The State Fair's missing sidewalks

For Streets.mn's "Our Fair State" series during the Minnesota State Fair, I don't really have a good story to tell about an out-state event. I do, however, live less than a mile from the State Fairgrounds and wanted to share a little of what this heavily pedestrian-oriented event is like to be around the other 353 days of the year.


View Missing Minnesota State Fair sidewalks in a larger map

One of the most surprising things, considering how the fair itself is known for its huge crowds of people doing that seemingly unnatural thing of walking, is that the fairgrounds is missing some sizable chunks of sidewalks around its periphery. Some roads, such as Randall Avenue and Commonwealth Avenue which are on the University of Minnesota Side, aren't major through streets, so may not need sidewalks, but the busy Como Avenue and even busier Snelling Avenue really should see some improvements made.

The missing sidewalk on the north side of Como Avenue between Liggett Street and the University of Minnesota Transitway is mostly just an annoyance since there is still a grassy area to walk on. The lack of a sidewalk on the Snelling Avenue side of the fairgrounds north of Dan Patch Avenue/Midway Parkway is far more dangerous—Snelling Avenue through there is signed at 40 miles per hour, and a lot of traffic goes much faster than that.

Up there, the fence surrounding the fairgrounds directly abuts the roadway near Arlington Avenue, meaning that anyone who attempts to walk along the west side of the road will find themselves walking right in a stream of high-speed traffic. Sadly, there's no real reason to have the fence jut out at that point, other than perhaps to protect a natural gas line. There is enough empty space for a sidewalk along the entire stretch, though retaining the trees and lamp posts may be a challenge. Perhaps an alternative such as hanging plants would be a good alternative to trees in some spots.

When a sidewalk finally does get added on the west side of Snelling, there will still be a problem that Snelling Avenue itself is a busy roadway and hard to cross. But it's possible to take advantage of the fact that northbound traffic can't turn left anywhere between Dan Patch Avenue and Hoyt Avenue and add some pedestrian refuge islands on the south sides of intersections along the road.

Improvements are planned for Snelling Avenue, though a recent intermodal study of the corridor had the northern study area end right at Dan Patch Avenue.  For the Snelling "A Line" enhanced bus service being planned, there is a conspicuously large gap between stations right by the fairgrounds—largely because of the missing sidewalk on the west side.

But for the most part, I've seen the fairgrounds as being a pretty decent part of the neighborhood. After this year, the transit center is moving from its spot on Como Avenue up to the current Heritage Square area. I'm curious what the plans are for the vacated space, since it could be a nice place to develop. Are there any changes you'd like to see around the fairgrounds to make it a better place when the fair isn't going on?

Measure transit quality with your phone

Here are two graphs I made of accelerometer data logged by my smartphone during two different trips I took on Metro Transit lines back in June: One on light rail, and the other on a regular bus. They were just experiments and shouldn't be relied on too much, but they do show that the two types of vehicles are substantially different in the ways they behave.

I've been surprised to have some difficulty finding information about ride quality on mass transit systems, particularly since I find the relative smoothness of the ride to be a compelling argument in favor of rail transit—In my view, ride quality is likely a major contributor to "rail bias." I have to put that in quotes because the implication is that favoritism toward trains, streetcars, and everything in between is based on pure emotion rather than physically-quantifiable factors.

The smartphone revolution (including gadgets like tablets and MP3 players) means that anyone can start gathering data about how good or bad their trip is and start doing some analysis. No longer do you have to wait for a report from some engineering firm contracted out to do the work, or try to sift through dense academic papers. The tool I used to gather data just ended up spitting out raw numbers, so it took a little post-processing to make it a manageable set of data, but it wouldn't be difficult for a smartphone app to be built or extended to directly present users with useful information and comparison points.

Data gathering alone will not end the old bus vs. streetcar vs. whatever else debate, but it's important to bring some real-world measurements into the conversation, since they have been lacking.

For those that are interested, my first graph shows a trip made on the Blue Line (Hiawatha) between Bloomington Central station and Terminal 2–Humphrey station in Bloomington and the MSP Airport area. The second set of data is from a route 3A bus along Como Avenue between about Hamline Avenue and Raymond Avenue. I didn't do anything special to secure my phone in place other than gently holding it down—something that would need to be changed if people try to make repeatable measurements. One document I came across suggested mounting a measuring device on top of a heavy rubber cone placed on the seat—such a cone would dampen some vibrations, but make others more measurable.

