By 2030 or somewhat soon thereafter, the Minneapolis-St. Paul METRO system will consist of two mostly-urban light rail lines with two mostly-suburban light rail extensions, four bus rapid transit lines on state or interstate highways, and eight rapid bus lines on urban arterials.
If it all goes to plan, the system will look like this:
No one will confuse this system for one of the great transit networks of the world. But it will represent a meaningful accomplishment. Of the Twin Cities’ peer regions, only Seattle is in the process of making transit investments that comparatively expansive and useful. By 2030, the Twin Cities will have laid the foundation of a true transit metropolis.
However in the process of getting to that point, there is still plenty of work to be done. Next week, I will discuss several big ticket projects that the region could develop in the 2030’s. But here, I want to discuss more modest changes to what already exists or is proposed. These are changes that would not fundamentally alter the vision shown above, but would strengthen it and lay an even stronger groundwork for the METRO system of the future.
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FIx The Red Line By Extending It To Downtown
Ever since it opened, the METRO Red Line BRT has been the red-headed stepchild of the METRO system. Compared with all of its peers, which have exceeded ridership expectations, the Red Line has been a bust. In a recent article for Racket, Henry Pan catalogued its disappointment and decline. In 2017, the Red Line had 870 weekday riders. As a result, service was cut. Unsurprisingly, by 2020 just 384 people a day were taking advantage of the diminished route. These numbers would place it outside of the fifty most popular routes in the Metro Transit system, well behind most local buses in the urban core.
The problems with the Red Line are fairly obvious. As Pan detailed, the line faces competition from other routes thanks to a turf battle with the Minnesota Valley Transit Authority. Its initial lack of success also made it an easy target for service cuts which triggered a negative feedback loop. But the biggest issue for the Red Line has always been fundamental: it simply doesn’t go where most of its potential riders want to go. The Mall of America is a strong trip generator and attractor, but it is not so strong as to anchor an entire rapid transit line without help. Moreover, there is no reason to suspect that a large number of homes, jobs, or commercial establishments will emerge along its route with time. If the Red Line is to succeed, it can only be extended to where more travel demand already exists. That means it must be extended to downtown Minneapolis.
This idea has been around for a while, but it makes more sense now than ever before. The opening of the METRO Orange Line BRT along I-35W has christened that corridor with all-day frequent service. With the construction of the I-35W/Lake Street Station to add to the I-35W/46th Street Station, there are now two inline stops for BRT on the highway trunk. An extended Red Line would also serve these two. In a mirror of the Orange Line, a further infill station might also be justified at either 66th and Cedar Avenue in Richfield, or at Portland Avenue and Route 62 on the Richfield-Minneapolis border.
Extending the Red Line to downtown Minneapolis would make it far more useful to the suburban Dakota County communities that it already serves, by cutting over 20 minutes of one-way travel time to downtown from the two-legged trip that riders currently need to make. These time savings would place a daily commute from Apple Valley to downtown within the limits of Marchetti’s constant, drawing new riders.
The extension would also make the two highway BRT stations shared with the Orange Line more useful in two ways. First, it would double the all-day frequency of service from these stations into downtown. Second it would offer new access from these stations to destinations (the Mall of America being the main one) in the outbound direction.
This extension might “take” some ridership from the Blue Line LRT and D Line aBRT. But this is a minor concern, given how few riders the Red Line currently contributes. The strength of a transit network comes from its operation as a whole, not through the competition of its various parts. Making the Red Line useful would not just benefit its own riders (which on its own is a completely worthy outcome) but would also improve the connectivity and utility of the entire network, which should in turn draw more riders overall.
An extension of the Red Line would also have one final (albeit small and not especially important) benefit: it would provide Metro Transit with the perfect excuse to claw back the primary color red, which is wasted on such a marginal route. With plenty of other colors already spoken for by now, pink is the obvious choice.
