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.
Last week, I shared three small ideas to make those investments even better. In this post, I want to look beyond 2030 towards bigger concepts that the Twin Cities could pursue that would not just tie up some loose ends, but take the METRO network to the next tier of American transit systems.
As impressive its transit plans for 2030 are, it is almost as striking how little is envisioned beyond that date. Just a single streetcar line is in serious early planning (for takes on why the Riverview project is a mess, see here and here). This decade is shaping up to be utterly transformative for the region’s transit system. The following one is shaping up to squander that momentum.
Maybe that forecast seems hasty. Maybe it seems too early to discuss what’s next. But something you quickly learn if you read any history of transit in the Twin Cities, such as Aaron Isaacs’ ‘Long Road to Light Rail,’ is that nothing happens quickly. All of the corridors that have been or targeted for light rail have been discussed for decades. The Bottineau LRT Corridor was formally identified in 2004. The Southwest LRT Corridor was formally identified in 1988. The Riverview Corridor name officially dates to 1997, the same year that the Ramsey County board decided to prioritize it (how did that go?) over the Central Corridor, which itself was targeted for heavy rail in 1972 and light rail in the late 1980’s. The Hiawatha Corridor may have been the first LRT line to open, but the Star Tribune was discussing it in 1974, thirty-years prior to the launch of revenue service. Given this history, transit lines that may open in 2035 ideally should’ve been put on a map somewhere a decade ago at the latest.
This is especially relevant, because while peer cities like Seattle, Denver and Dallas have funded long-range transit plans with ballot measures and dedicated streams of funding, the Twin Cities has funded its projects piecemeal. There may be advantages to this approach—Denver and Dallas certainly have not gotten good value for their money—but one clear disadvantage is that the process for project identification is extremely fraught. METRO projects have emerged sporadically l through the initiative of individual counties, elected officials, and only occasionally nonpartisan professional staff. While the Metropolitan Council maintains a statutorily-mandated transit “vision” for the region it is more a passive recipient of ideas rather than a progenitor of them. At no point in recent years has that agency or any other undertaken a metro-wide process to identify, prioritize, and develop future transit investments more intensive than arterial rapid bus lines.
There’s no time like the present to start. With years of experience in project development and management, better complimentary policies at all levels of government, and the moral imperative of climate change, maybe, just maybe there are reasons to hope that the next generation of transit projects may go from concept to completion more quickly than their predecessors.
So what should come next?
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Make The Most of The Existing System with a Downtown Minneapolis tunnel
The most impactful future Twin Cities transit project is one that nobody is talking about at all. But whether discussions start about building a transit tunnel through downtown Minneapolis now, or a decade from now, discussions will start.
Why is a downtown Minneapolis tunnel needed?
In one sentence: to fix reliability issues and increase capacity.
When Hennepin County and the State of Minnesota constructed the original Blue (née Hiawatha) Line in 2004, it was as much a pilot project as the foundation of a fourteen-line rapid transit network. Built using a lot of existing right-of-way and a smartly standardized kit of parts, the only real extravagances of the project design were the elevated station built at Lake Street and the tunnel underneath the airport (which the airport mostly funded). Through downtown Minneapolis, the LRT did require the partial closure of 5th Street to cars, but otherwise the line benefitted from few serious indulgences. Today, as then, it runs at-grade, sometimes waits at stoplights at either end, and has redundant stations at Nicollet and Hennepin just two blocks apart.
Accepting these issues was worthwhile in order to make the project happen, and none of them are fatal constraints. But they were compounded with the addition of the Green Line in 2014. The light rail segment in downtown Minneapolis became a trunk line and the frequency of trains was doubled. This service pattern meant more conflicts with the buses, cars, bicycles, and pedestrians, that cross the tracks at every downtown intersection. Congestion was inevitable. You do not have to ride either light rail line very frequently to end up waiting on a train that is being held just outside of downtown due to traffic on the lines ahead.
