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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Twin Cities Gold Line
Exciting developments are on the horizon in Minneapolis-St Paul. We dive into the new Gold Line BRT and its potential to redefine transit in the area, exploring its benefits and limitations compared to similar lines.
• Overview of the Gold Line and its dedicated infrastructure
• Comparison of Gold Line with B-Line and their operational differences
• Importance of transit-oriented development along the Gold Line route
• Insights into ridership expectations and community impact
• Discussion on how urban planning can influence future transit projects
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Doors are closing. Public transit, that's my way to roll On. A metro, I'm taking control. Bus stops, train tracks it's my daily grind. Public transit, it's the rhythm of my life. On this episode of Transit Tangents, we discuss new bus rapid transit lines headed to Minneapolis-St Paul. We'll compare pros and cons of the two models being used and where they're headed, moving forward. All of this and more coming up on Transit Tangents.
Speaker 2:Hey everybody and welcome back to this episode of Transit Tangents. My name's Chris and I'm Lewis and today we are listening to your feedback from our top 10 transit projects to look for in 2025. We got a lot of comments about other projects that we should have looked at and we are reading those comments and taking those suggestions. So today we are going to dive into the sort of Minneapolis St Paul area more on the St Paul side Gold Line BRT.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we're also going to talk about some of the light BRT stuff that's happening as well. We'll get into one of those projects in particular, but there's a lot to talk about with the Gold Line where it's true BRT, it is dedicated space. I was really excited when I looked into this and saw how hard you all were going with the. There's some little tunnels and bridges and it's real, real dedicated BRT and we don't see that much of that in the United States, so pretty excited to do it.
Speaker 2:Before we get started, though, we want to call out we have some new swag, as you've probably seen on the YouTube. On the YouTube little scroller, it shows hoodies and t-shirts and socks, and stickers and hats. I am not a hat person, but I'm wearing it today. So yeah, if you want to support the show and you're interested in some swag, check out the links under the video.
Speaker 1:Without further ado, though, let's jump into the episode here. Let's start off with the gold line, and throughout we're going to kind of talk about some comparisons between this gold line, which is like the true BRT, as well, as we're going to talk specifically about the B line, which is another route that's going to be opening in the area, and kind of comparing and contrasting some pros and cons between the true BRT, the kind of light BRT, things in between, as we kind of go. Have you been to Minneapolis? I have not been outside of the airport. Okay, I'd like to go though. Yeah, yeah, kind of go. But have you been to the minneapolis? I have not been outside of the airport okay, I'd like to go though.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the bike ability in minneapolis is supposed to be really great I think I think we will at some point do a minneapolis in a day using public transit. I've been to minneapolis and the st paul area for work before and, um, it's a beautiful, beautiful area and the connectivity between these two cities and all the potential that's there and already exists is really, really incredible. Fun fact Minneapolis is the place first time I ever saw a frozen lake. Wow, and I saw it and I was like why is the water dirty? And I was like, oh, no, it's just ice.
Speaker 1:You can now tell Chris is from the south if you weren't able to tell that before anyway, the gold line uh scheduled to open this year, in 2025, is a 10 mile project, again with true brt infrastructure along the route. Uh, it's scheduled to open in march, which by the time this comes out it might be open like close to now, very soon. Um, it creates 11 new stops, primarily along the i-94 corridor, 16 total stops in general. Some of them are kind of overlap with existing stops in the downtown St Paul area. I'm sure some of them are being reworked, so those numbers might be a little off as far as what's new and what's an existing station.
Speaker 2:Yeah, most of the project is fit within an existing right-of-way, so that's a huge cost savings, a huge benefit to the community to be able to use this existing right-of-way. You know, fewer chances of eminent domain and all that kind of thing. Yeah, in total there's about 93,000 jobs within a half mile of the station, which is also huge for getting commuters around totally and kind of.
Speaker 1:One last little fact about it is about 13% of the people who live within that same cashman area of a half a mile from the station don't own a car. So this will be a major benefit to folks who already are relying on transit in the area, and we'll also have the added benefit of potentially being appealing to folks who might have a car but are thinking about getting rid of one car and being a one-car household or looking for alternatives to commute into St Paul.