Still, with my rudimentary methods, I found it amazing in my graphs to see how much the motion on the 'x' axis (blue, side-to-side motion) went up between taking the train and taking the bus. The the green 'y'-axis plot is for front-to-back motion, while the orange 'z'-axis plot represents up-and-down motion—both of those are harder to interpret visually, though some rudimentary math suggests that y- and z-axis motion is still substantially better than the bus ride. I'll also note that the bus I took the sample on had a very thick cushion on the seat, while the Bombardier LRV I took the light-rail sample on has a very thin seat cushion.

Here are some averages and standard deviations for samples taken along the different axes. I used absolute values when making the averages, otherwise the periodic swinging past the origin line would make the x- and y- numbers very close to zero, and the z-axis average would be very close to 1 (since the z-axis is always being pulled on by Earth's gravity).

LRT	ABS(x)	ABS(y)	ABS(z-1)
Average	0.020	0.045	0.036
Std. Dev.	0.024	0.039	0.047
Bus	ABS(x)	ABS(y)	ABS(z-1)
Average	0.052	0.056	0.042
Std. Dev.	0.048	0.047	0.047

In these two fairly unscientific samples, the bus had average g-loading on the x-axis that was 160% higher than the bus, and it was 24% worse on front-to-back motion, and 17% worse on the z-axis. For me at 220 lbs., the aggregate motion could mean that I'd feel 20 to 40 pounds heavier on the bus than on the train, like I'm swinging around a heavy sack of salt pellets.

But the story isn't all rosy for light rail either—there's a big spike about halfway through my recording, probably due to the train crossing running through a switch, or it may just have been a jerk of my arm as I was holding the phone (perhaps both). Sometime soon I'll have to try this on the Northstar train to see how that one behaves, since it has much more substantial padding on the seats—often making the ride feel smoother—but it also has to share track with heavy freight trains which do a lot of damage to the rails. Hopefully someday we will have some local streetcars to also add into the mix of comparisons.

A rail identity crisis in Minneapolis

View Planned LRT stops in Minneapolis in a larger map

This is what the region's planned light-rail system looks like if you cut it off at the city limits of Minneapolis. It includes the Hiawatha, Central, Southwest, and Bottineau lines. While the first two largely stick to arterial corridors, Southwest (the planned Central/Green Line extension) and Bottineau (the Hiawatha/Blue Line extension) go as quickly as possible to under-populated freight railroad trenches. Again, this is in Minneapolis, where the vast majority of the region's current transit trips begin and end. Something is wrong with this picture.

As of 2013, there are 11 active stations: Ten of them opened in June 2004 when the Hiawatha Line (now Blue Line) started operation, and the eleventh—at Target Field–opened in November 2009 to coincide with the start of the Northstar commuter service. What's really surprising is that, despite the addition of three more routes, the number of stations within the city is only expected to double from 11 to 22: Four have been constructed in Minneapolis for the Green Line (Central Corridor), with probably another five expected to be added for the Southwest extension to Eden Prairie. The Bottineau extension of the Blue Line is only planned to add two stations within the city limits, almost completely bypassing the north side. Looking at these future routes, it almost seems like the Hiawatha Line would have been designed to run out of the city even faster, if not for that pesky Mississippi River in the way.

There are a couple of stops that will be just across the border, of course: Many people would be surprised to discover that the existing VA Medical Center station is just barely outside the city, in the unincorporated territory of Fort Snelling (along with the Fort Snelling stop and the two MSP Airport stops). On the Green Line, the Westgate station is barely past the border—one of the two platforms even extends into Minneapolis by just a few feet. On the planned Bottineau extension, stops at Plymouth Avenue and Golden Valley Boulevard are also just barely outside the city.

It's really remarkable how Minneapolis only gets token access in the Southwest and Bottineau projects. With locally-preferred alignments primarily along freight rail corridors. They are no longer urban transit projects, but are instead commuter or regional services in disguise. And once that fact is acknowledged, it's worth looking at how commuter and regional rail lines are set up elsewhere. In particular, why do we have to with building a double-track light-rail line right next to a freight line when they both have the same 4-foot, 8½-inch gauge? It would arguably be better for the existing freight lines to be upgraded to double-track and run passenger service over that instead of building something totally separate.

