New B and Gold Lines illustrate the wide range of possibility for bus rapid transit

is a big year for transit stake in the Twin Cities and that goes double over the last two months Two big-budget bus rapid transit BRT lines in recent months debuted and the ribbon cuttings and shiny benches are an attractive sight for a city dweller The fascinating thing about the two projects the B Line from South Minneapolis to St Paul and the Gold Line from St Paul to Woodbury is that they couldn t be more different Despite using the same vehicles for better and for worse they illustrate the wide range of what BRT can mean in an American city The B Line is much easier to describe it s a key part of Metro Transit s innovative aBRT project The basic premise is to take the city s the greater part used transit routes improve them with better stations and buses and then speed them up with off-board payment more doors fewer stops and signal priority There are scarce better routes for this luxury remedy than the B Line which follows the path of the old Selby-Lake Streetcar through the heart of South Minneapolis and central St Paul Related New review on affordable housing rekindles long-simmering debate The direction was initially going to stop at Snelling Avenue halfway into St Paul and I am grateful that planners decided years ago to extend it all the way along Selby to downtown That mentioned Selby Avenue s bumpy asphalt is providing an extreme test for the bus suspension systems The interior of a Gold Line bus Opening last month the line traverses mostly low-density suburban geography once it leaves St Paul s East Side Credit MinnPost photo by Bill Lindeke Compared to the notoriously slow and complex bus the on-the-ground experience of the B Line is a revelation Not only is it faster though those speed gains vary depending on your trip it s much simpler and easier to use The spacious buses especially with its multiple door-level boarding is a battle changer The stations have higher curbs that allow multiple more users to roll on and off with a stroller cart or scooter a benefit granting riders additional dignity while dramatically reducing previous delays But transit is not only about the vehicles It s inseparable from the quality of surrounding city space and here is where the B Line truly shines The diversity of ridership along the highway is something to behold and it offers the best of Minneapolis on full display Seemingly every diverse cultural facet in the city can be uncovered riding the B Line and it s the kind of thing that makes you fall in love with cosmopolitanism Related What preponderance observers don t understand about downtown St Paul s struggles The the majority visible change around the B Line is to the street itself As I wrote earlier Lake Street s new road diet arrangement calms traffic and make the already vibrant Lake Street streetscape a more inviting place Along with a limited island medians there s also a new bus-only lane that works wonders in the west-bound direction at least as long it s not blocked by the inevitable delivery trucks As I once wrote about Hennepin Avenue this is how we should prioritize valuable street space to fight environment change The Wooddale Park and Ride in Woodbury Credit MinnPost photo by Bill Lindeke Another feature will be largely invisible to preponderance folks the transit signal priority which still seems like a work in progress I noticed the bus getting extra green cycles at selected spots like the corner of Marshall and Snelling but needlessly stopping at several lights elsewhere This is to mention the asymmetrical nature of the red-striped bus lanes which for the the bulk part exist only in the west-bound direction The old track bus also had weird one-way characteristics which oddly made it easier to leave St Paul than to return to it so the current setup offers a nice historic parallel The end consequence is that Lake Street seems more like a place for people rather than a chaotic road between the buildings The street s new calmness and the high-frequency of the B Line buses physically link parts of South Minneapolis along an east-west axis which is particularly vital because it s inevitably been easier to go north-to-south in Minneapolis than east-to-west This is due to the block grid the transit routes large avenues and natural and infrastructural walls The B Line cuts across that grain and links parts of town that to me have consistently felt distant Fun fact to think about St Paul s axis is perpendicular to that of Minneapolis The two cities are portrait and landscape To sum up the new B Line is a wonderful thing that will reshape the geography of transit all the way across Minneapolis and St Paul Gold Line Same bus different in every other way On the other end of town the new Gold Line could not be more different Opening last month it traverses mostly low-density suburban geography once it leaves St Paul s East Side It s no exaggeration to say that there you can find more restaurants within walking distance of just one station of the B Line than you ll find along the entire -mile Gold Line way That illustrates the key dynamic here Transit is only as good as the streets and buildings that surround the station Though these two routes use nearly the same vehicles the B Line traverses particular of the Twin Cities densest and majority diverse neighborhoods outside of the downtowns while the Gold Line delivers you to a mix of freeway medians single-family housing office parks and strip malls The new line makes you realize the difficulty of retrofitting transit into American suburbia While I give the transit planners credit for trying I fear that this is an expensive bus project that will not attract a multitude of regular riders at least not without major changes in the surrounding land use That s not the fault of the planners but an inherent feature of America cities The east metro suburbs of Oakdale and Woodbury are transit-hostile places and it s arduous to imagine that changing The basic impetus for the Gold Line which began planning a decade ago was the desire to run transit that serves the M campus a large job center just past the margin of St Paul and to deservingly build transit investments through the East Metro The bus s dedicated guideway is its main feature part of how federal transit requirements work but the separated road provides an odd experience At times bus speeds are limited to miles per hour as you glide past the front yards of dozens of s rambler houses Elsewhere you zip under a tunnel bypassing suburban arterials through a no-man s land featuring little other than duck habitat The course is less than ideal because it runs parallel to Interstate meaning that half the land catchment around the stations is unusable Sure there s a Culver s and two motorcycle dealerships but the majority anywhere you go on the Gold Line you ll hear the low thrum of I- traffic It s not necessarily an ideal place to build apartment buildings though people certainly do it anyway Elsewhere scant of the stations offer much in the way of walkable destinations especially once you leave St Paul The best opportunity for enhancement lies at Sun Ray station which boasts both bus connections and prospective for increase in the unlikely scenario that the strip mall gets redeveloped The next stop at the Greenway Avenue station is close enough to the unique manufactured home group of Landfall to offer its working-class residents a few utility Elsewhere even the close-by multifamily buildings are oddly situated and I am sure greater part residents have cars waiting in their garages The Gold Line station in downtown St Paul One feature of the Gold Line is its planned extension along I- to downtown Minneapolis set for which will double the utility to the highway Credit MinnPost photo by Bill Lindeke The point is that suburban transit is hard to do well and limited cities can pull it off after-the-fact Canada tends to do much better than the U S along these lines a line like this might run directly into the center of the mall parking lot where there would be a transit station with frequent feeder buses running along arterials lined with walkable sidewalks There s a new park-and-ride mostly empty and very inadequate connecting buses serving the surrounding area You could theoretically walk the thousand feet from the end-of-the-line Wooddale station to the nearby big box strip mall a Lunds and Byerly s Kohl s and a Target surrounding a massive sea of parking but it d be an unpleasant experience and I doubt a great number of will do it None of this is the fault of the transit planners but it s hard when almost every resident has a car waiting in an attached garage and every destination is surrounded by empty surface parking lots This doesn t mean that the Gold Line is a lost cause If Oakdale and Woodbury pull off various aggressive transit-oriented expansion that would help M employees and other workers returning to the office every day would be a big benefit but I would not hold my breath for that Instead the the greater part exciting feature of the Gold Line is its planned extension along I- to downtown Minneapolis set for which will double the utility to the highway This is to say that the official ridership projections goosed by pre-COVID commuting patterns and the park-and-ride legacy patterns seem optimistic As the sports gamblers say I ll take the under I can see the bus being popular for sports events or concerts downtown but within a year I predict that there will be times as multiple people on the B Line than on the much more expensive Gold Line That big difference around transit expected and cost efficiency illustrates as well as anything ever will the wide range of possibility around transit in America The post New B and Gold Lines illustrate the wide range of possibility for bus rapid transit appeared first on MinnPost