Speaker 2:I think this is also a good time to call back to our BRT episode. If you're curious about what the difference between BRT and other types of bus networks, how that kind of breaks down. We have a whole episode about BRT. We don't see a lot of BRT in the US, so this project's really exciting because it's sort of the best thing we have is like a real bus rapid transit. What we see in other cities is maybe a dedicated bus lane that then merges back in with regular traffic. We see a little bit of thing. We saw a little bit of movement in Houston with BRTs. The mayor there has cut most of that service, so this is a really exciting project Totally, and this project has been floated for a while actually.
Speaker 1:So it first came up in the mid-2000s, slash, 2010s. At one point it was looked at into doing a rail line in this area, but ultimately, for cost reasons as well as for kind of ridership projections, they decided that true, brt was the way to go. It essentially is going to act as a bit of a commuter service, but a more frequent commuter service, we'll say so. It's supposed to run service all day long. They don't give exact times on any of the documents here, so I'm not sure if all day long means 24 hours, if it means 6 am to midnight, I'm not sure of the specifics here. I'm sure we will find out very soon. But yeah, and like we said, it runs mostly in that dedicated right-of-way, so you're going to have the benefits of not sitting at stoplights all the time. You're going to have transit priority in a lot of cases along the line Drivers will not be stuck sitting in traffic. Essentially, you'll be able to cruise right along on the BRT line directly into St Paul or back home if you're heading the other direction.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when we say it follows the right-of-way, it's not necessarily like just a lane of the highway that's been dedicated to this. It is its own standalone network for most of the path Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, most of it runs on the north side of I-94. It kind of weaves between a mix of long neighborhood streets but also just on its own roadways it bridges over several intersections. It goes under several intersections. It's pretty cool to actually look. If you're watching, you can see. If you're listening, I'll try to describe. It's really well integrated in and just it exceeded any expectation that I thought I was going to have of this, at least seeing the renderings and whatnot. Now I have not seen it in person. So people in Minneapolis, tell me if I'm wrong. Or in St Paul, tell me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 2:So all in all it sounds like the project's pretty well organized. It has its right of way. It seems like it's going to be delivered on budget. It's cost-wise, it's good for the community. Some downsides with how this particular model in the St Paul area works out. With it running along a highway it's harder to connect communities, I think in a way, so people don't necessarily want to live next to a highway. This promotes some development on that highway. Of when you're going to build things, you know, build new housing to try to connect to this BRT, you're building it really close to the highway.
Speaker 1:That may be not the most desirable for some people it's just like I mean for most people. I don't think most people want to live with an earshot of a highway, seeing a highway having the health effects of being next to a highway.
Speaker 2:You also don't want to cross a highway. So, with this running on the north side of I-94, you're going to try to have a catchment area on the south side of the highway as well. So now people have to cross the bridges to get over Not the most enjoyable experience.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, if you figure. And when Chris talks about a catchment area and I think I mentioned it earlier too just picture a round radius around a station and think about how far would you walk to get to a station or how far would you bike to get to a station, and if that range is somewhere you know, half a mile is probably the farthest end of that for most people and a lot of that half a mile radius is just literally taken up by highway.
Speaker 2:I also think about people in Minneapolis are definitely built different than I am. I cannot walk half a mile in the weather, in the cold weather conditions they get up there.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, but.
Speaker 2:I'm sure that's not a big issue for some of the people in Minneapolis.
Speaker 1:Agreed, agreed, um, yeah, uh, a couple other, a couple positives or nice features that that the system is doing. That I appreciated seeing, um, they're, they're doing pay before you're bored at each station. So there'll be a way to either tap or swipe, or whatever it may be, before you get on the bus, and that may sound like a small thing, but it actually saves a lot of time If you're someone who doesn't ride a bus. Every time the bus stops, usually you spend a good bit of time people getting up there, either paying with a credit card, putting quarters into the machine, trying to scan a QR code on their phone, and if five or 10 people are getting on at a given stop, it might take a solid 60 seconds, 90 seconds, for all those people to get on and sit down before the bus can start going again. But with this pay before you board, folks have already paid to get on the platform, essentially, and they just walk on the bus and sit down.
Speaker 2:It feels a lot more like a train experience getting on a light rail than it does getting on a bus, totally.
Speaker 1:There's also some trade-offs with it as far as, like, enforcement of paying the fare and whatnot. There's a little bit more of a trust system going on. But again, I think the main goal here is to get people moving and I think most people will pay their fare Absolutely.