There has been some precedent for running light rail on freight tracks: The NCTD Sprinter in San Diego and New Jersey Transit's River Line between Camden and Trenton are two examples. Austin's Capital MetroRail uses essentially the same vehicles as NJT's service, though it is classified as "commuter rail". Those are mostly low-frequency services using significant stretches of single-tracked, non-electrified routes—because it was cheaper to build that way, of course. A closer analog to what's planned for the Twin Cities is likely the UTA TRAX Blue Line in Salt Lake City, which is double-tracked and uses overhead catenary for power.

Frustratingly, the Federal Railroad Administration and Federal Transit Administration have required those lines to use "temporal separation" so that passenger service has exclusive access to tracks during the day, while freight services have exclusive access to track in the overnight hours. The diesel-powered vehicles on the Sprinter, River Line, and MetroRail services are used in Europe on mixed-traffic routes, but somehow we haven't figured out how to do that in the United States because of overblown fears that freight and passenger trains would crash into each other. Even though some services like the River Line have implemented active signaling systems to automatically stop trains before a crash could even happen, the federal government has balked at the idea of having freight service share track with lightweight passenger rail vehicles during daylight hours.

At the other end of the scale, there are some very busy bus corridors in Minneapolis which deserve to be upgraded. Over time, they've been cut out of being potential light-rail lines, though the city is currently pursuing adding streetcar services—something that has caused tension between the city and the Metropolitan Council. Riding the Blue Line down Hiawatha Avenue, it's easy to see why it was derided as a "train to nowhere" ahead of its opening. There are few obvious destinations along the bulk of the route, at least in comparison to historic streetcar corridors like Hennepin Avenue, Nicollet Avenue, Chicago Avenue, University Avenue, and others. The Blue Line does have a massive traffic generator at its southern end with the Mall of America (think of the daily attendance at the Minnesota State Fair, and multiply that by every day of the year), but it's still hard to imagine that rail service along any of those streets would carry any fewer people per mile as the Hiawatha corridor. So are streetcars really the right way to improve service along a busy commercial street which likely has higher inherent transit demand?

The Hiawatha Line blew past ridership expectations when it opened, and now ranks as the 5th-busiest light rail system in the country in terms of boardings per mile. Rather than going "lighter" than "light rail" with streetcars, it seems clear that the true urban corridors in Minneapolis should be getting re-examined for fully grade-separated service like a subway (the "heavy rail" that light rail is "light" in comparison to). That concept was largely discarded in the region many years ago, the argument usually being that "Minneapolis isn't dense enough". Yet the idea hasn't really been revisited even with Hiawatha surpassing ridership levels that weren't expected for another 15 years at least.



Back in the streetcar era, the frequency of service on Nicollet Avenue was every five minutes off-peak and three minutes or less during the busiest parts of the day—it should have been possible to look down the street and see two or three coming your way and a couple of others heading in the opposite direction. Of course, the good thing about sub-3-minute frequencies is that they're showing up all the time, which makes riders happy. But cramming that many rail vehicles onto a surface line mingling with regular traffic means that any disruption can propagate down the line pretty quickly. Each streetcar also needs its own operator, while a longer train can get by with fewer employees per number of passengers.

I'm not sure transit demand is quite high enough that streetcars would go back to historic levels if they were implemented on Nicollet Avenue again, it would probably get pretty close. The Blue Line is running 3-car trains all day long (though they're probably only needed at peak times), so streetcars along Nicollet would have to run three or more times as frequently as Hiawatha's current 10-minute schedule at certain times of day. The frequency can be reduced if multiple streetcars are chained together, but that means larger boarding platforms are needed.

Proper subway lines have higher capacity, faster and more frequent service, and a minimal visual impact on the land above. Longer trains can be used since they don't have to fit between street-level intersections, and the vehicle types can be switched up if the entire route is grade-separated (traditional subway lines allow passengers to walk between cars because the operator cab can be reduced in size—there isn't a need for all-around visibility and there's no risk of crashing into automobiles). Underground trains can operate very frequently and at higher speeds since there isn't cross traffic to worry about—even curves can be eased to allow faster trains, since they don't have to fit past buildings. With rights-of-way reduced or even eliminated, more land is available for developers on the surface, meaning that costs can be offset by very intense transit-oriented development.

