Location, location, location

I'll start this off by mentioning that Metro Transit is accepting comments on their Central Corridor Transit Service Study until this Monday, July 9th. When I attended a meeting last week, many concerns circled around the reduction of route 94 bus service. I've slowly been convinced that this is a reasonable idea, since the projected travel times for the Green Line make it only 9–12 minutes slower than the direct 94D for downtown-to-downtown trips, a difference that shrinks rapidly when compared to the 94B which circles around the state capitol.

Whatever comments you may have, they're due in by 5 PM on Monday. Metro Transit expects to modify their existing plans before they get implemented in 2014 with the start of light-rail service.

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A view of Target Field station
(Flickr/chief_huddleston)

A groundbreaking for the Interchange, the expansion of Target Field station in Minneapolis's North Loop, is also scheduled for Monday. Plans by Hennepin County to first add new light-rail platforms and then expand the heavy-rail platforms below (in hopes of one day hosting intercity trains to Chicago, Duluth, and elsewhere) have come under many of the typical criticisms for rail projects these days. There are always questions about cost and whether such a project is needed or not, but the Interchange project—often known as "MTI" for "Minneapolis Transportation Interchange"—also gets barbs thrown at it for having a less-than-optimal location for people trying to get into downtown Minneapolis. I thought it would be a good idea to put this into a bit of a historical context.

The Interchange site is not all that from the downtown core—only half a mile or so, depending on where you're measuring from. But half a mile easily becomes 10 minutes on foot, probably farther than many people—especially commuters—would like to hoof it once they've arrived in town.

Transit planners know this, of course. That's partly why the station is where it is. When the Hiawatha Line opened in 2004, the northernmost station was at 5th Street between Hennepin Avenue and 1st Avenue. By simply extending the light-rail line a few blocks further, it intersected the only remaining heavy-rail line through the city center. Putting the station anywhere else probably would have required tearing down buildings, digging trenches or tunnels. Thinking through those ideas is a good mental exercise, to be sure, but extending LRT tracks to Target Field already inflated the costs of the Northstar commuter rail project by a big margin, and attempting anything more complicated than that would have made it vastly more expensive.

Timed right, a light-rail ride can shave several minutes off the last leg of travel to work, even if a rider is only going 2 or 3 stops into downtown. There are also numerous bus routes originating in the "B" ramp a block away, including route 20, specifically created for Northstar commuters headed toward the southern end of downtown and timed to meet each train. Oh, and of course, the "B" ramp gives fairly easy access to the city's skyway network, so you can get across town in climate-controlled comfort without having to worry if those "Don't Walk" signs are going to slow you down.

Okay, but Minneapolis is an old railroad town. Surely some of the city's old train stations did a better job of connecting riders to the city center, right?


View Minneapolis railroad stations in a larger map

Well, maybe. There were basically four significant rail stations serving the city center back in the heyday of rail transportation. Residents of and visitors to Minneapolis should be familiar with the old Milwaukee Road Depot at Washington Avenue and 3rd Avenue, now converted to a hotel. The big station in town was the Great Northern Depot, located along the riverfront at Hennepin Avenue, using land now occupied by the Minneapolis Federal Reserve and the central post office. The remaining two were smaller, respectively operated by the Luce Line (also serving two other regional railroads) and the Minneapolis and St. Louis Railway.

Back when the city's commercial center was up near the river, the Great Northern and Milwaukee Road depots likely would have been the closest to the action. However, the central business district drifted southward along Nicollet Avenue over time, and nearly all of the Gateway District near the river was obliterated as the city took a heavy-handed approach to urban renewal. Today, the sites of the former rail stations and the Interchange's site are pretty much equidistant to the core of downtown. Certainly a traveler arriving at Target Field would now face a slightly shorter walk to the IDS Center than if they'd arrived at at the old Great Northern Depot, but only slightly.