Speaker 2:You already mentioned the frequent all-day service. We don't have. Like I said, don't have the schedule for that, but stay tuned. And then the one that I like the most is the heated shelters. Going back to saying that Minneapolis people are built differently than I am, I would. And then the one that I like the most is the heated shelters. Going back to saying that Minneapolis people are built differently than I am, yeah, I would have to have a heated shelter and that's honestly something I wish more transit agencies built into their system, because we have sat at some very cold bus stops Totally, and I've actually seen even on some busy local routes in the Minneapolis-St Paul area.
Speaker 1:I've seen images and videos on Twitter of heated things where you can literally walk into like it's like a glass, usually like bus stop or like plexiglass or whatever, and there's a button you press inside and it turns on the heater when you get in there and it probably stays on for a couple minutes or whatever. Pretty cool, yeah. But yeah, a couple other benefits here, though We've got limited stops to keep the buses moving. Obviously, if you do too many stops it's going to take a while, so the stop spacing is pretty nice along the route.
Speaker 2:Also signal priority. Which we hammer on a lot in our reviews of Transit and City is that buses and on-street trams they need signal priority. This will have the signal priority where it encounters intersections.
Speaker 1:Totally, and it's interesting. There's like technology in the buses that will essentially allow the drivers to ask for an extended green light or for a green light to change faster from a red to a green, which is pretty, pretty cool, and we see that in some places. Even in Austin, apparently, there are a couple places where buses can do that, and I think I've seen some of it along the 801 and 803.
Speaker 2:There's also some like on Fifth Street. Near the Whole Foods there's a section where they can signal priority. There's a couple places in town.
Speaker 1:Yep, yep, but yeah, with that let's move into expected ridership.
Speaker 2:Yeah, expected ridership starts off around 6,500 people a day. They expect that to increase to about 9,000 people per day by 2020. I'm sorry, by 2040.
Speaker 1:So for context, you know to compare that 6,500 or 9,000 riders a day. The busiest bus in the city right now sees about 10,000 riders per day. So this will be a very well-used route. On the system I-94, which this runs along, sees a lot of traffic. Hopefully this will kind of help alleviate some of that and also offer folks who commute along the corridor an alternative to sitting in traffic every day, to instead sitting on a nice bus and having it whisk them away to downtown.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this will also serve a lot of low-income communities in this area. As you said, about 13% of the households don't own a vehicle. That obviously doesn't correlate to necessarily low-income communities, but a lot of these communities may not have a car or it may be economically beneficial for them to take the bus into downtown St Paul and then the train to Minneapolis or wherever they need to go.
Speaker 1:It's also worth noting that there is a planned expansion to the Gold Line which will continue this route all the way to Minneapolis, totally Along with this project. We kind of talk about the importance of housing and transit. A lot now on this channel We've done, if you're interested, we actually had a really interesting episode with a friend of ours named Cutter who kind of works in that space here in austin. Um, we'll put a link for folks who are interested. But there are quite a few potential areas for transit oriented development along this line. So a couple stations in particular include the etna station, the sunrise station uh, the maple wood station, as well as the last couple stations on the line, uh, which are currently set up more as park and rides. Um, there's a lot of room over there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, looking at the satellite imagery, a lot of sort of woodland around those parking ride stations.
Speaker 1:And you know others include, like the Sunray station that I mentioned is essentially a strip mall. You know we've talked about how those can be kind of redeveloped in a couple episodes on the show as well.
Speaker 2:Your favorite phrase.
Speaker 1:Yes, where you see surface parking lots, I see potential. I keep saying we're going to make a t-shirt for that, but maybe by the time this comes, out, I'll make a t-shirt.
Speaker 1:With those transit-oriented developments, though the one thing I will point out is, again, they're going to be along a highway. It's not the best spot for this, and this is like an issue that we see in cities in the us and north america in general is that so often dense housing, like it's always built on just terrible roads for the most part, not always, but, and oftentimes it'll be concentrated on these main arterial roads um, because folks in the neighborhoods don't want an apartment in their neighborhood, and you end up with tons of folks living on these really busy, dangerous roads that are. Yeah, it's not a great scenario, but it's kind of what we have, so we'll take it, I guess.
Speaker 2:The Gold Line is not the only development that's really happening in this St Paul area. There are other lines, like the Green Line. We're not really going to get into those, but if you are interested in learning more about what St Paul and Minneapolis area, what they're doing, there is a great website. When you look up or you kind of Google, the Gold Line kind of goes through all the other connections that are going to kind of intersect with this line.