Washington, D.C.'s Metro system has really been a poster child for that aspect of building underground. They've also discovered that underground lines stand up better over time since they aren't exposed to weather—a major thing to consider in Minnesota with our heavy use of road salt in the winter. Going underground may also allow the deadlock to be broken between the idea of "railstitution" of busy bus routes with streetcars and the alternate concept of "Arterial BRT" (not technically bus rapid transit since it lacks exclusive lanes, but pulling in every other aspect including better stop spacing, level boarding, and off-board payment).

While the momentum behind existing transit projects in the Twin Cities shouldn't be totally disrupted, it is clear that something has gone wrong with our list of priorities when bridges and tunnels abound on the suburban Southwest LRT corridor, while the far more crowded urban segment along Washington and University Avenues saw tunnels discarded over cost concerns. This isn't just a problem for the Twin Cities region either—many other light-rail corridors across the country have taken the path of least resistance, and ridership has typically suffered because of it. That's not acceptable in a future where people will be asked to live more multi-modal lifestyles.

Bloomington to Apple Valley Red Line bus service opens tomorrow

Another iteration of my regular column on streets.mn

Apple Valley Transit Station seen during Red Line construction in October 2012.

The Twin Cities is welcoming a new transit service on Saturday: The METRO Red Line bus service along Cedar Avenue from the Mall of America in Bloomington to the eponymous Apple Valley Transit Station. The 10-mile route will have five stops: Aside from the endpoints, it also hits Cedar Grove Transit Station at Nicols Road and Cedar Grove Parkway in Eagan, and two additional stations along Cedar Avenue in Apple Valley near 140th Street and 147th Street, respectively. The route will have 15-minute headways between buses from 5 am to 7 pm on weekdays—It almost qualifies as a member of the region's Hi-Frequency Network, but falls short on Saturdays where frequency is only every half hour (Hi-Frequency routes are supposed to have 15-minute Saturday service from 9 am to 6 pm).

Have you gotten that sinking feeling yet?

The Red Line, formerly known as the Cedar Avenue Bus Rapid Transitway, has been championed as a pilot of BRT service in the Twin Cities.  BRT, of course, is often brought out as an alternative for potential rail projects—usually light rail or subway/elevated "heavy rail", but sometimes an option against commuter rail or streetcar service. It was a technology born out of necessity in poor Latin American countries. City planners sought out ways to optimize their disorganized bus systems (which often were—and still are—run by a number of independent companies) rather than building expensive railways. It is a technology which has since spread around the world.

BRT was invented when dedicated busways were combined with specially-designed stations which matched the buses' floor height, allowing level boarding. The stations also allowed passengers to use the normally wasted time in between buses to purchase tickets ahead of time. The buses themselves were usually articulated (sometimes double-articulated), with a larger number of wider doorways—in some cases on the "wrong" side or on both sides of buses so that boarding platforms could be constructed in the center median of a busway.

Unfortunately, as the idea of bus rapid transit spread, it was often watered down—especially as implemented in the United States. Proper dedicated lanes terminate before reaching congested areas. Routes get implemented with unnecessary loops or one-way sections. Pre-paid boarding gets cut, requiring passengers to waste time fumbling for cards, bills, and change as they step onto the buses. The Red Line has not been immune from those trends.

First, it is difficult to say whether the Red Line has a dedicated busway or not—strictly speaking, I would have to say no.  Buses will travel in the right-hand shoulder lanes, an extension of the of bus-only shoulder program that has been implemented on 300 miles of roads across the Twin Cities.  Buses will have to deal with right-turning vehicles sharing the surface segment of Cedar Avenue through the heart of Apple Valley. The route has implemented transit signal priority at intersections, which should help keep traffic flowing, but there will still be turbulence in places where cars and buses share space. The freeway segment of the route has a speed limit of 65 mph, and buses also have to mingle with regular traffic at on- and off-ramps.

Cedar Avenue is very wide now, able to maintain a 2+1+2 configuration even with half the road surface under construction.