Pre-pandemic, demand for light rail trains would meet the FTA’s threshold for being “at capacity” during peak hours.
The eventual opening of the Green and Blue Line Extensions will turn this occasional inconvenience into a full-blown impediment to the functioning of the light rail system. Currently, delays almost entirely occur on trips into downtown and affect people who are near their destination. Delays are rare on trips heading out of downtown, because the trains start with proper spacing nearby at Target Field Station. But when trains are traveling through downtown in either direction, delays will be far more common. Trains in all four directions will start their journeys much further away, encountering many more opportunities to slip off schedule before entering downtown and all squeezing together through the congested trunk line. These delays will also affect people who are headed to destinations on either end of downtown. To invent a plausible scenario, you can imagine a University of Minnesota professor who lives in Kenwood commuting to class through downtown along the Green Line. If delays in downtown Minneapolis prove too common or disruptive, it’s not hard to imagine them giving up on transit and driving instead.
The only permanent solution to this congestion problem is grade separation. If light rail trains could bypass cross-streets entirely, they would travel much more quickly through the downtown. This would improve end-to-end travel time on the system by turning its slowest segment into its fastest. It would also make the system substantially less vulnerable to long delays. While a tunnel wouldn’t prevent trains from encountering delays prior to entering the downtown, it would allow lead trains to clear their blocks more quickly and reduce waiting for the next train to follow.
Grade separation could take the form of a viaduct or a tunnel. But to avoid conflict with skyways and aesthetic issues with elevated structures, plus the benefits of shelter from winter weather, I think it’s fairly obvious that a tunnel would be the preferred option.
What could a downtown Minneapolis tunnel look like?
The most important variable that influences tunnel design is cost. The salience of this is even greater right now, given that overruns on the Kenilworth Tunnel portion of the Green Line Extension are in the news. A tunnel through downtown Minneapolis would be longer (by around 1,200 feet) and more complex (because of the need to build underground stations) than the Kenilworth Tunnel. At the same time, the geology of downtown Minneapolis is far better known (the City is tunneling under it right now!) than the Kenilworth corridor was and the available width of downtown streets is wider by 45 feet than the Kenilworth construction zone. While the known technical challenges of a downtown Minneapolis tunnel are greater than the Kenilworth tunnel, the unknown technical challenges may be less.
There are two obvious ways that the cost of a downtown Minneapolis tunnel could be minimized. The first would be to keep tunnel’s length as short as possible. Starting from Target Field Station, which would remain unchanged, southeast-bound trains initially do not have full priority at 3rd and 2nd Avenues. These crossings have low traffic volumes and could be closed, reconfigured with I-394, or given full train priority. The tunnel could then start east of I-394 between 2nd and 1st Avenues, avoiding all conflicts with the highway trench.
The tunnel’s other end (assuming it would replicate the current alignment down 5th Street—it would be worth looking into 4th Street as well which would solve a lot of construction phasing issues) could be placed between Portland and Park Avenues, or perhaps even just east of Park Avenue if there is room. This would keep the US Bank Stadium Station unchanged and avoid conflicts with the parking ramp directly underneath it. However, this approach would have big implications for the intersections of 4th Street and Chicago Avenue and 5th Street and Park Avenue. Both experience moderate but not overwhelming traffic. A cleaner but more costly solution would be to tear up the parking ramp underneath the existing station, build a new transit station underneath, and have the downtown tunnel begin east of Chicago Avenue.
The second way to minimize costs would be to consolidate the three existing stations in this stretch into two. The new Government Plaza Station would be built underneath where it is today (a redesign and rebuild of People’s Plaza could happen concurrently), but the Hennepin and Nicollet Stations would be consolidated into a single station placed underneath the long block between them. This station consolidation would not just limit costs, but would have the additional benefit of speeding train travel through downtown by cutting dwell time in this stretch by a third.
What would be the benefits of a downtown Minneapolis tunnel?