Speaker 2:So a lot of good connectivity, a lot of really good work. A lot of good connectivity, a lot of really good work, I think, coming out of this area. We do want to sort of compare this to some other lines in the area that are labeled as BRT, but they're not really BRT, as we mentioned in our BRT episode. When we talk about BRT, we expect it to be a pretty much separated network from your road networks, that's, dedicated bridges and tunnels and intersections that are meant just for this, stations that are off the road, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:The best example of that in the world is probably the I think it's the Transmilenio in Bogota. There are in Central and South America. There are a lot of good examples, yeah.
Speaker 2:Buenos Aires has really great.
Speaker 1:VRT, yep. Not tons in the US or Canada for the most part, but there are some coming. But this line that we're going to focus on right now, the B line and, like Chris said, there are others like this already existing in Minneapolis and others under development the B line is one that will also open this year. It is a 12-mile route currently being served by the 21 bus. The 21 bus, for context, is the busiest local bus route in the Minneapolis-St Paul area. The route runs kind of just south of the downtowns and kind of runs east-west, connecting them in between.
Speaker 2:Essentially, it makes a beeline between Minneapolis and St Paul.
Speaker 1:It makes a beeline between south Minneapolis and south St Paul.
Speaker 2:Yes, as you said, that 21 route is the busiest route in the sort of metro area and it serves about 9,000 riders per day currently. It's comparable to what the Gold Route will have in 2040.
Speaker 1:Right. Also notable, this is not going to run in any dedicated busways for the most part. There might be a few areas where there's a lane for a period of time, uh, but it mostly is running with mixed traffic. Um, the reason for this is there's not that much room on the right of way here. Uh, it's running through neighborhoods, it's running through businesses and all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1:Um, there's, without taking a lot of extra land, there's really just not space, unless you were to do something drastic, which I'm totally in favor of, things like this, when there are parallel cross streets and whatnot. I mean you could, in time, turn something like this into a transit corridor. It's not being proposed or anything right now, but I was about to say like, oh, it makes total sense. You could never do this, you could do this sort of thing, but I'll take this for now. A couple of the features, though, we want to go over that, surprisingly, are actually similar to along the Gold Line, which I like to see, the first being we're seeing pay-before-you-board again at every station along this line, yeah, which is great.
Speaker 2:There's also about one station for every 0.4 miles, so less frequent stops than a local line. So it gets us a little closer to BRT, almost more like an express line.
Speaker 1:Totally yeah. We're seeing larger vehicles and more frequent service than what the 21 used to have. Bendy buses. Yes, there will be bendy buses. You were looking at me smirking. I was like what? Yes, there will be bendy buses. That's just my face, lewis.
Speaker 2:I smirk.
Speaker 1:And as well as more frequent service. So I would imagine and folks, if you ride the 21 in the area, let us know, but I'd imagine the 21, given the ridership, you probably see a lot of standing room only on the bus and whatnot. Hopefully this will help alleviate that sort of thing by providing both more frequent buses, and when the buses do come, they will be bigger. And then another thing that I thought was interesting here the stations. It's not like one uniform station throughout. They're going to vary based on where they are along the route. So with a route like this, you know, some of the stations are going to be much more dense and will have more amenities at the stops. They'll be nicer, they might have more shade or heated stops or anything like that, whereas some of these are more surrounded in single family neighborhoods. They're not going to see as much ridership and maybe a more traditional bus shelter makes sense there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of positives there. We can kind of talk about pros and cons a little bit. One of the cons, if we're comparing these two projects, is that the beeline is going to be slower than the gold line. It is mixed in with traffic. It is harder to do signal priority that way it doesn't have the whole dedicated right away the whole way through this part of the city. So it is going to be a little slower.
Speaker 1:At the same time, it is also going to be much cheaper to construct this sort of thing.
Speaker 1:But again, there is that trade-off there We've talked about this a little bit before the phrase BRT creep, and I want to spend a second on this, actually.
Speaker 1:So the idea of BRT creep is that you know, you propose, oh, we're going to do this great BRT line, something that looks more like the gold line, dedicated right-of-way, the whole way bridges, signal priority, all this sort of stuff. And then as the project continues along the process and things start to go over budget and oh, this might be more expensive than we thought or this is going to take too much time slowly the project gets whittled down, and whittled down, and whittled down, and now you just have a bus, a regular bus, that sits in traffic with everything else that doesn't have signal priority, and sure, you might have saved some money or done it on time, but you no longer really have BRT. At best you have BRT light, and this is something that, like this, is a big reason why I feel like I push for light rail in a lot of cases when it makes sense is because it's harder to have BRT creep when you're doing a light rail necessarily, although you can you can run into the same issues.