Second on my list of Red Line issues is station placement: The Cedar Grove station is only accessible via surface streets, adding 3 minutes or more to northbound trips and at least 5 minutes to southbound trips. New ways of accessing the station are undergoing a year-long study process, but it's not clear when this major defect will be fixed. To the south, the 140th and 147th Street stations are being opened without any skyway connections across the wide highway, unlike AVTS as seen in the first photo, and they are not well located right at intersections with crosswalks. Other potentially valuable stations are completely missing, such as one which had been proposed at the Palomino Hills park-and-ride, one of the more densely-populated residential nodes along the highway which could benefit from better access to commercial zones along the route.

Another component that's currently missing is off-board pre-payment. The Apple Valley Transit Station has ticket vending machines (TVMs) installed for the start of service, but they are not yet installed at the intermediate stops along the route, and the Mall of America stop seems to be relying on existing machines used for the Blue Line (Hiawatha LRT). Ideally the Red Line will soon behave just like the Blue Line, where everyone onboard must carry a transfer or validated pass as proof of payment. However, it appears the line will require to pay or validate their fares upon boarding until machines are deployed to all stops.

The Red Line is an interesting experiment in the effort to make bus service better. While significant pieces are missing, fixes are at least in the pipeline. We'll see how long they take to arrive. The biggest challenge of all will involve finding new ways to overcome the suburban geography of the route, where pod-like developments are spread through the square-mile sections laid out by surveyors in the 19th century. Will this type of busway offer a way to balance out the natural tendency of car traffic to pile up along section-line roads?


It is worth noting that express bus service in the corridor has been expanding for several years already, to destinations including downtown Minneapolis, downtown Saint Paul, the University of Minnesota, and the Mall of America. The Red Line offers the first true station-to-station service along the highway, consistently making the same stops throughout the day.

Here's a breakdown of the corridor's $112 million budget:

• $57 million for 4 miles of highway and bus shoulder improvements.
• $34 million for express service expansion, including vehicles and facilities.
• $21 million for Red Line service, including vehicles and facilities.

Check out my Flickr set of Red Line photos. Are you planning to try the Red Line? Let us know in the comments.

Rochester's Zip Rail holds first EIS meetings

The Zip Rail project to connect the Twin Cities to Rochester with a fast train service has finally entered into a Tier I Environmental Impact Statement process, more than two decades after the concept of connecting Rochester was first dangled in front of the public. The EIS team held their first open houses this past week, showing off a number of routing alternatives and explaining some of the challenges that have to be resolved. Many different concepts for routings and endpoints have floated over the years, and the project has to weed out which options are the most feasible and likely to succeed.

If my math is right, it has now been 22 years since my dad took me to a public meeting in Rochester about a Twin Cities to Chicago high-speed rail line. That was back when Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois had collaborated on the Tri-State Study which envisioned linking the two metropolitan areas at speeds up to 185 miles per hour with TGV-like trains on steel rails, or even 300 mph with maglev trains—a technology that hadn't seen any real-world deployments at the time and remains extremely rare today. While historical Twin Cities to Chicago trains were mostly known for running down the Mississippi River 45 miles to the east of Rochester, that study had found that rerouting the trains to go through Rochester would give access to a significantly larger population and could have time and cost advantages because of flat, open land that could allow far gentler (=faster) curves than what was generally possible along the river valley.

However, in the 1990s, the consensus among state and federal planners across the country shifted from the goal of building "true" high-speed rail that pushed the boundaries of what could be accomplished with train technology. With the government unwilling to hand out money billions at a time like what was required, the idea became that it was better to take a more incremental approach. Existing freight corridors would be reused, and trains would be pulled by diesel locomotives that would remove the need for the overhead catenary wires. There would also be less effort put into adding grade separations—bridges, cuts, viaducts, and tunnels—in order to save money. In the end, plans for super-speed trains across the country pushing 200 mph were generally watered down to plans for service at 110 mph.

This had an impact on the idea of going through Rochester, which had always added a significant distance to the route. The time savings of having more consistent high speeds were largely washed out because of the extra length. After many years of wrangling, MnDOT finally decided in November 2011 that the first enhanced-speed train service to Chicago would run along the existing Empire Builder route (used by the Milwaukee Road Hiawatha prior to the formation of Amtrak).