Rail stations are often touted over airports because they allow people to arrive in the center of town. Perhaps that refrain has gotten a bit overplayed—certainly there are examples across the country and around the world where rail stations don't quite land you in the middle of the action, even if they get you pretty close. Still, I'll pretty happily take the 3,000-foot hike in downtown Minneapolis if the need arises: Even MSP airport's heavily-used Hiawatha Line station is a good 1,600 feet away from the baggage claim and ticketing areas, let alone the actual concourses.

The Interchange might not be in the best location ever devised, but it was among the best of a limited number of options. It will feel more connected once the Central Corridor is up and running, doubling frequency on the light-rail tracks through downtown. Now we should work to ensure that it becomes a great facility.

I hate it when this happens

I hate it when this happens.

The annual Hmong soccer tournament and festival is going on at Como Park (well, McMurray Field) this weekend (the "Hmong Freedom Celebration and Sports Festival"). 30,000 people are expected at the park today. Metro Transit's response? Oh, we give up.

Admittedly, the bus is still running, and not too far away for people who want to come to the festival and get dropped off near the eastern edge, but I'm stuck in the middle and have to add half a mile to my journey.

Como Park has been operating their own free shuttle service for the past 2 or 3 years, and it seems to have helped with congestion on the immediately-adjacent neighborhood streets (where stricter parking restrictions have been added on weekends).  But, in my view, there's a lack of integration between the Como Park shuttle and the Metro Transit network.

Como Park visitors are now directed to park in a lot at the southern edge of the Minnesota State Fairgrounds—an area that is otherwise rarely used.  The only immediately-adjacent bus service is provided by route 3—specifically, route 3A and 3B.  That combination runs at half-hourly service on weekends.  This is a park-and-ride solution, requiring people to get to a fairly auto-dependent area in order to take a bus somewhere else.

Only the 3A bus runs through the park, so if you're on Como Horton Avenue within the park itself, you can only expect hourly service on Saturdays and Sundays.

Of course, the entire Metro Transit network shrinks drastically and runs at lower frequency on Saturday and (particularly) Sunday, so it would be tough to get transit integration working really well for the area.  Personally, I think it would be nice if the Como Park shuttle could stop at the intersection of Como and Snelling Avenues, where route 84 maintains 15-minute service on Saturdays and 30-minute service on Sundays (and it's the point closest to the park where the 3 is still half-hourly).  It would also be nice if a shuttle could run down to University Avenue either via Snelling Avenue or Lexington Parkway and pick up traffic from today's route 16 and the Green Line starting in 2014.

But, this could all be for naught if the random stuff people carry with them to the park gets in the way anyway.  There are strollers galore, toys, random folding chairs and other furniture, plus many people bring all sorts of food to the picnic tables and grills in the park.  There are some things for which public transit is impractical, and park activities push that envelope.

I haven't had to use the Como Park shuttle since I live right by the place.  It seems to have pretty good service frequency—the travel distance is only about 1.5 miles, so just a few buses can go back and forth rapidly.  I've never gotten a good look at what type of buses they use, since they're always in motion when I'm waiting at my bus stop, but one drawback is that they only have a single door at the front.  I'm sure that loading and unloading becomes slow and stressful at times.

As for rerouting the 3A when the park gets busy,  I guess I just don't think the traffic usually gets bad enough to justify that.  But I'm not the one trying to ply my way through it a dozen or so times during the day.  I can just walk around my neighborhood if I want to.

Notes from the June 2012 Passenger Rail Forum

Target Field station will soon morph into "The Interchange".

I attended the June 2012 meeting of the Mn/DOT-facilitated Intercity Passenger Rail Transportation Forum this past Monday and took some notes.  The last meeting was in April.

Space conflicts resolved for The Interchange (Target Field station)

The lead informational presentation was all about the planned Interchange station at Target Field, an upgrade to the existing Northstar commuter rail and Hiawatha LRT platforms.  Over the past year, Hines has been working on their Dock Street Apartments project, which would fill in a parking lot just south of the Northstar train tracks.