The counter-intuitive thing about a downtown Minneapolis tunnel is that despite its location, it would mainly benefit users of the light rail system outside of the downtown. Future riders, whether in St. Paul or St. Louis Park, would benefit from greater reliability and less delay if the system could pass trains more smoothly through its major chokepoint. Making sure this is understood by elected leaders at the edges of the system is critical to winning support for this investment.
Why not Minneapolis? (Illustration from this great book)
A downtown Minneapolis tunnel could not just improve the quality of existing service, but actually make it possible to run even more service. With two light rail lines, each limits the potential frequency of the other because there is a constrained number of blocks in their shared downtown segment. Both lines are planned to run six trains per hour in each direction for 10 minute headways. At a single point of the trunk line, this means that a twenty-four trains cross in an hour, or one every 2.5 minutes on average.
But originally the Blue Line was expected to run eight trains an hour. If frequencies on both lines were increased to match this original expectation, that would mean that thirty-two trains would cross any given point in an hour, or one every 1.875 minutes on average. This frequency would exacerbate the problem of delays for trains as well as other modes.
A downtown Minneapolis tunnel would eliminate most or all of conflicts with crossing streets and in so doing, eliminate a major constraint on system capacity. Freed of these conflicts, the light rail system could likely achieve the 7.5 minute headways that were originally expected on both the Blue and Green Lines. This increased frequency would be enjoyed by riders on all ends of the system. This additional capacity would also be critical to winning matching federal funds from the FTA’s Core Capacity Capital Grants program without which the tunnel would not be funded
A final ancillary benefit of a downtown Minneapolis tunnel would be the opportunity to rebuild the street above it. This could be a significant carrot for the City of Minneapolis as a reward for putting up with the disruption of major construction. After decades as a low-capacity street, there would be no need to restore 5th Street to its pre-LRT condition. Instead, it could be rebuilt to prioritize pedestrians and bicyclists, or even banning cars entirely and becoming a perpendicular cousin of Nicollet Mall.
supercharge Connections With A Midtown LRT Line
People have been discussing a rail line in the Midtown Greenway trench for many years. But a lack of elite support and the demand for resources from other corridors have stalled the concept. The Midtown Corridor as currently drawn has limited geographic reach and has not attracted political support. But the core idea is sound.
Why build a rail line in the Midtown Corridor?
In one sentence: because people would ride it.
A year and a half ago, I undertook a study of arterial bus corridors in the Twin Cities. When I evaluated the ridership data, I wanted to get each corridor down to one number that show the intensity of ridership demand: the number of riders per stop per bus. One thing that this metric revealed was the incredible promise of the Lake Street corridor. It generated ridership greater than double the stretch of Hennepin Avenue currently planned for bus lanes. Its R/S/B was 45% higher than the next busiest corridor that I studied—Nicollet Avenue from downtown to 48th Street.
This might strike people as surprising. Lake Street does not go to downtown Minneapolis, the most active node of activity in the entire metro area. But it is extremely common to find major travel corridors on arterial roads that run tangential to (usually between 1-2 miles away) a city’s central business district. Classic examples include Halstead Street in Chicago, Broadway in Vancouver, and Bloor Street in Toronto. All of these corridors boast tremendous transit ridership numbers. Chicago’s Halstead Street bus is the city’s third busiest. In Vancouver, a subway is being built under Broadway to replace that city’s busiest bus route. Toronto is ahead of everyone, having constructed a subway line underneath Bloor Street nearly sixty years ago. Since then, Bloor Street spawned its own business district to compete with the city’s original center on the shore of Lake Ontario.