Extend the C Line By Extending It Down Bloomington or Cedar
In a lot of areas of transit operation, Metro Transit can’t fairly be compared to agencies that have been running subways since before the Second World War. Yet in terms of planning and building upgraded bus routes, it is probably the national leader. Cities as diverse as Austin, New York City, Philadelphia, and Seattle have applied local versions of the “Arterial Rapid Bus” playbook, consolidating stops, improving frequencies, rolling out new branding, and building out more legible stations. But none have combined these upgrades in so exemplary a package as in Minneapolis-St. Paul.
Given this success, it’s no surprise that Metro Transit is planning on investing heavily on more aBRT routes. However, as good as these plans are, they have some frustrating inconsistencies. The issue of through-running is a big one. In Minneapolis, the downtown area is located in a pinch point between the Mississippi River and the Bassett Creek Valley. It is not really possible to get from any given point in North/Northeast Minneapolis to another given point in South Minneapolis by any mode of transportation without going through the downtown. St. Paul has a similar layout as its twin, with a pinch point caused by the Mississippi River and the Trout Brook Valley.
Transit is most useful to a city when a transportation network has pinch points, because transit is the most space-efficient mode of travel. Provided that it is given dedicated right-of-way, transit excels in cramped urban conditions that constrain other modes (especially cars). Given the natural and human-made geography of Minneapolis and St. Paul, it makes sense as a general rule to run transit lines through the downtown areas and not to stop in them.
Through-running has big advantages for riders and operators. It makes using transit for trips that start and end on opposite parts of downtown significantly more feasible by creating one-seat rides through this pinch point. It also increases the number of potential connections with perpendicular routes on both ends of downtown.
Through-running also makes running buses more efficient, because it halves the number of buses that need to travel through the downtown corridors by eliminating redundancy in this area. Bus layover and operator facilities also do not need to be provided in one place where land is most valuable.
Unfortunately, Metro Transit’s aBRT vision has often been content to improve on the current network instead of pioneering new connections. Most planned aBRT routes simplify existing local bus routes. Few are envisioned to dramatically alter the corridors that are currently served. The lone exception is the planned G Line, which will combine the strongest parts of the #62 (Rice) and #68 (Robert) bus routes.
Both Bloomington and Cedar run through areas of South Minneapolis that are not currently planned to be in the 1/2 mile walkshed of north-south METRO system service.
Consider how the C Line terminates downtown because the #19 bus terminated downtown. The D Line through-runs downtown because the #5 bus through-runs downtown. There is no reason other than path dependency why these two routes, which are so technically similar in North Minneapolis, should be treated so differently in South Minneapolis. Like its neighbor, the C Line should be extended.
There are two natural options for an extended C Line. One option would be for it to continue on 7th and 8th Streets, merge onto the Route 55 highway, get off almost immediately at 24th Street, and proceed south to the Mall of America on Cedar Avenue. The other would be for it to follow the D Line south down Chicago, turn east at Franklin, and then turn south again on Bloomington Avenue. There, it would run until 52nd Street, then turn east to join Cedar and likewise head to the Mall.
Both of these options would provide a legible extension of the C Line and serve dense communities in South Minneapolis, including low income areas of Phillips. The areas that a C Line extension would serve are largely outside of the walkshed of existing and planned METRO services. Yet there’s no doubt that they could also support that same high quality of service. When I analyzed transit corridors in the Twin Cities several years ago, Bloomington Avenue stood out as one of the city’s most active transit corridors. While it was not possible to evaluate Cedar Avenue in the same way because the amount of existing transit on the street is so little as to not provide much data, it is close enough to Bloomington Avenue that what holds for one likely holds for the other. Whichever route the C Line were extended onto, either would provide major benefits to riders.
Re-Imagine the F Line By Sending It Down Nicollet
The same choice to not through-run downtown was in other cases, leading to similar missed opportunities. Hopefully for lines in planning it may be easier to rethink these situations before promises are locked in, money is firmly budgeted, and concrete is poured.
The F Line is the most glaring miss in the entire system. Planned to replace the #10 bus and mostly serve Northeast’s bustling Central Avenue, it would run from Northtown Transit Center to downtown Minneapolis. But for a 5.1 mile-long segment at the northern end where the route travels on University Ave NE, there is almost no ridership demand. Beyond I-694, land use patterns are significantly less urban and conducive to transit service and the character of the road is essentially a highway.