Even though the Target Field station area has been planned as an intermodal transit hub for some time, the apartment project didn't fully come onto the radar of transportation planners until the Minneapolis City Council approved conditional use permits for the site. Complicating matters, new and expanded heavy-rail boarding platforms hadn't even been designed yet, since that's part of "Phase 2" of the transit hub plans.  (The website for the Interchange currently only shows designs for Phase 1, which is more focused on expanding the light-rail platforms to handle the increased game-day loads once the Central Corridor/Green Line is up and running.)

Fortunately, an appeal was made following the CUP approval. After looking over plans, it turned out that the building took away about 4½ feet of space that would be needed for future use, particularly if the Cedar Lake Trail is to stay in the rail trench.  After several weeks of negotiations, Hines has basically decided to slightly rotate their building as compared to the original plans, which frees up the necessary space.

The Cedar Lake Trail will need to be partly relocated, and Hennepin County is planning to spend about $1.7 million to get a 25-year easement for the trail.  Hines also owns the other parking lots in the trench closer to Target Field, and plans to develop those with taller buildings at some point in the future.  Riders on the Cedar Lake Trail may find themselves inside riding through a colonnade/arcade area as pilings are sunk into the ground on the outside edge of the trail.

Needless to say, this was a near-disaster for transportation planning in the Twin Cities, which seems to have worked out for the best. Hennepin County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin has been calling this "the Kmart moment of this generation", in reference to the store that was plopped down in the middle of Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis back in the 1970s. There was acknowledgment by meeting facilitator Dan Krom of Mn/DOT that this harried 10 weeks of back-and-forth between planners and developers could have been avoided if the right lines of communication had been opened earlier.

The Interchange is only planned to have two 900-foot platforms and four tracks (aside from the already-present freight line), though Mn/DOT believes this should be able to handle more than 60 trains per day.  The existing Northstar platform is 40 feet wide, but is planned to be narrowed to 26 feet, and then a second platform will be added just to the south of the current one.  Finding suitable alignments for platforms is difficult in the trench because of bridge supports that get in the way. Some early design attempts ran into problems because the pylons for the 3rd and 4th Street ramps to/from Interstate 94 would end up being right where train doors were supposed to open, but those issues have apparently been resolved.

Construction should begin soon on Phase 1 of the Interchange. The project had received bids from contractors earlier this year, but they came in over budget. Contractors were then requested to submit "best and final offers", which are due June 11th. A recommendation for a contractor is expected on June 19th, and final approval is expected on June 26th. It sounded like construction could begin as soon as July.

2013 legislative agenda

There was some discussion of priorities for next year's session of the state legislature. There has been less funding distributed to rail projects than expected over the last two years—notably, funding for engineering work on the Southwest LRT extension of the Green Line to Eden Prairie wasn't included in this year's bonding bill, and the bonding money provided to the Interchange was less than hoped for.

I didn't follow the discussion in great detail, largely because we're still several months out from the start of the next session. However, there was some mention of a bill brought up in this past session which would have clarified and expanded the power of the Transportation Commissioner to enter into agreements with freight railroads and Amtrak (probably HF2272). The bill only got a hearing this year and didn't move forward. Something similar to that may pop up again next year.

Northern Lights Express (to Duluth)

The Northern Lights Express project continues to move forward. LIDAR mapping of the route was completed in April, in order to get detailed measurements of the existing conditions. As mentioned in my previous meeting report, there's a "Hinckley loop" study underway to figure out whether the line should have a bypass added to directly serve the casino on the eastern edge of the city.

Zip Rail (to Rochester)

There are two threads of activity happening in the Rochester area. There has been talk for several years of building a freight rail bypass around the city. The topic was especially hot back when the Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern Railroad was planning to expand into the Powder River Basin area of Wyoming to access the coal reserves there. That expansion hasn't happened, however, and the expected flood of rail traffic hasn't happened. A new rail capacity study is going to look at whether the bypass or any other upgrades will be needed along the route.