What’s critical to these tangential corridors is not just their own latent activity, but the connections they make. Most cities begin with radial transportation routes (for all modes) that connect outlying nodes to a single central node. But not all trips are to that central node and not all origins and destinations are along these radial routes. Circumferential lines are useful when they (1) serve a number of destinations in their own right and (2) make a ton of connections with the existing radial network. The Midtown/Lake Street corridor does both. Within three blocks of the Midtown rail trench are over 30,000 jobs and over 30,000 residences. The corridor also makes connections with major north-south arteries roughly every half mile: Hennepin, Lyndale, Nicollet, I-35W, Chicago, Bloomington/Cedar, and Hiawatha Avenues, plus the Kenilworth rail corridor. By 2030, the path of the Midtown Corridor will intersect with two light rail lines, one highway BRT line (two if I had my way), and two aBRT lines (four if I had my way) with the remaining corridors in the hopper.
These factors are what makes the B Line aBRT already planned for Lake Street the best transit project in the entire metro. But there are plenty of reasons to expect that the Midtown Corridor will soon have travel demand beyond what aBRT can serve. The corridor is still significantly underdeveloped. Midrise apartment development extending from Uptown tapers off after Pillsbury Avenue. Roughly 70% of the distance from Hennepin Avenue to Hiawatha Boulevard is filled by auto-oriented buildings or one-story commercial structures. The Minneapolis 2040 plan designated almost the entire corridor for six-story buildings at a minimum. Several major connection points, such as around the I-35W and Lake Street BRT Station and the East Lake LRT Station, are zoned for fifteen or twenty story buildings. If these nodes begin to be developed to meet this expectation, the need for higher capacity rail along the Midtown Corridor will quickly become plain.
What could a Midtown Corridor light rail line look like?
The 2012 transit feasibility study for the corridor recommended both rapid bus on Lake Street and rail in the Midtown trench. But this recommendation, while correct in the abstract, missed the mark in the particulars. Responding to trends that were regrettably pushed by the Obama-era FTA, the study chose “Modern Streetcar” as the desired rail mode. Like virtually all similar projects, this choice of mode was made for reasons that had essentially nothing to do with the purpose of transit, which is to move people around.
With years of experience, we know by now that “Modern Streetcar” is a transit dead-end; a way for political leaders to cut a ribbon on a pretty train without having to make any tradeoffs or incur significant costs. Even though it would’ve run in dedicated right-of-way, the proposed Midtown streetcar would’ve stopped far too often and used vehicles far too small for the purpose of being anything other than a city-themed amusement ride. If there’s a benefit to the lack of progress on this concept since the issue of the feasibility study, it is that the Met Council should now feel safe in totally discarding its conclusions. If the Midtown Corridor is busy enough for rail transit, it deserves rail transit done correctly, and that means meeting the minimum standard established by the rest of the region’s light rail services.
But—as I wrote a couple years ago, choosing a mode before fully understanding the corridor is the wrong order of operations. Before committing to a rail project in the Midtown Corridor, the region should first determine the extent of the transit corridor itself. By far the biggest difficulty in reviving and progressing with this project is identifying where any high capacity transit service should run.
Two options for routing Midtown transit either north or south of West Lake Station, along with possible station locations.
Here too, the 2012 transit feasibility study came up short. The study did not look far beyond the borders of the Midtown Corridor trench. It envisioned a line connecting the Green Line Extension’s West Lake Station and the Blue Line’s Lake Street Station. But travel demand does not end at these two points, and spatial constraints make both ill-suited to act as endpoints for a rail line with frequent service. On either end of the core Kenilworth-to-Hiawatha segment, there are different opportunities and challenges.
Looking westward and starting with a connection to the West Lake Station, any Midtown Corridor transit line would need to avoid duplicating Green Line LRT service. That would rule out extending this new service down much of Excelsior Boulevard. The most obvious remaining options would be to route the line to Highway 100 and then turn north or south. The northern alternative would use Route 7 to get to Highway 100, head north, and serve the booming West End area. The southern alternative would use France Avenue and Excelsior Boulevard to connect to Highway 100, head south, and serve Grandview and Southdale. Both of these options would rely on available right-of-way occupied by big roads, but would serve dense concentrations of jobs and commercial activity.