Speaker 2:Once you build a light rail it's also a lot harder to justify stopping that service. What we've seen with BRT Houston's a good example. You have areas near the sort of Galleria area, uptown area of Houston and you have this beautiful dedicated bus lane that runs through this part of the city and it had signal priority.
Speaker 1:Well, it had sort of signal priority at each of the intersections it could have been better.
Speaker 2:But it is just this nice little strip of bus lane that's separated by these little gardens, just as we saw. It was very easy for the mayor to say, no, we don't need that, let's use a smaller bus, let's make it cheaper to operate.
Speaker 1:Let's run it less frequently, yeah.
Speaker 2:One other thing, too, is studies have shown that with bus lines and BRT lines, yes, the upfront cost is cheaper to build these, but over the long term you spend a little more than you would on a light rail operation. With the operations you have to pay bus drivers, the buses require a lot more maintenance. There's just more operational expense that goes into this BRT line versus light rail, which comes with some more streamlined operations.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Not to get into the whole light rail thing, but the concept of BRT creep, though, is not something that people think about all the time. I would imagine A few other pros and cons with this system. In particular, I think, well obviously is getting stuck in traffic. We've already kind of covered that but uh, having these kind of even brt light lines, uh like the b line, will be, uh, totally easier to understand than a regular bus line for the most part. Usually, systems like this are branded better, they might be shown differently on the maps and almost be drawn out more like a metro line would be or a train line would be, and I think it is a good first step for someone who isn't a transit person to like learn how to ride the bus.
Speaker 2:I absolutely agree. Before starting this podcast, one of my things I was sort of apprehensive about with buses it wasn't the normal things people are, you know refuse to ride buses about, like the people on the bus and all this kind of stuff it was. I don't know where this bus is going, right, obviously, google Maps and Apple Maps, things like that, do a really good job of helping you navigate, but buses, it's a little uncertain. They can deviate from their existing path. A light rail can't do that and a BRT also has a really hard time doing that hard time doing that. Right? I think that when you have here's point A, here's point B, here's exactly where this bus is going to go People can wrap their heads around that a little easier, totally.
Speaker 1:So I think you know with that, that sort of thing right there being solved here also can help with increasing ridership. Right, the 21 bus people just see a bus with a number on it and like sure, the 21 did run a fairly straight line, from what I can understand by just kind of looking from afar here. But having this kind of branded differently, having less stops on it, having more defined stops on it, makes it easier for folks to understand who are not necessarily riding the bus every day.
Speaker 1:And increases service for the people who were, because now you know if you can get on that express bus, essentially, and skip some of the stops and get to your destination faster, that's a win.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we always say buses aren't sexy, but then, like BRT, maybe people are going to look at it and be like hey look at that.
Speaker 1:That's a pretty sexy BRT light, damn. One other point I want to make here too, I guess I want to make here too, I guess. So, comparing the Gold Line to the B-Line and other similar ones, the Gold Line, I think you could actually have potential for real TOD to happen, real transit-oriented development.
Speaker 1:With a BRT Lite, I mean, you can see some of it Again. You will have higher levels of ridership, and people who live there and do take transit might be like oh, I would rather live near the B line stop, or something. I would say that it's probably to a much lesser extent, though.
Speaker 2:that you see significant transit oriented development around these areas Doesn't mean none, but yeah, and as you said at the beginning, the feasibility study looked at light rail in this area, originally with more I think it was commuter rail, but either way, Either way, but with a rail line, but with more TODs maybe being built up in this area, maybe in 40 years.
Speaker 2:they look at this and they say, well, now we have the population to support a light rail and now we already have the dedicated right of way. So there could be some even potential future benefits that we aren't even aware of.
Speaker 1:Totally, but yeah, this was a pretty interesting one. Again, this was requested in the top 10 transit projects to look forward to in 2025. Excited to see both the Gold Line, the B Line, as well, as there were a couple other lettered lines that are scheduled to open this year, next year and, I believe, even into 2027. So certainly a lot of interesting stuff going on in the Minneapolis-St Paul metro area. I'd love to get out there and visit you all someday. If you're from the area, definitely reach out. We'd love to hear from you.
Speaker 2:Especially if you're part of any sort of Twin Cities urbanist group.
Speaker 1:Please reach out to us. We'd love to have those contacts.
Speaker 2:If you have other projects in that region that you would like us to focus on, please also share that in the comments.
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