Plans for passenger rail to the city are still in early gestational stages, but a statement of work has been put together for alternatives analysis and a Tier 1 EIS.  This means we should have an actual route to plan around within the next couple of years (there isn't any direct rail connection between the Twin Cities and Rochester, so something new will have to be built).

Saint Paul Union Depot

The updated status for the Union Depot  was short and sweet: "On time, on budget, scheduled to open in December", according to Ramsey County's Jim McDonough.  No word on whether Amtrak will be able to start operating there right away, however.

Enhanced rail service to Chicago

There are two rail projects in the planning stages between the Twin Cities and Chicago: A second daily roundtrip between the two areas operating at conventional speeds, and plans for multiple daily roundtrips operating at higher speeds (up to 110 mph).

The second daily train has some support from the state of Wisconsin and has the cooperation of WisDOT.  Amtrak began a 9-month study for the service on May 15th, so it should wrap up around February 2013.  Four route and terminus options are being contemplated in Minnesota:

• Terminating at Saint Paul Union Depot.
• Stopping at SPUD and terminating at the Interchange in Minneapolis.
• Stopping at SPUD and the Interchange and terminating at St. Cloud.
• Stopping at SPUD and the Fridley Northstar station and terminating at St. Cloud.

Amtrak has already conducted an inspection of the route, but will need to spend some time determining infrastructure capacity and equipment availability.  The train would likely operate with a schedule roughly the inverse of what the Empire Builder does today: It may leave Chicago in the morning and start its return run in the afternoon/evening.

Amtrak plans to spend three or four months on the study before first submitting a draft to the host railroads. They'll get a chance to comment on it, and then it will get sent to the state DOTs.

Unlike the Empire Builder, this is expected to start as a state-supported "corridor" train.  In order to get the best possible operating ratio, some stations may get added or skipped.

As for enhanced-speed, multiple-trains-per-day service, Minnesota is moving ahead with a Tier 1 EIS for what will be needed on our side of the Mississippi River, but WisDOT is not actively participating. A new website for the EIS phase is expected to appear soon, to go aside the current page which had been used up through the alternatives analysis stage of planning.

Minnescraper returns (sort of)

Minnescraper, the main forum for news and gossip about local urban design and transportation topics, has returned from the dead, at least for a little while.  Something has gone wrong with the database, possibly due to disk space issues.  One of the moderators went in and deleted some old messages, which apparently cleared up enough space for it to start working again, though the always-hot thread about the Vikings Stadium is still broken (not that I mind at this point... I'd rather not talk about it).

The primary site administrator has a life these days and hasn't had a chance to look into the problem in depth.

The Motor Line and its fireless soda locomotives

A Baldwin "soda motor" for the Minneapolis, Lyndale, and Minnetonka Railway.

One strange technology that gets mentioned in passing in histories of the Twin Cities streetcar network is the "soda motor".  When I first read about it, I was sure it must have just been a play on words: soda must have come from the tail end of Minnesota, right?  Further reading explained that no, it really refers to sodium hydroxide, commonly known as caustic soda or lye—not something I'd want to spend any time close to if I could avoid it.  But it really did get used here, even if the 'Sota / soda similarity seems a bit punny.

The Minneapolis, Lyndale, and Minnetonka Railway was built in part to capitalize on tourist traffic heading from Minneapolis to Lake Calhoun, Lake Harriet, and eventually Lake Minnetonka.  Their line ran from downtown Minneapolis along Marquette and Nicollet Avenues to 31st Street South, where it turned west until reaching Lake Calhoun.  From there, it used a largely private right-of-way to run to Lake Harriet and eventually out to Excelsior on Lake Minnetonka.

The railroad started out in 1879 with one conventional steam locomotive and two "steam motors" which were small locomotives wrapped in streetcar-style shells—reportedly to help prevent horses from being frightened as trains ran along city streets (the city had ordinances against running conventional locomotives on streets as well).

Because of the steam motors, the ML&M was nicknamed the "Motor Line".  They were able to sustain operation for a while, but unfortunately the company had been the fourth and last railroad to reach Lake Minnetonka and were never very financially stable.  There was also an ever-increasing push to get steam-powered vehicles off the streets of Minneapolis, whether they looked like streetcars or not.

