4th game vs. the Yankees. But when push came to shove, and with four people in the car, it made more sense to just drive into town.

Part of that decision is owed to the 55 minutes it took to get from 10th Street in St. Paul to the Nicollet stop in Minneapolis when we tried the new line out on the weekend of Rock the Garden.

More often, we hear “it takes too long” among potential riders. There’s a good reason for that. It takes too long.

If you have a larger group, it's not necessarily cost-effective, either. Say you're a St. Paulite and you want to go to Minneapolis to see the Twins. On the weekend, you can get a special pass that lets you ride for $7, but on ordinary days if you ride it's $3.50/person outside of rush hour. If you have a group of 4 with you, that's $14. You can beat that price at a lot of ramps downtown.

Meanwhile, if you want more, a lot more, detail about the poor thinking that went into building the Green Line, it's here, in a post from David Markle on the Streets.MN blog. A taste:

It’s pretty clear that higher transit speed using the freeway alignment would have attracted the additional 33% of riders, including many commuters. University Avenue had 25 stop lights plus many additional intersections on the 6.1 miles between Huron Avenue in Minneapolis and Rice Street in St. Paul. On such a busy commercial street, a surface train must stop for red lights at the many major intersections: a thwarted train. In contrast, the Blue Line’s Hiawatha Avenue is a spacious divided highway with only eight stop lights on the four miles between Lake Street and Highway 62, and the train has priority at those lights, permitting relatively high track speeds. Unfortunately, tunneling or elevating the Green Line tracks was considered too expensive.[1]

Consequently the train will have a transit speed only about the same as the present Route 16 bus, but with 46 fewer places to get on and off. It’s likely to run more slowly, on average, than the Route 50 limited stop bus, which had at least eight more passenger stops. The 50 was dropped when the new train started operating, the 16 service has been significantly reduced, and, importantly, the Route 94 express bus service was eliminated outside of rush hour–even though it gets from downtown to downtown far more quickly than the train. These service reductions seem calculated to force riders onto the train and cut costs, but will hardly help the mobility impaired who may have to wait longer for the bus or else roll a wheelchair an extra half-mile or more to or from a station. It appears that by most measures, addition of the new train will result in poorer service, and a step backwards for public transit.

Other than that, and the traffic accidents, it's pretty great.