Ridership, (represented by the red circles) falls off north of 53rd Street.
It might make sense to put aBRT down this corridor if it were primed for massive development or if the Northtown Mall were an exceptionally strong anchor. But neither of these things are true. Or, it might not be a big deal to put aBRT down this corridor if there were no better places to put it. But this is also not true. In fact, the currently-envisioned route of the F Line comes with a massive opportunity cost. Whatever advantages are realized by serving the University Avenue NE segment, they are dwarfed by the benefits of running the bus through downtown Minneapolis and down Nicollet Avenue instead.
As a part of the same analysis of transit corridors in the Twin Cities referenced in the previous section, I identified the stretch of Nicollet Avenue from Franklin to 48th Street as having the second densest concentration of riders of all of the corridors studied. Studied all the way down to I-494, the Nicollet corridor would rank 7th. Even if the analysis is extended all the way down to 98th Street, where the density of development falls off considerably, it would drop in ranking only to 11th.
Metro Transit’s internal assessment backs up my own. When comparing the corridors targeted for the next wave of aBRT investments, the agency’s planners found that Nicollet ranked well ahead of the pack in its candidate score, and fourth in its technical score. For nearly its entire length, Nicollet is a dense and commercially-active corridor that passes through a series of diverse urban neighborhoods. Everyone who has studied it has come to the same conclusion: Nicollet is a perfect route for aBRT service.
Except—at the same time that Metro Transit was in the process of identifying the next aBRT routes, there were two big barriers to running a line down Nicollet. One of them was the existence of the infamous Kmart store that blocks the street between 29th Street and Lake Street. The other was the existence of a streetcar plan from almost a decade earlier, which had been moribund for years yet was still officially on the books. But just after Metro Transit released its picks for the F, G, and H Lines, both of these obstacles were removed. As a result, Nicollet didn’t just become available for aBRT consideration, it became more ready for aBRT than any other route being considered.
That’s because by finalizing a plan and timeline to remove the Kmart, the Minneapolis City Council created a unique opportunity to build transit connections directly into the fabric of a subsequent master-planned development on the site. Meanwhile, by changing the law to allow funds originally collected for the streetcar project to be used for aBRT instead, the state legislature gave the Nicollet corridor a funding head-start enjoyed by no other project.
Metro Transit’s planning should change in response to these changed circumstances. Instead of running to the Northtown Transit Center, the F Line should instead begin at 53rd and Central (or possibly just across the highway where Medtronic has a large office). It should then run through downtown Minneapolis onto Nicollet Avenue, proceed south to Richfield, and finally terminate at the I-35W and 66th Street Station of the Orange Line BRT. This revised Central-Nicollet route would trade a weak 5.1 mile section for an extremely strong 6.8 mile section. That would keep the total route length to under 15 miles, well within the range of aBRT routes, and provide far greater bang for Metro Transit’s buck than what is currently proposed.
Meanwhile, the northern segment on University Avenue NE could still be served instead by a rump #10 bus. That bus route would instead take a U route along its two current branches, funneling riders to the revised F Line at 53rd Street. Potentially further in the future the entire University NE corridor could get the aBRT treatment after all, with a route that would pair it with Cleveland Avenue in St. Paul.
One of the great benefits of Metro Transit’s aBRT program is that it is more quickly planned, engineered, and built than BRT and LRT lines. That speed and flexibility should allow it to adapt and take advantage when new opportunities emerge. With official work soon to begin on the F Line, the agency can’t miss the opportunity to pivot and turn a good project into a great one.
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These three ideas do not represent the totality of ideas that have been put forward to adapt the current map. But I believe they would represent the three most impactful changes that are also entirely in keeping with the planning work that has already occurred. Each idea would fill in a gap in the current 2030 vision and require little rethinking, restudying, or rebuilding. These are not paradigm shifts, just meaningful tweaks. The Twin Cities METRO system is already on an impressive path. With these changes, it could be even better.