In December 1885, the Motor Line began experimenting with electrification using a system from Charles Van Depoele, but electrified traction had not yet matured enough by that time.  The electric motors in the initial vehicles vibrated badly and there were other mechanical problems showing that electrification wasn't quite ready for prime time.

In 1886, the railroad began running soda motors manufactured by Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia, reportedly the first (and possibly the only) such engines to be built in the United States, it seems that others may have been imported previously for use along elevated rail lines in New York City.  European railroads had been experimenting with them for some time, and it seemed they might have been a way to deal with tunnels without filling those limited air spaces with noxious exhaust. Articles on the experiments of a Mr. Honigmann near Berlin, Germany were described in the British journal Engineering and in Scientific American in 1885.

An article on Honigmann's locomotives from the British journal "Engineering".

The idea of a soda motor conjures up childhood memories of baking-soda volcanoes: Mix baking soda with vinegar, gases get produced, and in seconds the mixture bubbles up and overflows its container.  However, while these locomotives mixed soda and a liquid (water), they didn't use gas directly generated by chemical reactions, but rather operated by capturing the heat that was generated.

Caustic soda is exothermic when it comes in contact with water.  Given a large enough quantity, this soda and water solution can generate enough heat to boil water and produce steam.  Instead of having a firebox filled with coal or another fuel to heat up a boiler, soda locomotives had boilers jacketed with a container filled with sodium hydroxide (or other salts in some cases).  The heated soda caused steam to be generated in the boiler, the steam was fed through pistons to provide propulsion, and then the condensing steam was fed through the soda to cause more heat to be produced.

This normally operated in a closed loop, so no steam was escaping the engine during operation (a side-effect being that the engines were practically silent).  Only when boiler temperature reached high enough levels where the soda solution itself began to boil would steam be let off.  However, operating a soda locomotive was a race against time:  Eventually, the sodium hydroxide would become saturated and wouldn't generate enough heat to produce more steam.  Nonetheless, these locomotives were able to operate for hours at a time before being brought back to home base to be recharged.

At the end of operation, a stationary boiler (likely installed at the railroad's roundhouse, the site of today's Nicollet Garage) would be hooked up to the engine and feed superheated steam through the soda solution, boiling off the water, leaving more or less solid sodium hydroxide, and allowing the process to start all over again.

Clearly this wasn't the most efficient process.  According to the 1885 reports on Honigmann's locomotives, the soda motors only produced about 60% as much steam per unit of coal as traditional locomotives did, though the stationary boilers could be run on cheaper, lower-quality coal than their mobile counterparts and (at least theoretically) didn't require as many employees to run.

Still, the prospect of an exploding soda motor spewing (literally) tons of boiling-hot caustic material around a neighborhood means that it was probably good that the technology never really caught on.  Minneapolis passed an ordinance in 1887 which banned the soda motors.  Van Depoele had apparently continued work on making electric traction more reliable on the line, but unfortunately the company had gone bankrupt.  It quickly came under the control of Thomas Lowry's Minneapolis Street Railway, and within a few years the entire streetcar network in the Twin Cities was electrified.

Washout near Le Sueur, Minnesota

The Trains magazine News Wire reports that there's been a washout of Union Pacific tracks near Le Sueur, Minnesota. The segment of track is part of the Mankato Subdivision. Apparently about half a mile of track will have to be repaired. Traffic is being rerouted along the ex-Rock Island "Spine Line" farther east.

Sprawl and the Big Crunch

Another column for streets.mn.

30-minute travel shed for bus and rail routes to downtown Minneapolis

Almost all of us are guilty of living sprawling lifestyles, either now or in the past. Sprawl is a huge urban planning problem, but it's a difficult one to handle simply because it's so prevalent. There's little will to change when everyone shares part of the blame, but we must find ways to do so in order to help deal with the challenge of climate change and changes in the cost and availability of energy sources.