Another potential problem with building a super-speed line in the United States is simply the fact that our passenger rail network is really minimal and has largely stayed that way since Amtrak appeared in 1971. That wasn't always the case, of course—rail lines weaved all across the country, really only thinning out in the least-populated states of the West. As this series of maps shows, the passenger rail network had rapidly become less than skeletal in the decade up to the formation of Amtrak. Other countries that have built true high-speed lines have been able to overlay them on top of pretty dense networks of existing passenger service, but that is practically nonexistent here.

It has slowly dawned on federal, state, and local governments that it's also necessary to rebuild regional networks of conventional-speed trains. Today, statewide rail plans need to be in place in order to receive significant federal funding. Minnesota released a 20-year plan back in 2010, which included a link to Rochester regardless of whether it ended up being on the primary route to Chicago or ended up as a branch by itself. At this point, environmental review processes are now underway on three routes: Rochester, Duluth (Northern Lights Express, now advanced into Preliminary Engineering), and the river route to Chicago. The latter route's future remains a bit murky due to Wisconsin's political antipathy toward enhanced-speed service, though they are still participating in a parallel process that should result in a second daily round-trip between Saint Paul and Chicago.

Ahead of the EIS, the Zip Rail team has been working on a Service Development Plan to work out travel demand and how the line may meet those needs. No details have been released yet, but comments by presenters, including in this KARE11 report, indicate that it will do better than break-even with its farebox recovery ratio. If that pans out, it would open up a funding source from the Federal Railroad Administration that would cover 80% of the capital cost with federal dollars, only leaving Minnesota and the local governments on the hook for 20%—just like the Northern Lights Express route to Duluth.

A multitude of specific route alternatives have been proposed for the service, and it's not even clear yet where the route will begin and end. On the northern end, there is desire to reach downtown Minneapolis (The Interchange), downtown Saint Paul (Union Depot), MSP International Airport, and some southeastern suburb. It's not practical to reach all four of those, and even hitting more than two would prove challenging.

Some have advocated running directly between MSP airport and Rochester International (RST), but that would miss the center of action at both ends. Reaching MSP would require building new rail alignments within the urbanized area of Saint Paul or the Twin Cities' southeastern suburbs, plus a crossing of the Minnesota River, Mississippi River, or both. Meanwhile, RST airport is a good eight miles from the main Mayo Clinic campus in downtown Rochester—it's closer to the neighboring town of Stewartville.

On the main trunk of the line, there are two options that have been considered: either closely paralleling U.S. Highway 52 or running further west and making use of an abandoned rail corridor (built by the Chicago Great Western) when convenient or building anew to bypass sharp curves and small towns. It appears unlikely that any stops would be included between Rochester and a (potential) suburban Twin Cities stop. Along the U.S. 52 alignment option, the largest intermediate town is Cannon Falls. The CGW alignment gets frustratingly close to Northfield, running through the hamlets of Stanton and Randolph, each about halfway between that college town and Cannon Falls.

And lets not forget about speed, frequency of service, and related issues. MnDOT's 2010 state rail plan suggested building along an alignment with curves capable of 150 mph, but beginning service with diesel-powered trains maxing out at about 110 mph (going significantly faster typically requires electrification as well as a fully grade-separated corridor). The Zip Rail team claims to be looking at speeds up to 220 mph, but again it might just turn out that they'll build on an alignment capable of super-speedy service someday, but will initially implement the slower, un-electrified service. Also, with the short distance, it could easily become a waste to go super-fast, since the amount of time actually spent running at top speed wouldn't be all that long. Would it kill you if the train took 50 minutes instead of 40, especially when the highway travel time is 90 minutes by comparison?

It's not entirely clear how often trains would run either. Some studies have proposed up to 20 round-trips daily, and why not? If the bulk of the corridor is dedicated to passenger service, it makes sense to run as many trips as are practical. And if the end-to-end time for a train is less than an hour, it wouldn't take much staff or equipment to run the service all day long. A good deal of thought would need to go into picking the right size of train, though: Too small, and the economies of scale just wouldn't work out. Too big, and the capacity would swamp demand. (In the extreme, there's no need for a double-height, double-length TGV Ouigo with 1,268 seats, for instance.)

