Slower Than Molasses in a Minnesota Winter

Remember the Twin Cities light-rail line that was supposed to average 17 mph but, after testing, was scheduled for just 13-3/4 mph? It turns out that, in actual operation, it averages less than 12.5 mph. That means it takes 53 minutes to go from downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul, 36 percent longer than the 39 minutes originally promised and more than twice as long as the 26 minutes required by a bus.


A green line train near the University of Minnesota. Flickr photo by Michael Hicks.

What’s slowing the trains down? Traffic signals. Apparently, the city of St. Paul is reluctant to give the trains signal priority over all other traffic. “It is hard to rationalize a train with 300 people stopping at an intersection with no cross traffic,” says Metro Transit’s general manager. But it is also hard to rationalize giving the few people who ride the train priority over the thousands of people who use other modes of travel.
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It’s even harder to rationalize spending nearly a billion dollars (the green line cost $957 million) on a clunky train, even if it could go a speedy 13-3/4 mph. As the Antiplanner has frequently pointed out, buses can move more people, more comfortably, at speeds as fast if not faster than light rail for a lot less money.

Building a light-rail line as the centerpiece of your transit system is like building an ordinary house but getting taxpayers to pay for lining the floors, ceilings, and walls of the hallway with solid gold. The hallway will have cost more than the rest of house put together. But, like a light-rail line, the gold provides no additional functionality other than to stroke the ego of the homeowner.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

12 Responses to Slower Than Molasses in a Minnesota Winter

  1. gattboy says:

    jeez i lived 2 blocks off hiawatha when they opened the first line in Mpls… took months to get the lights dialed in

    anyways considering there is an 8 lane freeway parallel about a half mile south of this corridor, i doubt many people were using university ave for fast trips before the train, and now they definitely are not…

    university is a commercial street and not really a through route, been like that for decades… fix some of the frontage roads behind the super blocks and they might even be able to get rid of a few lights.

  2. prk166 says:

    26 minutes? I wouldn’t compare LRT on the Central Corrdior to the 94 buses. They have different purposes. The new LRT line replaced the 50 bus.

    http://www.metrotransit.org/route-50-limited-stops-for-longer-rides

    After 15 years in service, Route 50 will be replaced in 2014 by the METRO Green Line, which will travel a similar path as the 16 and the 50. The train is replacing Route 50 because it will serve many of the same destinations as Route 50 with better travel times and much greater capacity.

  3. Dave Brough says:

    On the rare occasion that I take Utah’s Frontrunner commuter rail into Salt Lake City, I am always amazed at how a one-person trainload can hold up 200 cars at every intersection. At least St. Paul is doing it right: make the damn trains wait.

  4. gilfoil says:

    “it is also hard to rationalize giving the few people who ride the train priority over the thousands of people who use other modes of travel.”

    From the Twincities.com article:

    The average weekday ridership has totaled 30,264 passengers.

    I guess “few”=30,264 (depending on your definition of “few”).

  5. MJ says:

    “It is hard to rationalize a train with 300 people stopping at an intersection with no cross traffic,” says Metro Transit’s general manager.

    I’m pretty sure those trains have never had 300 people on them at one time, except maybe on the first day of operation when there were no fares.

  6. MJ says:

    I guess “few”=30,264 (depending on your definition of “few”).

    The problem is that most of these are former bus riders.

  7. gilfoil says:

    The problem is that most of these are former bus riders.

    Sounds like you’ve done your research on it.

  8. MJ says:

    Sounds like you’ve done your research on it.

    I had to do some digging, but it was there.

  9. gilfoil says:

    The article didn’t say that most riders were former bus riders, but perhaps you are right; why is that “the problem”?

  10. gilfoil says:

    But it is also hard to rationalize giving the few people who ride the train priority over the thousands of people who use other modes of travel.

    I concede the Antiplanner’s point here. If only a few people, say 30,264 passengers, daily ride the train, giving the train priority seems downright silly. But if the ridership grew to sometime sizeable – say around 30,265 – I’d say we should consider maybe timing the lights to allow the riders to reach their destination faster.

  11. metrosucks says:

    Look at the sociopathic government planners go. All they can do is scramble to find reasons to justify spending billions on the boondoggle, and then inconvenience everyone else for their favored constituents who use the choo choo.

  12. MJ says:

    The article didn’t say that most riders were former bus riders, but perhaps you are right; why is that “the problem”?

    If you read through the article, it states that just after the line’s opening, Metro Transit reported a drop in bus ridership of about 15,000 per weekday on the routes that served the area. And they were reporting fewer than 28,000 boardings per day at this time. This tells me that an upper bound for the number of new riders on the line is about 7,000. For a billion-dollar project, that’s not very impressive.

    I’d say it’s problem if they are seriously considering giving the trains signal pre-emption, which would cause absolute havoc at the intersections. Besides, if offering faster travel times for transit users in this corridor were such a priority, why didn’t they start doing so years ago? It’s not like the riders weren’t there. Any number of things (dedicated bus lanes, more limited-stop service, off-board fare collection, etc.) could have been implemented more quickly and at a fraction of the cost of this monstrosity.

    The fact that they are now considering privileging the train by making everyone else’s travel more costly just reeks of ‘CYA’ for a poorly-planned, poorly-designed, and embarrassingly slow train. Sunk costs, and all that.

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