Finding ways to deal with urban/suburban sprawl isn't helped by the fact that it's difficult to define in the first place. Sure, city dwellers deride the suburbs for their common cul-de-sacs and curvilinear streets, but even the scale of our central cities is pretty vast—Minneapolis itself stretches 11 miles north to south, a distance which would take 3 to 4 hours to traverse on foot. Saint Paul is almost as wide east to west. By bicycle or public transportation, that would typically take an hour to 90 minutes, about three times the average one-way travel time for a car commuter in our area.

I'm sure it happens all the time: A car commuter grows weary of his or her commute, but is confronted with a stark reality when they look up the bus journey on metrotransit.org or a mapping site—The trip will take 3 to 4 times as long as it would by car, if it can be done at all. The reaction is often to blame the bus or the train. Clearly something is wrong with the system!

Well, sort of. It's true that public transportation can and should be sped up and expanded, but there are some inherent limits to the technology. A bus or train running at the same top speed as a car will never be able to reach the same end-to-end speed because of the number of stops made in between. The only ways to get public transportation to be competitive for end-to-end travel time is to increase the top speed, leapfrog over potential intermediate stops, and/or make extensive use of exclusive transitways to bypass congestion. Each of these has trade-offs, such as increasing expense, reducing potential ridership, and sometimes taking property through eminent domain.

Sprawl is the real reason why it's often impractical to switch a car trip to a train, bus, or bike ride. Most of us make daily demands of our transportation networks that are illogical (and sometimes those demands are made by others upon us). If the car never came along, our cities would be much more compact. People would most likely still travel about the same amount of time each day to work, learn, or shop, but transportation through slower methods would have limited outward growth and encouraged building up rather than out.

Travelers to cities outside the U.S. often remark about how fast and efficient transit networks are in other countries, but in reality, they're often not any faster than what we have here. In reality, they're simply seeing the effects of a more compact geography, amplified by the fact that tourist attractions are also centrally-located a lot of the time. There isn't just a greater population density, there's also a greater density of places where people want to go.

1914 map of the Twin City Rapid Transit streetcar system.

The same used to be the case here during much of the streetcar era. While the Twin City Rapid Transit system famously extended from Lake Minnetonka in the west to Stillwater in the east, the core of the system barely extended past the borders of Minneapolis and Saint Paul themselves. In an accident of history, the borders of he core cities roughly correspond with 30-minute travel times to the respective downtowns.

Now, the car is never going to go away, and many people will fight long and hard to keep their hands on the steering wheel. However, I'm convinced that they're at or near a peak in this country and will become much less popular in future decades. Fuel prices will rise and the everlasting push for safer and more efficient cars will keep making the vehicles themselves more expensive. Along with direct costs are moral and ethical issues—externalities ranging from direct and indirect pollution from CO₂ and other pollutants, altered landscapes in places like the Alberta tar sands, and violence and economic impacts on people elsewhere in the world. Changing over to renewable energy sources will help, but it's unlikely to cover our current needs.

Moving away from car-based transportation requires us to shift our population around and change where we place businesses, schools, and other amenities. In the Twin Cities, these shifts almost certainly have to be toward the core of our region, because Minneapolis and Saint Paul themselves are much more walkable, bikeable, and transitable than anywhere else, and that's where the existing and future investments are most sustainable.

30-minute bus travel shed for a job site in Eden Praire's Golden Triangle.

Some suburbs will certainly see improved transit mobility in the future, but job and population centers are so dispersed that a transit system that attempted to serve all of them would probably collapse under its own weight. Some communities are going to have to get by with minimal transit access and instead build more exclusively around the idea of getting around on foot and by bike. Pick a spot and turn it into a real town center.

We're going to go through a Big Crunch as car ownership rates decline and more people seek out transit-rich environments that have jobs and the amenities of daily life in close proximity. The population won't tolerate trip times tripling or quadrupling in length, so communities out on the edge must plan to become denser and more connected, or they'll be left behind as populations move elsewhere.