Still, the number of trains would probably be constrained by the amount of pre-existing freight track used within the Twin Cities. At the meeting I went to on Tuesday, 8–10 round-trips were suggested, again on par with NLX and still far better than train service in most of the U.S.

Since this will be a largely "greenfield" alignment no matter what, the cost will be steep. Whatever the cost is, it should be contrasted with the amount of economic activity going on in Rochester, estimated to be in the billions over the next several years merely based on the Mayo Clinic's activities. A series of past studies have estimated a significant positive impact from such a train, so it's hard to expect a different outcome this time. The route also has the potential benefit of becoming the first leg in a truly high-speed link between the Twin Cities and Chicago, the two biggest economic centers of the Midwest. The road ahead is long, though—The EIS is expected to take 24 months, and it may still be another decade or more before the Zip Rail project lives up to its name.

Where's my bus (arrival sign)?

A NexTrip arrival sign at the Uptown Transit Center in Minneapolis.

Real-time arrival information for buses in the Twin Cities area has been publicly available since 2008, when Metro Transit added NexTrip functionality to their website. It was updated a year later to include a mobile web version. Eventually the communication protocol used under the covers for both the mobile and desktop websites was simplified and made publicly available, and there are a number of computer programs and smartphone apps available to get at that information. For me, NexTrip ranks as a "killer app"—a program so useful that it could justify the purchase and continuing use of a cellular data plan and smartphone (or an Internet-enabled "feature phone") all by itself.

While anyone can access arrival times through a mobile device, the deployment of permanent digital signage at bus and light-rail stops has been maddeningly slow. While the Blue Line on Hiawatha Avenue has had LED panels in place since it opened in 2004, they have only been used for showing the current time and periodic admonitions to stay behind the yellow line, report suspicious activity, keep your belongings close, and so on and so forth. There have only been intermittent sightings of any schedule information going up on the boards.

A handful of busy bus stops have the signs. Transit centers at the Mall of America and in Uptown have them. There's a sign tucked away at the busiest single stop in the system at 7th and Nicollet. Along Interstate 35W, the 46th Street BRT stop also has some real-time displays.

The most ambitious deployment of NexTrip signage in the Twin Cities was in the "Marq2" project, an impressive system of doubled-up bus lanes in downtown Minneapolis on Marquette and 2nd Avenues that serves suburban express buses. Every stop along that project has a large LED panel to show arrivals—a pretty useful tool considering how many different routes are funneled down those lanes. Still, it seems there are only dozens to perhaps a hundred installations of real-time arrival boards across the region's network of 14,000 bus stops—probably less than 1% of the total, and not corresponding all that well to the busiest stops or routes.

It's hard to understand why this is still the case in an era when unlocked, unsubsidized smartphones can cost as little as $125. As a proof of concept, it would be easy to slap one of those into a weathertight box and attach a solar panel to recharge it. Within Minneapolis, such devices could make use of the city's municipal Wi-Fi network to receive data, minimizing or eliminating the need to pay for cellular network access. Some further engineering might probably be needed to handle the extreme depths of cold in the winter and heat in the summer that we get around here, but it's not insurmountable. Since a tiny smartphone screen would be hard to read at a distance or in direct sunlight, a real deployment would have to rely on larger LED panels (where costs for bulk quantities are measured in dollars per square meter). An interesting alternative might be an electronic paper display like that in the Amazon Kindle, potentially allowing printed paper schedules to be eliminated entirely.

Done right, it's likely that hundreds of displays could be built for the cost of a new bus, let alone a whole transit line, although operational costs would eat into that a bit. While informational displays don't seem to get much backing since they don't directly impact travel times, they do provide a huge psychological benefit to users of a transit system. Eliminating or reducing the worry that you've just missed the bus has a tremendous value and is certainly worth the investment now that the technology behind it has become so cheap and data accessibility is not the problem it once was.

Duluth train finishes major stage of environmental review

The proposed Northern Lights Express train from Minneapolis to Duluth ("NLX") took another step forward on Monday last week when the long-awaited Tier 1 Service Level Environmental Assessment was finally released. Initially expected to be completed by October 2011, the environmental review was delayed as the scale of the project was reassessed after early cost projections came in higher than expected. Since 2007, the route has been planned to operate at a top speed of 110 miles per hour, though the proposed length of that fast section of the route was reduced in 2011, lengthening the typical end-to-end travel time from two hours flat to 2 hours and 17 minutes. Today, the $820 million service is planned to have eight daily round-trips with six total stops: Minneapolis, Coon Rapids, Cambridge, Hinckley, and Duluth in Minnesota, plus Duluth's twin port of Superior, Wisconsin.