Four main options, with a fifth alternate alignment, for routing the Midtown Corridor to the east of Lake Street Station, along with hypothetical station locations.
At the east end, the options are far trickier. This is not for a lack of route options, but because there is no easy way for a Midtown transit line to connect to the Blue Line’s elevated Lake Street Station. One option would be for the line to curve north along the existing Greenway trail, then rise up over 28th Street and bend back south to either interline with the Blue Line or stop alongside on a separate, entirely new viaduct. This option would be technically and operationally complicated. An alternative option would be to send the Midtown line into a tunnel between 18th and Cedar Avenue S, run it underneath the Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery, and then create a new station underneath the existing Lake Street Station. This may be technically and operationally simpler, but would create new challenges, especially for vertical circulation at the existing station.
The clear benefit of this second option and why it ought to be preferred, however, would be that it lends itself far more easily to extension to the east. Such an alignment could then proceed in its shallow tunnel under the Target/Cub parking lot and 26th Avenue, emerging to reconnect back with the Midtown right-of-way. From there, it could serve Longfellow and Seward before crossing the river. Once across, a wide variety of options open up to serve major destinations while making use of existing right-of-way. It would be possible to serve the University of Minnesota’s primary campus, Dinkytown, and Northeast Minneapolis in one set of alignments. Another alternative could use Highway 280 or surface streets in the Raymond Avenue industrial area to head towards the state fairgrounds and the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus. A final option could continue down the Ayd Mill corridor and serve pre-war residential neighborhoods.
What would be the benefits of a Midtown Corridor rail line?
A METRO system caliber transit line in the Midtown trench would expand the transportation capacity of Minneapolis’ strongest non-interstate travel corridor, connecting dense neighborhoods and job centers. It would also expand crosstown capacity more generally and enable faster and more reliable connections between a huge number of perpendicular lines. It would take pressure off the B Line and local buses on parallel corridors like Franklin and 38th. It would also provide alternative routes for riders whose trips might otherwise travel out of their way through downtown.
A Midtown Corridor transit line would support growth in the corridor that is already coming. Development of multi-family housing is moving eastward from Uptown. Job growth may not be far behind. Already the corridor hosts a major office for Wells Fargo and the expanding Abbott Northwestern medical complex. The expansion to WeWork to Uptown several years ago was a strong signal of future prospects, even if the pandemic puts the future of some office space into question.
Such growth would not be uncommon. For all of the attention paid to the skyscrapers of downtowns, most cities are multi-polar and commonly coalesce into a network of distinct business districts, including satellite districts that closely ring the core. Metropolitan Boston is a classic example, with three primary jobs cores in downtown, Back Bay, and Cambridge that measure no more than 1.5 miles apart from each other. Minneapolis may be only slightly more spread apart, but its spatial layout would be similarly conducive towards the development of an inner employment ring built around the University and Midtown axis. A high capacity, high frequency transit line in the Midtown Corridor would do more than almost anything else to make this possible.
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Without the kind of regional master plan that has powered transit expansion (for good and ill) in other peer cities, the growth of transit in the Twin Cities is reliant on the initiative of elected leaders. This is the one thing that the two transformative projects discussed above lack. It’s the primary reason the Midtown Corridor has stalled after the initial feasibility study, and it’s the primary reason there has been no discussion of the future need for a downtown Minneapolis tunnel. The region’s elected leaders have generally supported transit, but few actually use it and few truly champion it. The best thing a reader can do to put projects such as these on the agenda is to let their elected representatives know that it is important that projects for the future get put on the map today.
To read the news about transit is to ride wave after wave of frustration and excitement. Ridership surges and falls. Projects advance or take wrong turns. Construction progresses and then stalls. Governmental support waxes and wanes. But all the same, the need to travel is fundamental to the functioning of a city, and the paths of travel are deeply embedded. The need remains and the work to meet it cannot begin early enough. With patience and persistence, there’s much more to come.