One of the first comments I got after posting a link to the EA last week was a question: "Why do we need an environmental assessment to run a daily passenger train to Duluth over existing tracks?"

That's a good one to ask, and I don't have a very good answer. The route has existed for well over a century, and passenger trains ran on the line until 1985, so it's worth asking why something that is partially a restoration of former service should require an extensive environmental process. However, the proposal does push beyond the historical level of service considerably. A full history may reveal more, but this 1951 timetable shows just two daily round-trips along the route, plus another three on parallel railroads (both of which have seen major chunks of the route abandoned). In order to achieve eight round-trips a day and to allow faster speeds, a new parallel track is planned for 41 miles between Isanti and Hinckley. Most of the rest of the route would be limited to speeds of 79 or 90 mph, while this new segment of double-tracking (where there has historically only been a single track), will be the section dedicated to 110-mph operation.

Some other shorter segments of additional track will be installed in Minneapolis, between Fridley and Coon Rapids, and on the northern end in Superior. However, all of these are expected to fit within the original right-of-way granted to the railroad in the 19th century. There is certainly some call for the Environmental Assessment, though it shouldn't be treated any more significantly than a typical highway widening. Ultimately I'll answer the question with a question: Was the Northern Lights Express put through any more hoops than a project to add lanes to a freeway? If this review was more complicated than that, then some priorities need to get straightened out.

Another comment I received related to the pace of construction for the route. Wouldn't it be better to start out with one or two trains a day and then scale it up incrementally?

That has certainly been considered, but there are many examples from around the country which show that incremental builds take ages to complete.  Among the dozens of routes Amtrak operates nationally, only a handful of corridors have 8 or more daily round-trips today, a level of service that would be considered modest in Europe.

In the Northeast, only the  Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington, DC and branches off of it from New York to Albany, Philadelphia to Harrisburg, and DC to Richmond have 8+ daily round-trips.  In the whole rest of the country, only two other corridors in California do as well: Los Angeles to San Diego, and Sacramento to Oakland.


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A few other routes have five to seven trains each direction each day. Why should a route to a relatively minor metropolitan area of 280,000 people be at the same level as these major corridors? Another very good question. There really should be many corridors across the country that see that much passenger train traffic or more. This route is also planned to have an average end-to-end speed of 67 miles per hour, and there's only one route anywhere in the U.S. running faster than that today: The Acela Express from Washington, DC to Boston. Everything else falls in the range of 38 to 57 mph.

The NLX planners used computer models of ridership to come up with the speed and frequency of service. The models told them that this speed and number of trips are the bare minimum needed in order to operate the trains without a direct subsidy year over year. 67 mph is just barely faster than a typical driver will do over a whole trip (keep in mind that Interstate 35 has a 70 mph speed limit for most of its length between Duluth and the Twin Cities—most drivers will have top speeds reaching or exceed that, but any stops or slowdowns along the way will cause average speed to drop rapidly).

When costs are spread out across the number of passengers who will use the service over time, it also works out pretty well. A typical Amtrak short-distance "corridor" route requires an operating subsidy of $20 for every 100 passenger-miles traveled, the projected average trip length for NLX passengers. Existing corridor trains have periodic needs for additional capital costs as well. The Northern Lights Express is expected to start out carrying over 900,000 passengers in early years, and slowly but steadily growing from there. Over the next 30 years, that probably translates to 33 to 40 million passengers. If the project can achieve what the computer models say and operate without significant subsidies, the capital cost per rider would work out to somewhere between $20 and $25 for that time span.

So you can start out with a slow, infrequent train and pay half the cost of each rider's trip in order to entice them to use the service, or an up-front investment can be made to improve travel times and add frequency, and the overall cost works out to be about the same—potentially better in some cases. If we went with an incremental approach, there would be years and years worth of direct operating subsidies, plus the capital investment would probably work out to just as much as what's currently planned.

While the initial price tag is certainly giving some of our state politicians heartburn, in the long run, it works out better to invest in the route now.